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By the time I had finished repairing the TH-205E the sky had cleared and the sun had come out so after tea I thought I should go for a bit of fresh air and exercise. Olga is still suffering from a chesty cough and didn’t want to come so I decided to drive over to Tallentire village and walk to the top of Tallentire Hill. A couple of weeks ago I had spent a couple of hours parked near the top making some contacts from my HF mobile station. But it isn’t possible to get right to the top by car unless you have a 4 wheel drive vehicle, because the track is rather stony. Even if you had a 4×4, there is nowhere to park off the road right at the top. The actual summit is in a small field and accessible through an unlocked gate from the track, but it is presumably private land so whilst walkers enjoying the view may be welcome, hams setting up a portable station would probably be accused of trespassing.

But on a day like today it is worth going just for the view. The picture above shows the trigonometrical point (a reference point for measuring height used by the Ordnance Survey) looking south east towards the Skiddaw range. On the larger version (click on the small one to see it) you can see snow-covered mountains beyond Keswick in the background.

The next picture shows the view south west and on the large version you can see some of the buildings of Cockermouth nestling in its valley. The big mountain on the left is Grasmoor with its steep drop towards Crummock Water. In the distance you can see the Buttermere fells.

The last picture shows the view north across the Solway to Dumfries and Galloway in Scotland. I don’t know the names of the Scottish mountains.

I would love to own the field containing this summit so I could use it as a portable site whenever I wanted, even if it meant buying a 4×4 vehicle! With the take-offs shown in the pictures the site might be quite good for VHF, so I will have to take the MFD and the FT-817 up there one day when there is a 2m contest in progress.

Today I didn’t manage to raise anyone with the TH-F7E I took with me. But despite the sun it was pretty cold up there with a stiff breeze so after a few calls on 145.500 I headed back down again.