page_title: Skiddaw
section_title: Skiddaw House
hierarchical_section_title: Skiddaw / Skiddaw House
caption_attribution_description: English: The Kitchen Range, Skiddaw House
context_page_description: Skiddaw is a mountain in the Lake District National Park in England. Its 931-metre summit is the sixth-highest in England. It lies just north of the town of Keswick, Cumbria, and dominates the skyline in this part of the northern lakes. It is the simplest of the Lake District mountains of this height to ascend and, as such, many walking guides recommend it to the occasional walker wishing to climb a mountain. This is the first summit of the fell running challenge known as the Bob Graham Round when undertaken in a clockwise direction.
  The mountain lends its name to the surrounding areas of ‘Skiddaw Forest’, and ‘Back o' Skidda' ’ and to the isolated ‘Skiddaw House’, situated to the east, formerly a shooting lodge and subsequently a youth hostel. It also provides the name for the slate derived from that region: Skiddaw slate. Tuned percussion musical instruments or lithophones exist which are made from the slate, such as the Musical Stones of Skiddaw held at the Keswick Museum and Art Gallery.
context_section_description: Below Sale How is Skiddaw House, a stone building which has variously served as a shooting lodge, shepherd's bothy and Youth Hostel. Its windbreak comprises the only trees in Skiddaw Forest, and it is reached via a long access track up the Dash Valley.
  Built around 1829 by the Earl of Egremont it was originally a keeper's lodge; a base for grouse shooting and for the gamekeepers who managed the extensive land owned by Egremont in Skiddaw Forest.
  Little is known of the house in the nineteenth century but it was used by both gamekeepers and shepherds beyond 1860 and there were rooms for Egremont and the shooting parties. Canon Rawnsley, a founder of the National Trust, visited in about 1900 and mentions in one of his books the hospitality of the shepherd's family at that time.  Sir Hugh Walpole, author of the Lake District novel Rogue Herries, was a visitor in the 1920s and 30s and used the house as the scene, set in 1854, of the murder by Uhland.
  These arrangements for accommodation continued into the 20th century up until the early 1950s. Several families brought up their children there until they were able to go to school, but the longest tenure was possibly from Pearson Dalton, a shepherd and bachelor from the Caldbeck area, who came to stay for a month in 1952 and left in 1969 aged 75. He lived there alone for five days a week, only going home for long weekends with his sister in Caldbeck, then returning on the Monday to resume his duties. By this time farming practices had changed and the house was no longer needed and declined although there was intermittent use by various schools and outdoor groups.
  In 1986 the house was leased by John Bothamley who had created the YHA Carrock Fell Hostel a few miles away and eventually the building was handed over to the YHA. It closed in 2002 following a disagreement over the lease. In 2007 it re-opened as an independent hostel run by the Skiddaw House Foundation, under the YHA's Enterprise franchising model.
caption: Kitchen range
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