What a ride! Everything seemed to come together in perfect linemen’s for this first ride of my short break in Eskdale. The campsite is magnificent, the weather almost perfect for mid-October (no rain, no wind and, if not hot, certainly not cold), the route – Jack Thurston’s ‘Still Glides The Stream’, cycle number 2 in his highly recommended Lost Lanes North book – a mixture of challenging climbs and gentle valley saunters, and the landscape… well, this in the Lake District but even the high bar of Cumbria can seldom be surpassed more than by this remote south-western corner of the National Park.