The walk starts from the council's Rydal Road car park (LA22 9AN) at the north end of Ambleside. It has 171 spaces plus 10 disabled spaces, and charges from 8AM to 8PM: £2.60 for 1 hour, £4.40 for 2, £5.80 for 3, £7.40 for 4, £8.80 for 6 or £10.60 for the day. As this walk takes 6 to 7 hours, get the all-day ticket. You can also pay by phone (location 9917), and Blue Badge holders get an extra hour. There are public toilets in the car park. Check the latest prices here.

Dove Crag, the third summit on this walk, has a special place in fellwalking history. On 9 November 1952 Alfred Wainwright sat down to start the first page of his Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells, and the fell he began with was Dove Crag. In the weeks before, he had climbed it from Ambleside, making notes and taking photographs.

That first chapter grew into seven books covering 214 fells, which he worked on at about a page an evening for well over a decade. Book One, The Eastern Fells, came out in 1955 and includes every fell on this horseshoe. The guides have been in print ever since and have sold more than two million copies.

Wainwright counted this round among his favourite ridge walks. He called it a great horseshoe of grassy slopes below a consistently high skyline, and, against his usual practice, advised walkers to go anticlockwise and start with Low Pike, the way this route goes. Even little Low Pike got its own chapter, because he felt it stood high enough above Scandale and Rydal Beck to feel much loftier than it is.

The steep path off Nab Scar comes down right beside Rydal Mount, the house where William Wordsworth lived from 1813 until he died in 1850. The family had outgrown Dove Cottage and then Allan Bank in Grasmere before moving here, and his sister Dorothy stayed on at Rydal Mount until her death in 1855. Wordsworth laid out the garden himself, and high in the grounds he built a simple writing hut, little more than a bench with a roof, where he did much of his writing.

Grief left its mark here too. When his daughter Dora died in 1847, Wordsworth planted hundreds of daffodils in her memory in a field beside St Mary's Church in Rydal, which is still known as Dora's Field. Mary Henderson, his great-great-granddaughter, bought Rydal Mount in 1969 and opened it to the public the following year.

Next door, the walk passes Rydal Hall, the old home of the Fleming family. In the late 1660s Daniel Fleming built a small summerhouse in its grounds, called the Grot, to look out on a waterfall on Rydal Beck. Through the 1700s and 1800s it drew a stream of visiting artists and writers: Wordsworth described it in his early poem An Evening Walk, published in 1793, years before he came to live beside it, and Joseph Wright of Derby painted the falls in 1795.

The Grot is well worth a visit. Look out for it near the end of the walk, about 9 miles in: once you're down off Nab Scar and past Rydal Mount, turn into the grounds of Rydal Hall and follow Rydal Beck a short way to the little stone house. Its window frames the falls perfectly, and it's free to visit during the day.