The walk starts from the National Trust's Stickle Ghyll car park (LA22 9JU) in Great Langdale, right next to Lanty Slee's pub at the foot of the ghyll. It has around 50 spaces and is pay and display, and as this walk takes 7 to 8 hours you'll want an all-day ticket. National Trust members park free by scanning their card at the machine. There's little or no phone signal in the valley, so download the JustPark app and set it up before you go (location 80604), or bring cash for the machine. There are public toilets at the top of the car park. It fills up early on fine weekends and in the holidays, and there's no overnight parking. Check the latest prices here.

Long before walkers came, the fells were crossed by strings of packhorses. There were no roads fit for carts in the Lake District until the late 1700s, so goods were carried on horseback over the high passes, and Esk Hause is thought to have been one of the routes they used. The way from Wasdale to Great Langdale climbs to Sty Head, crosses the col by the stone shelter just below Esk Hause and drops over the Rossett Pass into Mickleden, and it was used to carry smuggled goods from Ravenglass on the coast.

By the 20th century the walkers' path up Rossett Gill had a bad name. Alfred Wainwright called it almost certainly the least liked of the Lakeland passes. It wasn't the steepness he minded but the stones, and he blamed the boots of the crowds for grinding away what little grass and soil was left. He sent walkers instead up the old Pony Route, a longer, roundabout line to the south of the gill. Since then the direct path has been rebuilt with stone pitching and is much improved.

The top of the pass brings its own puzzle. The crossing by the wind shelter that most walkers call Esk Hause isn't the real one. The true Esk Hause is about 30m higher and about 270m away, between Great End and Esk Pike, where the path from Borrowdale to Eskdale crosses. At 759m it is the highest pass in the Lake District, higher than Sticks Pass on the Helvellyn range, which usually gets the title. This walk passes through both.

In 1806 the painter John Constable spent two months touring the Lake District. He told his friend and biographer Charles Robert Leslie that their solitude weighed on his spirits, and Leslie, whose life of Constable came out in 1843, wrote that the painter needed scenery full of people: villages, churches, farmhouses and cottages.

Bowfell was one of the fells he drew. From sketches he made on the spot came a small oil painting, Bow Fell, Cumberland, only about 20cm by 25cm. It was one of three Lake District pictures he showed at the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition at Somerset House in 1807, a change from his usual views of the River Stour in Suffolk.

Afterwards Constable's work returned to the lowlands. He settled into a routine of winters in London and summers painting at East Bergholt, the Suffolk village where he was born, and from 1811 the cathedral city of Salisbury inspired some of his greatest works. His picture of Bowfell crossed the Atlantic and is now in the collection of the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts, which acquired it in 2007.