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 3 to 4 hours you'll want a ticket for at least 4 hours. 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.

Around 5,500 years ago, Neolithic people climbed to the screes just below the summit of Pike of Stickle to find a special volcanic rock, a hard greenstone that breaks like flint. They chipped it into rough axe heads on the spot, and the scree is still scattered with their flakes and rejects. The rough-outs were carried down to the coast and beyond to be ground and polished, and about a quarter of all the Neolithic stone axes found in Britain came from the Langdale fells.

Pike of Stickle is thought to be one of the most important Neolithic stone axe factories in Europe. The main quarries sit above the screes on its steep southern face, and a small cave at the top of the Stickle Stone Shoot was part of the workings. Radiocarbon dates suggest the work went on for about 1,000 years.

Langdale axes have been found as far north as Orkney, as far south as Cornwall and across the sea in Ireland, with the most in eastern England, especially Lincolnshire. Some look as if they were never used, and archaeologists have suggested they may have been prized as treasures as much as tools.

Lancelot “Lanty” Slee was a Langdale farmer and quarryman who, for much of the 1800s, ran illegal whisky stills hidden in caves and old quarries around the valleys. One still was piped underground so its steam seemed to rise from a hedge. He sold his whisky to the local gentry, a magistrate among them, and took it by pack horse over Wrynose and Hardknott to the coast, bringing smuggled tobacco back on the return trip. On one night crossing, so the story goes, his dog warned him that excise men were coming.

Born in Borrowdale around 1800, Lanty built Greenbank Farm in Little Langdale in 1840. He charged about ten shillings a gallon, and buyers are said to have opened with a coded question about his potato crop.

He was caught at least twice. In May 1853 he was fined £150 after his business partner, William Pattinson, informed on him. After one night in the cells, a magistrate joked that the spell had been broken this time, and Lanty is said to have pulled a full bottle from his coat. He died at Greenbank in 1878. The barn at the start of this walk now carries his name, and the spirits sold there are made in his honour.