More power to Wasdale Head, the hamlet that's been without electricity since Christmas

The remote Lake District hamlet of Wasdale Head has spent 11 weeks without any electricity, but now work is starting on getting it reconnected to the national gridIt's been just like the good old days in Wasdale Head, when rugged guests washed up at the pub by Tilley lamp and woke to the spluttering coughs of a generator. Since 2am on Christmas Eve, the Lake District hamlet has been without mains power because of a cable fault below Wastwater. Since the lake is the deepest in England, the 26 residents of the lonely spot knew there would be no quick fix reuniting them with the national grid.Eleven weeks later, work starts on Tuesday on Tuesday on a marathon reconnection costing �1m, via new cable looping from the lake to run beneath part of the five-mile road to the nearest village, Nether Wasdale. "We'll have a party when it's finished," says Georgina Wrathall at the Wasdale Head Inn, "but there's been lots of nostalgia since Christmas. Some of our visitors will be disappointed when the generators go."That will probably be several weeks after Easter, though Northwest Electricity is chary of certainty, with hard rock everywhere along the Lake shore. "We don't like undergrounding in these conditions," says a spokesman. "But in a place voted Britain's Best View last year, what else can you do?"Life has been edgy on occasion since Christmas, according to Wrathall, assistant manager of the inn where more than half of the hamlet's people live or work. "Have you tried serving a wedding breakfast for 30 in the dark?" Skill at making toast on a gas grill has rocketed and some villagers wonder during generator breakdowns if the "Wasdale drone" from the machines has stuck in their heads, like tinnitus.Stiff upper lips come easily, though, in a place where mains electricity only arrived in 1977. Candles and log fires were the stuff of life to previous guests such as Geoffrey Winthrop Young, the poet and a champion of the Billiard Table Traverse (a circuit of the residents' bar without touching the floor) in spite of his artificial leg.Room 5 is the one for generator fans, directly overlooking the machine, whose specially muffled predecessor kept failing because the air circulation didn't work. The inn's proud boast, "We are pleased to announce that we are unable to provide TV", has gone since satellites arrived a few years ago but mobile reception and the internet remain blessedly dodgy. The valley's Wasdale Web Twitter account has managed just five tweets since June, one about sheep and the others about the weather.HomesLake DistrictUnited KingdomNational GridMartin Wainwrightguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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