One of the earliest accounts of an ascent of Helvellyn for the pleasure of doing so is contained in James Clarke's guidebook of 1787. He quotes the account of an unnamed gentleman from Penrith who wanted to eat his dinner on Midsummer Day while sitting in a snowdrift on top of Helvellyn. The man left home at two in the morning, rode to Glencoyne and left his horse at a house in the valley there. He started to walk up the mountain at between four and five in the morning and after five hours hot and hard work he reached the snow and the summit. The snow was covered with dust so he had to dig for clean snow to eat with his dinner. He returned by a different route, reaching Glencoyne ten hours after leaving it. This story seems to reflect the colder climatic conditions of the eighteenth century, during the so-called Little Ice Age.