A SON has told how he tried in vain to save the life of his father after he fell 150 metres from a Lake District mountain ridge.

Stewart Morton Armstrong, 59, died this summer when he fell off Striding Edge, which leads to Helvellyn.

The 59-year-old from Murton, County Durham, was walking with son Ross Armstrong when the accident happened on June 20.

Mr Armstrong told an inquest in Kendal that his father was an experienced walker and they had taken the route along the steep and exposed ridge before.

He said it had been raining in the week before they went on their walk and the weather was damp with heavy mist.

“It was damp and mizzle and rain,” he told assistant coroner Robert Chapman.

“The rock had a thin glaze and so we had to think about what we were doing.”

His father had been walking some distance ahead of him when the accident happened at around 11.15am.

“I didn’t see it happen initially, but I heard him make a sound as he fell,” he added.

“He just picked up speed and he couldn’t get any traction at all and then he went off the edge.”

Mr Armstrong climbed down the slope and found his father 150 metres below, with what appeared to be head, chest, arm and leg injuries.

He sat him up and cleared his airways and began CPR, as well as calling 999.

Passers-by joined in the efforts to resuscitate Mr Armstrong, but he showed no signs of responding in the hour-and-a-half it took for Patterdale Mountain Rescue Team to reach them.

Dr John Ellerton, a member of the mountain rescue team, said he arrived at the scene around 12.45pm and pronounced the father-of-three dead around 1pm.

A helicopter from the Great North Air Ambulance was unable to land nearby due to low cloud but the crew of a Sea King from RAF Boulmer took three rescue team members and an air ambulance paramedic and doctor as high as possible where they had to make their way by foot to the casualty site.

A pathology report said Mr Armstrong died from head injuries sustained in the fall.

The coroner said: “It is clear he was an experienced walker and had been in the Lake District on a number of occasions and in particular he had walked up Helvellyn on this particular route.

"Unfortunately, on this particular day it had been raining in the previous week and the ground was pretty wet and greasy.

“In this area when you do fall you tend to fall quite a distance.”

He concluded that Mr Armstrong died as a result of accidental death.