All posts by George Kitching

The Fell King

April 13, 2020 George Kitching 18 Comments

High Rigg and the Poet Stonemason of St John’s in the Vale

Named for a 13th century’s hospice built by the Knights Hospitaller, St John’s in the Vale is an idyllic glacial valley, hemmed in by High Rigg & Helvellyn with Blencathra at its foot. In the 1800’s, it was home to a stonemason turned schoolteacher who became a minor celebrity when he published two volumes of dialect rhymes that capture the comedy and romance of Cumbrian life like few others could. A few weeks before lockdown, on a brooding day between seasons, I walked through the vale to visit his modest grave, then returned over High Rigg where I found the view that inspired one of his finest poems.

The valley is soft grey and mauve, a wash of impressionist watercolour, bathed in fine mizzle, like a comforting memory that patters faintly on the cosy cocoon of my waterproofs. Through a bare-branched lattice of beech and silver birch, Wren Crag rises, a gaunt white face of rock, furrowed with olive wrinkles, its lower reaches wrapped in a scrubby winter blanket of mustard and salmon pink. At the bottom of the slope, St John’s Beck roars and hisses, gushing and crashing over rocks in a surging torrent of youthful exuberance.

Here and there, a fallen tree testifies to the brutal winds that have scourged the land in recent weeks. Battered and weather-beaten, but perennially resilient, the first signs of spring rebound in the respite of this gentler day. The moss that clothes the mottled stone of an ancient wall is vivid green, as is the grass of the grazing pasture beyond. Across the valley, shafts of sunlight tint the orange bracken that cloaks the foot of Calfhow Pike, while above, its charcoal crags are flecked yellow with straw grass.

At Low Bridge End Farm, a tea-room (self-service today) is testimony to a farmer’s ability to diversify, while a vintage tractor, inert in a meadow, is a silent echo from an older time. Further along the track, a lichen-stippled ruin tells of a farming heritage that stretches all the way back to the Vikings; its roofless gables mirror the mighty pyramids of Blease and Gategill fells, Blencathra’s western buttresses, that rise as a colossal rampart beyond.

Soon after the Norman conquests, Ranulph Engayne, chief forrester of the Forest of Inglewood (which once stretched from Carlisle to Penrith), is said to have built a hospital at Caldbeck for the relief of travellers that had fallen victim to the “desperate banditti” that roamed the woods. The same dangers may have beset travellers journeying south from Keswick. Perhaps this is why, in the thirteenth century, The Knights Hospitaller of St John are said to have built a hospice on the pass between High and Low Rigg.

The Knights Hospitaller were a religious and military order with their own papal charter, which exempted them from the laws of the countries through which they travelled and held them answerable only to the Pope. They were originally formed to staff a hospital in Jerusalem, providing succour for sick or injured pilgrims, but they began to offer armed escorts through the Holy Land, and they became an elite fighting force in the crusades. By the late thirteenth century, the order had acquired significant lands in several countries, including England.

The Hospitallers’ chief rivals in terms of power and influence were the Knights Templar. The Templars are widely accredited with having invented modern banking. Noblemen planning to visit the Holy Land could assign their wealth over to the Templars, and on arrival at a Templar stronghold in the East, they could withdraw money and treasures to the same value.

By 1312, the Templars had become victims of their own success. With banking came credit, and with credit, debt. King Philip IV of France owed so much that he was desperate to wriggle out of his obligation. When an ex Templar brought some dubious criminal charges against the order, Philip seized the opportunity to have the Grand Master and many prominent members arrested. The Templars’ secret initiation ceremonies bred distrust, and the confessions Philip extracted under torture “revealed” that Templar recruits were required to spit on the cross, deny Christ, worship false idols and indulge in acts of homosexuality: all highly dubious claims that nonetheless resulted in dozens of members being burnt at the stake as heretics. Under duress, Pope Clement V disbanded the Templars, signing over much of their property (like Temple Sowerby in the Eden Valley) to the Knights Hospitaller.

Evidence for the hospice below High Rigg is sketchy, but there is a mention of a “House of St John” in a land bequest to Fountains Abbey in 1210. It is thought the hospice evolved into the inn that stood on the pass for many centuries. It likely lent its dedication to St John’s church, which dates back to the 1500’s (possibly earlier). For many centuries, St John’s was an outlying chapel of the parish of Crosthwaite, Keswick. (It became a parish church in its own right in 1863). It’s a lonely setting for a country chapel, but it serves both the Naddle valley and St John’s in the Vale, and if James Clark’s Survey of the Lakes of 1778 is anything to go by, the presence of the inn may have been an incentive for the faithful to turn out for worship:

“all the inhabitants of the parish, old and young, men and women, repair to the ale house after Evening Prayer”.

According to Clark, the valley was properly known as the Vale of Wanthwaite but calling it the Vale of St John had already become common practice. In his wonderful parish history, former vicar, Geoffrey Darrall, suggests that the variation, St John’s-in-the-Vale, was first used to differentiate the chapel from St John’s Keswick, when the latter was built in 1838.

By 1845, the chapel had fallen into disrepair to the extent it needed rebuilding. The man who was given the job was a local stonemason who had built many of the area’s dry stone walls and dwellings. His name was John Richardson, and he lived at the end of this footpath.

Beyond Sosgill Bridge, the beck that has been a constant companion takes a wider birth, swinging back for a final parting kiss beneath the copper-bracken clad slopes of Rake How. Lonscale Fell commands the forward view now, soft purple but for a thin band of snow that defines its pointed eastern peak, the valley at its foot is fleetingly gilded by a shaft of sunlight. Ahead, beneath an intricate tracery of black branches, appears the white-walled haven of Bridge House, the Richardsons’ residence from 1858, when they moved from Stone Cottage on the Naddle side of the Fell.

The path meets the winding lane that climbs the pass. I turn up it, and in no more than a hundred yards, I reach the church. This humble edifice of weathered slate, nestled under High Rigg, in the shadow of Blencathra, looks as if it has been carved from the hillside—an enduring unassuming testament to rural faith.

Originally, the pass served as a corpse road. Anyone who died in the valley had their coffin carried to Crosthwaite for burial. In 1767, the chapel was granted the right to bury its own dead in its own chapel yard. It wasn’t until nine years later that the first burial took place here. A local superstition held that the Devil was waiting to claim the soul of the first interred, and the belief was so strong as to compel all ageing locals to insist they be carried to Crosthwaite when their time came (unless, by chance, someone else had beaten them to the first lot). According to Richardson, that “someone else” was an ailing vagrant who dropped dead on the road. Rather than being bemoaned as burden by the parish saddled with his burial costs, the poor soul met with a hero’s funeral.

John Richardson grave and St John's church — John Richardson grave and St John’s church

In the churchyard, opposite the east window, stands an old gravestone in the shape of a Celtic cross, its edges softened by moss and its face mottled with lichen. The circle at the centre of the cross holds a Christogram, intwining the letters “I”, “H” and “S” into a gothic motif—iota-eta-sigma—the first three letters in the Greek for Jesus. The foot of the cross broadens into a tablet, which bears the following inscription:

IN LOVING MEMORY OF JOHN RICHARDSON
Of Bridge House
ST JOHN’S IN THE VALE
WHO DIED ON THE 30TH APRIL 1886
Aged 68 Years
ALSO OF GRACE, HIS WIFE
WHO DIED FEBRUARY 11TH 1909
Aged 90 Years

John Richardson's gravestone — John Richardson’s gravestone

Writing in 1975, Frank Carruthers lamented, “Today (the grave) is seldom visited because memories of John Richardson have faded”. Almost ninety years earlier, the whole valley turned out for his funeral, and they were joined by many, many more from far further afield. For John Richardson was more than a stonemason, and his legacy, more than the humble church in whose shadow he lies.

After rebuilding the church, Richardson built the school next door (now the Carlisle Diocesan Youth Centre), then put down his chisel and took up the position of school master. It was during these years that he gave full reign to another talent—a gift for capturing the rural life of the fells and valleys in a way few others have ever managed.

In 1871, Richardson published Cummerland Talk—being short tales and rhymes in the dialect of that county. A second volume followed five years later, and between them, the books turned Richardson into a minor celebrity. Seamus Heaney has described his own poetry as “the music of what happens”, and this too is what Richardson makes, a celebration of the commonplace, rendered in the everyday parlance of the district and the time, a Cumbrian counterpoint to the writings of his hero, Robbie Burns

Tom an’ Jerry (written forty years before the cartoon when the term meant a drinking den) tells the story of a man and wife, who procure a barrel of ale, which they plan to pay for by selling pints at threepence apiece to their neighbours.

Says Ben to t’ wife, “Auld wife”’ says he,
“We’ll hev a Tom an’ Jerry;
An’ thoo can wait, an’ I can drum.
By jing! but well be merry!
We’ll hev a cask o’ yal for t’ start,
An’ than when we want mair.
We’ll pay wi’ t’ brass we’ve selt it for.
An’ summat hev to spare.”

As each decides to sample the ale, the other insists they hand over the requisite threepence. In the absence of any other punters, they carry on like this all evening until they both pass out. When they awake, they find they’ve drunk the barrel dry, and they’ve no means to pay for it as, all night, they were simply swapping the same threepence back and forth.

In “FOR SHAM O’ THE’, MARY!” SES I, the narrator admonishes his wife for spreading gossip, but in his eagerness to express his own disdain for such “clattin’ an’ tattlin’ ‘s aboot nowt”, he manages to repeat every piece of salacious tittle-tattle he’s heard.

The Cockney in Mosedale tells of a farmer chancing upon a strange red-whiskered creature running about the fellside in fear of everything around him: the farmer, his dog, the sheep, and the fells themselves. In his panic, the poor creature gets stuck fast in a “peet-pot”. Fearing it might come to harm if left to its own devices, the farmer leaves it “stack theer as fast as a fiddlepin” while he fodders his flock. Then he hauls it out, ties it up in his hay sheet, and carries it down to Troutbeck station, where he discovers the creature is a cockney, who’d taken the train out of London for the first time and alighted, in the dark, at the wrong station.

By way of an introduction to Sneck Posset, Richardson explains the term:

“The old fashioned mode of courting in the northern counties, which is still common in many places, is for the young man to go to the house where his sweetheart lives, late at night, after all the other members of the family have retired to rest, when gently tapping at the window, the waiting damsel as soon as she has ascertained, by sundry whisperings, that he is the expected swain, admits him. If from any cause she refuses to let him into the house, he is said to have got a ‘Sneck Posset’.”

John used the same mode (albeit with more success) to court Grace, and he tells the story (from her point of view) in It’s Nobbut Me:

“Ya winter neet; I minds it weel,
Oor lads ‘ed been at t’fell,
An’ bein’ tir’t, went seun to bed,
An’ I sat be messel.
I hard a jike on t’window pane,
An’ deftly went to see;
Bit when I ax’t, ‘Who’s jiken theer?’
Says t’chap, it’s nobbut me!”

By turns comical and romantic, Richardson’s rhymes drip warmth and earthy authenticity. As he explains in the preface to Volume II, they are “strictly Cumbrian in character and idiom, the author having taken pains to ascertain that the real incidents related actually happened in that county; while in the few pieces which are purely imaginary, he has been careful to preserve the same characteristics.”

He could be reflective too, philosophical even. Carruthers describes him as “the supreme example of one of the popular images of the Lake Country Dalesman—quiet, resolute, kind-hearted and self-effacing”. In What I’d Wish For, Richardson concludes,

“Oor real wants are nobbut few
If we to limit them would try”

It’s a sentiment I’ll dwell on more than once in the weeks to come, when the country goes into a painful lockdown, and yet the birdsong seems louder and the sky, free of vapour trails, clearer than I have ever known. Such was the wisdom of a man who prized peace of mind over celebrity and chose to live all his life in the parish of his birth, under the vaunting ridges of Blencathra.

It’s a steep pull up High Rigg from the Youth Centre, but the effort pays back handsomely. On this brooding day between seasons, the ridge is a patchwork of grassy paths, rocky turrets, drystone walls, tiny tarns and swathes of scrub in shades of ochre, tan, russet and green. The views are procession of riches: Skiddaw and Blencathra, Clough Head and the Dodds, Castle Rock, Raven Crag and Thirlmere. Helvellyn is capped in snow and wrapped in mist. Skiddaw is brown and snow-free, just as they both were when I stood here in November. Then, the snow marked the onset of winter, now it marks the season’s last stand.

Surely this is where Richardson stood when the muse struck in 1876, for this very picture is the premise for one of his greatest rhymes, the Fell King, which I’ve reproduced in full below; so I’ll leave the last words to John.

(If you’re struggling with the dialect, read it aloud—persistence rewards richly).

THE FELL KING.

By John Richardson of Saint John’s, 1876

Breet summer days war aw gone by
An’ autumn leaves sa’ broon,
Hed fawn fra t’ trees, an’ here an’ theer,
War whurlin’ up an’ doon;
An’ t’ trees steud whidderin’ neàk’t an’ bare,
Shakken wi’ coald an’ wind.
While t’ burds war wonderin’ hoo it was
Neah shelter they could finnd.

Helvellyn, toorin’ t’ fells abeun,
Saw winter creepin’ on,
An’ grummelin’ sed, “Hoo coald it’s grown;
My winter cap I’ll don.”
Clean wesh’t an’ bleach’t, as white as drip,
He poo’t it ower his broo;
An’ than to t’ fells aw roond he sed,
“Put on ye’r neetcaps noo.”

Auld Skiddaw, lap’t i’ heddery duds,
Laal nwotish seem’t to tak:
An’ seun wi’ lood an’ thunnerin’ voice,
Agean Helvellyn spak:
“I say, put on that winter cap,
Broon hill ower-groun wi’ ling;
Rebellious upstart! put it on;
Obey thy lawful king!”

Auld Skiddaw lang hed hanker’t sair
Itsel to be t’ fell king;
An’ Saddleback hed egg’t it on,
Thinkin’ ‘t wad honour bring;
An’ bits o’ profit it mud be,—
Fwok see eneuf o’ that;
When kings an’ girt fwok thriven ur
Their flunkies oft git fat.

Seah, Skiddaw stack it’ hedder up,
An’ pertly sed, “Is yon
Rough heap o’ crags an’ shilly beds,
To tell us what to don?
I’ll freely oan it’s wise eneuf
To hap itsel wi’ snow;
If I was neak’t an’ bare like it
I’d hide mysel an’ aw.

“I’s nut asham’t my heid to show,
Withoot a neetcap on;
An’ claim mair reet to be t’ fell king
Nor a bare hill like yon,
Fra t’ farthest neùks o’ t’ warld fwok come
Fam’t Skiddaw bit to see;
Whoar ten climm up Helvellyn breest,
Ten twenties climm up me!”

With threetnin’ storm, Helvellyn laps
Dark cloods aroond it’ heid;
An’ noo a voice fra t’ clood com oot,
“A bonny king, indeed!
A hill thrown up by mowdiwarps,
An’ cuvver’t ower wi’ ling,
Withoot a crag, withoot a tarn,
Wad mak a nice fell king!

“Laal brag it is for enny man
To climm up Skiddaw side;
Auld wives an’ barnes on jackasses,
To t’ tippy top may ride;
When theer, it’s nut sa’ much they see,
Bit level country roond;
They’re better pleas’t when gangin’ up.
Nor when they’re comin’ doon.

“Bit let them climm Helvellyn side,
If climm’t they nobbut can;
They munnet be auld wives or barnes;
It taks a strang hale man,
To stand on t’ dizzy edge, an’ leuk
Doon t’ screes, whoar Gough was lost;
An’ he’s neah snafflin’ ‘at can say,
Ower Striden edge I cross’t.

“Than what a glorious scene it is
‘At ‘s spread befwore his eyes,
O’ lakes an’ tarns an’ woody deàls.
An’ fells ower fells ‘at rise.
A dozen lakes, an’ twenty tarns,
Ur spread befwore his een;
An’ Skiddaw, like a low black hill,
Far doon to t’ north is seen!”

What mair palaver theer hed been,
It’s hard for yan to tell;
For gnimmelin’ soonds, an’ snarlin’ words.
Noo spread fra fell to fell;
An’ some their caps o’ white don’t on,
While udders went without;
An’ some proclaim’ t Helvellyn king,
While some wad Skiddaw shoot.

Bit noo roond Scawfell Man theer hung,
As midneet black, a clood;
An’ oot fra’t brast a thunner clap,
‘At rwoar’t beàth lang an’ lood:
Than hail an’ snow com whurlin’ doon.
An’ hap’t beàth crags an’ ling;
While t’ fells aw roond, as whisht as mice,
Oan’t Scawfell as their king!

Sources/Further Reading

Richardson, John. 1871: Cummerland Talk. London: John Russell Smith; Carlisle: Geo. Coward.

Richardson, John. 1876: Cummerland Talk (Second Series). London: Bemrose and Sons; Carlisle: G. & T. Coward.

Carruthers, F. J. 1975. The Lore of the Lake Country. London: Robert Hale & Company

Darrall, Geoffrey. 2009. The Story of St John’s-in-the-Vale. Keswick: Piper Publications (available from St John’s Church)

Fell Walk, General, Ghost Story, History, Legend, Literature, Natural History, Nature

Before the flood

February 23, 2020 George Kitching 21 Comments

Raven Crag & the Flooding of Thirlmere

In 1879, the Manchester Corporation obtained royal permission to turn Thirlmere into a reservoir by building a dam that would flood the valley, drowning the hamlets of Wythburn and Armboth and submerging a shoreline rich in beauty and folklore. I climb Raven Crag and Launchy Gill in search of the ghosts of a lost world.

Frost has iced the earth, feathering treetops in elegant plumes of winter. Above a lake of shadows, Raven Crag stands proud, mirrored in waters blue as midnight, its chiselled face furred with conifer. Not that anyone left alive remembers, but it once stood taller:

“Farewell! the dear irrevocable shore!
Dark firs, and blue-bell copse, and shallowing bright!
Stern Raven Crag is cheated of its height”

The words are Canon Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley’s, lamenting a Victorian act of vandalism wrought on this ancient landscape by the construction of the stone dam beneath my feet. He was not alone in his anger: W. G. Collingwood, founder of the Ruskin museum and designer of the Great Gable war memorial, declared, “Thirlmere… once was the richest in story and scenery of all the lakes. The old charm of its shores has quite vanished, and the sites of its legends are hopelessly altered, so that the walk along either side is a mere sorrow to anyone who cared for it before; the sham castles are an outrage and the formality of the roads, beloved of cyclists, deforms the hillsides like a scar on a face”. Ruskin himself was less generous, saying of the dam builders, “as to these Manchester robbers … there is ‘no profit’ in the continuance of their lives”.

The “robbers” were the Waterworks Committee of the Manchester Corporation. In 1877, they published a report predicting that Manchester would outgrow its current water supply within seven years—this in spite of municipal policies that discouraged water closets and baths in working class homes. They proposed a scheme to turn Thirlmere into a reservoir that would supply Manchester with fifty million gallons of water per day by means of a ninety-six-mile-long aqueduct. It would be an innovative triumph of engineering, and it would provide the city (and its cotton mills) with some of the purest water to be found anywhere in England.

To obtain the powers necessary, a private bill was brought before Parliament. The corporation had anticipated the kind of objections that were raised by wealthy landowners (such as, “undesirable disturbance by constructing the aqueduct through gentlemen’s private pleasure grounds”). They had even whipped up local support—when petitioned the ratepayers of Keswick voted 90% in favour (they’d been promised the scheme would free the town from flooding forever). But Manchester had underestimated the weight of opposition from another quarter.

Social reformer, Octavia Hill, called for a committee to examine the matter, devise a plan of opposition, and raise funds to fight the scheme. Under a name more evocative of a paramilitary force than a village green preservation society, the Thirlmere Defence Association was born. It was a coalition of creatives, including eminent writers, artists and philosophers.

The debating of a private bill is designed to consider objections from those who will be financially disadvantaged by its proposal. Unable to demonstrate any such private interest, the TDA presented the landscape as a public asset and its despoliation as an affront to the nation. Their argument was sufficiently strong, and whipped up enough public support, to commute the private bill into a hybrid bill, which considered the public as well as private interests.

The Defence Association was particularly incensed by Alderman Grave’s assertion that the scheme would improve on nature. John Grave actually had closer ties with the area than many of his opponents, being the son of a Cockermouth saddler. He had moved to Manchester to found a highly successful paper manufacturing business and had become mayor three times. He was now chairman of the Waterworks Committee—converting Thirlmere into a reservoir had been his brainchild.

Lord of the Manor, Thomas Leonard Stanger Leathes of Dale Head Hall, on the eastern shore, was outraged; he banned anyone associated with the scheme from his land. As a result, Grave and Sir John James Haywood had to conduct a clandestine survey, on hands and knees in appalling weather to avoid forcible ejection. As a consequence, they both spent several days in bed with severe colds.

But Leathes died in 1877, and the Manchester Corporation bought his estate. Despite spirited opposition, Parliament found in favour of Grave’s committee, and in 1879, the Corporation was granted royal permission by Queen Victoria to begin work; the first stone of the dam was laid in 1890. It would eventually raise the level of the lake by 54ft and increase its expanse to 690 acres, submerging the cottages and farmsteads of Wythburn and Armboth, and transforming the valley forever.

The Thirlmere Defence Association had lost the battle but not the war. It inspired the formation of the National Trust and was iconic in the development of modern environmental protection—it was, essentially, the birth of the Green movement in Britain.

Grave died in 1891, three years before the water supply was switched on, but not before the Cumbrian landscape had exacted a degree of poetic justice. With the scheme underway, Grave retired to Portinscale where he built a grand residence, the Towers. In a headstrong rush of pride, Grave augmented his property with an ostentatious gothic coach house, sporting steeples and cloisters. Locals warned him that the ground between the lake and road was too moist to support such a thing. When he refused to listen, they termed the building, “Grave’s folly”; and such it turned out to be. In a scenario reminiscent of a Monty Python sketch, it “sunk into the swamp”.

I walk on past one of the faux castles that so enraged Collingwood. They were built by the Manchester Corporation to house the dam’s workings—Grave’s vision of enhancing the landscape, no doubt.

Some people felt that the greater affront was the Corporation’s aggressive afforestation policy, replacing the thin skirt of indigenous oaks that lined the lake with dense spruce and larch plantations. The aim was to filter run-off water from the fells and preserve the lake’s purity, but the dense cover obscured magnificent vistas and gave Thirlmere a look more in keeping with Canada than the heart of the English Lake District.

These days, the prospect is changing. Even before handing stewardship to the Water Board, the Manchester Corporation had adopted more sensitive policies, thinning the conifer and planting broad-leaf tree varieties. As I climb through the woods, a clearing reveals the bay-dun majesty of Helvellyn and the Dodds, and splashes of deciduous shrub lick sombre greens with flames of autumnal copper. Ahead the larches are not without their charms. Unique among conifers in shedding the needles, their stark winter forms adorn the mossy terraces and vertical white walls of Raven Crag. Their perpendicular trunks are slender pillars, and their bare branches, rib vaults to a succession of rock galleries, enhancing the stately grandeur of this immense natural cathedral.

The path tracks uphill beside the cliff to the old iron age fort of Castle Crag. From here, I climb to Raven Crag’s summit from behind by means of a wooden boardwalk. The top commands a peerless view down the entire length of the lake. This is the spot where Wainwright sketched himself, “apparently contemplating the view (but more likely merely wondering if it’s time to be eating his sandwiches)”.

Edward Baines, writing in 1834, helps us imagine what all this looked like in the pre-Manchester days:

“Before us, and lying along the foot of the fells, which separate this valley from that of Watendlath, stretched the dark, narrow lake of Thirlmere, which bears also the names of Leathes Water and Wythburn Water. It is nearly three miles in length, but about the middle the shores approach each other so as almost to divide it into two distinct lakes, —a bridge being thrown over the strait. It is overhung and shaded by crags, some of which are stupendous, and all naked and gloomy. The most conspicuous is Raven-crag, near the foot of the lake, which forms a striking object for many miles,—resembling a gigantic round tower, blackened and shattered by the lapse of ages. Thirlmere has a higher elevation than any other lake, being 500 feet above the level of the sea: its greatest depth of water is eighteen fathoms. Its borders are not adorned, like those of the other lakes, by wood, with the exception of a few fir plantations, (which rather increase the gloominess of the scene), and of a bold wooded eminence, called the How, at the foot of the lake. This valley has no luxuriance, and its general character is wild magnificence.”

(It was Thirlmere’s elevation that proved so attractive to the Manchester Corporation. Few other English lakes could have fed the aqueduct by gravity alone.)

Harriet Martineau, in 1855, adds to the picture:

“Of the two lake-roads, the rude western one is unquestionably the finest. The woods, which were once so thick that the squirrel is said to have gone from Wythburn to Keswick without touching the ground, are cleared away now; and the only gloom in the scene is from the mass of Helvellyn. The stranger leaves the mail road within a mile of the Horse’s Head, passes the cottages called by the boastful name of the City of Wythburn, and a few farmhouses, and soon emerging from the fences, finds himself on a grassy level under the Armboth Fells, within an amphitheatre of rocks, with the lake before him, and Helvellyn beyond, overshadowing it. The rocks behind are feathered with wood, except where a bold crag here, and a cataract there, introduces a variety.”

This old road has been lost beneath the waters, along with its landmarks, rich in stories. Submerged is Clark’s Lowp, a huge boulder opposite Deergarth How Island, from which Clark, a henpecked dalesman made mortally miserable by the nagging of his wife, sought peace by launching himself into the water and drowning. His wife apparently remarked with indifference, “he had often threatened to do away with himself, but I never thought the fool would find the courage to do such a thing”.

Where Launchy Gill crossed the old road was the Steading Stone. Here, the manorial courts were held and the Pains and Penalties of Wythburn were exacted. The penalties included fines for allowing more than your allotted number of sheep to graze the fell or letting cattle wander and foul the becks. (Years later, Wainwright was rumoured to have fouled the becks in protest at “the dark forests (that) conceal the dying traces of a lost civilisation, lost not so very long ago.”

Many of these legends are woven into Hall Caine’s novel, The Shadow of a Crime, published in 1885. Caine grew up in Runcorn but his mother was Cumbrian, and while his story is a fiction, the book is steeped in local heritage. Set just after the English Civil War, it tells the story of Ralph Ray, an honest dalesman, who won respect fighting in the republican army. Times are changing, however, and with Cromwell in the grave and Charles II on the throne, opinion is turning against former Roundheads. Ralph saved the life of a turncoat royalist soldier, James Wilson, and brought him home to Wythburn to work on his father’s farm; but his father suspects Wilson is a snake-in-the-grass. When Wilson is found dead, suspicion falls on an impoverished tailor, called Simeon Stagg. There is insufficient evidence to convict Stagg and he walks free, but the community, convinced of his guilt and fearful of divine wrath should they knowingly shelter a murderer, drive him out, forcing him to live in a cave on the slopes above Fornside.

Ray and Wilson are Caine’s inventions but the story of Sim’s cave and the “hang-gallows tailor” are a genuine part of the valley’s folklore. He allegedly murdered a traveller on the eastern shore road near the Nag’s Head tavern that once stood opposite Wythburn Church. Sim is said to have eventually left the area when the hardships of cave-dwelling became too much.

In Caine’s version, however, Sim is innocent. He knows what really happened that night but refuses to tell as the truth would harm Ralph, his only friend. Not even Sim knows the whole story, however. That only emerges when another villager is stricken with The Plague and resolves to die with a clear conscience.

The Great Plague of 1665 was a genuine concern for the residents of Wythburn and Armboth (as it was for many other Cumbrian villages). At its height, movement around the District was restricted, but livings still had to be made. Up above Launchy Tarn, at a confluence of paths, is the Web Stone, a boulder where webs of wool would be covertly traded well away from the villages. Coins were washed in vinegar and water to disinfect them before they were brought back down the fell.

When the Manchester Corporation felled the last of the old oaks that used to line Launchy Gill, Canon Rawnsley was moved to write, “Where are the thrushes and blackbirds to build now? Every branch had been a possible home but for the axe. I have many a time heard thrushes singing from these lower branches, and watched the squirrels playing upon them. I shall hear and see them no more”. The canon would be heartened to know that Launchy Gill is again flanked by indigenous broad-leaf trees, one of the most conspicuous examples of the more recent rewilding policies.

Storm Desmond also conspired to help with the rewilding. The Corporation had incurred the wrath of the conservationists by erecting a wooden walkway and footbridge around the gill to encourage tourists to view its spectacular waterfalls. The storm destroyed the bridge and obstructed the path with a succession of uprooted trees. When I visited, I was obliged to don microspikes to ford the beck and scramble the wall of greasy boulders on the other side. For the motorist looking for an easy twenty minute peramble in pub shoes and leisurewear, it might prove an unnerving experience. As a precaution, United Utilities (the present stewards) have removed the signpost and steps by the road. For the romantically-inclined fellwalker, however, it feels like a victory for nature, and a far-more satisfying adventure.

Above the A591, that now skirts the eastern shore of the lake, is Wythburn church. With the exception of Dale Head Hall and the farms at Stenkin and Steel End, it is the only surviving building. Today, it is a church without a congregation. The communion rail is dedicated to the Reverend Winfried Des Vœux Hill, vicar of Wythburn at the time of the dam’s construction; the pastor who saw his flock dispersed. Outside, gravestones stand as monuments to Wainwright’s “lost civilisation”.

On the wall is an old photograph, taken from the churchyard, looking down over farmland to Armboth Hall. Superstitious villagers must have drawn some comfort from the church’s pre-eminent position, as the Hall was once considered the most haunted house in Lakeland. Harriet Martineau reported:

“Lights are seen there at night, people say, and the bells ring; and just as the bells set off ringing, a large dog is seen swimming across the lake. The plates and dishes clatter; and the table is spread by unseen hands. That is the preparation for the ghostly wedding feast of a murdered bride, who comes up from her watery bed in the lake to keep her terrible nuptials. There is really something remarkable, and like witchery, about the house.”

According to W. T. Palmer, the hall played host to an annual supernatural jamboree for all the spooks in Lakeland, including the skulls of Calgarth:

“For once a year, on All Hallowe’en, it is said, the ghosts of the Lake Country, the fugitive spirits whose bodies were destroyed in unavenged crime, come here… Bodies without heads, the skulls of Calgarth with no bodies, a phantom arm which possesses no other member, and many a weird shape beside.”

But the spirits are all gone now, along with the homes of the dalesfolk who feared them. Drowned beneath the waters of progress. It’s a fate that farmers whose lands fall across the proposed HS2 route may find painfully familiar.

In the wider context, what the engineers achieved was phenomenal. The Cumbrian water supply has long been a cause for celebration in Manchester, and it benefits local towns too. The Corporation proved a good employer, allowing workers to live on in their cottages after retiring, and protecting the surviving farmland from property developers.

Thirlmere is still astoundingly beautiful. But standing here in this lonely churchyard, with a head full of old stories, looking out over the rippled expanse of water, I can’t help but wonder whether its soul has been submerged.

Sources/Further Reading

Baines , Edward. 1834: A companion to the Lakes of Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Lancashire. London: Simpkin and Marshall

Martineau, Harriet. 1855: A Complete Guide to the English Lakes. Windermere: John Garnett.

Palmer, W. T. 1908. The English Lakes. London: Adam and Charles Black.

Carruthers, F. J. 1975. The Lore of the Lake Country. London: Robert Hale & Company

Caine, Hall. 1885. The Shadow of a Crime. New York: W. L. Allison Company

Findler, Gerald. 1984. Lakeland Ghosts. Clapham: Dalesman Books

Pipe, Beth and Steve. 2015. Historic Cumbria. Off the Beaten Track. Stroud: Amberley.

Darrall, Geoffrey. 2006. Wythburn Church and the Valley of Thirlmere. Keswick: Piper Publications (available from Wythburn Church)

Wikipedia is also good on the history of the reservoir:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirlmere

Fell Walk, General, Ghost Story, History, Legend, Literature

An Unkindness of Ravens

January 19, 2020 George Kitching 20 Comments

How Castle Rock of Triermain got its name

A striking outcrop of Watson Dodd, Castle Rock of Triermain is named for a local superstition and a legend of King Arthur, popularised by Sir Walter Scott. It was a favourite of rock climbers until a recent event that bore an uncanny resemblance to the story. On a crisp and frosty morning, I go in search of Merlin in the Vale of St John.

A sheer wall of white rock, marbled with indigo and mauve shadow, rises over stark winter branches. Spindly rowan saplings extend white twigs like spectral fingers, and burgundy berries hang in clusters over copper bracken. I climb over littered boulders to the foot of a crag that looms like the ruin of a colossal fortress. The earth is crisp with frost and the air hangs still but for the staccato croak of ravens. These giants of the crow family have kept guard, since time immemorial, over this natural castle in the Vale of Saint John.

The Vikings believed ravens to be the eyes and ears of Odin; the Greeks considered them associates of Apollo, god of prophecy, and ill omens in the mortal world; native Americans thought them tricksters. Collective nouns for ravens include: an unkindness, a treachery, and a conspiracy.

Deceptive spirits are associated with this crag. In 1773, William Hutchinson published perhaps the first real Lakeland guidebook, An Excursion to the Lakes in Westmoreland and Cumberland. In its pages he gives rein to a local superstition, and in doing so, helps cement a change of name for this towering outcrop of Watson Dodd, once known as Green Crag. Hutchinson writes:

“In the widest part of the dale you are struck with the appearance of an ancient ruined castle, which seems to stand upon the summit of a little mount, the mountains around forming an amphitheatre. This massive bulwark shows a front of various towers, and makes an awful rude and Gothic appearance, with its lofty turrets and ragged battlements; we traced the galleries, the bending arches, the buttresses. The greatest antiquity stands characterised in its architecture; the inhabitants near it assert it is an antediluvian structure.

“The traveller’s curiosity is roused, and he prepares to make a nearer approach, when that curiosity is put on the rack, by his being assured, that, if he advances, certain genii who govern the place by virtue of their supernatural art and necromancy, will strip it of all its beauties, and by enchantment, transform the magic walls. The vale seems adapted for the habitation of such beings; its gloomy recesses and retirements look like the haunts of evil spirits. There was no delusion in the report; we were soon convinced of its truth; for this piece of antiquity, so venerable and noble it its aspect, as we drew near changed its figure, and proved no other than a shaken massive pile of rocks, which stand in the midst of this little vale, disunited from the adjoining mountains, and have so much the real form and resemblance of a castle, that they bear the name of the Castle Rocks of St. John.”

Overhead, the guttural squawk of the ravens assumes a mocking tone.

In Susanna Clarke’s novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, the Raven King is the custodian of English magic and the builder of the King’s Roads, the realm behind the mirrors that affords access to other worlds. Clarke’s figure is a fiction, but a Raven King does exist in Celtic mythology. He was Brân the Blessed, a Welsh giant, and high king of Britain. Brân’s sister, Branwen, was due to marry the Irish king, Matholwch, however, resentful that his permission had not been sought, their brother, Efnysien, mutilated Matholwch’s horses. Matholwch was incensed, but Brân placated him with the gift of a magic cauldron which could bring the dead back to life.

Back in Ireland, Matholwch began to brood afresh on Efnysien’s affront, and banished Branwen to the kitchen where she was beaten daily. In retaliation, her brothers waged a vicious war which only seven of the Welsh and none of the Irish survived; the Irish were initially indomitable as they could use the cauldron to resurrect their fallen, but Efnysien dived in and destroyed it from within, sacrificing himself in the process . Mortally wounded in the foot, the Raven King instructed his seven survivors to cut off his head and carry it with them. The head continued to talk. Eventually, it instructed them to carry him to England, to White Hill, where the Tower of London now stands, and to bury him facing France so that he could forever ward off invasion. To this day, six ravens are kept at the Tower. Should they leave, superstition says, the kingdom of Britain will fall.

A Celtic king whose spirit is eternally entwined with the fate of the realm has an Arthurian overtone. Indeed, in one Cornish version of the Arthurian legend, the dying King Arthur transforms into a raven. King Arthur has a direct association with the Castle Rocks of St John, courtesy of Sir Walter Scott’s epic poem of 1813, Bridal of Triermain. The poem was in part, inspired by Hutchinson’s account, and it is set right here in St. John’s in the Vale, where Gategill fell, that steep pyramidal buttress to Blencathra, dominates the northern skyline, and the Helvellyn massif is a high eastern rampart.

Gategill Fell, Blencathra from Legburthwaite in St John’s in the Vale

Scott’s poem intertwines three stories. The first is that of the narrator, a lowly musician attempting to win the hand of his high-born sweetheart, Lucy. Afraid that Lucy’s head may be turned by a rival with greater wealth or breeding, he recounts the tale of Roland De Vaux, the twelfth century Baron of Triermain, as a cautionary tale against maidenly pride. In the story, the Baron has a vision of a maiden so fair, he swears he will wed none other than she. He dispatches his faithful page to Ullswater to seek the advice of the Lyulph, a sage whose ancestry stretches back to King Arthur’s time (and who gave his name to the lake: originally, Ulph’s Water). The Lyulph recognises the girl from the page’s description:

“That maid is born of middle earth
And may of man be won,
Though there have glided since her birth,
Five hundred years and one.
But where’s the Knight in all the north,
That dare the adventure follow forth,
So perilous to knightly worth,
In the valley of St. John?”

He goes on to recount “a mystic tale… handed down from Merlin’s age”. In the Lyulph’s tale, King Arthur rides out from Carlisle and reaches Blencathra (which curiously, Scott calls Glaramara). Arthur passes Scales Tarn and descends beside the fledgling Glenderamackin river until he reaches the Vale of St. John, where he spies a formidable castle. Arriving at the gate, the castle appears deserted: it is silent, no banners flutter, and no guards patrol the battlements. Arthur sounds his bugle, and immediately, the portcullis is raised, and the drawbridge lowered. The king rides in to find a castle inhabited entirely by fair young maidens and their beautiful queen, Guendolen, in whose seductive company, he wiles away the next three months.

Guendolen has an ulterior motive for seducing the unsuspecting king:

“Her mother was of human birth,
Her sire a Genie of the earth,
In days of old deemed to preside,
O’er lovers’ wiles and beauty’s pride,
By youths and virgins worshipp’d long,
With festive dance and choral song,
Till, when the cross to Britain came,
On heathen alters died the flame,
Now deep in Wastdale solitude,
The downfall of his rights he rued,
And, born of his resentment heir,
He train’d to guile that lady fair,
To sink in slothful sin and shame
The champions of the Christian name.”

While Guendolen’s charms hold sway over Arthur, his kingdom languishes, ravaged by Saxons and Vikings alike. Eventually the king remembers himself and resolves to return to Camelot, but mindful of a lover’s responsibility, he first swears an oath to Guendolen: if, as a result of their union, she should bear him a son, the boy shall be heir to Arthur’s kingdom. Should she bear him a daughter, Arthur will hold a tournament, where the best of his knights will battle for the girl’s hand in marriage.

With the king mounted on his charger, Guendolen offers a parting drink: “not the juice the sluggish vines of earth produce”, but “the draught which Genii love”. She quaffs from a goblet and hands it to Arthur, but as he raises the cup toward his mouth, a drop falls on his horse’s neck and burns it so badly, it leaps twenty feet in the air:

“The peasant still can show the dint
Where his hoofs lighted on the flint”

Dropping the goblet, Arthur returns to Carlisle, resumes command of his knights, and defeats the Saxons in a series of twelve bloody battles. Fifteen years pass, then during an extravagant feast at Camelot, a fair young maiden appears on a white charger. At first, Arthur thinks it is Guendolen, but quickly realises he is wrong. This is Gyneth, his illegitimate daughter by Guendolen, come to claim her birthright.

Arthur is true to his word and organises a tournament, offering Gyneth’s hand together with a handsome dowry of Strathclyde, Reged and Carlisle to the victor. However, fearing the cost to his army should his knights battle to the death, he instructs Gyneth to stop the combat before any blood is shed. But Gyneth is her mother’s daughter, and she refuses.

As one by one, Arthur’s knights begin to fall, and their hearts’ blood stains Gyneth’s sandals red, Merlin appears from a cleft in the ground and orders a halt the proceedings, condemning Gyneth for her pride and sentencing her to unbroken sleep in the Castle of St. John…

“until a knight shall wake thee,
For feats of arms as far reknown’d
As a warrior of the Table Round”

To make the quest more difficult, a spell will hide the castle from mortal eyes.

The musician’s tale has the desired effect, and Lucy marries her humble lover, but following their wedding, she presses him to tell her what becomes of Gyneth and whether Sir Roland De Vaux goes in search of her…

…Of course he does. Sir Roland spends many long days and nights in the Vale of St. John, searching in vain for the castle. Then one night, he is awakened from his wild camp by a strange sound echoing around the fells. A meteor passes over, and by its ethereal light, he glimpses the castle, but such is the enchantment, that by the time he reaches its walls, they once again resume the form of a shattered crag. In frustration, Sir Roland raises his battle axe…

“And at the rocks his weapon threw,
Just where one crag’s projected crest,
Hung proudly balanced o’er the rest.
Hurl’d with main force, the weapon’s shock
Rent a huge fragment of the rock”

In response to the blow, the rocks come tumbling down, and when the dust has settled, a fractured and mossy staircase is revealed that leads Sir Roland up to the castle’s entrance. He swims the moat, and enters the castle where, in successive chambers, he runs a gauntlet of ferocious tigers, declines the offer of untold riches, resists the charms of wanton maidens who declare themselves slaves to love, and declines offers of power and influence. Having thus conquered fear, pleasure, wealth and pride, he proves his worth and dissolves the spell that holds Gyneth in perpetual sleep. On awakening, King Arthur’s daughter happily agrees to wed her rescuer, and they leave the castle to lead a long and happy life together.

However, in their absence, the enchantment on the castle resumes:

“Know too, that when a pilgrim strays,
In morning mist or evening maze,
Along the mountain lone,
The fairy fortress often mocks
His gaze upon the castled rocks
Of the valley of St. John;
But never man since brave De Vaux
The charmed portal won.
‘Tis now a vain illusive show,
That melts whene’r the sunbeams glow,
Or the fresh breeze hath blown.”

Today, Harvey maps name Castle Rock, the Castle Rock of Triermain, in reference to the poem. Its north face offers popular rock climbs with names like Zigzag and Overhanging Bastion. But in 2012, a large crack was discovered in the buttress; a block the size of bungalow threatened to splinter from the main cliff, and climbers were cautioned to keep away.

On 18^th November 2018, in an uncanny echo of the poem, the block finally detached and came crashing down, disfiguring the cliff face and littering its foot with shattered rocks. I climbed over its remnants to get here, and now, I stand gazing at the jagged spot from which it cleaved. A steep irregular gully climbs behind it, carpeted with green moss and fractured rock. It ends in a vertical wall. Yet, however hard I stare, it refuses to resolve into an ancient staircase and a castle gate.

A loud croak comes from a raven perched on the crag; its beady eye fixes me in cool appraisal. A raven’s stare is quizzical; it’s easy to see why our ancestors thought these birds prophetic, or spies for the gods. It could be a genie bent on trickery. Its demeanour is haughty, and the raucous cackle of its call sounds like mockery. Is it laughing at me for something it knows, and I don’t? That I am staring blindly at a faery castle? I see only ruptured rock—the will of Merlin perhaps, or an unkindness of ravens.

This Is My Church

November 24, 2019 George Kitching 29 Comments

Scafell & Scafell Pike via Lord’s Rake, the West Wall Traverse and Foxes Tarn

Wainwright declared Scafell Crag, “the greatest display of natural grandeur in the district”, and climbing pioneer, Owen Glynne Jones, thought the Pinnacle “the finest bit of rock scenery in the Scawfell massif”. I set off for Lord’s Rake and the West Wall Traverse to experience these breathtaking crags up close. In the golden hour before dusk, I scramble down Foxes Tarn Gully and up on to Scafell Pike, where sunshine and snow make for a sublime experience.

In our porch are two walking sticks, rough-hewn and robust, cut for hiking. Metal badges decorate their shafts, testimony to myriad adventures; they depict summits, stags, viaducts and mountain villages, and bear Alpine names like Brienzer Rothorn, Grimsel Furka, Jochpass and Brünig. The sticks belonged to Sandy’s great uncles, Tom and Arthur, brothers who shared a love of fell walking, mountaineering and ice-climbing. In the 1940’s, to heed the call of the Alps was to embrace a British passion that was less than a hundred years old.

The Victorians turned mountaineering into a pastime. Alfred Wills’s ascent of the Wetterhorn in 1854 opened the Golden Age of Alpinism, which culminated with Edward Whymper’s ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865. A Silver Age followed, which ended in 1882 when William Woodman Graham reached the summit of the Giant’s Tooth.

Four years later, a new sport was born here, in the English Lake District, when Walter Parry Haskett-Smith climbed Napes Needle, a free standing rock pinnacle on the side of Great Gable. To climb the Needle served no mountaineering purpose. It was rock climbing as sport in its own right. The notion caught on, spearheaded by men like Haskett-Smith and John Robinson, and fostered by the formation of the Fell and Rock Climbing Club in 1906.

Of these early pioneers, one man did perhaps more than any other to fan the flames of interest. His name was Owen Glynne Jones, and what set him apart from his peers was not so much his climbing prowess, remarkable though it was, but the engaging way he wrote about it. Demand for Jones’s book, Rock Climbing in the English Lake District, soon outstripped its initial 1897 publication run.

Abraham Brothers postcard of the Scafell Pinnacle (but is it Owen on the top?)

The book is beautifully illustrated with photographs by the Abraham Brothers of Keswick. George and Ashley Abraham were accomplished climbers, but they were photographers by profession, and their startling images of the Lakes graced many a contemporary postcard. They accompanied Jones on several climbs, but two, in particular, stood out:

“Two climbs with Mr. Jones are most strongly impressed on our memories, and these two would probably rank as the two finest rock climbs made in our district. These are the Scawfell Pinnacle from the second pitch in Deep Ghyll in 1896, and the conquest of the well-known Walker’s Gully on the Pillar Rock in January, 1899. Both of these were generally considered impossible, and it is probably no exaggeration to say that no leader excepting Mr. Jones would have had the confidence to advance beyond the ledge where the last arête commenced on the Scawfell Pinnacle climb.”

Jones describes the Pinnacle as;

“the finest bit of rock scenery in the Scawfell massif. It rises up some 600 feet from the foot of Lord’s Rake in steep and almost unclimbable slabs of smooth rock, forming the left-hand boundary of Deep Ghyll and the right of Steep Ghyll.”

The Pinnacle and Pisgah Buttress, Scafell Crag — The Pisgah Buttress and the Pinnacle, Scafell Crag

You don’t have to be a climber to be swept along by the power, humour and joie de vivre in Jones’s writing. His account of their assault on the Pinnacle is a particular highlight:

“My companions were holding an animated discussion below on the subject of photography. The light was excellent, and our positions most artistic. The cameras were left in the cave at the foot of the ghyll. Ashley was afraid I meant to go up without him; but his professional instinct got the better of his desire to climb, and, shouting out to us to stay where we were for five minutes, he ran round to the high-level traverse on the other side of the ghyll, and down the Lord’s Rake to the cavern. George had the tripod screw and could not hand it to his brother; so, asking me to hold him firmly with the rope, he practised throwing stones across the gully to the traverse. Then, tying the screw to a stone, he managed to project this over successfully…

“‘Mr. Jones! I can’t see you, your clothes are so dark.’ I apologised. ‘Will you step out a foot or two from that hole?’ I was in a cheerful mood and ready to oblige a friend, but the platform was scarcely two feet square, and to acquiesce was to step out a few hundred feet into Deep Ghyll. For this I had not made adequate preparation and told him so.”

In 1898, Jones and G. T. Walker broke new ground on the Pinnacle. Contemporary climbing practice favoured ascending chimneys, cracks and gullies, but Jones and Walker went straight up the face of the buttress above Lord’s Rake.

The Lord’s Rake, Scafell. The Pinnacle forms the left hand wall.

In 1903, an attempt to do something similar ended in tragedy for R. W. Broadrick, A. E. W. Garrett, H. L. Jupp, and S. Ridsdale. The men were roped together, so when the leader fell, they all did. At the time, it was the worst climbing accident ever to have occurred in Britain.

The news never reached Jones. He was already dead. He had perished four years earlier, attempting to climb Dent Blanche in the Swiss Alps. A second edition of his book was published posthumously. It contains a poignant memoir from W. M. Crook, who had spoken with Jones just the day before. When Crook had asked him about the ambitious schedule he had set himself, Jones had replied:

“‘You see there are only a few years in which I can do this sort of thing, and I want to get as much into them as possible.’ Alas! Owen Jones had not twenty four hours more; the years were ended.”

At the foot of Lord’s Rake, a humble cross, carved into the rock face, serves as a memorial to Broadrick, Garrett, Jupp and Risdale. It takes me a while to find. It’s deliberately unobtrusive, respectful of the prevailing notion that the mountains should remain unsullied by the mark of man.

In 1730, the political philosopher, Montesquieu, had written, “there is no religion in England.” The Age of Reason had swept godliness aside, at least in intellectual circles, but it had left a spiritual vacuum, which the Romantics filled with the idea of the sublime—the notion that some experiences, and some landscapes, possess such inherent magnificence, such grandeur, such terror even, that they take us utterly beyond ourselves. Scottish glaciologist, James Forbes, wrote of finding the bodies of mountaineers in the Alps:

“The effect on us all was electric… we turned and surveyed, with a stranger sense of sublimity than before, the desolation by which we were surrounded, and became still more sensible of our isolation from human dwellings, human help and human sympathy…We are men, and we stand in the chamber of death”

A skeleton lies at the foot of the rake, not far from the cross. It was once a sheep, but its front legs are missing, giving the strange impression of a velociraptor. Even a dinosaur would be millennia younger than “towering rampart of shadowed crags” that rise all around. The words are Wainwright’s, and he goes on to declare the Scafell crags “the greatest display of natural grandeur in the district”. Today, an early blanket of snow helps illuminate their every nook and cranny. Upper shoulders are bejewelled with glittering crystals of ice, and they conspire to trick the imagination with chameleon forms. The curved ravine of Steep Ghyll creates an elbow in the rock of Pisgah Buttress, and I can see a colossal king of stone, seated on his throne, his face all but hidden by a prodigious beard that flows into his lap. To his right, the Pinnacle stands guard, a might champion, battle-ready in breast plate and helmet, sword held against his chest, while the rounded foot of Shamrock supplies his shield.

The Pinnacle and Pisgah Buttress — The Pisgah Buttress and the Pinnacle, Scafell Crag

I detour along a rocky path that hugs the foot of the cliff, rising on a narrow shelf to Mickledore, the ridge that separates Scafell from Scafell Pike. The summit of Scafell Pike is England’s highest, but it takes its name from its neighbour, which from many angles looks the larger and more imposing. The way up the Pike from Mickledore is easy but the summit of Scafell is defended by the sheer wall of Broad Stand. Wainwright marks Broad Stand “out of bounds for walkers”, and I have no intention of risking my neck. I will ascend via Lord’s Rake, but first, I want to study these magnificent rock faces at close quarters. Their ghylls, gullies, arêtes and chimneys bear the names of climbing pioneers who risked death or glory here: Puttrell’s Traverse, Collier’s Climb, Slingsby’s Chimney, Robinson’s Chimney…

Mountaineering, climbing, even fell walking feats are often described as conquests, but it’s ludicrous to imagine that we could ever conquer a mountain. The conquest is personal—conquering our own fears and frailties, our own dearth of knowledge or lack of skill. Perhaps the victory is simply the feeling that we have entered the “chamber of death” and survived.

The Lord’s Rake from The Rake’s Progress

I retrace my steps and start up the scree of Lord’s Rake. The Rake is a steep gully that affords walkers a dramatic passage up through the crags. It comprises three ascents and two descents. The first section is the hardest, being particularly steep and loose. While not graded as a scramble, hands are frequently employed. About a third of the way up, there’s a breach in the left-hand wall. A mossy cave stares out, like the green mouth of a giant snake. This is the first pitch of Deep Ghyll. The cave’s roof is a tremendous chockstone, assailable only by climbers. Above and set back some way, I can see the entrance to another cave. This is the second climbers’ pitch, where Jones once spent a cheery Christmas Day. His planned ascent was nearly abandoned when one of his party produced a jar of Carlsbad plums. They tasted so good that no-one wanted to leave the cave. Eventually, the owner seized the jar and swore no-one was to take another mouthful until they had completed their climb.

The top of the first section of the Rake is littered with large boulders—the remains of a chockstone that fell in 2002 and came to rest in a standing position, forming a precarious arch. Mountain Rescue warned walkers against using the Rake for fear it would topple, but after a couple of years, it was assumed stable. It did eventually come crashing down in 2016. Fortunately, no-one was on the Rake at the time, or there might have been cause to carve another cross.

Looking down the Lord’s Rake from the top of the first section

Just shy of the boulders, a clear path climbs out of the rake. This leads up to the West Wall Traverse, a narrow ledge that runs above Deep Ghyll and enters the ravine at its third pitch. In its final section, the ghyll is a grade 1 scramble through some of Lakeland’s most astounding rock scenery. I took this route two weeks ago. Today, I intend to follow Lord’s Rake all the way to the top, but with snow and the sunlight painting such a striking picture, I can’t resist another detour on to the ledge.

If your heart doesn’t perform a double somersault when you set foot on the West Wall Traverse, you should apply to your doctor for a soul transplant. The Pinnacle and Pisgah tower above you, two imposing towers separated by the Jordan Gap, biblical names that testify to the religious impulse this terrain induces. The Traverse feels like the nave of a colossal temple. From this side, the Pinnacle resembles the furled wing of vast eagle; Pisgah is its breast and its head, encased in a hood, or perhaps a gladiator’s helmet, with a large chiselled eye socket keeping watch. Savage grandeur: imposing, formidable, awe-inspiring, and sublime.

The Pinnacle and Pisgah from the West Wall Traverse

A crack runs up the right hand side of the Pinnacle. This is the route that Jones and the Abrahams took before traversing a thin ridge across the rock face to the subsidiary summit of Low Man. I’ll never know how it feels to perch so precariously, especially in tweeds and hobnail boots! I’m happy simply to know that I’m standing exactly where Ashley did when he photographed them.

Eventually, I walk back down the snowy ledge to Lord’s Rake and clamber gracelessly over the boulders. The next section is a short descent and re-ascent. The path then drops much further to climb again beside another scree slope. At the top, a snowy plateau looks down over Wasdale’s ruddy screes to the long blue ellipse of Wastwater.

Wastwater from the top of the Lord’s Rake

To the north stands Great Gable, a mighty pyramid, free of snow, but swarming with tiny figures. They are a large crowd of people, gathering on Remembrance Sunday to pay their respects, not in a church, but on the summit of mountain. Gable was bought by the FRCC, along with 12 surrounding peaks, and donated to the nation as a memorial to the club members who died in the First World War. Known as the Great Gift, this was the ultimate expression of what James Westaway calls sacralisation of the landscape: mountains liberated from private interests to stand as national monuments to the men who died in the nation’s defence.

Great Gable from the top of the Lord’s Rake

It was not the only such gesture. in 1919, Lord Leconfield donated the summit of Scafell Pike to the nation, “in perpetual memory of the men of the Lake District who fell for God and King, for freedom, peace and right in the Great War”. And so, the Roof of England herself became a shrine to those sacrificed in her service.

From the saddle below Symonds Knott (the top of the West Wall), I track around to the head of Deep Ghyll. Here Wainwright sketched the Pinnacle and Pisgah, including himself, bottom right, as “the Oracle”. I cross the narrow shoulder on to Pisgah rock, treading carefully—the drop into Deep Ghyll is unforgiving.

The Pinnacle and Pisgah from the plateau above Deep Ghyll

Pisgah is the Biblical name of the mountain where God showed Moses the Promised Land. The Scafell version is aptly named. But to cross the Jordan Gap and gain the top of the Pinnacle is beyond my skills, so after a brief visit to Scafell’s summit, I descend the scree into the deep bowl of Foxes Tarn. The tarn itself is an enigma. It’s no more than a puddle, but a perpetual stream of water cascades down the rocks of its outlet gully. The gully is the Rake’s counterpart on the Eskdale side of Mickledore. In summer, it’s a simple scramble, but today much of the lower section is iced, so Microspikes pay dividends. Water sparkles, icicles glisten and with the gentle tinkling of the cascades, the deep green moss and crisp white snow, it’s a magical oasis of tranquility.

Ahead are the sun-flecked crags of Scafell Pike, my final destination. It’s a slog back up the loose scree to the crest of Mickledore, but the chiselled charcoal tower of Broad Stand is ample reward. After paying due reverence, I turn and follow cairns over snow covered boulders to England’s highest ground.

A stone tablet, set into the summit platform, tells of Leconfield’s legacy. I’ve heard it lamented that this memorial is too seldom noticed by the crowds that flock here daily. In truth, no-one has ever missed it, for the tablet is not the memorial. The memorial is the mountain itself.

As we approach the final hour of daylight, a golden radiance licks the surrounding fells. All except Scafell that is, which remains black and foreboding, “a spectacle of massive strength and savage wildness”, as Wainwright so perfectly puts it. AW understood the sublime, so I shall leave the final word to him:

“A man may stand on the lofty ridge of Mickledore, or in the green hollow beneath the precipice amidst the littered debris and boulders fallen from it, and witness the sublime architecture of buttresses and pinnacles soaring into the sky, silhouetted against racing clouds or, often, tormented by writhing mists, and, as in a great cathedral, lose all his conceit. It does a man good to realise his own insignificance in the general scheme of things, and that is his experience here.”

Pedestrian Verse

October 20, 2019 George Kitching 21 Comments

St. Sunday Crag, Fairfield, Seat Sandal & Grisedale Tarn

Inspired by the words of National Trust founder, Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, I trek over St. Sunday Crag, Fairfield and Seat Sandal to Grisedale Tarn, where a prized Celtic crown lies deep in the water, a spectral army stands guard, and a lonely rock bears a poignant inscription from William Wordsworth to his shipwrecked brother, John.

“A sparrowhawk swung out from the crags, and the swifts screamed at us while we watched him. St. Sunday Crag itself cannot be viewed to finer advantage than from here, and the little Cofa Pike, like a watchtower guarding the portcullis, was a remarkable feature in the near foreground.
One was sorely tempted to climb Cofa and drop down upon the narrow neck that divides Fairfield from St. Sunday Crag—for St. Sunday Crag is said to be one of the few mountain heights that can boast remarkable flowers and plant growth—but we contented ourselves with the marvellous beauty of the colouring of the red bastions of Helvellyn as they circled round to Catchedecam, with the ebon-blue water patch of Grisedale Tarn in the hollow. With memories of Faber’s love of that upland lake, and of Wordsworth’s last farewell to his sailor brother on the fell beside the tarn, we turned our faces from the battle-ground of the winds to Great Rigg, but not before we had wondered at the piling up of the gleaming cloud masses above the long range of High Street to the west, and the sparkling of the jewel of Angle Tarn between Hartsop Dod and the Kidsty Pike.”

Grisedale Tarn and Seat Sandal from Fairfield

Thus wrote Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley of a walk upon Fairfield—“the battle-ground of the winds”—in 1911. Rawnsley was a vicar, a social reformer and a conservationist to whom us Lakes lovers owe a significant debt. Influenced by William Wordsworth and John Ruskin, Rawnsley believed that education and immersion in nature were key to improving the lot of the impoverished. His work began in the slums of Bristol where he arranged classes and country walks for the residents of Clifton, one of the city’s poorest areas. In 1878, he moved to Cumbria to become vicar of Wray. Five years later, he moved to the parish of Crosthwaite on the outskirts of Keswick. Here, he and his wife, Edith, founded the Keswick School of Industrial Arts as an initiative aimed at tackling the widespread unemployment that dogged the town during the winter months.

The school began in 1884 as free evening classes in the parish rooms offering professional instruction in wood carving and decorative metalwork. The proceeds from sales of the work were used to fund tuition and materials, and the school rapidly gained a reputation for quality. By 1890, it was winning prizes in national exhibitions, and by its tenth year, it had outgrown the parish rooms and was obliged to move into purpose-built premises, where it continued for ninety years, finally closing in 1984.

Understandably, Rawnsley’s belief in the benefits of the natural landscape burgeoned with his move to Lakeland, and he became an ardent conservationist, battling against the proliferation of both slate-mining and the public transport network. He campaigned to keep footpaths and rights of way open and quickly realised the biggest threat to the landscape and its traditions came from private property developers. In 1895, together with Octavia Hill and Robert Hunter, he founded the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty. The Trust aimed (as it still does) to acquire and hold land to protect it from development. Thanks to the efforts of Rawnsley, Hill and Hunter (and the bequest of Rawnsley’s protégé, Beatrix Potter), the establishment of the Lake District National Park was made possible.

On this occasion, Rawnsley had climbed Fairfield from Grasmere via Stone Arthur and would return down the ridge from Great Rigg to Nab Scar—half of the horseshoe that remains the most popular way to ascend the mountain. But for my money, the finest way up is the one he gazes over: St. Sunday Crag and Cofa Pike.

Inspired by Rawnsley’s words I ready myself for the route. I see a sparrowhawk before I even leave the house. It’s perched on an old wooden chair in the garden, beneath the bird feeder, wondering why the gang of sparrows that perennially besiege the spot have all mysteriously disappeared. By the time I reach Patterdale, the sun is out, marking a welcome change in what has so far been an underwhelming August.

I’m heading for Birks but intend to forego the summit in favour of the path that crosses its north-western shoulder and provides spectacular views over Grisedale to Striding Edge, Nethermost Pike and Dollywagon Pike. I was there in February when the Helvellyn massif was a dark volcanic rampart, frosted with snow and illuminated in a spectral light that would have had you believe you had somehow traded Wainwright for Tolkien’s Pictorial Guides to Middle Earth. I’m keen to see how it has transformed in high summer.

It’s a tough old pull up Birks, but the backward prospect of Ullswater stretched out below, a cool blue languid pool, gives ample excuse to stop. Over a rickety stile, I gain the clear path that traverses the shoulder. The summit is up on my left, but to my right, the slopes fall steeply away to Grisedale, and across the valley are the flanks of Helvellyn, with Striding Edge a crowning wall, ahead.

Some argue these fells assume their true mountain character in winter, shorn of green vegetation, their physiques chiselled, their craggy profiles sharpened and highlighted with snow. But only a churl would deny the splendour of their summer majesty; their lower slopes mottled as they are now, olive, gold and forest green; higher daubs of purple heather are stippled with exposed stone, tinged coral pink by the ever shifting splashes of sun that dance across their sides. A slim stream of silver tinkles down from the dark cliffs of Nethermost Pike to meet a broad river of light cascading over Dollywagon to illuminate its lower crags. If you don’t believe in magic, you have simply never stood here in February and then again in August.

The gentle shoulder affords a temporary respite from the steepness of the incline, but beyond the col with St. Sunday Crag, the strenuous effort resumes. The stiff climb finally relents, but the remaining ground to the summit presents a fresh challenge—the wind is gusting hard. Rawnsley’s “battle-ground of the winds” has extended along the ridge. Even if I had his botanical insight, today might not be the time to study the “remarkable flowers and plant growth”. Simply staying upright is taxing, but it’s edifying, and just beyond St. Sunday Crag’s summit is a sight to further lift the spirit.

In the distance, the mighty trinity of Fairfield, Seat Sandal and Dollywagon Pike form a circle as if to guard something of value in their midst. That something is Grisedale Tarn. From here, it looks like a dewdrop in the hollow, or perhaps a tear shed for the last king of Cumbria—a deep well of myth and religious impulse.

Grisedale Tarn between Fairfield, Seat Sandal and Dollywagon Pike

Rawnsley talks of “Faber’s love of that upland lake”. Frederick William Faber was a theologian and hymn writer, and a friend of William Wordsworth, who would take long vacations in the Lake District to soothe the spiritual and intellectual stress of wrestling with divergent forms of the Christian faith. In 1840, he published a poem, Grisedale Tarn, in which he imagined that if he were “a man upon whose life an awful, untold sin did weigh,” then here is where he would build a hermitage.

John Pagen White’s poem, King Dunmail, tells a darker story that links the Tarn with the large pile of stones at Dunmail Raise. According to the legend, Dunmail was the last king of Cumbria, a kingdom that then stretched as far north as Glasgow. This Celtic stronghold had long resisted subjugation by the Saxons and the Scots but was finally overthrown when they joined forces. Dunmail was supposedly slain at Dunmail Raise and his men are said to have built the large cairn to mark his grave. As White puts it:

“Mantled and mailed repose his bones
Twelve cubits deep beneath the stones
But many a fathom deeper down
In Grisedale Mere lies Dunmail’s crown”.

Dunmail’s crown held magical powers and his dying wish was that it should be kept from Saxon hands. A small cohort of his men took the crown and fought their way to Grisedale Tarn where they cast it in. To this day, they keep a spectral guard, and every year their apparitions carry another stone from the tarn to Dunmail Raise.

“And when the Raise has reached its sum
Again will brave King Dunmail come;
And all his Warriors marching down
The dell, bear back his golden crown.”

It’s a long descent to Deepdale Hause, and from the trough, the sight of Cofa Pike towering above is formidable. In actual fact, the path cuts a canny zigzag up through the crags and three points of contact aren’t required quite as often as you’d imagine. On a good day, it’s an exhilarating airy scramble, but as I start up its slopes, the heavens open and the wind whips the rain into a stinging scourge.

In the notes to his poem, White suggests the idea of Dunmail, and King Arthur, as once and future kings may have been a legacy of the Vikings. In old Norse belief, Odin would enact a winter trance in which he rode across the sky, accompanied by wolves, ravens and an army of the dead, in pursuit of a wild boar or, in some versions, a whirlwind. Shortly after dispatching his quarry, the god himself would die, only to be born again when next he was needed. In the eye of a mountain storm, it’s a dramatic notion and one that haunts as I tread lightly over the slender summit of Cofa and climb into the mist atop the Battleground of the Winds.

Thankfully, the rain is easing by the time I negotiate the steep eroded path down to Grisedale Tarn. As I lose height, I come into the lee of Seat Sandal and the wind abates. After Birks, St. Sunday Crag and Cofa Pike, another stiff ascent will be taxing, but Seat Sandal shows no mercy. As I scramble up its rock steps, I’m passed by two fell runners. I catch up with them at the top. Above, the clouds are rolling back, and down towards Grasmere, summer is re-revealing itself.

“They’ve got sunshine down there”, one says.

“And beer”, replies the other.

And with that, they take off down the southern ridge.

I sit awhile in the shelter of the summit wall, then retrace my steps down to the water’s edge, now dark and inscrutable as the legend it harbours. Beyond the far shore, I follow the stepping-stones across the tarn outlet to join the Patterdale path. In the shadow of Dollywagon’s Tarn Crag, I keep my eyes peeled for a brass sign affixed to the top of a hefty boulder.

“Here did we stop; and here looked round
While each into himself descends,
For that last thought of parting Friends
That is not to be found.

Brother and Friend, if verse of mine
Have power to make thy virtues known,
Here let a monumental Stone
Stand–sacred as a Shrine;“

The words are William Wordsworth’s, inscribed on a slab set into a rock that stands about 200 metres from the path. The stone is now so weather-beaten, the words are hard to read, but they combine two halves of different stanzas from Wordsworth’s Elegiac Verses, written, “In Memory of My Brother, John Wordsworth, Commander of the E. I. Company’s Ship, The Earl Of Abergavenny, in which He Perished by Calamitous Shipwreck, Feb. 6th, 1805”

This is the spot where the brothers bade farewell, neither knowing it would be for the last time.

The brass sign says, “The Brothers Parting, Wordsworth”. It was a later addition, intended, I suppose, to highlight the stone’s whereabouts to those passing along the path. I confess to having walked by unawares before, but after reading Raymond Greenhow’s blog, I’ve come looking for it. Raymond’s article provides rich historical detail and tells the little-known story of how the brass sign went missing just before the outbreak of WWI. It was retrieved, some years later, from Grisedale Tarn, where, like Dunmail’s crown, it had apparently been flung.

Inspired by Wordsworth’s elegy, Raymond asks an interesting question: “What would you say if you knew it was the last you would ever see of your kin”? This gets right to the heart of why this simple inscription retains such power to move. Wordsworth elevates his account of his brother’s loss above the personal and speaks to us all about our own uncomfortable farewells to those we love. It captures the awkward reticence, the sense of something left unsaid, that intangible emotion we perpetually fail to put into words. There will, we assume, be time enough for that anon. But what if that opportunity is denied us as it was for William?

Robbed of the opportunity to ever see his brother again, the Lake Poet wishes for a monumental stone to stand on this spot as a shrine to John. That wish was granted some thirty years after the William’s death by the Wordsworth society and Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley… And here it stands, a monument to fraternal love, near the site of Faber’s imagined hermitage and the watery refuge of a lost Celtic crown, it’s inscription now as spectral as Dunmail’s army.

When in late September 1800, John, William and their sister, Dorothy, said their last goodbyes, William and Dorothy returned to Grasmere, but I turn now in the opposite direction and follow in John’s footsteps—down through Grisedale to Patterdale.

Grisedale Tarn and Dollywagon Pike from Seat Sandal

To the Shores of Lake Placid

September 15, 2019 George Kitching 20 Comments

Landscape of Liberty: from Auschwitz to Ambleside

My quest for heritage in the landscape takes me over a wintry Lingmoor Fell to the Merz Barn in Elterwater and finally to Windermere library where I learn of 300 children who survived the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz and Theresienstadt to start a new life here beside the lake. They described their journey as one “from hell to paradise”.

Lingmoor Fell

Snow clouds are forming, light as yet, smudges of soft graphite like finger blurs of a 3B pencil sketch, bunched together like blankets on an unmade bed. Through the gaps, shines an ethereal yellow light, haunting, heavenly. For an unapologetic atheist, the experience is unnervingly religious. These celestial beams spotlight the shoulders of the Langdale Pikes, illuminating bands of warm ochre between the iced granite of their snowy summits and their long skirts of winter scrub.

Ling is the Norse name for heather and Lingmoor is just that; now in January, dead foliage wraps the fell in a winter coat of chocolate. From Blea Tarn House, I climb beside a ghyll to a wall at its head, cross a stile and track the line of a fence up the slope. A further step stile leads to the summit at Brown How, and here the brutal force of the wind hits home, forty miles per hour, gusting over fifty. I’m buffeted about and struggle to retain balance.

I find a little respite in the lee of the cairn and look east to Windermere, a long slim finger of molten silver. This tranquil stretch of water shares a surprising legacy with a busier waterway I knew as a kid. In my pre-teen years, we lived near Rochester in Kent. I learnt to dinghy sail on the River Medway, in the shadow of the Royal Naval dockyard at Chatham. Cargo ships were a common hazard, their arrival invariably coinciding with a lull in wind, necessitating some frantic paddling. Forty years earlier, we’d have had something swifter to contend with.

Windermere from Brown Haw — Windermere from Brown How

In 1937, the Short brothers began production of the Sunderland ‘Flying Boat’ at their factory near Rochester Castle. These seaplanes could land and take off from water and would play a significant role in WWII, particularly in the North Africa campaign, where they protected supply convoys sailing from the USA to Britain. In 1939, however, the Luftwaffe began targeting the Medway, and a decision was made to move production somewhere more secure. It 1941, manufacture moved to White Cross on the shore of Windermere.

Just under half of Shorts’ Westmorland work force comprised local labourers. The rest moved up from Rochester. To house them all, a purpose-built estate of red brick bungalows was erected at Troutbeck Bridge. With asbestos roofs, indoor bathrooms and hot running water, the Calgarth Estate was modern by Lake District standards, and by 1942 it boasted a primary school, an assembly room, a club house, canteen, sick bay and two shops. It is all gone now. The Lakes School stands on the site. Indeed, Shorts’ official records were lost in a fire, and beyond a handful of official photographs and the fading memories of those they employed, little evidence remains of their tenure here.

Short Sunderland Flying Boat — Short Sunderland (photo by Canadian Forces Expired crown copyright)

My thoughts drift to another war refugee whose journey also ended here. (Sometimes, life is like a length of rope where disparate threads intertwine in unexpected ways.)

When I first moved to the South Lakes, my wife, Sandy, worked at Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal. I was a frequent visitor, and one picture never failed to arrest my attention (it still does). It’s a tiny collage called Mier Bitte by German artist, Kurt Schwitters.

Schwitters was born in Hanover and trained at the Dresden Academy, but in the aftermath of the First World War, everything seemed chaotic and broken, and he felt conventional modes of expression had lost their relevance. He experimented, creating collages from found objects as a way of forging new meaning from the detritus of everyday life. It was a technique he called Merz. Mier Bitte is an example: it is named for the two German words in the top right-hand corner, often taken to mean, “to me, please”. But the phrase only looks German. The collage was made here in Langdale, and the words are just the visible portion of a label, lifted from a bottle of Yorkshire Premier Bitter.

Mier Bitte, Kurt Schwitters — Mier bitte (1945-7), Kurt Schwitters, Abbot Hall Kendal

Some of Schwitters’ earlier works incorporated wheels that turned only to the right, a commentary on the drift in German politics that would turn his life upside down.

During their reign of terror, the Nazis murdered six million Jews. Six million. That’s more than the entire population of Scotland. But Jews were not the only victims. Anyone who didn’t fit the Führer’s blueprint for the Aryan race was marked for extermination. Alongside Jews, the Nazis murdered gypsies, the mentally and physically disabled, homosexuals, political and religious dissidents. The total death toll is estimated at between nine and eleven million.

By 1937, Hitler’s ire had turned on modern artists; he denounced them as “incompetents, cheats and madmen”. There would be no room for their kind of degeneracy in the Reich. Between July and November, the Nazi party staged an exhibition of degenerate art in Munich, where confiscated items, including works by Schwitters, were hung upside down to be ridiculed and to demonstrate to the public what should no longer be tolerated. When the Gestapo ordered Schwitters to attend an interview, he fled to Norway, and when the Germans invaded Norway, he escaped to Britain.

After months in an internment camp, Schwitters moved to London, but he never really gelled with British art establishment. In 1942, he visited Lakeland and discovered a mountain landscape that could inspire him afresh. He moved to Ambleside in 1945 and rented an old stone barn near Elterwater from a landscape gardener friend, called Harry Pierce. This would be his studio, his Merz Barn. Happy at long last, Kurt would write to a friend, “Thanks to England, we live in an idyll, and that suits me just fine. England in particular is idyllic, romantic, more so than any other country.”

Studios were never just studios for Schwitters. Ideally, they were Merzbauten: works of art in their own right, with walls, corners, ceilings and floors transformed into installations. The Langdale Merz Barn was to be his third and final incarnation of this concept. He transformed an entire wall into a large abstract sculptural relief, but that’s as far as he got. Schwitters died in 1948.

After his death, the barn fell into disrepair, but the finished wall was rescued in the 1960’s by renowned British Pop artist, Richard Hamilton. It now hangs in the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle. The Merz Barn itself was acquired by the Littoral Arts Trust in 2005, but with the onset of austerity, they suffered funding cuts, and last year, newspapers reported that the Barn had been put up for sale. I’d always intended to visit; now, it seems, I’ve missed my chance. All the same, when I get back down to the valley, I’m going to look for it. At the very least, I might be able to glimpse it from the outside.

I start a spectacular descent along Lingmoor’s western ridge. The snow hasn’t made it down this far, but the higher fells are all white capped. A drystone wall protrudes like an emaciated spine from the hide of brown heather, dropping, twisting and curving with the contours. Crinkle Crags and Bowfell form an epic backdrop, winter-shorn of green summer cloaks to reveal gaunt Alpine profiles; the chiselled countenance of Side Pike dominates the foreground—a precipitous dome of brutal black rock.

The bitter wind shows no mercy. I’m battered and blown about, glad of the wall as a buffer. Reaching the col with Side Pike, I skirt the cliff on the southern side, attain the western ridge, and climb up through the crags. From the summit, Langdale looks wild, windswept, yet in this unearthly light, every bit as romantic as Schwitters asserts. When I reach the Old Dungeon Ghyll Hotel, I retrieve my car and go in search of his studio.

Merz Barn

I hardly need the deductive powers of Sherlock Holmes to find it. Opposite the Lakes Hotel is a stone wall and recessed gateway that I must have passed a hundred times, my mind too full of mountains to notice the sign. The heavy wooden gates are shut, but a small notice says “open”.

Beyond the gate, a dirt path curves through a small copse to a stone barn I recognise from pictures. By the door, a slate plate bears the words, “Merz Barn, Kurt Schwitters, 1947”. There is some salvaged iron machinery, and an incongruous bay window. Propped against the wall is a sign that says, “AHUMBLESHELL”.

With the principal artwork long gone, you’d be forgiven for thinking a humble shell is all that remains. But the barn has been renovated from the dilapidated state it was in when the Trust acquired it. A full-size photograph of the Merz wall stands where the original once did, so your imagination isn’t taxed in picturing it. A photographic portrait of Schwitters stares out from the corner—his expression animated, mischievous, eccentric. It’s easy to see why this place inspired him: it’s tranquil; somewhere to soothe the trauma of forced exile; somewhere to unfetter the mind and the let the muse take hold.

Director, Ian Hunter, comes over to greet me. He tells me they are in the process of commissioning a replica of the Merz wall to replace the photograph. It sounds as if the scare stories about selling up were premature. Before I can ask, he’s guiding me to the smaller back room with the bay window. He calls it the Cake Room—Schwitters had intended to use it as a café.

Here, they’ve staged a little exhibition to mark Holocaust Memorial Day. Schwitters wasn’t Jewish, but he deeply empathised with the Jews’ plight. On one wall is a photograph of Hitler at the opening of the Degenerate Art Exhibition. Most of the space is devoted to the work of children, however, screen-grabs from episode 9 of Simon Schama’s Civilisations, which tells the story of Friedl Dicker Brandeis and the children of Theresienstadt.

Theresienstadt was a concentration camp in Bohemia that acted as a staging post for the mass extermination centres like Auschwitz. Propaganda films portrayed it as a self-governing Jewish ghetto, where happy children played in the streets, and enjoyed pageants and sports days. But it was all a sham. As soon as the cameras stopped rolling, a brutal regime of beatings, hangings and shootings resumed; many more died of starvation and disease.

Friedl Brandeis was an art teacher. When she learned she was bound for Theresienstadt, she filled her suitcase with art materials. She spent the rest of her life surreptitiously teaching children to paint and to draw: to create better worlds into which their imaginations could escape. Brandeis was murdered at Auschwitz on 9th October 1944. Seven months later, the Soviet army liberated Theresienstadt. When they searched the buildings, they discovered two suitcases she had hidden. They contained 4,500 pieces of art made by the children.

In Civilisations, Schama devotes time to these pictures, and the one that captivates him most is the one that holds my attention longest now. It is a striking collage of stylised white shapes—mountains and trees—mounted on a red background. It’s the work of a young girl called Helena Mändl, and it absolutely belongs here in the Cake Room. For if you look closely at the shapes, they are cut from filing paper, replete with the remnants of columns and numbers—a discarded leaf from a ledger, perhaps. Helena has forged a landscape of liberty from the bureaucratic instruments used to administer her incarceration. Schwitters would have been proud. This is Merz.

Other paintings show boats on lakes and one depicts an open window looking out on to a mountainous terrain that could easily be Langdale. Helena didn’t survive. Very few of the children did. But for a handful, those dream landscapes were about to become a reality.

From Auschwitz to Ambleside

Seven months have passed since I visited the Merz Barn. I’m upstairs at Windermere library, viewing a small exhibition by photographer, Richard Kolker, entitled The Landscape of Auschwitz. There are no people in these monochrome shots, just the awful machinery of mass murder: a field of brick crematoria, arranged in neat rows, precise, orderly, like troops on a parade ground, cold, Teutonic, and ruthlessly efficient. The Spartan branches of leafless trees hang over railway tracks where the iron horses of the Reich carried train loads of innocents to their deaths. I’ve never been to Auschwitz, but I’ve been to Dachau, and these pictures evoke its memory: high wire fences and watchtowers; row upon row of soulless functional buildings, built for containment and execution. I remember a shower block. A large communal room, designed to deprive its users of their dignity. They would be herded in naked, like cattle, to be sanitised. Then the doors would lock. No water ever sprayed from the nozzles mounted in the ceiling. They were only disguised as a shower heads. This was a gas chamber.

Kolker’s pictures hang heavy with doleful atmosphere, the stifling weight of appalling memory. But if this room depicts the very worst the human race is capable of, the next room represents the best.

On the wall is a short piece written by curator, Trevor Avery. It recalls an exhibition at the Brewery Arts Centre, Kendal, in 2005 to mark the 60^th anniversary of VE Day. One room was given over to Kolker’s pictures, but in another were photographs and information boards about the Flying Boats and the Calgarth Estate. It was in here that Trevor overheard two elderly gentlemen enthusiastically reminiscing about their time at Shorts. They were looking at an aerial photograph of the estate, recalling who had lived in each of the bungalows. Trevor starting chatting with them, enjoying their stories, then one of them astounded him by saying, “Of course, this is where the children from Auschwitz came.”

When the allied forces liberated the concentration camps, many of the surviving children were orphans with nowhere to go. Homes had to be found, and the British government offered to take a thousand.

On the banks of Windermere, production of the Flying Boats had ceased, and operations at White Cross were being wound up. Some of the married quarters at Calgarth were still occupied, but most of the single bungalows were free. With its school, sick bay and canteen, the estate was perfect. In August 1945, ten RAF Stirling bombers flew three hundred children from Prague to Crosby-on-Eden airfield near Carlisle. They were the survivors of Auschwitz and Theresienstadt. Buses brought them on to Calgarth which was to become their home for the next few months.

A couple of local newspapers carried the story, and the BBC wanted to make a documentary, but their carers thought it unwise. As such, it is a story little known until recently.

Since that chance conversation in 2005, Trevor Avery has devoted much effort to researching and curating the Auschwitz to Ambleside exhibition that now has a permanent home at Windermere library. Its centrepiece is a short film, narrated by Maxine Peak, in which four of those children, Minia Jay, Arek Hersh, Ben Helfgott and Jack Aizenberg, are reunited and revisit the lake to talk about their experiences

Minia explains how Josef Mengele (the Angel Of Death) devised a system to determine who would work and who would be sent to the gas chamber. She failed these assessments twice. It was only a shortage of transport that delayed her execution long enough for her to face a third. When the guards were distracted, she climbed a division and hid amongst the party that had been spared. Had she been caught, she’d have been shot.

Jewish Prisoners Arrive at Theresienstadt

Jack recounts a crushing cross country march from Colditz to Theresienstadt. It lasted days and they had almost nothing to eat. Anyone who lagged or weakened was shot and thrown in the ditch. They stopped at a bombed engineering works and scoured the building for food. Jack found a single dried pea. He wanted to boil it, but when he saw all the faces staring at him, he feared they might attack him, so he ate it dry, breaking it into four crumbs to make it last.

These survivors, now pensioners, describe their journey to Lakeland as a voyage from hell to paradise. They eulogise about the clean linen, the food, and the warmth and kindness they were shown. Minia recalls looking in wonder at the lake and the mountains, and someone shouting. “Good morning, beautiful day”, from their garden. Few of us will ever know just how beautiful that day was for her.

All four have gone on to lead successful lives, driven no doubt by the instincts that kept them out of the gas chambers. They all struggle to understand how they survived, but they draw strength from the fact that they have. Minia says she constantly reminds herself, “I am alive, and Hitler and Mengele are dead”. Jack confesses he always stops in front of the frozen food section in the supermarket to look at the peas, acutely aware he could buy the whole freezer if he chose.

We live in troubling times. Far right groups are on the rise again, here, across Europe and in America. Thankfully, for now, they are fringe movements, given short shrift by ordinary decent people. Whatever our disagreements in the broad sphere of mainstream politics, we must unite in keeping it that way. In the words of Jo Cox (the Batley and Spen M.P. murdered by a man with psychiatric issues and links to an American neo-Nazi group), “we have far more in common than that which divides us.”

I feel proud that the Lake District played a small but pivotal role in changing the lives of these brave children, and I applaud the sterling work of Trevor Avery and the Lake District Holocaust Project in telling their story. It should be told. It deserves to be shouted from the roof tops. For theirs is a legacy not of hate, but of hope.

Exhibitions and Further Reading

Visit the Lake District Holocaust Project exhibition, “From Auschwitz to Ambleside” at Windermere library

Lake District Holocaust Project
Windermere Library
Ellerthwaite
Windermere
LA23 2AJ

Tel: 015394 88395

Website: http://ldhp.org.uk/

Visit the Merz Barn at:

The Merz Barn, Cylinders Estate, Langdale, Ambleside LA22 9JB

Telephone: 015394 37309

Website: https://merzbarnlangdale.wordpress.com/

Fell Walk, General, History, Nature, Scramble

Hit the Rake Jack

August 18, 2019 George Kitching 23 Comments

Jack’s Rake and Dungeon Ghyll Force

Wainwright describes Jack’s Rake as “just about the limit” for the ordinary fell walker. Richard Jennings and I set off for Pavey Ark to find out whether he’s right.

“Pavey Ark is Langdale’s biggest cliff. In an area where crags and precipices abound, here is the giant of them all, and, scenically, it is the best. The view of the Ark across the waters of Stickle Tarn, at its foot, is superior to all others of this type in Lakeland, having an advantage over the principal rival team of Dow Crag-Goats Water in that the scene, being invariably reached by the steep climb from Dungeon Ghyll, bursts upon the eye with dramatic effect.”

As rather a big fan of the rival team (I can see Dow Crag from my kitchen), I’ve always been a bit miffed that Wainwright relegates it into second place, but this morning, staring at Pavey Ark across the green marble waters of Stickle Tarn, I concede he has a point.

The cliff is riven by two magnificent gullies, but to the north of the tarn another significant cleft has appeared. It delimits the buttocks of a wild camper, who’s just emerged from his tent, stark bollock naked, and is proceeding to undertake his morning stretches with nary a care about who may be copping an eyeful.

The author looking at Pavey Ark (photo by Richard Jennings)

Naturism is no match for the natural wonder of the cliff face, however. I eye the latter with a tremor of nervous anticipation as it holds in store a challenge. Richard Jennings and I are about to embark on ascent which Wainwright describes as “just about the limit that the ordinary common garden or fell walker reasonably may be expected to attempt” (which maybe a case of all the right words, not necessarily in the right order). Unusually for a cliff, Pavey Ark permits the walker to get up close and personal. A narrow ledge runs diagonally across it from bottom right to top left. This is the infamous Jack’s Rake, revered and feared for its steepness, bad steps and sheer drops.

Jack's Rake on Pavey Ark — Jack’s Rake is the faint line running bottom right to near top left

A preposterous rumour purports that the Rake was named for Jack Nicholson who supposedly made its first ascent. In truth, Jack’s Rake was already popular in Victorian times (half a century before Nicholson was born). It is mentioned in O. G. Jones’s guidebook, Rock-Climbing in the English Lake District, a tome that was on its second edition by 1900. Owen Glynne Jones (although he claimed his initials stood for the Only Genuine Jones) was a pioneer of English rock-climbing, and his book, written with characteristic dash and vigour, did much to popularise the sport. Of Jack’s Rake, he says this:

“Well towards the north end of the cliff is a wide scree gully with a square notch at its crest. Near the foot of this a safe natural path may be followed obliquely across the face. This is the well-known Jack’s Rake. It starts rather steeply, but soon assumes a gentle, uniform gradient. It crosses the Great Gully a hundred feet below the top; there then follows a rather awkward bit for the walker, who will need to scramble up a corner to get on to the last portion of the rake. It crosses the Little Gully within fifty feet of the summit, and ends on the buttress just beyond.”

Of course, to a climber, the Rake is child’s play, and Jones’s attention is drawn to Pavey Ark’s gullies and chimneys. His interest is piqued by the words of another writer, a certain Mr Gwynne:

‘About half-way up there runs on to the ledge a chimney which —when it is not a small waterfall—forms a pleasant climb to some broken rock above, whence the summit is easily reached. If, however, the water in the chimney makes it uncomfortable and unpleasant for the climber, he may still arrive at the top of it by choosing a long bit of steep, smooth rock on the left.’

I can find no evidence that Mr Gwynne wrote a book of his own, but it does seem he was a correspondent for the Pall Mall Gazette. He is immortalised in far grander way, however. The chimney is known as Gwynne’s Chimney; and the FRCC credits H. A. Gwynne with its first ascent.

Gwynne’s Chimney is well beyond my capabilities, and as a Jack’s Rake virgin, I’m wondering how I’ll fare on the Rake itself, especially the awkward bit near the top. Wainwright is not exactly reassuring:

“For much of the way the body is propelled forward by a series of convulsions unrelated to normal walking, the knees and elbows contributing as much to progress as hands and feet. Walkers who can still put their toes in their mouths and bring their knees up to their chins may embark on the ascent confidently; others, unable to perform these tests, will find the route arduous.”

At the tender age of fifty-three, neither my toes and mouth nor my knees and chin have been on intimate terms for years, but I do have something in my favour. My legs are just a touch on the short side for my height. I have never considered this an advantage before, but it just might be when it comes to Jack’s Rake. Wainwright archivist, Chris Butterfield, has, in his extensive collection, a private letter from A. W. to a Mr Crompton congratulating him on his ascent. In it, he reveals this:

“I too put off Jack’s Rake until it could be put off no longer. When I finally plucked up courage and did it I was in such a state of apprehension that I quite forgot to take any photographs or pace the distance, my sole reason for going. So the following week I did it again, more leisurely, and once out of that awful initial groove, which in my case (having abnormally long legs) called for the most grotesque contortions, I almost began to enjoy it.”

Wainwright’s letter to Mr Crompton (courtesy of Chris Butterfield)

Fortunately for me too, Richard is a Rake veteran. Indeed, last time he climbed it, he was dressed as an Oompa-Loompa. Sadly, this isn’t his normal walking garb. It was donned in aid of a charity group excursion to raise funds for Mountain Rescue. On the day, the summit was veiled in cloud, and walkers crossing from Thunacar Knott must have been a little startled to find twenty-three Oompa-Loompas emerging from the mist.

Looking down the first section of Jack’s Rake

For all his experience, even Richard confesses to a slight tremor in the legs whenever he tackles the Rake. Today however, he’s distracted by another mission. Wainwright’s map mentions a stone tablet, set in a cairn, bearing the inscription, “JWS, 1900”, and Richard’s determined to find it. We follow the path around the south end of the tarn and keep our eyes peeled as we approach the foot of the cliff. We double check the position against Wainwright’s guide, but there’s no sign of a cairn. We even wander off piste, but there’s nothing doing. Eventually, we give up and wander back toward the path.

Still scouring for a cairn, I trip over a rock and steady myself on a boulder. That’s when I see it, tucked in among the stones by my foot—the elusive tablet. No trace of the cairn remains, but JWS is still commemorated in a secret natural shrine away from the tread of boots. No-one seems to know who he or she was, although on one web forum, someone has floated the idea that “J” might stand for Jack—the man or woman who gave their name to the Rake perhaps? It’s a beguiling thought, and a tad more believable than the Nicholson ruse. Richard is determined to uncover the truth, and he’s as tenacious as a terrier when he gets the scent of his story, so keep an eye on the local history section of his Lakeland Routes website for more on this.

Two climbers are roping up at the foot of the cliff, and just beyond, begins our line of ascent. It’s a narrow trench, littered with boulders. It rises at an alarming angle. And it smells of death.

The decaying remains of a Herdwick ewe lie near the bottom. Herdwicks are natural mountaineers, but they’re not infallible. Something about the Ark seems to wrong foot them. Richard tells me it’s not uncommon to find a body here: a brutal truth, unlikely to instil confidence, and one I try to put out of mind. That’s easier once we’re upwind of her.

Climbers at the foot of Jack's Rake — Climbers at the foot of Jack’s Rake (photo Richard Jennings)

I’ve stowed water bottles inside my rucksack and shifted my camera bag from belt to chest strap—precautions that prove prudent as soon as Wainwright’s warning about knees and elbows is fulfilled (which is almost immediately). From here on, engagement is total: hands grip and haul; legs balance and push; eye and brain engage to plan contortions and match body parts to nooks and crannies that might accommodate them. Adrenaline courses through my bloodstream; I’m buzzing with exertion. Curiously, there’s little sense of exposure as the groove of the gully hides the sudden drop, and the demands of the scramble keep senses focused on the task in hand. It’s totally invigorating.

Scrambling Jack's Rake — The author scrambling Jack’s Rake (photo by Richard Jennings)

First steep section on Jack's Rake — First steep section (photo by Richard Jennings)

A prominent rowan tree marks the start of a brief respite. The gradient eases then levels off to a small platform at the foot of Gwynne’s Chimney. Any relief is tempered by a sudden sense of exposure. The protective lip of the gully has crumbled away to expose steepest part of the cliff. Richard turns to check I’m OK with this. I’m less daunted than I expected to be, but it’s no place for complacency, and the trickiest section lies just ahead.

The rock funnels into another short but steep chimney, blocked at the top by a fallen boulder known variously as the Cannon or the Gun. Manoeuvring up and around this is awkward. It involves getting in slightly under the slab where there is a natural step, then gripping the overhang, while stretching backwards to force a knee on to a higher ledge and swinging your weight across. Richard tells me I make it look easy, but I had the distinct advantage of watching him do it first, and besides, from above, he couldn’t see the faces I was pulling.

Scrambling round the Cannon of Jack's Rake — Scrambling round the Cannon of Jack’s Rake (photo by Richard Jennings)

From above, the Cannon’s name makes even more sense, and the grass shelf Wainwright calls Easy Terrace gives a genuine respite; although Richard introduces a frisson of drama by climbing on top of the Gun. Slowly, meticulously, he inches along the barrel, then straightens up to stand proud at the top. As I take his picture, it occurs to me he looks as if he’s on a diving board. I fumble momentarily with a camera setting, and when I look up, he’s gone. Moments later, the sound of a grand splash echoes up from Stickle Tarn, and on the far bank, a panel of Oompa-Loompas hold up score cards that would shame Tom Daley.

Climbing the Cannon on Jack's Rake — Richard climbs the Cannon

The Cannon on Jack's Rake — The Cannon on Jack’s Rake

(OK, I might have made a bit of that up).

So far, I’ve coped with the physical demands of the scramble and the psychological demands of the exposed sections, but there remains one last real test—the awkward bit near the top that O. G. Jones mentions. If I’m honest, this is the part that worries me the most, and it’s only a matter of minutes before it’s upon us. The gully is again blocked by a large rock, but this time, the way around it involves climbing out of the channel onto a thin stone ledge between the rock and the precipice. It’s a bad step with maximum exposure.

Richard goes first and points out a narrow groove and lip in the ledge. It’s a reassurance, a small but welcome barrier to your feet slipping over the edge. Getting up there requires a big ungainly heave, but once on the ledge, you can lean in on the boulder and use it for support, keeping your body away from the drop. The ledge is only two or three steps, then you tuck back in, safely away from the edge.

The Rake widens, and the Pinnacle rock that marks the top is visible ahead. Between here and there is a rising wall of large boulders. Despite their size, this is easy scrambling. We’ve turned a corner, moving away from the drop, moving out of the most obvious danger. I’m borderline euphoric, and it feels as if we fly up this bit. Moments later, we cross the summit wall and stand proudly admiring a hanging rock that looks like a primitive head carving.

The Pinnacle on Jack's Rake — The Pinnacle on Jack’s Rake

Nearing the Pinnacle on Jack's Rake — Richard nearing the Pinnacle

Nearing the top of Jack's Rake — Nearing the top {photo by Richard Jennings)

The author on Pavey Ark summit (photo by Richard Jennings)

That was one hell of a scramble, but the day isn’t quite done with surprises. We walk on over Thunacar Knott, Harrison Stickle, the Pike O’ Stickle and Loft Crag, swapping accounts of cloud inversions. Richard waxes lyrical about the fog bows and Brocken spectres he’s seen on his many wild camping trips to these summits.

We take the path between Loft Crag and Thorn Crag that descends by Dungeon Ghyll. As we reach the lower slopes, the Ghyll runs near to the path, but it’s cut into a ravine and hidden by foliage. I’ve walked this path many times, but I’ve never seen Dungeon Ghyll Force. It has remained an elusive blue star on the OS map. I meant to look for it today, but after the exhilaration of the Rake and the wonder of the summits, and our rapid-fire conversation, it goes clean out of my mind.

Not far from the hotel, Richard stops abruptly, double checks his surroundings, and grins.

“Come with me”, he says and turns down a narrow path I hadn’t seen for its generous covering of bracken. It leads to the edge of the ravine, which is much deeper than I’d realised.

And suddenly, we’re scrambling again. Down climbing steep rock steps to the stream. At the water’s edge, we stow our rucksacks in the undergrowth, and wade in, clambering atop the large rocks that line the bed to try and stay out of the water. They’re wet and mossy and slippery as hell. I lose purchase and drop in. My boots fill with water but it matters little as up ahead is a vision immortalised by Wordsworth in the Idle Shepherd Boys:

“Into a chasm a mighty block
Hath fallen, and made a bridge of rock ;
The gulf is deep below;
And in a basin black and small,
Receives a lofty waterfall”

We’re in the chasm that’s been turned into a cave by the boulder lodged overhead. In front of us, the stream crashes down a wall of rock into a dark pool. Here is the primeval majesty of Dungeon Ghyll Force.

“Welcome to Jurassic Park”, says Richard. “The lost world.”

And he’s right. Not just for its sublime grandeur, so well concealed from above; or for the the fact a dinosaur encounter wouldn’t be incongruous; but because a hundred and fifty years ago, Dungeon Ghyll Force was a cause célèbre, and according to Harriet Martineau, it was the principal draw that brought visitors to Langdale. Martineau was a prolific writer on politics, religion and sociology, but in 1855, she also produced a guide to the Lakes, which became the go-to resource for the nascent Victorian tourist industry, superseding Wordsworth’s own guidebook, published forty-five years earlier.

The idea that well-to-do Victorian women in crinolines scrambled down this bank seems inconceivable, but according to Martineau:

“There is a well-secured ladder, by which ladies easily descend to the mouth of the chasm; and when they have caught sight of the fall, they can please themselves about scrambling any further. There is the fall in its cleft, tumbling and splashing, while the light ash, and all the vegetation besides, is everlastingly in motion from the stir of the air.”

I imagine the outcry a bid to fix a ladder would provoke today. Now, we like our wild places to appear wild, even if, in the interest of conservation, we have to accept compromises like stone-pitched paths. A ladder might be a step too far, but the very fact that one once existed is testimony to the power of this landscape to enrapture sightseers. That is all to the good. There is little doubt that the world would be a happier place if more people engaged with the great outdoors; and yet, most often, the reward is proportional to the effort expended to attain it. That doesn’t mean we all have to take on a challenge as big as Jack’s Rake, but I’m heartened that Dungeon Ghyll Force is, once again, a hidden treasure that it takes a certain degree of commitment to behold.

Postcard from the Edge

July 21, 2019 George Kitching 28 Comments

Blencathra via Sharp Edge

Sharp Edge is a razor sharp arête on Blencathra and something of a challenge for fell walkers. Is it as terrifying as some claim, or the finest day out in Lakeland? I set off to find out.

From Watson Dodd to Clough Head, from Bow Fell, Causey Pike, Castlerigg or Castle Crag, by the waters of St John’s Beck or the asphalt of the A66, one landmark unerringly arrests the eye, an inspiration to painters, poets, filmmakers and fell-walkers alike—the magnificent scalloped profile of Blencathra.

“The mountain is almost guardian to the locals,” notes Terry Abraham in his beautiful cinematic eulogy, Blencathra—Life of a Mountain. “It is like a benign friend; always there”. According to Abraham, locals believe that climbing Blencathra is something best left to the tourists, but for those who so aspire, the mountain offers a rich array of ascents: from the gentle to the dramatic, the easy to the unnerving. One way stands out, however, for its ability to strike fear and awe in equal measure. It is, of course, the knife-blade arête of Sharp Edge.

Sharp Edge is something of a rite-of-passage for fell-walkers; but it’s not for everyone, and the question of its difficulty divides opinion. In the BBC Series, Wainwright’s Walks, Julia Bradbury appears to cross it à cheval, as Wainwright advises, albeit “at some risk of damage to tender parts”. In Abraham’s film, the ridge leaves Stuart Maconie quaking, while fellow traveller, Ed Byrne, is the epitome of a phlegmatic mountain goat. I’ve been told it’s the most terrifying experience in Lakeland and that it’s the most fun you can have with your clothes on. So who is right?

Well, I suppose, they all are. In part, this is down to conditions—in the wet, its smooth Skiddaw slate is notoriously slippery; but even in the dry, what should be technically straightforward is complicated by steep drops of over 400 feet. How you cope with those may say more about your genetic makeup than it does about your bravery. If you’re uncomfortable with exposure, Sharp Edge is clearly not for you. But what if (like me) you’re uneasy around truly vertical drops (like the roof edge of a tall building), but you’re OK when there’s some kind of gradient? At what angle does sensible caution give way to irrational dread, and on which side of that divide is Sharp Edge? There’s really only one way to find out, and it’s high time I did.

A few weeks ago, I watched a YouTube video filmed by my friend, Richard Jennings. It showed his dog, Frankie, making Sharp Edge look easy. “Proper showing off”, as Richard puts it. When I messaged him to say Frankie had inspired me to try, Richard offered to come with me. Well that wasn’t an offer I was about to pass up. Richard and I have been friends on Facebook for a while. Richard authors the Lakeland Routes website, a treasure trove of route maps, walk reports, ideas and stunning photography. More recently, he has started researching local history and blogging about Lakeland stories. With his wife Jaclyn, he has spent many long hours knocking on doors, talking to locals and scouring the fell sides for lost artefacts. His findings make compelling reading, and I’m really keen to meet him in person.

We arrange to meet outside Booths in Keswick (sans Frankie unfortunately, but I’m probably too much of an amateur for him). We set off along the A66 to Scales, deep in conversation. By the time we’ve climbed the bracken-clad slopes to Scales Tarn, I’ve learnt that Richard used to run a walking group called Lakeland Meet Ups, and that five years ago, he got involved with the Friends of Blencathra.

Blencathra had belonged to the Earls of Lonsdale for four centuries. But in 2014, to help cover £9 million worth of death duties, the 8^th earl, put it up for sale. The announcement sent shock waves through the local community. Many feared the mountain would become a private playground for a billionaire, and when the earl casually remarked that he hoped to offload it on “some daft Russian”, it did little to assuage concern. The Friends of Blencathra formed to try and buy the mountain on behalf of the people. The charity scored a minor victory when it persuaded the council to list Blencathra as an “asset of community value”, which bought them a six-month moratorium to raise funds. Sir Chris Bonington was nominated patron and made a statement setting forth their aims:

“While all mountains are special, Blencathra is often seen as the gateway to the Lake District and sharing ownership for those that love the mountain is much more than about the right to roam. It means conservation, enhancing the landscape and involves working with farmers who use the land’s grazing rights.”

Richard brought to the Friends the experience he’d already gained raising money for the Calvert Trust. The Calvert Trust arranges outdoor activities for people with disabilities, and when Richard moved to the Lakes in 2013, it was a cause he embraced. He’d met more than enough fell-walkers to know that we’re easily seduced by kit; when readies allow, we’re tempted to buy new gear even though our old stuff is still perfectly serviceable. To help the Trust raise funds, Richard proposed a group walk up over Sharp Edge at the end of which everyone would auction off their old gear. The idea proved popular, and interest swelled when Chris Bonington put his name down. Sir Chris was as a good as his word and turned up on the day (apologising profusely for being late, even though it was scarcely five minutes past the stated time).

As we sit down for a snack beside the waters of Scales Tarn, I quiz Richard about Sir Chris. What is he like in person? Humble, genial and a lot of fun, comes the reply, then Richard grins,

“He was sitting right where you are, and I was right here. When I opened my lunchbox, Chris leapt up and said, ‘Richard, that’s the biggest growler I’ve ever set eyes on!”

I raise my eyebrows, but Richard is ahead of me,

“No, George! I know you lived in the north-east for several years, but in Yorkshire a ‘growler’ means a pork pie, so whatever it is you’re thinking, stop it now.”

When the group started up Sharp Edge, Chris fell into line as an ordinary member of the party, insisting Richard lead. He had a surprise up his sleeve for the auction, however. He’d brought a battered old hold-all from which he pulled a number of brand-new Berghaus jackets. Bonington is sponsored by Berghaus, so he receives a lot of items that he is obliged to wear once for a photoshoot but ever after just hang in his wardrobe. As you can imagine, brand new Berghaus jackets modelled by Chris Bonington soon had the bids rolling in. Meanwhile, Richard’s attention was drawn to the hold-all. It was covered in badges from places like Nepal, and it was salt streaked from perspiration.

“Oh that’s been all over the world with me,” explained Chris. When he saw Richard’s eyes light up, he smiled. “Go on, you can auction that too”.

I could sit all day by these dark mountain waters, listening to Richard’s stories and the songs of the skylarks. But we’re here for something a little more challenging. As we talk, my eyes are drawn to the brutal wall of blue slate that rises to our right. It looks the stuff of gothic fantasy—a dolorous fortification, rough-hewn by dark forces, its plunging buttresses and erratic crenellations designed to repel and intimidate. And yet I’m not repelled or overly intimidated, at least not beyond a natural nervous excitement. When Richard follows my gaze and asks if I’m ready, I leap to my feet.

Wainwright describes Sharp Edge as “a rising crest of naked rock of sensational and spectacular appearance, a breaking wave carved in stone. The sight of it at close quarters is sufficient to make a beholder about to tackle it forget all other worries, even a raging toothache”. As we ascend the path that curves up from the tarn to the start of the ridge, an inner voice says, “this is it”, and suddenly, I’m aware that this is a moment I’ve been building up to for some time.

Richard calls the first rocky outcrop, “The Shark’s Teeth”, for its opposing rows of jagged points. He explains that a path runs to the right below the ridge line, but if you follow it, you’re forced back on to the ridge, further along, in a move that is arguably harder than scrambling along the crest from the start. Scrambling the crest would be my choice anyway.

As the ground drops away, the sense of exhilaration soars, and the heart performs a double somersault skyward, propelled by a rush of adrenaline and a tidal wave of wonder at this unfurling mountain majesty. But almost immediately, a sobering note chimes. A man sits hunched on top of the next pinnacle staring down at Scales Tarn (now a considerable distance below). Richard says hello, but the man blanks him. When I reach him and ask if he’s OK, he turns around and nods, but his mouth is fixed in an unnatural grin, and he looks quickly away, reluctant to talk. When I catch up with Richard, we look at each other inquiringly.

“I think he’s in shock,” he’s says.

As we’re wondering whether to offer help, he moves, shuffling on his bottom towards The Shark’s Teeth. We watch until he reaches safe ground. It’s not uncommon for people to get to the start and think better of it, but he must have ventured a little too far out of his comfort zone before the fear overwhelmed him. Mountain Rescue call this becoming crag fast. He’s managed to overcome it, but only just.

Beyond the next outcrop, the ridge turns into a narrow pavement, devoid of rocky handrails. Photos tend to exaggerate the slope, making it look like a tightrope. In reality, this is the easy bit. The crest is flatter and wider than it looks, but for all that there’s no denying the sensation that you’re walking in the air. It’s invigorating, and if you’re not phased by the exposure, it’ll make your spirit soar. Richard speeds ahead so he can take pictures of me crossing the Bad Step, a sloping slab dropping on to a knife edge. Wainwright warns, “countless posteriors have imparted a high polish to this spot”. I’m quite prepared to cross it on my bottom, but in the event, that isn’t necessary. It would be precarious when wet or coated in verglas, but today, my boots grip the surface easily enough, and a rocky bannister provides unexpected support. The subsequent knife-edge is just that, but it’s mercifully short: a momentary lapse of concentration might cost you dearly, but remain focused, and you’re over in an instant.

Author on the Edge (photo by Richard Jennings)

The author on the Bad Step (photo by Richard Jennings)

Thus far, the Edge has been roughly horizontal, but from here on it starts to climb. I catch up with Richard where Sharp Edge ends, and the much steeper scramble up Foule Crag begins. From Doddick Fell Top, this section looks almost vertical, but it’s a little less daunting at close quarters. A narrow gully runs up to our right. In wet or winter conditions, this is the only choice, but today we can safely scale the sloping slabs in front. Hand and footholds multiply with height, and sooner than I’d imagined, the gradient eases.

The top of Foule Crag is the summit of Atkinson Pike, one of the six distinct fells that comprise Blencathra. Atkinson Pike joins hands with Hall’s Fell Top (the true summit) over a wide grassy ridge that dips in the middle to create the saddle, which gives the mountain its Victorian name of Saddleback.

Sharp Edge and Scales Tarn from Atkinson Pike

We walk towards Hall’s Fell Top with a mind to descend Hall’s Fell Ridge, a longer but easier scramble and the route Wainwright rates as “the finest way to any mountain-top in the district”. But first, we have something to find.

In the dip of the saddle lies a large cross of white stones. It’s a well-known feature, and many make the short walk from the summit to look at it. Like many, I had always understood the cross to be a one-off, but Richard tells me there are others. We find a second one in no time: it’s right beside the first, but its stones are grey, and it’s smaller and a little set back, so you don’t notice it unless you leave the path. Richard is adamant there is a third. This is something he heard about years ago. Supposedly, the cross sits right beside the trod where it climbs to Hall’s Fell Top, but by all accounts, it’s overgrown and far from obvious. We start to scour the grass.

“Do you think this is it?”, shouts Richard.

We stare long and hard, then shake our heads in unison. It’s just a pile of stones. Before long, I’m seeing crosses everywhere, but they all prove illusory, and I start to wonder whether we’re on a wild goose chase. But Richard has form for this sort thing. He found the lost boot of Frederick Cadham, a Canadian pilot who crashed into Stone Cove, between Great and Green Gable, in 1942, and he rediscovered an all but forgotten wooden cross commemorating Maria Antoine Löchle, a German au pair, who took a fatal fall from Dale Head in the late sixties. Both stories are on his web site, and the latter reads like a detective novel.

“It’s here”, he exclaims. And true to form, he’s found it. It’s right next to the path. The stones that form the main shaft have grassed over, but you can still make out the shape. No-one is quite sure what the crosses signify, but one theory suggests they honour perished fell walkers. That there are three, at least, is slightly chilling.

The Earl of Lonsdale never did accept the Friends of Blencathra’s offer (it fell well below his asking price), but neither did he sell to a Russian oligarch or any other private individual. In 2016, he withdrew the mountain from sale. It seems a shame that Blencathra isn’t now owned by the community it watches over, especially if the mountain’s iconic saddle is, in truth, a memorial to its fallen.

As we climb toward the summit, I look back over our route, and a line from a modern folk song seeps into mind. It appears in the soundtrack to Terry Abraham’s film. Over a picked guitar arpeggio, Lee Maddison’s soft-spun vocal sounds a note of caution, “Step lightly on Sharp Edge my son”.

Ocean Rain

June 23, 2019 George Kitching 26 Comments

Red Screes, Mountain Bagging and Memories of War

I join the Mountain Bagging group for a memorable scramble up Red Screes and chat to founder, Zoe Little, about her motivation in forming the group. On the way down, I meet a Falkands veteran who has written a thought-provoking book. They say you should never judge someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes; over the following weeks, Kevin’s writing takes me much further than that.

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more

Lord Byron’s words express the joy of solitude in the embrace of the wild. It’s a sentiment I share. I love solo walks—escaping the hectic buzz of the working week for the tranquility of the fells. The landscape weaves a primal magic, stresses evaporate, and walking becomes a meditation where the mind wanders further than the feet. After all, as Jean Paul Sartre put it, “if you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.”

But sometimes, the company of others is exactly what we need. I hadn’t considered joining a walking group until last year, when I pulled up in the Dodd Wood car park to tackle Skiddaw. There, by chance, I found a small band of people assembling to hike the very same route under the guidance of Jez Starkey of Let’s Walk the Lakes. Let’s Walk the Lakes is a Facebook Group set up by Jez and Sammie Reynnie. I had joined for the photos, on-line chat, ideas and inspiration, although latterly, it had crossed my mind that turning up for one of their events might be rewarding. Now, serendipitously, here they were. I asked if I could tag along, and I was made very welcome.

Jez led us up over Ullock Pike, Long Side, and Carlside; up the steep screen run to Skiddaw; and eventually down and up again on to Dodd. Fell walkers are a friendly bunch—our mutual reverence for the landscape provides a profound bond—and it’s very uplifting to meet a bunch of people you click with instantly. Sammie was great fun and quite an education—I learnt a lot of new words that I think must be technical terms for describing steep gradients.

Among the friends I made that day was Neil Steel. Our paths would cross again a few months later when we attended one of Hayley Webb’s superb navigation courses. Neil is an irrepressible ball of energy and infectious enthusiasm. Hayley had just explained the principle of Naismith time for estimating how long it’ll take you to reach a given point (assume a base speed of 15 minutes per km and add a minute for every contour), when Neil set off at such a velocity that she was forced to call him back and suggest the calculation might need tailoring in his case.

Also on the course were Kathryn Reyes and Julia Charnock who talked warmly about the new Facebook group they had just formed, Let’s Talk the Lakes. The idea was to have a remit wider than fell walks alone. This would be a forum where people could discuss everything they love about the District—pubs, tea shops, whatever you like.

There was clearly currency in these social media groups. I was now a member of several and getting to know some of the regular contributors. One person who stood out was Zoe Little. Her posts overflowed with positivity and the sheer unbridled joy of the mountains. Here was a someone bursting to share the wonder; if you commented on one of her photos, she’d draw you into a conversation about summits and experiences; it was inspiring to follow her progress around the 214 Wainwrights. A few months later, I learnt that Zoe had started her own group, Mountain Bagging. What’s more, she’d recruited Neil and Ken Trainer (another veteran of the Skiddaw walk) as admins. This had to be a group worth checking out.

All of which explains why I’m standing at the top of the Kirkstone Pass, waiting for the group to arrive. Ken is going to lead an ascent of Red Screes via Kilnshaw Chimney, a steep gully that promises a dramatic scramble to the top. A stiff breeze whips up from the Irish Sea, gathering speed over the length of Windermere. It finds no impediment until it rattles the doors of the old 15th century coaching inn across the road. This is slightly ominous as Storm Freya is due to hit later. According to the forecast, we’ll be long off the fell before she does; I just hope she’s not early.

Neil arrives first. He’s full of flu and imbibing Lemsip from a flask. Anyone else would be tucked up in bed (see what I mean about irrepressible).

Zoe and her partner, Richie, arrive soon afterwards. Richie is nursing a knee injury but has turned up anyway (he’s clearly wrought from the same steely stuff as Neil). Zoe is every bit as exuberant in person as she appears on social media: warm, welcoming, ebullient and genuinely eager to hear about everyone else’s adventures. I ask her what led her to form Mountain Bagging. She tells me that she saw it as a way to share her love of the Lakes and Scotland. While she readily concedes there are “some awesome walking groups out there”, her experience on social media was not entirely without negativity. One flippant remark (she doesn’t elaborate) made her want to help others get out on the mountains.

“I asked Ken to join”, she explains, “then Neil and finally Beverly as I knew they had the exact same love for mountains as me. You just click with some folk and I think we are a great admin team, although, I bet I drive them all mad.”

Zoe is proud and a little overwhelmed at the response they’ve had from members, and it lends weight to her hope that they are achieving something a little bit unique:

“The best is when you take a group out and it might be their first time out or they haven’t done it on their own, so they have joined to gain confidence, and the sense of achievement they have just makes my day. Last year, I took one group up to the Priest Hole, and they had so much pride in that. That feeling of being part of someone’s adventure is priceless.”

Zoe Little on Red Screes summit — Zoe Little

As we’re talking, the rest of the group arrives, including latest recruit to the admin team, Beverley Simm—a very experienced walker, who began exploring the mountains as a youngster with her Dad. Ken and Anita rally the group and outline the route. Ken is full of bonhomie and cheeky humour. He suggests that if anyone struggles with his Merseyside accent, Anita is here to translate.

When we set off, Anita takes the lead and Ken brings up the rear, ensuring no-one gets left behind and signalling to Anita if the front-runners get too far ahead. Later, Anita shares a post on Facebook describing how wolf packs are organised: the slowest members set the pace, and the leader follows at the back where he can keep all in sight and move to wherever he is needed. It’s an interesting parallel.

The ascent is steep, but we start by following a clear path. I get talking to Anita, who tells me she started climbing the fells last year. She had little choice: “if you’re going out with Ken and you want to see anything of him, you’re going to be up a mountain at the weekend”. He’s a nurturing mentor, and she’s loving the experience; together, they’re ticking off the Wainwrights.

About two thirds of the way up, Ken directs us off piste to the start of the gully. As we fan out and start to scramble, I find myself with Gail and Alex. Walls of slate-grey crag, clad in green moss and milky lichen, rise on either side, and we clamber up erratic stairs of broken stone. I glance behind to see the slopes fall away severely. In the grey wintry light, the landscape beyond is a sepia wash, as if lightly sketched to be coloured in later. Only the thin grey ribbon of the road provides any discernible feature as it snakes away below. The red and blue jackets of the group are a striking contrast; it’s as if the defined world has shrunk to the immediate environs of our small party.

Before long, our way is blocked by a large rock step. It has only one obvious foot hold—a small damp moss-covered spur that looks slippery as hell—and a single hand hold, beyond the reach of many. This is where the power of teamwork wins out. Everyone who needs a hand is lifted up.

The squat tower of the trig point marks the summit, and cloud softens the vista over Middle Dodd to the pale sheen of Brothers Water. The contoured profiles of distant fells are the barren browns and tans of winter, with just the odd fleck of green to hint at the imminence of spring. Everyone takes a quiet moment to drink it all in.

We press on to Little Hart Crag, and once in the lee of Red Screes we stop to eat. I get talking to Gail and Kevin. Gail says when she first started walking with groups, she didn’t understand the term “comfort break” and thought it meant stopping for a snack. She didn’t understand why the men had to disappear behind a boulder or a tree to eat. Kevin slips discreetly behind the dry-stone wall, but his tangerine beanie serves to let everyone know where he is and what he’s doing (except Gail, who probably thinks he’s gone for a flapjack).

It starts to rain. and I pull on my waterproof over-trousers with all the balletic elegance of Darcy Bussell. Ken feels compelled to commentate much to the amusement of the group, and the situation does not improve when Gail endeavours to prop me up with such force I nearly end up half-way down the fell.

On Little Hart Crag, when the rain turns to snow, Ken revises the route, and we descend by High Hartsop Dodd. The gradient is steep but gets us down quickly. Kevin hangs back to help a couple of people whose footwear isn’t coping brilliantly with the slippery rock. His tangerine beanie is a useful beacon. He tells me it’s been all over with him: Scotland, Wales, The Falkland Islands…

As we follow the stream back up to the top of the Kirkstone Pass, I quiz Kevin about the Falklands. It turns out he’s a veteran of the conflict. He was just 18 years old when he stood on the bridge of HMS Fearless and faced the onslaught of repeated bombardments from Argentinian planes. He’s written a book about the experience. By the time we reach the Kirkstone Pass Inn, my interest is piqued. When I get home, I order a copy of “Fearless—the Diary of an 18-year-old at War in the Falklands” from Amazon. Several weeks later, my head is reeling. I’ve just finished the book; indeed, over the last few days, I’ve found it very hard to put down.

I was sixteen in 1982. My idea of a challenge was learning a Hendrix guitar riff or making fumbling attempts to attract girls. Kevin Porter was just two years older and faced a terrifying ordeal, well beyond the scope of anything most of us will ever encounter. He kept a diary, and that is what is reproduced here, augmented with context, explanations and detail from his older self, now better able to express the avalanche of emotion he was going through.

The book takes us on a compelling journey. Awkward farewells to a close-knit family in Millom make way for teenage bravado in Portsmouth, where saying you’re a sailor about to go to war proves an effective chat up line. The rousing send-off the public give the ship instils immense pride and patriotism, but as the shoreline fades, Kevin experiences fear and depression, and wonders if he’ll ever see his homeland again.

At sea, we get glimpses of Kevin’s rapport with nature: his delight at seeing pods of whales and his regular bids to venture out in the small boat that collects the airdrops of letters and supplies. As HMS Fearless approaches the battle zone, however, the mood understandably darkens.

The battles are a rollercoaster of terror, excitement, pride, pathos and anguish. One salient theme is the mutual respect the fighting men of both sides have for each other. They bear no personal animosity; they are here over historic claims of sovereignty, the political ambitions of a ruthless military junta, and the failure of politicians to resolve the matter with diplomacy. True, the Argentinians are “murdering bastards” when they score a direct hit, but in quieter moments, Kevin acknowledges their pilots’ bravery and skill. The respect is mutual. One poignant story concerns a British SAS officer who single-handedly holds off the enemy so his platoon can escape. When he finally succumbs to their fire, the Argentinians bury him with full military honours and declare him the bravest man they have ever encountered.

Jubilance at news of the Argentinian surrender turns to tetchiness on the long journey home. A hero’s return, marked by a street party, gives way to a growing unease, erratic behaviour and depression as PTSD takes hold.

Kevin eventually conquers his demons and is now a fully qualified transformational hypnotherapist, skilled in helping others to overcome them too.

This self-published book has a raw, unvarnished authenticity. It raises many questions about war, politics, the international arms trade, patriotism, and the emotional cost of serving your country. It doesn’t attempt to answer any of them; instead, it does something with much greater emotional heft—it gives you a profound insight on what it was like to be there in the thick of it. It is riveting testimony to heroism and humanity.

Thanks to Mountain Bagging, I started up Red Screes in my walking boots, but ended up on the decks of HMS Fearless, travelling all the way to the South Atlantic in Kevin Porter’s shoes.

Links

You can find Kevin’s book, “FEARLESS – The Diary of an 18 Year Old at War in the Falklands” on Amazon, using the following link

Hayley Webb Mountain Adventures

For superb navigation training or one-to-one guidance from a qualified mountain leader

https://www.facebook.com/HayleyWebbAdventures/

Fell Walk, General, History, Legend

UNDERWORLD

May 26, 2019 George Kitching 9 Comments

Glenridding Dodd, Sheffield Pike, Greenside Mine & Operation Orpheus

What connects an Ancient Greek legend about a lovelorn musician and his snake-bitten sweetheart, an American scientist with an explosive theory, an international initiative to stem the nuclear arms race, and an old lead mine in the hills above Ullswater? I trek over Glenridding Dodd and Sheffield Pike to find out.

In Greek mythology, Orpheus was a musician so accomplished that his playing could charm all living things. When his lover, Eurydice, fell into a viper’s nest and died of snake bites, Orpheus descended into the underworld where his song induced the god, Hades, to release Eurydice back into the land of the living. Her freedom came with a condition, however: Orpheus was to walk in front and not to look around until they were both out in the upper world. But Orpheus turned too soon, and Eurydice was lost to the underworld forever.

Orpheus was to return to the underworld in 1960, in Cumbria, and sadly, the objective of his endeavours would again fail to make it out alive. This time, the underworld was Greenside Mine near Glenridding, Orpheus was Operation Orpheus, and the object of his endeavour was not Eurydice, but the ratification of a nuclear weapons test ban treaty between the West and the Soviet Union.

The years following the end of WWII saw the West and the Eastern Bloc embroiled in the Cold War; a period of mounting political tension and mutual distrust that led both sides to amass nuclear arsenals in the hope that Mutually Assured Destruction would deter attack. By the 1950’s, the cost of this arms race had become unsustainable, and both sides were looking for some form of non-proliferation agreement. In 1958, negotiations began towards a test ban treaty.

Unfortunately, an American scientist, named Albert Latter, lobbed a large spanner into the works. Latter theorised that if a subterranean explosion was suspended in an empty chamber roughly the size of the hole that would have been created by the blast had it been detonated in tightly packed rock, then the explosion would register as many times smaller than it actually was on seismographs located above ground. If Latter was right, either side might be able to cheat a ban by testing underground.

Proving or disproving Latter’s theory became a matter of international urgency, and joint Anglo-American research projects were launched. The British initiative, code-named, Operation Orpheus, was the work of scientists from the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE). Underground explosions were tested in Cornwall, but the second phase of the investigation required a larger chamber, and AWRE turned its attention to Greenside Mine.

Stybarrow Dodd is a prominent peak on the Helvellyn massif. Its western slopes fall to Thirlmere, and it is closely bounded by Raise to the south and by Watson Dodd and Great Dodd to the north-west and north-east, but to the south-east it extends a long shoulder over Greenside and Sheffield Pike to Glenridding Dodd above Ullswater. Greenside Mine nestles in the col where Greenside, Raise and Sheffield Pike meet. Between 1825 and 1962, it was one of England’s most successful lead mines, extracting large amounts of the metal along with smaller quantities of silver. It spearheaded the use of hydroelectric power, harnessing the natural resources of Swart Beck and Glenridding Beck, the latter fed by Helvellyn’s Red Tarn and Kepple Cove Tarn, both of which were dammed to provide greater capacity. Its main tunnel ran deep below Greenside’s eastern ridge, but by the end of the 1950’s, its lead seams were exhausted, and the mine was in the process of closing down. Operation Orpheus was to be its swan song.

Once AWRE had reassured anxious Glenridding residents that no fissile material would be involved in the experiment, months were spent putting everything in place. The tests would comprise two explosions: the first, a large detonation “decoupled” from the rock by its suspension in a large empty chamber; the second, a smaller explosion “coupled” to the rock by packing the explosives into a narrow cross shaft. The decoupled detonation would require 3000 lb of explosive, arranged in 7 layers of 36 boxes, each weighing 12 lb. The coupled explosion would be approximately 3 times smaller. If Latter’s theory was correct, the recording equipment would register each as roughly the same size. Six recording stations were set up, the nearest half a mile from the mine, the furthest, 47 miles away in Malham, Yorkshire.

On Saturday 19th December 1959, the button was pressed and the decoupled explosive detonated. Significantly, a recording station in Sedbergh failed to register any seismic activity at all, suggesting decoupling might be even more effective than Latter had anticipated. Below the surface, however, the blast was so powerful it destroyed some of the electrical equipment that had been set up to trigger the second detonation with the result that it had to be postponed until after Christmas.

Tragically, preparations for the second test claimed two lives. The first explosion released large quantities of carbon monoxide and smaller amounts of cyanide. Blowers were installed to disperse the gas, and a mix of high-tech detection equipment, and old school methods (mice and canaries) were used to identify its lingering presence. Despite all the precautions, two mine workers, William Sinkinson and Alex Santamara, wandered into a stope that was still contaminated. When shift boss, John Pattinson Brown, realised they were missing, he went in search of the men with the help of Arnold Lewis and Fred Dawes. Dawes climbed the ladder to the stope where he saw Santamara’s body slumped. While Brown went for help, Dawes and Lewis entered the stope, holding their breath for protection, and managed to pull Santamara to the edge by the ladder, but could get him no further. When Brown returned with a rescue team and a doctor, Dawes and Lewis had passed out too. Luckily, they recovered, but the help had come too late for Santamara and Sinkinson.

With the second detonation, hopes of ratifying the treaty died too. Albert Latter’s theory had been proven right. Both sides temporarily resumed nuclear weapons tests, but they returned to the table in 1963 when a partial test ban was agreed. This treaty excluded underground testing, which, as Operation Orpheus had helped demonstrate, could too easily be disguised.

Beyond Troutbeck, mist fills the roadside hollows, and the tops are hidden, but as the car crests the brow of the Kirkstone Pass and begins the winding descent to Patterdale, the cloud-line is a little higher. As I drive through the village, the eastern shoulder of Birks stands proud, and as I approach Glenridding, Glenridding Dodd has a narrow band of clear sky above.

In the carpark, a woman who looks exactly like the Queen is examining the pebbles that line the top of the drystone wall. I can’t tell if she’s pinching some to augment the rockery at Balmoral, or whether she’s donating specimens from the royal collection—a spot of benefactory community service perhaps, before zipping off to Carlisle for the races.

On Greenside Road, I get talking to a lad who’s heading for Helvellyn; he’s a little concerned at the lack wind and the prospect of spending all day with his head in the clouds. When I say I’m heading for Glenridding Dodd and Sheffield Pike, he tells me he did those a couple weeks ago. We look up at the craggy drama of the Pike, perched above the sheer screes that line the old mine road.

“There is a path,” he assures me. “Not that you’d guess it from here.”

We part company when I leave the road to climb behind the old miners’ cottages and join the rake that runs up to the col between Glenridding Dodd and Sheffield Pike. It’s unrelentingly steep, especially in the lower reaches, and my calves complain all the way up to the wall that runs across the saddle.

In Wainwright’s time, Glenridding Dodd had fallen from public favour. “Fashions change”, he writes. “When people climbed hills only for the sake of the views, the heathery summit of Glenridding Dodd must have been more frequented than it is today, for once-popular paths of ascent are now overgrown and neglected.”

While still a lesser-trodden fell, the legacy of AW’s Pictorial Guide has ensured a steady stream of Wainwright baggers so the path is now easier to pick out. He’s not wrong about the views. The summit grants a grand vista north-eastward over the lake.

Ullswater changes her mood to match the seasons: on long summer days she’s joyful and uplifting; in autumn, brooding and mysterious; today, she’s sullen and reflective, as if pondering the folly of humans who spend lifetimes perfecting weaponry powerful enough to destroy themselves and the planet with them.

Glenridding Dodd and Ullswater from Heron Pike

Footsteps break my thoughts, and a man from Egremont joins me at the cairn. As we chat, he says he’s heard of another cairn, further down on the south-eastern side, that commands magnificent views over Glenridding and the southern end of the lake. I follow him down through the heather to a small stone beacon, perched above a plunging drop. The aspect is brooding and dramatic. Across the water, Place Fell hides in mist and the water below is the steely grey of armour plate.

This gentleman is heading for Sheffield Pike too. On the way back down to the col, he tells me how he lost the path on Grange Fell, the other day, and had to make a tricky, improvised descent to get down before dark. When we reach the col, he opts not to join me on the crags of Heron Pike—apparently last time he tried it, he lost the path here too.

I’m not so easily deterred, the ridge that leads to the subsidiary summit of Heron Pike promises to be the best bit, and I’m up for a bit of semi-scrambling, if needed. His words strike a note of caution, all the same. In the event, the trod is narrow but well-defined. It picks such a canny line between the steep craggy outcrops that (despite appearances) three points of contact are never required. I start to wonder if losing paths is a regular affliction for my new acquaintance, but then I note the ubiquitous heather, now winter-brown and died-back; in late summer, I’ll warrant the way is easily lost under foliage.

The top of Heron Pike yields yet more arresting vistas over Ullswater. Filtered through the cloud, the light is subdued but ethereal. To the south, the spectral outline of Catstye Cam is slowly emerging from veils of mist. It’s a scene far more evocative of Greek mysteries than the harsh realities of the Cold War. Perhaps because the deeper truths of mythology are timeless, whereas the Cold War tensions should long ago have been confined to the history books.

But of course they haven’t. I was born six years after Operation Orpheus, and I grew up in Salisbury, the quaint market town that has now become a symbol of renewed distrust between Russia and the West. The Bishop’s Mill—the pub where the Skripals stopped for a drink before collapsing on a nearby bench—was a favourite haunt in my late teens. It was the venue for many a near alcohol poisoning, but it’s galling to imagine it as the backdrop to an assassination attempt. It’s such a shame. I visited St Petersburg with work a few years ago. It’s a beautiful city, and I was made very welcome. I was there to meet doctors, pharmacists and biomedical scientists: men and women dedicated to saving lives, not taking them.

The ground changes beyond the top of Heron Pike, the rock and heather give way to a soggy depression before climbing again to the stony outcrop that forms the summit of Sheffield Pike. Wainwright loses interest at this point and gets positively hostile about Greenside mine below: “westwards the fell is drab and, in the environs of a vast lead mine, hideously scarred and downright ugly. Its rich mineral deposits have, paradoxically, caused its ruin: it has been robbed not only of its lead but of its appeal and attractiveness to walkers.”

My friend from Egremont has arrived already. He’s planning to follow the path around the prettier northern slopes back to Glencoyne, avoiding the mine. But industrial heritage holds its own fascination for me, especially as nearly sixty years of disuse has allowed nature to soften lines. The old mine buildings are now hostels and camping barns. For all its spoil heaps and scars, the hill is slowly healing itself. In a million years, there’ll be no trace of its wounds. There may no longer be any trace of humans either, but the hills will still be here. Such a timescale seems an eternity to us, but in mountain years, it’s a matter of weeks, and that’s only if these fells are middle-aged. For all we know, they might be in the first flush of youth, or barely out of the cradle.

The cloud is slowly lifting. The tops of Raise and Stybarrow Dodd are still concealed, but Greenside’s summit (known as White Stones) has emerged; shafts of sunlight break through to illuminate its grassy eastern ridge. If Wainwright thought these slopes drab, he must never have seen them emerge from shadow like this. I’m seized by the urge to stride on up Greenside and on to the Helvellyn massif, but I don’t have time. I have family coming around later, and I’ve promised them roast chicken, Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes—the whole nine yards. I glance at my watch, but in my mind’s eye, I see hungry expectant faces turning to indignation and disappointment as they discover their chef was last seen ascending into the clouds with a head full of Greek tragedy and Cold War drama.

So instead, I descend to the track between the spoil heaps—the road to the underworld. The sun intensifies, and above, Greenside is a golden green ramp leading through the mists to a finer realm—a world where you can leave behind Wainwright’s “hideous scarring” and the perennial power struggles of human politics and gain fresh perspectives, learn nobler truths—just so long as you take heed of Orpheus and don’t look back too soon.

A Big Day in the North

April 28, 2019 George Kitching 11 Comments

Blencathra via Doddick Fell, Mungrisdale Common, Bannerdale Crags, Bowscale Fell, Souther Fell

Wainwright describes no fewer than 12 ways to ascend Blencathra. When I chicken out of Sharp Edge due to high winds, I try his third best route—the exhilarating ridge of Doddick Fell. On reaching the summit, I ramble on over Mungrisdale Common, Bannerdale Crags, Bowscale Fell and Souther Fell, encountering foxhounds, Geordies and John Wayne. (Some of them are even real).

“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”. The opening line of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet may have chimed with Alfred Wainwright in 1961, as he spent evening after evening sketching for his fifth book, The Northern Fells. While her words hardly described his marital life at the time (the fells and his books were his retreat from the unease of a failing relationship), they perfectly capture how he felt about Blencathra.

Wainwright spoke of a “spiritual and physical satisfaction in climbing mountains – and a tranquil mind upon reaching their summits, as though I had escaped from the disappointments and unkindnesses of life and emerged above them into a new world, a better world.” For AW, the southern face of Blencathra was “the grandest object in Lakeland”. He devoted 36 pages to this mountain (more than any other) and described 12 different ascents— “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”.

The southern face comprises five distinct fells fused together by the summit ridge. At either end, Blease Fell and Scales Fell are broad grassy flanks, but the middle three, Gategill Fell, Hall’s Fell and Doddick Fell, taper to narrow airy ridges separated by broad plunging gills. As far as dramatic mountain scenery goes, it’s an embarrassment of riches. Hall’s Fell Top is Blencathra’s summit, and from here, another short ridge dips then rises to Atkinson Pike to create the Saddle, the mountain’s iconic skyline that gives rise to its alternative name, Saddleback.

Hall’s Fell Ridge was Wainwright’s favourite ascent (indeed, he thought this the finest way up any mountain in the district). Second came Sharp Edge, the narrow arête that runs east from Atkinson Pike above Scales Tarn. Doddick came in third. But third is good isn’t it? Third out of twelve—that’s something. AW went walking in his third-best suit. Better than second, at any rate. Shakespeare bequeathed his second-best bed to his wife, and I can’t imagine she was overly chuffed. Probably raised some awkward questions about who got the better one…

OK, it’s a ridiculous train of thought, I know, but I’m standing at the bottom of Mousthwaite Comb trying to convince myself I’m not a chicken. Ahead, a path runs up to the col between Scales Fell and Souther Fell and, from there, climbs above the river Glenderamackin to Scales Tarn and the start of Sharp Edge. This was my plan for today, but the ridge is a razor edge scramble with sheer drops on either side. It’s not for the faint-hearted, and I’d quite like to lose my Sharp Edge virginity on a day when the wind isn’t gusting quite so hard. With the words “discretion” and “valour” repeating in my head like a mantra, I take the other path—the one that climbs over the toe of Scales Fell and heads for Doddick Fell.

I’ve climbed Halls Fell Ridge before. It has drama aplenty—an exhilarating scramble with steep sides, if not quite as sheer as Sharp Edge, still capable of instilling an air of danger. While holding few genuine difficulties, it does require care. Doddick is a similar slim ridge, but with fewer rock turrets and precipices so it should be a little easier. However, my scrambling abilities are tested before I even start the ascent. Scaley Beck separates Scales Fell and Doddick Fell, and its crossing requires a descent into a steep ravine. The way down is easy enough, but on the other side, a narrow path climbs to a large rock step with a dearth of decent hand and foot holds. After some shenanigans that are most accurately described as scrabbling rather than scrambling, I manage to get one knee over the parapet, and with a little inelegant huffing and shuffling, I haul myself up.

A few minutes later, I’m stuffing outer layers into my rucksack. Out of the wind, the sunshine is warm. It’s a beautiful spring day, quintessential May—except it’s February, and this is alarming. (Still, it would be churlish not to enjoy it).

As I start my winding ascent up the steep foot of Doddick Fell, the green fields of St John’s in the Vale stretch out below, walled into irregular squares like a patchwork chequerboard. Wisps of low cloud soften the charcoal peaks of Clough Head and the Dodds as they rise across the valley, and to the west, the ridges of Coledale and Newlands are dark sails in a sea of fine mist. At 450 million years old, they’re all newcomers compared to Blencathra, which has stood a full fifty million years longer, forged not from cataclysmic volcanic eruptions but formed, over imponderable millennia, from layer upon layer of sedimentary deposits on the sea bed. I can’t tell whether it’s the weight of such eternities, or simply the wind direction, but the noise from the A66 below seems to have disappeared.

Across the foot of Hall’s Fell, half a dozen foxhounds are trotting this way. Members of the Blencathra pack, perhaps? Kennelled at Gate Gill, they are a famed company with a lineage stretching back to John Peel, the huntsman immortalised in the seventeenth century song, “D’ye ken John Peel in his coat so gay”. Their master awaits further up the slope here on Doddick. Perhaps I’m just used to seeing farmers dressed in fleeces and coveralls, but in his tweeds, waxed jacked and flat cap, he seems the embodiment of tradition. In spite of myself, I find I’m enjoying the scene. I supported (and still support) the fox hunting ban, and I don’t subscribe to the Countryside Alliance’s view that it is a law passed by Townies who don’t understand country ways. Growing up in the countryside, I encountered as much anti-hunt feeling as pro, even among some farmers whose interests it claimed to serve. Yet, it is possible to acknowledge and appreciate a close working relationship between man and dog, and between both and the landscape, even if you don’t condone the endgame.

Of course, since the ban, the endgame is supposed to have changed. They no longer kill foxes, they pursue fell runners now (which surely even Oscar Wilde would consider fair game). Trail hunting, where a runner lays a trail scented with aniseed or fox urine, was big in Cumbria long before the ban, and the Blencathra Hounds’ website states emphatically that their events keep strictly within the law—any attempt to do otherwise will result in the hounds being returned to their kennels. How rigidly this is enforced, I don’t know, but there’s no bloodshed today, they’re simply exercising the animals. One of the hounds has already reached Doddick, and minutes later, he brushes eagerly past my leg. As I reach the top of the slope, I pass his master, and being British, we comment on the weather, “Aye, wam oop ‘ere”, he grins.

According to Wikipedia, one version of the folk song paints Peel’s coat as grey, not gay. This seems likely, as it was probably made from Herdwick wool. It also reminds me I know the song best from Porridge, where Norman Stanley Fletcher sings an entirely different lyric:

“D’ye see yon screw with his look so vain?
With his brand new key on his brand new chain;
With a face like a ferret and a pea for a brain
And his hand on his whistle in the morning.”

As the initial slope levels off, Doddick’s ridge is revealed. If you ask a child to draw a mountain, they draw a triangle, and this is the shape of things ahead—a perfect chestnut pyramid rising to a pale grey peak. At the top, this fell joins the ridge that curves round from Scales Fell. The ground between is scooped into a deep and wide gill, its high sides draped in dry heather, like the chocolate fleece of a Herdwick yearling.

To my left, is another higher horseshoe. Across Doddick Gill, Hall’s Fell rises to an imperious tower where it becomes Blencathra’s summit, its slopes, a great wall of exposed stone flecked with sparse patches of yellow scrub, topped with rocky turrets and riven by a narrow fissure running all the way down to its foot. It’s a view Wainwright calls “awe-inspiring”. I’m reminded of a friend who used to run the Coniston Launch. I once asked him how he lured punters away from his chief rival, the historic steam yacht, Gondola. “Ah well,” he said, “I tell them the best view of the Gondola is from The Coniston Launch.” The same may be true of Hall’s Fell and Doddick.

A man with a north east accent is similarly wrapt. He tells me he normally climbs Blencathra by Hall’s Fell or Sharp Edge but decided to try Doddick today for a change. He’s not dissappointed. I confess to chickening out of Sharp Edge because of the wind (which sounds lame because here in the lee of the mountain, there isn’t any). He smiles and assures me it’s not as bad as people make out, then as we start up the slope, he admits he’s regretting the six pints he had yesterday afternoon while watching the rugby.

St John's in the Vale from Doddick Fell — St John’s in the Vale from Doddick Fell

Our paths continue to cross as we climb the narrow ridgeline. When I reach Doddick Fell Top, I gaze back over the ascent. He’s two steps behind and looking beyond me.

“Sharp Edge”, he nods.

I turn, and there it is, towering like an impregnable wall over Scales Tarn. Its blue slate sides look well nigh vertical, and a tiny figure strides nervously along its battlements. Just then, we’re buffeted by a huge gust. My companion looks at me with a smile and nods, “Aye, bit windy today”. Then, as one, we glance back to check the solitary figure is still there and not floating in the tarn below.

The unseasonal weather has inspired people to pull on their boots, and Blencathra’s summit is crowded. A large group is posing for photo, so I make friends with their dog. We’re on tummy tickling terms by the time his grinning owner reclaims him. I stare down the spine of Hall’s Fell Ridge, falling abruptly away toward Thelkeld below. It promises thrills and adventure, but the day is young, and there are other summits I want to roam.

Hall's Fell Ridge from the summit — Hall’s Fell Ridge from the summit

I set off over the Saddle toward Atkinson Pike. On its eastern flank, lies Foule Crag and Sharp Edge, but to the west, a blue slate scree slope (known imaginatively as Blue Screes) drops to a flat plateau of upland moor—Mungrisdale Common. If Wainwright thought the southern face of Blencathra, Lakeland’s grandest object, he found Mungrisdale Common its least impressive. Indeed, he’s positively rude about it, claiming it “has no more pretension to elegance than a pudding that has been sat on”, and that its “natural attractions are of a type that appeals only to sheep”. But I’ve been reading William Atkins’ book, The Moor, and it’s left me with a deeper appreciation of these boggy, desolate wastelands.

While our moors are as hazardous as our mountains, we conceive of their dangers differently. Literature reinforces this: lofty crags are noble; to scale their heights, heroic; to die trying, worthy. Moors are bleak, lonely places, populated by outcasts; to drown in the bog is the ignominious fate of the wretched.

Atkins’ book teems with tales of men and women who have battled to turn moors into fertile farmland. Yet time and again, the attempt is futile and leads to ruin, even madness. For centuries, our peat bogs were seen as useless waste ground. Today, with the reality of global warming, we’re waking up to their value. We learn in school that plants take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen, but when plants die they release all that stored carbon back into the atmosphere. The sphagnum moss that covers our wetlands is an exception. When it dies it forms the peat that lies beneath, and peat traps all the carbon it collected during its lifetime. Or at least it does if it stays wet. Drain our moors and we release the carbon. Protecting our wetlands is now a task of significant environmental importance.

As a carbon sponge, Mungrisdale Common’s diminutive size means it hardly registers in significance compared with the vast peat bogs of Exmoor, Dartmoor, The Peak District or North Yorkshire, yet as I step off the blue scree and on to the squelchy ground, I look at the green and red sphagnum with a new-found appreciation.

Finding the summit is more problematic. Wainwright declares that “any one of a thousand tufts of tough bent and cotton-grass might lay claim to crowning the highest point”, which means, I suppose, that walkers bagging the Wainwrights need only set foot on the Common to claim it. I decide it deserves more respect, and set off along the broadest of the visible paths heading for what I hope is a patch of imperceptibly higher ground.

Cloud has now swallowed the top Blencathra, but here on the Common, I’m still in sunshine, and the landscape assumes an air of the Wild West. Admittedly, cacti and Comanches are in short supply but there’s something about craggy mountains rising from a broad sweep of straw-hued flatland that evokes John Wayne. I’ve been to Denver a couple of times and always marvel at the plains running flat as a pancake all the way to Kansas, while in the opposite direction the vast wall of the Rocky Mountains rises out of nowhere. Skiddaw is no Pikes Peak, but it’s a giant in Lakeland terms, and it looks “mighty fine” (as they might say over there). The Common compliments Great Calva and Lonscale Fell to similar effect, and I conclude that AW must have been in a unusually unimaginative mood to resist to such charms.

I find a cairn which I count as the summit and turn heel for the Glenderamackin Col. At the col, the paths to Bowscale Fell, Blencathra and Bannerdale Crags intersect with a fourth that follows the course of the fledgling river down into the valley.

Bannerdale Crags looks unexciting from here, a nondescript grassy hillock basking in the shadow of Blencathra’s saddle. That changes entirely when you reach the summit. Here the views are utterly uplifting. To the east, Souther Fell rises over the infant River Glenderamackin, a last noble outpost of the Northern Fells. Beyond is the broad flat sweep of the fertile Eden valley, hemmed by the distant indistinct wall of the Pennines. Immediately to the north, the Tongue rises to the neighbouring peak of Bowscale Fell, and from here the pièce de résistance, the crags themselves, sweep round to meet it, a crescent wall of charcoal cliffs plummeting to apricot slopes beneath. It makes for an inspiring walk, and everyone I pass along its sweep has the same beatific smile.

On the summit of Bowscale Fell, I meet a man who’s sweating and puffing from the ascent. He’s come all the way up from the valley, past Bowscale Tarn, which, according to Wordsworth, is home to a pair of “undying fish”.

“That doesn’t get any easier”, he exclaims.

“Oh, I know”, I reply. “They get higher with age.”

“They certainly do!”, he grins, and staggers off for the sanctuary of the summit shelter.

I wander back down to the Glenderamackin col with the dark Saddle dominating the skyline and follow the stream down into the valley between Bannerdale Crags and Scales Fell. Above me on my right, Sharp Edge looms, looking no less daunting from this angle. Daunting but inspiring, and I find myself whispering, “next time”.

I leave the path where it rounds the bottom of White Horse Bent, cross the steam by the footbridge, and climb to the col where Scales Fell and Souther Fell meet. From here, the path leads down Mousthwaite Comb and back to Scales, where I left my car.

But Souther Fell is right there, the last bastion of the Northern Fells, and with the weather so amenable, aching legs would seem a small price to pay for making it a big day in the north.

In 1745, twenty six men and women swore they’d seen a ghost army marching over Souther Fell. For more on that, my ascent of Hall’s Fell Ridge and the legendary Celtic king who is said to lie beneath Blencathra, click here…

Sympathy For The Devil

I did eventually get to walk over Sharp Edge. If you’d like to read that account, here’s the link:

http://www.lakelandwalkingtales.co.uk/blencathra-via-sharp-edge/

Fell Walk, General, History, Legend, Natural History, Nature

Riddle of the sands

March 24, 2019 George Kitching 18 Comments

Humphrey Head

How does something too small become a fell? When it’s a place of extinctions and exotic new colonists? When the curative powers of its holy waters have been celebrated alike by Roman lead miners and modern celebrities? When it has one foot on land and the other in the sea? When its charms outweigh its diminutive height to the degree that Wainwright felt duty bound to honour it as one? When it’s the outstretched finger of the Cartmel Peninsula, jutting out into the perilous mudflats of Morecambe Bay? Tim and I cross a salt marsh to explore the beguiling mysteries of Humphrey Head—historic home of England’s last wolf.

Twenty years ago, I joined the RSPB in a remote hide in the middle of Riggindale. It was an easy sell. I’d just seen a golden eagle perched on the crags of Riggindale Edge (the slender spine that Wainwright calls the “connoisseur’s route” up High Street). His mate (the eagle’s, not Wainwright’s) circled above Kidsty Pike. When I looked up from the telescope, the steward proffered a pen and the membership form, and I signed without hesitation.

The eagles were the only nesting pair in England. Sadly, the female died a few years later. The male hung on until late in 2015, but has not been spotted since, and the RSPB has now taken down the hide. Fortunately, some of the Society’s flagship work has had happier outcomes. The organisation started life with a campaign to protect another bird, the little egret. During the 19th century, egret feathers, alongside bird of paradise feathers, had become the must-have costume accessory among the Absolutely Fabulous, Vogue-reading fashionistas of the day. Indeed, the feathers became so sought-after that they were worth more than their weight in gold (literally). The social standing of contemporary Edinas and Patsys rose in inverse proportion to life-expectancy of the young chicks, and in 1889, Emily Williamson formed the Society for the Protection of Birds (later the Royal Society…) to campaign against this barbaric trade.

Today, the RSPB website describes the little egret as “a small white heron with attractive white plumes on crest, back and chest, black legs and bill and yellow feet”. Back when I joined, a little egret sighting would have been almost as rare as a golden eagle sighting. The birds first appeared on these shores in significant numbers in 1989 and didn’t breed here until seven years later. Over the intervening years, numbers have grown to the point where they are now quite at home in our coastal areas. Indeed, one has just taken off from the salt marsh in front of us: a flurry of white beating wings and an elegant, aerodynamic profile, rocketing skyward. Tim and I watch in wonder. Such an encounter may no longer count as uncommon, but it’s still a thrill to behold.

We’re on our way to Humphrey Head, one of Wainwright’s Outlying Fells, despite his emphatic assertion that, “not by any exercise of the imagination can Humphrey Head be classed as an outlying fell of Lakeland. Outlying it certainly is: a limestone promontory thrusting from the Kent Estuary coast and almost surrounded by mudflats at low tide but awash at high. A fell it is certainly not, being a meagre 172 feet above the sea and, away from it’s dangerous cliffs, so gentle in gradient and surface texture that the ascent is a barefoot stroll.”

Just as you’re scratching your head and wondering whether Wainwright has taken a bump to his, he explains that nevertheless, “it’s isolation, far-ranging views and seascapes, bird life (of national repute), rocky reefs and interesting approach combine to make the place unique in the district, giving better reason for its inclusion in this book than its omission.”

That recent colonists like the little egret have made a new home here feels like poetic justice when you consider that Humphrey Head is traditionally associated with a final act of extinction: it’s the spot where the last wolf in England was slain.

In her book, Tales of Old Lancashire, Elizabeth Ashworth tells a romanticised version of the story…

So determined was Sir Edgar Harrington to rid the Cartmel area of this ferocious beast, he offered his niece’s hand in marriage to the man who could slay the wolf. His niece, Adela, held a candle for Sir Edgar’s son, John, and the feelings were reciprocated, but Sir Edgar disapproved of the match. Besides, John was abroad fighting a foreign foe, and had been gone so long, that even Adela had given him up for dead.

Despite her lack of egret feathers, Adela’s beauty was such that many young men vied for her attentions, and wolf hunt was organised to determine who should wed her.

Her most ardent admirer was a local knight called Laybourne, but on the eve of the event, a mysterious stranger appeared on the Cartmel peninsula, riding a fine Arab stallion. The next day, the hunt raged long and hard, and one by one the competitors dropped out except for Laybourne and the stranger, who rode neck and neck. Eventually, they chased the wolf to Humphrey Head, where Laybourne’s horse pulled up at a vast chasm and refused to jump. The stranger’s horse was braver but failed to clear the distance and plunged to its death. The stranger, himself, managed to cling to the crag’s edge and pull himself to safety on Humphrey Head summit. Here, he confronted the wolf on foot and dispatched it with his sword.

When the stranger claimed Adela as his bride, he revealed himself to be none other than Sir Edgar’s missing son, John, and the couple enjoyed a long and happy marriage.

John Harrington is buried in Cartmel Priory. The church’s weather vane is a wolf, but as Ashworth astutely observes, the grave names his wife as Joan, not Adela.

For me, there is another troubling inconsistency in the story. I will admit to being adept in the art of the “man look”. I frequently spend long minutes looking for what is right under my nose, before giving it up as irretrievably lost. However, I’ve been to Humphrey Head before, and if the way to the summit lay over a gaping chasm, too wide for an Arab stallion, I’m sure even I would have noticed. Besides, how did the wolf get across?

The slightly more prosaic version of the story says the wolf was killed by angry villagers, armed with pikes, after the animal attacked a child in the woods.

As Wainwright recommends, we set off from Kent’s Bank Station. Wooden boards permit pedestrians to cross the tracks, and a little white gate leads out on to a concrete parapet that runs parallel to the line. Wainwright’s descriptions of the shenanigans needed to shin the wall and avoid the eye of the station master are no longer required, it seems. The parapet tracks the line for about a third of a mile and stops before the rocky outcrop of Kirkhead End. Here the path drops on to the mudflats and weaves between the rocks. And it’s here we pause to watch the egret.

The Bay fascinates me. Locals call it the watery desert, and it’s an apt description. At low tide, the sands run as far as the eye can see in a beguiling pattern of spiral shapes, carved by wind and water, glittering with the mesmeric shimmer of orphaned puddles and pools. A place of barren beauty and hidden hazards: quicksands proliferate and the tide returns so fast it can outrun a horse.

Humphrey Head Point is the outstretched index finger of the Cartmel Peninsula, and on this side, we look across the Kent Estuary to Arnside Knott. Together with its neighbours, Hampsfell and Whitbarrow Scar, Humphrey Head would once have been part of one long limestone reef, forged over millions of years when this whole area lay below a shallow sea. These vestigial outcrops may lack the lofty drama of Lakeland’s mountains, but they have character aplenty.

We follow the path through the verdant grass of the salt marsh, leaping streams and scouting for stepping stones in the soggiest sections. By Wyke House farm we turn a corner and join a section of the Cumbrian Coastal Way heading for the foot of Humphrey Head’s gentler wooded eastern side. Just before the Outdoor Centre, we turn right through a kissing gate and fight our way up a narrow footpath, overrun with brambles and nettles, their extravagant growth nurtured by the same warm spring sunshine that has cruelly encouraged us to wear shorts.

We join a country lane that leads to the beach, then turn up towards the Outdoor Centre. From here, a path climbs gently beside a fence above the cliffs to the headland’s summit. Stunted hawthorn trees line the route, their trunks bent from years of relentless subservience to the wind. Behind us, over gentle rolling pastures, rise the Coniston Fells, the ominous vanguard of the high ground beyond. Before us is the Bay, a vast wilderness of slowly ebbing tidal waters and exposed silvery sands. Humphrey Head’s abrupt western cliff is a ha-ha, the grassy summit plateau looks to run seamlessly into the sea with no hint of the hidden drop; and a gate appears to open on to the waves.

Across the bay, the Lancashire coastline is interrupted by a large unnatural rectangle. The Heysham nuclear power plant dwarfs its surroundings. To the west, over the Leven estuary an army of thin white wind turbines occupies the sea beyond the Furness peninsula. One goal, two very different game-plans, separated by about ten miles of sea and a vast ocean of ideology.

With the tide running out, we were hoping to make a circular walk—returning via the beach—but a channel of water still laps the foot of the cliff. We descend to the rocks of Humphrey Head point. The water here still looks deep—we can’t see the bottom—and there’s no telling how firm the sand below might be. We take off our shoes and resign ourselves to sitting on the rocks and dipping our feet in the sea before heading back over the headland. A black Labrador is bolder and dives in. When I look over at him, I do a double take. He’s not swimming, he’s standing. The water’s barely up to his waist. I tentatively dip a foot in. It finds the bottom, so I slip off the rock and into the water. It comes halfway up my calf, and the sand is firm.

Laughing at our hesitancy, we paddle back beneath the cliff face toward the beach. As the water clears, it reveals the channel to be something of a marine nursery. Tiny crabs scurry beneath the surface, and a baby fluke, no longer than the tip of my finger, attacks a rag worm nearly twice its size.

Mustard coloured algae cover the rocks, and shrubs and wild flowers shoot from crevices in the crags. As we reach dry sand, a man is telling his grandchildren about the cave in the rock behind them, and how you can clamber all the way through. The boy and girl’s faces light up and they tug at their father’s sleeve. They disappear into an opening in the cliff where mineral strata form eye-catching stripes. Excited shouts and laughter echo from within, and in a matter of minutes, they emerge a hundred yards up the beach.

The big kid in me wants to play too, so I climb over boulders to the cave entrance. It’s a narrow passage known as The Fairy Chapel. Daylight permeates in from the other end, but the width tapers before I reach it, and I’m slightly concerned this might turn out to be a case of Fat Man’s Agony. Would Mountain Rescue come out if I end up wedged firm between the walls? Or would they quote Wainwright at me, “we’re MOUNTAIN RESCUE and ‘not by any exercise of the imagination can Humphrey Head be classed as an outlying fell’”? Fortunately, I prove more svelte than I feared and emerge into the open, where the young lad is demanding of his dad, “AGAIN”.

Somewhere here is the site of a holy well. The waters were said to possess healing powers, and lead miners from as far back as Roman times would walk here to drink in the hope that the liquid would flush the toxins from their bodies. In 2003, Phil Lynott (a local landowner, not the late Thin Lizzy frontman) launched Willow, a brand of mineral water bottled from a spring in his nearby field.

His curiosity was roused when he moved two sick ponies into the paddock and found that each made a remarkable recovery. When Lynott realised that the ponies were drinking from the spring, he had the water analysed and found it contained traces of salicin, a natural anti-inflammatory. Salicin is formed from willow bark and is the natural origin of aspirin. Willow trees were once prevalent, and their remains now form a layer in the earth, through which the water is filtered. Lynott was convinced the water helped him recovery from cancer, and celebrity chef, Clarissa Dickson-Wright, claimed, live on television, that it had cured a benign cyst on her breast and a gungey toe. The company got into trouble with the consumer safety authorities when they went a step further and launched an advertising campaign claiming their product could cure a range of skin complaints such as eczema and psoriasis.

In its heyday, the holy well lay behind a door in the rock. All that remains now is a rusty pipe, but I can’t find it (“man look”, probably).

As the kids lead their dad back to the entrance to the Fairy Chapel, an inscription on a slab of rock catches my eye. It says, “Beware how you on these rocks ascend. Here William Pedder met his end. August 22nd, 1857. Aged 10 years”. It’s a sobering note, like a soulful minor cadence in a feel-good hit of the summer.

We head back past the Outdoor Centre and retrace our steps to Kent’s Bank. From the salt marsh, I cast a goodbye glance at Humphrey Head: a place of endings and beginnings, miracle cures and tragic demises, historic extinctions and exotic new colonists, prettiness and peril; and every bit deserving of the honorary fell status, Wainwright accords it.

Fire and Water

February 23, 2019 George Kitching 15 Comments

Sunset Over Morecambe Bay, In Snow

Snow covered Coniston Fells beckon, but a computer glitch and an ill-fated Christmas shopping trip, worthy of Father Ted, rob me of a day on their slopes. As a consolation, I climb Hampsfell to watch the sun set over Morecambe Bay. It turns into one of the most magical fell walks I’ve ever experienced.

December 9th, 2017 and the snow was falling, clothing the peaks in an alluring blanket of white. From my kitchen window, I can see Dow Crag, and in winter, when the trees are stripped of leaves, I can also make out a little of the Old Man of Coniston’s shoulder. By mid-afternoon they were looking positively Alpine, promising all kinds of winter adventure. It was too late to get out today, but Tuesday would be my birthday, and with uncharacteristic foresight, I’d booked the day off work. I checked the Met Office mountain forecast: sunshine and excellent visibility; and with only two days to go, there was just a chance it might be right.

Sheep at the foot of Hampsfell — Across the fields

I was buoyant. Borderline ecstatic. And then it happened. Or at least it didn’t. Sandy switched on her laptop, and nothing responded. Zilch, nada, not a flicker. I’m unusual in being a software developer who hates computers. It’s nothing personal, I just spend so much of my day immersed in them, I try to avoid them in my spare time. I fumbled for an excuse, but it wasn’t forthcoming, and Sandy was panicking, so I felt compelled to help.

My wife is a freelance journalist and animal photographer. She had two important photoshoots to process in the coming week, and her laptop is a vital tool. Luckily it was still under guarantee, so I got out my phone and looked up the nearest Apple Dealer (I know nothing about hardware).

“There’s one in Lancaster”, I announced triumphantly. “They can book you in on Tuesday.”

“But I’m at the Westmorland Gazette on Tuesday”, she said, far from consoled. “We’re on a deadline. I’m busy all this week”. Then she added, “Don’t you have the day off on Tuesday?”

My heart sank faster than a Sunderland supporter’s on the first day of the season; or Sue Lawley’s when Wainwright told her he didn’t much like music, at the start of half an hour of air time she was supposed to fill with his choice of Desert Island Discs.

“There are some nice shops in Lancaster”, Sandy offered brightly. “You could do some Christmas shopping”.

It was supposed to be a positive suggestion, but the very thought filled me with dread. I have form, you see. Once in Newcastle, with a few hours to kill, I tried a spot of seasonal gift hunting, unsupervised, but it turns out I’m terrible at it. I just wondered around John Lewis like an automaton, unable to find the way out. When I finally did, it led straight into Fenwicks and the nightmare started again. It was like an episode of Father Ted, except there wasn’t a party of priests in the lingerie department that I could follow. (I know this because I looked). When eventually I escaped into fresh air outside the Grainger Market, I seriously considered buying everyone sausages.

Tuesday arrives, and The Apple Dealer can’t see me until 11:30, so with that and the drive, and the fruitless Christmas shopping, and wandering around Sainsbury’s like an automaton, I don’t get home until 2:30pm. The sky is an unbroken expanse of blue, and the snow-capped Coniston Fells in the distance look magnificent. But they’re half an hour away—by the time I get there, there’ll only be about an hour of daylight left.

Determined to salvage something from the remains of the day, I wonder about Hampsfell. Hampsfell is a small hill that separates Cartmel and Grange. A tiddler compared to the Coniston Fells, but it punches above its weight with its rare limestone pavements and panoramic views of both the Lakeland fells and Morecambe Bay. Wainwright suggests it might appeal to the semi-retired fellwalker: “It is a hill small and unpretentious yet endowed with an air of freedom and space that will recall happy days on greater heights. It is a place for looking northwest, indulging memories, and dreaming.”

I’d be on the summit in time to watch the sun set. Sunset over the bay, on a beautiful snowy day, from a summit made for dreaming—that has to be something special.

I layer up, pull on my boots, grab gloves, hat, headtorch and microspikes and set off. The magic starts almost immediately I step outside the front door. The snow is little more than a dusting of icing sugar on the surrounding fields, but it’s enough to turn the landscape into a Christmas card. A robin hops about the hedgerow and the spire of Field Broughton church rises from a hollow across the meadows to complete the scene.

I wander up narrow country lanes and on to a bridleway, then a follow a path across a field to a stand of trees above. Sheep graze on scattered patches of exposed grass, their shaggy fleeces like mounds of driven snow. As I climb higher through Hampsfield allotment, the low orange sun blazes like a fireball through a lattice of branch and twig, a giant bonfire amid the deepening white blanket. Galloways roam the open fell side, their coats a swatch of seasonal colour: black, red, yellow, and cream, matching the silhouettes of the naked trees, the autumn bracken and the winter grass. As I approach the summit, something is happening across the valley…

On top of Hampsfell stands the Hospice, a squat stone tower with an open door and an open fireplace; a gift to travellers from the pastor of Cartmel in 1846, and a testament of thanks to beauty here experienced here daily. As Wainwright astutely observes, “Outside, over the doorway, is an inscription that will be Greek to most visitors.” Translated from the Greek (for Greek it is), the inscription, “rhododactylos eos”, means “the rosy fingered dawn”. Her cousin, the rosy fingered dusk, is at play now.

North-west over Cartmel valley, beyond a brown swathe of winter woodland, the Coniston Fells rise like a frozen tundra, artic blue in the dimming light; but they are transforming before my eyes—awaking, warming as if softly stage-lit in anticipation of an imminent first act—their chiselled contours now reflect a warm pink glow. Behind them, the sky is a wan, ethereal yellow, sparsely streaked with wisps of mauve.

As I turn south and climb between snow softened escarpments to the limestone-paved plateau, black skeletal branches of stunted, windblown hawthorn trees bow in unison toward the Hospice, a dark tower before a horizon of deepening orange.

In the short distance to the tower, the colours shift and blend again as the sky overhead darkens. To the east, over the Kent Estuary, Arnside Knott is little more than a soft Prussian blue suggestion below a strip of sky, pink as oyster shells. The reflective snow bestows a strange ambience. The stone fence posts that guard the Hospice are black shadowy sentinels, chained together to repel the shaggy cows that roam like ancient bison.

This is a landscape so familiar yet altogether new. It’s as if I’ve crossed into a parallel universe—somewhere I may have glimpsed on the cover of a 1970’s prog rock album. Folk tales of a faery kingdom that the unwary traveler may pass into and return a haunted, altered man seem suddenly less fantastical.

Yet, the real drama is happening to the west, where the orange sky intensifies over Bardsea and Barrow. In the sea beyond the dark peninsula, I can just make out tall thin poles, little more than fine grey pencil lines. Using the zoom on my camera, I discern the blades of the wind turbines. This is the offshore wind farm, Britain’s largest. Or at least it is in the parallel world I’m used to. Here, with imagination uninhibited, they are an encroaching army of Martian fighting machines from H G Wells’ War of the Worlds. And they must have opened fire, because all of a sudden the sky and water alike burst into flame.

In between, a low bank of cloud, the thick smoke of the conflagration, engulfs the peninsula, forming a soft grey barrier between the incandescent sky and its mirror image in the waters. All that’s left of the land beyond the Leven estuary is a thin black strip of shoreline. And before my eyes, a new civilisation emerges. The formless cloud bank resolves into an acropolis of colossal towers, slate grey but licked with yellow, still fresh from the furnace that rages above and below.

Beyond the Hospice, the snow covered limestone gives way to snow covered scrub. I climb a stile over a dry stone wall and follow a white path lined with a Mexican wave of wind-bowed hawthorns. The south eastern horizon is salmon pink, below quilted cloud the colour of Herdwick shearlings. Copper rivulets snake across dark sands to reach the silver sea beyond.

Slowly, the blaze in the west softens to amber afterglow and becomes a slender strip of pale gold beneath a charcoal sky. The cloud city levitates and starts to disperse, and beneath are pin pricks of light, like tiny candles, from the miniature human conurbations of Barrow, Bardsea, Dalton and Ulverston.

I’ve been reading the memoirs of Flookburgh fisherman, Jack Manning. He knew these patterns of lights like the back of his hand. They were crucial landmarks when out on the sands, on horse or tractor, scooping shrimp or cockle in the dead of night before the tide’s return.

As I watch the ever changing light show from the subsidiary summit of Fell End, I’m aware of little puffs of steam rising in the dark. I hear a soft footfall and a snort, and I realise I’m not alone. As my eyes adjust, I discern the shapes of sheep grazing quietly on the slope below.

The snow is so reflective I leave my head torch in my rucksack. I return to the wall and find the stile has vanished. I’m momentarily perplexed, but when I retrieve the torch and switch it on, the stile materialises right in front of me. It must be darker than I thought.

And it’s growing darker by the minute; the torch beam accentuates the gloom, but I can no longer see without it. I pass the Hospice and begin the descent back to Hampsfield Allotment.

Suddenly, I notice something strange in the darkness up ahead. Two little points of light hover above the path. I can’t think what they could be. I’m not given to superstition but with my imagination so stoked it would be easy to start believing in the supernatural. They look like disembodied eyes and they hold their position at around head height. Try as I might to find a terrestrial explanation, none presents itself.

When I’m no more than a few yards away, I hear the breathing and see the vapour from the invisible nostrils. Slowly her outline materialises. A big Galloway cow, black as the night. She’s staring intently at me, probably wondering what the approaching ball of light might be. When she realises it’s only me, she loses interest, but doesn’t relinquish the path. I give her wide berth, more from respect than fear. Somehow, I sense no tension here. Nothing threatens the peace of this enchanted landscape on this frozen winter evening.

Just over half an hour later, I turn they key in my front door. I’m back where I started three hours earlier, yet in some intangible sense, I’m still half a world away.

Art, Fell Walk, General, History

Mountains and Margarine

January 20, 2019 George Kitching 20 Comments

Bonington, Beatrix, Kurt & the Borrowdale Caveman

Castle Crag in autumnal splendour and the museums of Keswick and Ambleside spark a train of thought about four Lakeland luminaries and the landscape that inspired them.

Man vs Mountain

The curator pops her head around the corner to say she’ll be shutting up the till in a couple of minutes—if there’s anything I want from the shop. She glances at the screen and adds, “you’ve got time to see it through to the end”. Then she smiles, and I wonder if she can tell that I’m fighting back tears.

I dare say I’m not the first. I’m in Keswick museum, at the Man vs Mountain exhibition, watching a short film about Chris Bonington. Chris is recalling how he reached the summit of Everest for the first time at the age of fifty. The last difficult part of the climb is the Hillary Step. As Chris started up it, he began to doubt whether he still had the upper body strength required. All of a sudden, he sensed his old climbing buddy, Doug Scott beside him, offering words of encouragement and spurring him on. Whilst he was fully aware this was something his mind was constructing to help him dig deep, it worked: he found the resolve and his muscles didn’t fail.

From the top of the Hillary Step onwards is relatively easy (apparently), but as Chris trod the snow in the footsteps of the others, his mind filled with memories of the friends he’d lost. Men like Ian Clough, with whom he conquered the north face of the Eiger. Their faces fill the screen, and Chris wells up as he remembers collapsing in tears on the roof of the world. You’d have to be harder than the Eiger and colder than the Hillary Step not to be moved.

Ten minutes ago, he had me crying with laughter as he read out a letter from his former employer, refusing him leave to embark on a mountaineering expedition. Chris worked for a foodstuffs manufacturer and the letter has all the hallmarks of CJ giving Reggie Perrin a dressing down. His employer concluded that this request was hardly likely to be a one-off, and repeated absences for this sort of thing would almost certainly conflict with the young Bonington‘s career as a business executive. It was time he made a choice between mountains and margarine!

For all his far-flung adventures since choosing summits over Sunshine Desserts, it’s Cumbria that Chris calls home. He has said of the Lake District, “It may not be the most beautiful place in the world, but it is as beautiful as any place in the world”. Of course, it’s Lakeland for a reason, and today, torrential rain has driven me indoors, but yesterday, the District more than lived up to such an accolade.

The Professor of Adventure

It’s autumn, “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”, and twenty-four hours ago in Borrowdale, Keats’s words found their full expression. As I walked through the woods beside the River Derwent and climbed to the top of Castle Crag, the trees were in their majesty, robed in leaves of amber, honey, mustard and flaxen against the purple fell—a last parade of pomp before winter’s winds strip them bare. Swathes of undergrowth were fire brick and barn red. The quarry-cut faces of slate-grey escarpments thrust from the flora like stalagmites, aspiring to kiss the volatile sky—all wisps of smokey mist and darker banks of rain-cloud, punctuated with shafts of soft yellow light. Over Derwent Water, Blencathra’s crenelated ridge was pale sunlit gold.

On the way to the summit, I stopped for coffee with the ghost of another Lakeland legend. A cave above a spoil heap, on the eastern slope of Castle Crag, was home to Millican Dalton. Like Bonington, Millican made a life-changing decision to quit his job as a London insurance clerk and live free, becoming a self-styled Professor of Adventure.

Millican Dalton's Cave Entrance — Millican Dalton’s Cave Entrance

After selling his house, he overwintered in Buckinghamshire in a log cabin, but spent his summers in the Lakes, initially under canvas, but from around 1914, in this old quarry cavern. During WWII, when his Buckinghamshire home was a little too close to the Blitz, he spent the winter here too, obliged to put out his campfire at night at the behest of the blackout wardens.

In his book, Millican Dalton: a Search for Romance and Freedom, M. D. Entwistle reproduces an interview from a January 1941 edition of the Whitehaven News. It helps paint a picture of the cave as it was in Millican’s time—pots and cooking utensils, salvaged from village dumps, packed neatly in their places, and huge icicles hanging from the entrance. Dalton himself cut a dashing figure in his Tyrolean hat and home-made clothes—lightweight, functional but never quite finished. This wildman of the woods was anything but reclusive. On the contrary, he was well-known and well-liked around Keswick and would trade climbing lessons and adventures for Woodbines and copies of the Daily Herald.

Where the path swings away from the River Derwent, it forks. The left-hand prong climbs below spoil to a shallow waterlogged cavern. A little way above is Dalton’s cave, a split-level affair with a larger lower chamber and an upper room which Millican called the attic. Here was where he slept. Yesterday, I sat on a stone shelf beside his bed, which had been given a fresh mattress of bracken—maintained, it seems, by an invisible devotee. It’s easy to imagine Millican’s presence; easier still, to understand the cave’s appeal. Water dripped hypnotically from the entrance, but the interior was dry. I stayed a good while in quiet meditation, soothed by a pervasive sense of calm.

Millican Dalton's Cave — Millican Dalton’s Cave

I have a friend who is something of a modern day Millican. Like Dalton, he’s gregarious and works with people—that’s what makes him tick—but he loves the solitude of wilderness too. He has a house but only retreats within its walls for the worst of the winter. For the rest of the year he camps wild, moving his tent every two days to avoid leaving an imprint. His eyes sparkle as he describes the joy of living so close to the wildlife.

People talk about getting close to nature as an escape, but when we’re out in the landscape, it feels much more as if we’re getting closer to reality—closer to who we really are. Modern living divorces us from the natural order and can fill us with all kinds of unnatural, trivial neuroses. The landscape restores a sense of belonging, but it also triggers a survival instinct: nature does not owe us safe passage; we must keep our wits about us; we will survive or fall by our judgements. The more challenging the terrain, the more intense that feeling. Ultimately, it’s more liberating than intimidating, because nature’s threats bear no malice, they’re just part of a system that, deep down, we fully understand. Bonington and Dalton simply took it to another level.

Both men quit their regular jobs to do what inspired them. By contrast, Kurt Schwitters was forced out of his because of what inspired him. He would eventually find refuge, fresh hope and a new muse in Lakeland, but it took a circuitous route to get here.

Mier Bitte

Schwitters was born in Hanover and studied art at the Dresden Academy. In the chaos surrounding the First World War, he felt conventional modes of artistic expression were no longer relevant:

“In the war, things were in terrible turmoil. What I had learned at the academy was of no use to me and the useful new ideas were still unready…. Everything had broken down and new things had to be made out of the fragments; and this is Merz. It was like a revolution within me, not as it was, but as it should have been.” – The Collages of Kurt Schwitters, Dietrich, Cambridge University Press 1993

Merz was a term coined by Schwitters to describe his technique of building ‘psychological collages’ from fragments of found objects: bus tickets, bits of wood, wire, newspaper cuttings. The pictures attempt to understand the world by assembling something new, witty, poignant or thought-provoking from its broken and discarded pieces. Mier Bitte hangs in Kendal’s Abbot Hall Art Gallery. It takes its name from the words that appear in the top right-hand corner, a corruption of the German for “me please”. Or is it? If you look closely enough, you can almost make out the letters that have been covered up—cut from an advert for Yorkshire Premier Bitter.

Picture With Turning Wheel comprises a set of wheels that only turn clockwise—an allusion to right-wing drift in German politics that gained momentum between the wars. When the Nazis took power, Schwitters was denounced as a degenerate. He was relieved of his contract with Hanover City Council; his works were removed from public galleries and ridiculed. Kurt feared for his safety when the Gestapo summoned him for interview. He fled to Norway. His wife stayed behind to manage their properties and visited regularly at first, but eventually they became estranged.

In 1940, the German army invaded Norway, and Schwitters escaped to Britain where he was interred on the Isle of Man. The camp was home to a number of artists and writers. Schwitters was a popular figure and a mentor to young creatives, but some accounts suggest he worked tirelessly to shut out depression. His internment ended in 1941, and he moved to London, where he would become a major influence on British Pop Artists like Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton, as well as their American forerunners, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.

In 1942, he visited the Lake District and found a volcanic landscape that reminded him of beloved Norway. He moved to Ambleside three years later and set up a studio in an old stone barn near Elterwater. Schwitters was a Merz artist and his studios were his Merzbau: more than just workshops, they were installations, transformed into works of art in their own right, walls, columns, ceilings becoming Merz sculptures. His original Hanover Merzbau was destroyed by Allied bombing, and his second in Norway burnt down. The Elterwater barn was the only survivor.

After his death, Schwitters’ legacy languished, and for a while, he was largely overlooked. The barn fell into disrepair. Eventually the Tate Gallery and Richard Hamilton got involved and airlifted one sculptural relief, spanning an entire interior wall, to a new home in the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle.

In recent years, Schwitters’ reputation has enjoyed a renaissance. In 2011, Lakeland builder, Mike Hodgson, was commissioned to build an exact replica of the Elterwater Merzbau in the forecourt of the Royal Academy—a reminder to the artistic establishment that the arts have flourished beyond the boundary of the M25.

This morning, I visited the Armitt museum in Ambleside to see a small exhibition of Schwitters’ oil paintings. Schwitters never entirely abandoned what he learned at the Academy. He continued to produce figurative work alongside his Merz experiments, if only because these were easier to sell. This small collection comprises richly evocative pictures of Ambleside and the Lakes. Bold and expressive, the paint so thick it’s almost sculptural in its textures, these canvases take you deep into the landscape beyond the walls. This is the work of a man who understood this wild terrain: the rough fell pasture and the craggy pinnacles, the haunting light and the white rendered farm houses, the twisted wind-blown trees and the drama of brooding weather fronts. In the dramatic shadow play of late afternoon, light dimming, leaves blown in spirals by the brutal buffets of a bracing wind, a thin veil of mizzle softening focus, hard lines blur, blending building, tree, shrub, scrub and hill; in these paintings, Ambleside’s iconic Bridge House is organic, tree-like, growing from the foliage behind; the gables of a grand Grasmere residence are siblings to the crags of Silver How; and the shifting patterns of light unite lake, leaves and fell in one ephemeral sweep of green and white.

Ruskin said, “Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural landscape”. A pulmonary edema ended Schwitter’s life at the tender age of sixty, but he died in the shadow of the Lakeland fells: they had become a happy final refuge from the chaos and turmoil he strove to capture through Merz.

In their own ways, Bonington, Dalton and Schwitters have all been champions of Lakeland, but in the adjacent room hangs the work of a woman, who may just have been the greatest champion of them all.

Mrs Heelis

The exhibition comprises a number of scientific drawings and watercolours of fungi. Painstakingly accurate, they have long served as a reference for the correct identification of species, but they are also exquisitely beautiful artworks. The artist was a woman and an amateur mycologist. The daughter of an eminent London lawyer and a socially ambitious mother, she may have seen scientific research as a way out of the rather straight-jacketed existence of a dutiful Victorian daughter—permitted a tightly circumscribed choice of activities until her mother could find a respectable match for her to marry.

Her uncle was a distinguished chemist and arranged a meeting with George Murray, the Keeper of Botany at Kew Gardens. They struck up a friendship, but Murray remained sceptical about the woman’s theories on the nature of lichens. Her uncle attempted to go over Murray’s head by arranging a meeting with the director of Kew, William Thistleton-Dyer. It was not a great success—Thistleton-Dyer was dismissive and patronising.

Undeterred, and with the help of her uncle and George Murray, the woman submitted a paper on “On the Germination of the Spores of Agaricineae” to the Linnean Society. At the time women were prohibited from attending Linnean Society meetings, so her paper was presented in her absence. By all accounts, it was well received, but the society felt it needed more work before they would agree to publish it. The changes were never made, and the paper was lost.

There is some debate as to whether this was a case of a promising young mycologist being stifled by a misogynistic establishment, or whether an amateur with a slightly inflated view of her own work’s importance simply lost heart when confronted with legitimate demands for greater scientific rigour. Perhaps the paper simply got put on the back burner when the woman found a more fruitful path to freedom.

She had enjoyed some success with her designs for greetings cards, featuring animals dressed in human clothing. In 1901, she developed the story of one such character into a book, which publisher, F. Warne, published to widespread success. Lovers of the Lakes must be thankful that the doors of the Linnean Society slid shut at the right time. If Beatrix Potter had forged a successful career as a mycologist, the Lake District might look very different today.

Beatrix used the profits from her first book, The Tale Of Peter Rabbit, to buy Hill Top farm in Near Sawrey. It became the inspiration for several of her later, equally successful stories, but it also kickstarted her interest in farming and conservation.

Much to the dismay of her mother, Potter married a humble Hawkshead solicitor, William Heelis. With William’s help, and motivated by the work of family friend and National Trust founder, Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley (once described as “the most active volcano in Europe”), Beatrix began buying and conserving other Lakeland farms, including the huge but run-down Troutbeck Park. The Heelises’ objective was to protect the land from the property developers who were quickly waking up to its commercial potential.

Beatrix’s coup-de-grace came when the vast Monk Coniston estate was put up for sale. She realised this might be the writing on the wall for the traditional Lakeland fell farms that surrounded Coniston and Hawkshead. She petitioned the National Trust to buy the land and preserve it in the national interest. They lacked the funds to do so, so she made them a deal. If they bought half the estate, she would buy the other half, and she would manage it for them until her death, at which time, she would bequeath the Trust all her land. Without her intervention, the National Park, as we know it today, might not have been possible.

As I drive out of Keswick under Skiddaw’s vaulting peaks, and journey beside the black primordial waters of Thirlmere, Grasmere, Rydal and Windermere, glinting inscrutably in the encroaching darkness, my mind is full of four Lakeland luminaries and the ancient landscape that inspired them. I may never climb Everest or live in a cave in Borrowdale. It’s unlikely I’ll be persecuted by fascists or facilitate the formation of a national park. But for many of us, the months ahead will hold their own challenges. As they loom on the horizon, some might even seem as insurmountable as Everest. To meet them head on may mean stepping far outside our comfort zones; but if I’ve learnt anything in the last two days, it’s don’t be afraid to fail; and always, choose mountains over margarine.

Fell Walk, General, Literature, Natural History

Here’s where the story ends

December 26, 2018 George Kitching 12 Comments

Paw Prints of the Plague Dogs part II

News bulletins, artillery fire and the shadow of Sellafield conspire to recreate the atmosphere of Richard Adams’ 1977 bestseller, Plague Dogs, as I continue to follow Rowf and Snitter’s footsteps through the fells. It’s an adventure that takes me off the beaten track in the Duddon Valley, and out to the coast at Drigg, where the story reaches its dramatic finale.

Seathwaite Tarn, Dow Crag, Caw & Brown Haw

It’s as if Seathwaite mine has been swallowed by the mountain. The entrance to level no. 1 is buried under a bed of spoil. You could easily miss it, your attention seduced by the precipitous face of Dow Crag reflected in the still waters of Seathwaite Tarn, or the sheer slopes of Brim Fell, Swirl How, and Great Carrs plunging to enclose the valley like a steep sided bowl. Even when looking its way, your gaze would likely lift above to the imposing crags of Grey Friar.

But the keen-eyed might notice the remains of two small walls extending from the rubble like the outstretched arms of an avalanche victim. These ruins demarcate the cutting. I climb up and pull away a few loose stones from the top to reveal the hollow behind—the dark of a tunnel entrance. You’d need a JCB to excavate it, but readers of Richard Adams’ The Plague Dogs have a clue to its whereabouts. It sits behind a small plateau of grass, “about the size of a lawn tennis court” on top of a spoil heap; this terrace, at least, is just as Adams described.

The Plague Dogs is the story of Rowf, a big black mongrel, and Snitter, a small fox terrier, who escape a vivisection lab, fictionally located on the east shore of Coniston Water. The dogs have been subjected to harsh experiments. Before his incarceration, Snitter remembers a happy life, tragically cut-short when his loving master was hit by a lorry. When he and Rowf escape, he imagines the outside world will be a familiar place of houses, gardens, dustbins and lampposts, populated by kindly men and women, who will give them a happy home, like the one he used to know. Their initial encounters are discouraging, however, and the pair flee into the Coniston fells, a frighteningly alien wilderness, where they realise that they must learn to live as wild animals. This old copper-mine tunnel is where Rowf and Snitter first take refuge.

In a previous post, Whitecoats, I trace the first leg of their journey, using the maps and illustrations contributed to the book by Alfred Wainwright. Today, I pick up their path again.

Earlier, I met the farmer from Tongue House Farm. He was driving a flock of Herdwicks on to the fellside. I was walking up the narrow lane from Seathwaite village when the sheep charged out of the farm drive. My presence stopped them in their tracks, and in a flash, his sheepdog was beside me, blocking their path and sending them the other way.

“That was lucky,” said the farmer, as he arrived at the rear, “there’s not usually someone there to turn them. It’s always the same. If there are two options, they always go the way you don’t want them to.”

As he took off up the lane on his quad bike, I gazed across at the farm house. It features in the story, and the occupant in the book is a real-life former tenant, Dennis Williamson. After years of struggling to make a go of things, Williamson is now just about comfortable, so it’s with some alarm that he finds one of his ewes lying dead on the path at Levers Hause. This was Rowf’s first kill, but it was a rookie error to leave the carcass where Williamson so easily finds it.

Fortunately for the dogs, they’re not the only occupants of the tunnel. In the dead of night, an elusive presence tries to steal the sheep’s leg that Snitter dragged here. Rowf jumps up aggressively. Snitter is close behind, but when the shadowy creature starts to talk, the dogs are astonished, “for the voice… was speaking, unmistakably, a sort—a very odd sort—of dog language.”

The animal is the tod, a shrewd, sharp-witted fox. He speaks in a broad rural Northumbrian dialect, and scorns at the dogs’ naivety, “By three morns, the pair on yez’ll bowth be deed”. All the same, he’s impressed with Rowf’s ability to kill ewes, so he offers to school them in survival, if they share their kills with him. On top of Dow Crag, the tod teaches the dogs to kill a sheep by driving it over the precipice (this way, its death looks like an accident). He shows them how to raid chicken runs and snatch ducks from the stream. But when Rowf kills a ewe on Tarn Head Moss, five hundred yards from the tunnel entrance, the tod is incensed: “Forst ye kill on th’ fell—reet o’ th’ shepherd’s trod, clartin’ th’ place up wi’ blood like a knacker’s midden. An’ noo ye kill ootside wor aan nyeuk! Thon farmer’s nyen se blind! He’ll be on it, sharp as a linty. Ye’re fee th’ Dark, nee doot, hinny. Yer arse’ll be inside out b’ th’ morn.” (Translation: now you’ve killed outside our own lair. That farmer’s not blind. You’re as good as dead.)

Despondent, Rowf considers giving himself up, but the tod knows better, “Yer nay a derg noo, yer a sheep-killer. The’ll blaa yer arse oot, hinny. Howway let’s be off, or ye’ll bowth be deed an’ dyeun inside haaf an hoor, ne bother.”

The tod leads the way up above the reservoir, below the summits of Dow Crag and Buck Pike, and down to the Walna Scar quarries. From there, they climb over Caw to a cave on the slopes of Brown Haw.

Two paths lead that way from here: one follows Far Gill up to Goat Hawse, over the summit of Dow Crag and along the ridge line. The other tracks the southern shore of Seathwaite Tarn. The animals’ route is somewhere in between. Looking up, I see only crags, sheer and unassailable, but the OS map shows that the incline eases above them, and a strip of gentler terrain runs below the spine. There are no paths here, but if I follow the course of Near Gill to its source above crags, then walk on a bearing to Bleaberry Gill, the stream will take me down to a wall that leads to the quarries. At one point, Adams says the dogs are nine hundred feet above the reservoir road; I count the contours; this looks about right.

Seathwaite Tarn from copper mine — Tarn Head Moss

The path across the squelching bog of Tarn Head Moss is no more than a line of flattened reeds. I leap the beck and cross the sketchy trod that leads up to Goat Hawse. I ford Far Gill and start my pathless ascent beside Near Gill. It climbs steeply beside the crags. Where they finish, the slope relents and the stream curves round into the wetter ground above. Green sphagnum moss carpets the spongy peat. I check the compass and track below the ridge.

The moorland is moist, but firmer than the valley bottom. Hassocks of straw-coloured grass anchor the hummocks of soft moss. Elsewhere are red stalks of bog cotton, its white candyfloss flowers long gone. Harter Fell rises across the valley—a mossy pyramid, upper reaches defended by charcoal crags. Its lower slopes are swathed in russet, striped with yellow and coppiced with evergreen. Underfoot, clumps of rare red sphagnum now compliment the green.

I cross a brow and start to descend. The distant wall is in sight below, with the Walna Scar quarries beyond. Ahead, there is a break in the long rampart of hillside where the slopes of White Pike drop steeply away. The high ground rises again to the summits of Pikes and Caw, but through the gap, I can see silver inlets of the Irish Sea. The sky above is a rolling ocean of cloud – raging white breakers and darker swells.

I stray northward to overlook the reservoir road. From here, the tod spots Dennis Williamson, walking purposefully toward the mine, shotgun in hand.

When I reach the Walna Scar quarries, I have a dearth of daylight hours left to me so turn down to Seathwaite. I return at first light, when the grey fluffy clouds above the fell have orange underbellies. Across the valley, the Scafells are flood lit red. Harter Fell wears incandescent robes of gold and green, and in silhouette against the flaming sky, the slate ruins of quarry buildings are dark satanic mills.

A Herdwick ewe eyes me with suspicion. She carries a red smit mark on her back. The tod understands that smit marks are shepherds’ marks. He points out to Rowf and Snitter how the colours used here are different from those on the ewes near the copper mine. If Rowf were to kill here, it wouldn’t further antagonise Williamson.

Under White Pike, the path traverses the soggy sump of Yaud Mire, and I leave it to scramble between the crags to the summit of Pikes. Caw lies across another boggy depression; a trig point stands on a slender rocky plinth to crown its highest point.

The descent to Long Mire Beck is steep and slippery. Ahead, on the slopes of Brown Haw, I spy the cave that becomes the dogs’ new hideout. Once I reach it, however, I realise it’s an illusion; what I took for an entrance is just shadow cast by the low winter sunlight. I hunt further along, but the cave eludes me. I meet a walker, striding with the easy confidence of someone who knows his way. I ask if he knows of a cave, but the only one he can think of is a quarry tunnel on the north-western face of Caw. He’s curious at my question, so I ask if he’s read The Plague Dogs.

“Rowf and Snitter?” he grins, his face suddenly animated with memories of childhood.

I show him a photo of the Wainwright map that gives the cave’s location. We agree it’s pretty much where we’re standing.

I never do find it, but I climb to the tops of Brown Haw and Fox Haw (which seems appropriate), then return to Seathwaite on a track that the dogs will come to know.

When further sheep are found dead, and word gets out that two dogs have escaped from the Lawson Park laboratory, Dennis Williamson kicks up a fuss. Mr Ephraim, a gentleman’s outfitter, organises a hunt, hoping the publicity might boost trade. Unfortunately, he doesn’t know one end of a shotgun from the other, and his inexperience results in a tragic, fatal accident. Snitter is seen running from the scene. When the story reaches the offices of the London Orator, a notorious tabloid, it’s the opportunity they’ve been looking for. Their owner is keen to discredit the government. There has been some controversy about the public funding for Lawson Park. If the Orator can discredit the lab, they can embarrass the Secretary of State. An unscrupulous but brilliant young reporter, named Digby Driver, is dispatched to Cumbria with a remit to dig dirt on the lab and spin the story of the killer dogs into a national scandal.

As the heat rises in Dunnerdale, the tod leads the dogs over Crinkle Crags and Bowfell, through Langstrath to Wythburn and up on to the Helvellyn range. From here, Sticks Pass offers access to the farmsteads of Glenridding.

Rowf and Snitter are caught raiding a chicken coup. The farmer has a shotgun, but inexplicably, he backs away in fear and encourages the dogs to escape. Unbeknown to them, Digby Driver has published some shocking revelations. As part of top-secret research for the MOD, Lawson Park has been cultivating a strain of bubonic plague. There is no way the dogs could have been infected, but fact never got in the way of a good headline and now, in the public mind, Rowf and Snitter have become the Plague Dogs—public enemy number one; pawns in a political game.

Driver has the Secretary of State in check, and just as intended, awkward questions are asked in the House. To save his skin, the minister employs an age-old politician’s trick—misdirection. If he can be seen to act decisively, perhaps the concerns about funding and who knew what about the plague research will all go away.

Two battalions of paratroopers are dispatched to Cumbria, and the minister means to preside, in person, over the Plague Dogs execution.

Back in Dunnerdale, Snitter watches helplessly as the tod is torn apart by hounds. With the army closing in, he and Rowf make one last brilliant move. By night, they flee over Harter Fell and down into Boot, where they hide out in a wooden crate; exhausted, they fall asleep. When they awake, they’re moving. Unknowingly, they’ve stowed aboard L’ile Ratty, the steam train that runs between Eskdale and Ravenglass. Rowf and Snitter are heading for the coast.

If he knew, Dennis Williamson would undoubtedly be delighted. He bitterly regrets raising the alarm. The dogs were no trouble at all compared with the human circus that has followed. He knows the plague hysteria is nonsense and wholeheartedly hopes the dogs escape. It’s a faint hope, however. They’re spotted in Ravenglass, and the army units are mobilised.

Ravenglass and Drigg

It’s out of season when I cross the footbridge in Ravenglass station. L’ile Ratty isn’t running, but an open carriage, like Rowf and Snitter’s, is parked in the siding below.

All the way here, the car radio was reporting on the furore unfolding in Westminster. Theresa May has just presented her Brexit plan to parliament, and her ministers are queuing up to resign. Pundits are particularly bemused by the departure of Dominic Raab, who helped negotiate it. As the papers spin the story to favour whichever faction best suits their agenda, it dawns on me that this has all the hallmarks of Adams’ novel. Plague Dogs is how he saw the British political landscape in 1977; forty-one years later, it seems little has changed. Vox pops with members of the public reveal attitudes not dissimilar to Dennis Williamson’s—whatever it was we wanted, it wasn’t this.

The rivers Irt, Mite and Esk commingle in the Ravenglass estuary. The tide is out, leaving moored yachts beached and the river channels exposed. This is just how it is when Rowf and Snitter arrive. They escape the village by running across the mudflats and swimming the River Irt to reach the Drigg sand dunes. My route there is a little more circuitous. I follow a country lane from Low Saltcoats to Hall Carlton and cross by the packhorse bridge at Holme Bridge. From here, a path runs over fields to the sleepy coastal village of Drigg. Beside the quaint rural station, a road leads down to the beach.

Before I reach the shore, I pass something altogether more menacing. High security fences topped with rolls of barbed wire protect the Drigg low level nuclear storage facility. A sign warns that armed guards patrol at unpredictable times. Another says that the site is protected under section 12b of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005. This is all very evocative of eighties’ TV drama, Edge of Darkness, about a low-level nuclear storage facility that’s illegally processing weapons-grade plutonium. Swap a nuclear facility for a laboratory researching germ warfare, and we have a scenario not a million miles away from The Plague Dogs.

Behind the Drigg facility is Sellafield, the nuclear reprocessing plant that really was designed to extract plutonium from spent fuel rods. It’s visible through a gap in the sand dunes. Someone has positioned a bench such that you can sit and look at it. This may seem bizarre, but it’s perhaps indicative of the regard in which Sellafield is held around here. It’s rejuvenated the area, providing large numbers of people with well-paid jobs. To others, though, it is a Sword of Damocles, hanging over our heads by the finest of threads.

Drigg Low Level Nuclear Waste Repository

By the time I reach the beach, the nuclear facilities are hidden by the dunes. What’s here instead is a breathtakingly beautiful stretch of coastline, a nature reserve and a site of special scientific interest, a haven for natterjack toads, stonechats, sandpipers, skylarks and all manner of marine life. The tide has turned but a wide stretch of sand is still exposed, riven with delicate channels and intricate rock pools, studded with shells—cockle, razor clam—and patterned with the honeycomb stencilling of lug worm colonies.

I walk the one and half miles to Drigg Point, lost in the lazy, wild wonder of the beach. But as I reach the headland, my reverie is broken by an explosion. Across the estuary, a red flag is flying. The artillery are conducting large calibre gun testing on the Eskmeals range. I look back to Ravenglass and the route Rowf and Snitter took to get here. For them too, armed troops are closing in.

The sun slips behind a bank of cloud, and the sky darkens. Out to sea, slender shafts of golden light pierce the gloom and spotlight the white crests of waves. The horizon is a band of ethereal yellow. All of a sudden, the scene assumes a drama befitting of the book’s dark heart.

And that dark heart is human. It asks us hard questions about ourselves and our relationship with the natural world. Near the end, Snitter has a revelatory vision:

“The world, he now perceived, was in fact a great, flat wheel with a myriad spokes of water, trees and grass, forever turning and turning beneath the sun and moon. At each spoke was an animal—all the animals and birds he had ever known—horses, dogs, chaffinches, mice, hedgehogs, rabbits, cows, sheep, rooks and many more which he did not recognize—a huge striped cat and a monstrous fish spurting water in a fountain to the sky. At the centre, on the axle itself, stood a man, who ceaselessly lashed and lashed the creatures with a whip to make them drive the wheel round. Some shrieked aloud as they bled and struggled, others silently toppled and were trodden down beneath their companions’ stumbling feet. And yet, as he himself could see, the man had misconceived his task, for in fact the wheel turned of itself…”

But the novel is also an allegory about how we treat each other. The Brexit vote was howl of protest at a disengaged elite, governing in their own interest—out of touch with the hardships faced by ordinary people. Average incomes have flat-lined over the past ten years, and we’ve been hurt by savage cut-backs, implemented in the name austerity, to bear the cost of bailing out our banking system. In the run up to the referendum, the finger was pointed at immigration, but the causes of our current situation are multi-faceted and far-reaching. They stretch back to the 1980’s and the deregulation of the money markets that sent the value of the pound skyrocketing and did for British manufacturing. They encompass the takeover of the City of London by large American investment banks, and forty years of ripping up employment law in the hope that leaving everything to the free market will bring prosperity.

And it has. To some. We’re now the sixth richest nation in the world, but 20% of all that wealth lies in the hands of just 680,000 people, while almost twice than number are obliged to use food banks. Can we really lay the blame for all of that at the feet of the ordinary individuals who are now being spat at in the street and told to “go home”? They’ve become the scapegoats, the Plague Dogs, callously used by media moguls to sway public opinion in favour of political initiatives that advance in their own agendas. With the current farce unfolding in Westminster, the guns sounding across the estuary, and the shadow of Sellafield on the sands, the atmosphere of Adams’ novel is perfectly evoked.

I sit down on a dune and gaze out at the encroaching waves. In my mind’s eye, a small fox terrier and a black mongrel stand before them. To stay on land means certain death, but to swim out to sea seems like suicide. An optimist to the last, Snitter wonders whether they could reach the Isle of Man. Rowf doesn’t like the sound of that, but Snitter has heard tell of another place, a better island, the Isle of Dog. It has to be out there somewhere. Perhaps, just perhaps, they could reach it. Despite his suffering, Snitter has always been sustained by hope, and it sustains him now as he leads his friend out into the icy waters.

The book and the film conclude differently. I’ll divulge neither denouement, but they both play out in my head as I sit on the beach and gaze over the Irish Sea—for according to Wainwright’s final map, right here is where the story ends.

High Rigg and the Poet Stonemason of St John’s in the Vale

Sources/Further Reading

Enjoyed this post?

Share this:

Like this:

Raven Crag & the Flooding of Thirlmere

Sources/Further Reading

Enjoyed this post?

Share this:

Like this:

How Castle Rock of Triermain got its name

Further Reading

Enjoyed this post?

Share this:

Like this:

Scafell & Scafell Pike via Lord’s Rake, the West Wall Traverse and Foxes Tarn

Further Reading & Listening

Enjoyed this post?

Share this:

Like this:

St. Sunday Crag, Fairfield, Seat Sandal & Grisedale Tarn

Further Reading

Enjoyed this post?

Share this:

Like this:

Landscape of Liberty: from Auschwitz to Ambleside

Lingmoor Fell

Merz Barn

From Auschwitz to Ambleside

Exhibitions and Further Reading

Enjoyed this post?

Share this:

Like this:

Jack’s Rake and Dungeon Ghyll Force

Further Reading

Enjoyed this post?

Share this:

Like this:

Blencathra via Sharp Edge

Further Reading

Enjoyed this post?

Share this:

Like this:

Red Screes, Mountain Bagging and Memories of War

Links

Mountain Bagging:

Let’s Walk the Lakes

Let’s Talk the Lakes (LTTL)

Hayley Webb Mountain Adventures

Enjoyed this post?

Share this:

Like this:

Glenridding Dodd, Sheffield Pike, Greenside Mine & Operation Orpheus

Further Reading

Enjoyed this post?

Share this:

Like this:

Blencathra via Doddick Fell, Mungrisdale Common, Bannerdale Crags, Bowscale Fell, Souther Fell

Enjoyed this post?

Share this:

Like this:

Humphrey Head

Further reading:

Enjoyed this post?

Share this:

Like this:

Sunset Over Morecambe Bay, In Snow

Enjoyed this post?

Share this:

Like this:

Bonington, Beatrix, Kurt & the Borrowdale Caveman

Man vs Mountain

The Professor of Adventure

Mier Bitte

Mrs Heelis

Enjoyed this post?

Share this:

Like this:

Paw Prints of the Plague Dogs part II

Seathwaite Tarn, Dow Crag, Caw & Brown Haw