Category Archives: Fell Walk

Fell Walk, General, History, Lake District, Legend, Nature

Strange Tales From The Kentmere Riverbank

November 21, 2021 George Kitching 18 Comments

The Good, The Sad, and the Crafty

As I follow the River Kent to its source in the rugged wilderness of Hall Cove, high in the fells that ring Kentmere Head, I discover old tales of tragedy and criminal cunning.

Crag Quarter

Primeval boulders slumber like fossilised dinosaurs, uprooted by ice ages to litter irregular pastures. Here and there, they combine in the neat alignment of dry stone walls, scavenging gateposts from green slate, before reverting back into tumbledown disarray. Higgledy piggledy sheep walks are green with succulent grass, plumped with late summer rain, and hemmed with rowan trees, resplendent with berries—vibrant bunches of scarlet against the ordered symmetry of pinnate leaves. As Kentmere’s Green Quarter gives way to its Crag Quarter, Calfhowe Crag stands like an rough-hewn dome, a lumpen tower of ancient stone toward which everything appears to lead. On another day, the crag might be revealed as a mere foot soldier in the massed ranks of rock that rise to the heady heights of Yoke, but today, low cloud conspires to veil its overlord, shrinking the world and crowning Calfhowe Crag king.

Calfhowe Crag, Cowsty Crag, Ewe Crag, Goat House Scar, Rams Slack—a mountain landscape named for the animal husbandry conducted in its shadow. Yet for one Kentmere farmer’s son and promising poet, the relationship ran deeper. The fate of Charles Williams was foretold by a boulder.

The Poet of Kentmere

At the very hour the boy was born, a large rock dislodged itself from Wallow Crag, in neighbouring Mardale, and rolled down the slope to submerge itself in Haweswater. Those versed in science might explain such happenings as the effects of frost and thaw, but to the old women of Kentmere, it was a portent. An ill omen. The boy was born to drown.

In proud defiance of such superstition, Charles grew into a fine youth, healthy of body and enquiring of mind, spending much of his free time roaming the valley and engaging in scientific experiment—diverting the course of a stream to make a mini-waterworks, constructing a windmill from scavenged stone and timber. But all such pursuits were rapidly abandoned the day he rescued Maria from an marauding bull. Snatching an umbrella from the girl’s hand, Charles opened it in the animal’s face, stopping the bull in its tracks and giving it cause to change course.

Maria had been a childhood friend, but that afternoon, as he walked her home, Charles looked at Maria with fresh eyes—sixteen-year-old eyes—and something within him stirred. The attraction proved mutual and they began spending much time together. The upswell of emotion bubbling inside the lad first found expression through his pen, and he scribbled a succession of promising love poems. Happily, when he eventually plucked up the courage to profess his feelings to her face, Maria bashfully agreed to become his wife, just as soon as she turned twenty-one.

Sadly, it seems that boulders don’t dislodge from Wallow Crag to presage marital bliss. As Maria entered her twenty first year, she was struck down by a strange illness that confounded her doctors. Perpetually at her bedside, eager to see signs of improvement where there were none, Charles was powerless to stop the life draining from her. When she died, all prospect of his own happiness died with her.

His poetry became darker and more profound. Only the beauty of the Kentmere landscape afforded any sort of relief:

“I seem a moment to have lost
The sense of former pain;
As if my peace had ne’er been crost,
Or joy could spring again.”

…but the escape was ever fleeting:

“But ah! ‘it’s there!—the pang is there;
Maria breathes no more!
So fond, so constant, kind, and fair,
Her reign of love is o’er. ”

His brooding moods would birth the blackest notions:

“I feel the cold night’s gathering gloom
Infect my throbbing breast
It tells me that the friendly tomb
Alone can give me rest.”

It was Charles’s custom to return from his ramblings before dark, so when he failed to show one evening at dusk, his parents panicked. Friends and neighbours formed search parties. The stricken youth had been spotted on Harter Fell, earlier in the afternoon, so their efforts extended into Mardale, where their worst fears were confirmed. Charles was found drowned in Haweswater, right at the foot of Wallow Crag.

Reservoir Dogs

For a short while, I handrail the River Kent. In years past, I have waded its estuary on the mudflats of Morecambe Bay; and I have often meandered along its banks in Kendal, before the opulent Georgian splendour of Abbot Hall; but today, I will follow its course up into the rugged bowl of Hall Cove where it springs into life. First, I must leave its bank and follow a footpath across these stone strewn pastures to the old reservoir road.

The reservoir was built in 1846 to provide a steady water supply to the woollen mills, paper mills, gunpowder mills, and flour mills further down the valley. With the coming of the railways and the ready availability of coal, it’s usefulness was quickly superseded. Eventually, the James Cropper paper mill became the sole owner. The mill still maintains the reservoir even though it no longer uses the water.

Beyond the farm at Hartrigg, the metalled road becomes a footpath, and nearer to the reservoir itself, the landscape bears the scars of old industry, the chiselled entrance to a quarry emerging from the mist that hides the majestic heights of Ill Bell. Heaps of spoil surround the old reservoir cottage and the barracks, built to house quarry workers. By 1900, there were eight working quarries in the valley, with only one hostelry in which the quarrymen could slake their thirst. The scenes of rowdy drunkenness outside the Lowbridge Inn became so notorious that Kendal magistrates refused to renew its license, and the valley has been without a pub ever since. Both cottage and barracks are now bunkhouses under the collective management of the Kentmere Residential Centre. They cater for activity groups, but not for stag or hen parties, apparently. The moral quest for temperance persists, it seems.

The reservoir itself nestles at the head of the valley, surrounded by a horseshoe of high fells: Ill Bell, Froswick, Thornthwaite Crag, and Mardale Ill Bell. A wispy veil of cotton cloud hides their summits, leaving only their bracken-clad slopes sweeping upward into nothingness, a realm of ephemeral mystery like an Ancient Greek vision of Olympus. Only the spur of Lingmell End reveals its full extent, a stately pyramid of purple crag and yellow scrub, which casts a long shadowy reflection on the dark, lugubrious waters. The reservoir is filled with the waters of the Kent, whose nascent stream comes crashing down from the wilds of Hall Cove, lurking in the ethereal mists above.

Hall Cove—Source of the Kent

I circle the shore and pick up a sketchy path beside the infall, treading over boggy ground at first, but soon finding firmer footing on scrubby grass, a swathe of yellow-green, brightened occasionally by sparse sprigs of purple heather. As I ascend slowly towards the veil of chiffon cloud, the stream hisses and chatters. Grey boulders frequently break its flow, splitting its course into white cascades, plunging in parallel down rocky steps. Jets of white water collect in limpid pools, green or the iron-red of mineral ores.

I’ve not seen a soul since leaving Kentmere village, and the mist contrives to hide any sense of a wider world. It’s just me and the stream, climbing gently into a tranquil wilderness, now far removed from the signs of human industry. The fizz and swish of the water becomes a walking meditation, at once soothing and stimulating. Ahead, the thinning and whitening of the mist hints at the cloud lifting; slowly; at walking pace; as if with every contour I enter another chapter in the unraveling of a mystery.

Like a harbinger of autumn, a fallen sheaf of dead bracken forms a copper arch over a round boulder, green with moss and flanked with twin cascades—a natural work of art. I sense I’m being watched, and look up to see a cow, the colour of the red bracken, eyeing me with curiosity—unused to seeing humans, aside from the farmer, perhaps.

Beyond an old sheepfold, a craggy outcrop pushes me away from the water. The hiss amplifies into a crashing roar, and I sense a hidden waterfall. I scramble over the top to peer down into a steep-sided bowl, into which the stream pours in a crashing torrent over a sheer wall of granite, rendered vivid green with moss.

Beyond the waterfall, I find myself in the rugged amphitheatre of Hall Cove. Here the Kent splits into five slender feeder streams. One descends from Thornthwaite Crag down a ravine which has gouged a dramatic course between the twin ramparts of Gavel Crag and Bleathwaite Crag. Two more fall from the steep wall of Bleathwaite Crag itself (one of these bears the distinction of being the river’s official source). Two more descend the grassy slope of Lingmell End, whose top is now clear of cloud. I opt to follow the second of these, ascending over rough pathless terrain, whose scrubby appearance belies the severity of the gradient. With aching calves, I reach the source of the stream—a subsidiary source of the Kent itself—and haul myself up to the ridge line. I walk along to the cairn at the end, and look down over the reservoir and the verdant pastures of the valley.

The Mock Tithe Commissioner

For centuries, farmers here, as everywhere, would have paid tithes to the church. Tithes were paid in kind as one tenth of all produce from the land: wheat, eggs, milk, timber and such like. With the dissolution of the monasteries and the enclosure acts, large tracts of land fell into private ownership. The landlords inherited the right to receive tithes, but to many, receiving payments in kind was an inconvenience. The Tithe Commutation Act of 1836 replaced tithes with monetary payments, known as corn-rent. Tithe commissioners were appointed to oversee the process, and they employed gangs of surveyors to carry out the unpopular work of determining who owed what to whom. The presence of tithe surveyors in Kentmere created an opportunity for one cunning and unscrupulous individual.

On the July 9th, 1836, The Kendal Mercury reported that a stranger in a striking moleskin coat had appeared at the inn in Staveley. After drinking his fill of ale and rum, he asked whether payment might be deferred until his return from Kentmere. Witnesses not privy to the exact exchange of words were surprised when the landlord agreed. En route to Kentmere, he made the same request at a Jerry shop. (Jerry shops were informal, and often disreputable, drinking dens, named for Jerry Hawthorn and Corinthian Tom—the original Tom and Jerry—a fictional pair, whose rakish exploits featured in a popular monthly journal). Here however, the reason for the stranger’s easy access to credit was discovered. He announced that he was none other than Mr Watson of Snow Hill, the Tithe Commissioner. He had no change, but would settle his bill after paying his surveyors.

When he chanced upon said surveyors, in a field further up the valley, he told a different story, however, claiming to be a fellow itinerant labourer, fresh from working on the railways. As he was yet to be paid for his travails, he wondered whether the surveyors could lend him a little money; but the men revealed they too were awaiting payment and were subsisting on the credit of Jonathan, a yeoman who was giving them bed and board.

Next, the man in the moleskin coat turned up at Jonathan’s house, once more introducing himself as Mr Watson, come to pay his surveyors, but unable to find anyone in the valley who could give him change for a note. Jonathan was said to be as “cunning as a Yankee”, but so frustrated was he at the inability of his lodgers to pay their bills, he fell over himself to lend the Tithe Commissioner half a crown.

That evening, when the surveyors returned, Jonathan demanded that they settle their account, declaring that he knew full well they had been paid, having met Mr Watson in person.

“Pooh!” said the Surveyer, “that wasn’t Mr. Watson but a poor broken-down fellow, begging for relief on his road.”

At this, “fresh light dawned upon Jonathan’s mind—the conviction went through his heart like a pistol bullet—he had been done.”

Arming himself with “a strong sapling of about two yards in length” and recruiting the assistance of his neighbour, Gilpin. He set off on the trail of the mock commissioner. On hearing that a stranger had been spotted heading over the Nan Bield Pass (that crosses between Lingmell End and Harter Fell, linking Kentmere with Mardale), the pair gave pursuit, arriving at Mardale’s Dun Bull Inn at about midnight.

When the landlord confirmed that a gentleman matching the description was indeed lodging there that night, Jonathan demanded, “then let us in; we want him; he is a rogue, a housebreaker, and a robber”

Once inside, it dawned on Jonathan that he had no warrant or power to take the imposter in to custody, but spying his moleskin jacket on a chair in front of the fire, he resolved to take the coat instead.

After fortifying themselves with gin and ale, the vigilantes arrived home at about 3 o’clock. To Jonathan’s surprise, he was roused the next morning by a constable at his door, accompanied by the mock commissioner. At this, the yeoman flew into a rage and insisted the constable apprehend the imposter, but it was not the imposter who was facing arrest. Indeed, the pretended Mr Watson remained “cool as a cucumber”:

“I borrowed half a crown of you, I admit—you leant it freely, and I will return it to you in time—then where is the reason, Sir, that you should come in the night and steal my clothes?”

To avoid custody and charges, Jonathan obeyed the constable’s orders and returned the coat, with the borrowed half crown still in its pocket. Left to brood over its loss, the hard fact that his lodgers’ bills remained outstanding, his own wasted nocturnal journey, and the realisation that he was now the laughing stock of his neighbours, Jonathan calculated the whole affair had cost him exactly six-and-eightpence—at the time, the going rate for an attorney.

Sources/Further Reading

For more on the history of the reservoir and the story of the quarrymen, magistrates, and the Lowbridge Inn, see A Brief History of Kentmere by Iain Johnston on the Kentmere.org website

https://kentmere.org/wp-content/uploads/A-brief-history-of-Kentmere.pdf

The story of Charles Williams, The Poet of Kentmere, comes from Wilson Armistead’s 1891 book, Tales and Legends of the English Lakes, London: Simpkin, Marshall and Co; Glasgow: Thomas D Morison; (reissued by Forgotten Books).

The story of the Mock Tithe Commissioner was reported in the Kendal Mercury on July 9th, 1836.

Fell Walk, General, History, Lake District, Literature, Natural History, Scramble

In the Footsteps of Wainwright – Striding Edge to Catstycam

September 26, 2021 George Kitching 23 Comments

“For Those Who Tread Where I Have Trod”

In 1930, Alfred Wainwright crossed Striding Edge for the first time. It was shrouded in mist and doused in rain. For all its terrors, it sparked a passion that led AW to pen his celebrated Pictorial Guides, documenting 214 Lake District fells. This year, I walked the same ridge en route to Catstycam to bag my final “Wainwright”. As I recount my precarious negotiation along craggy crests and plunging precipices, I consider what it was about an antisocial pen-pusher from Blackburn that made him such an inspiration.

An Ex-Fellwanderer Remembers

“Before reaching the gap in the wall we were enveloped in a clammy mist and the rain started…We went on, heads down against the driving rain, until, quite suddenly, a window opened in the mist ahead, disclosing a black tower of rock streaming with water, an evil and threatening monster that stopped us in our tracks. Then the mist closed in again and the apparition vanished. We were scared: there were unseen terrors ahead. Yet the path was still distinct; generations of walkers must have come this way and survived, and if we turned back now we would get as wet as we would by continuing forward. We ventured further tentatively and soon found ourselves climbing the rocks of the tower to reach a platform of naked rock that vanished into the mist as a narrow ridge with appalling precipices on both sides. There was no doubt about it: we were on Striding Edge.”

Thus writes Alfred Wainwright in Ex-Fellwanderer, recalling his second full day on the Lakeland Fells. He was 23 and having saved £5 from his spending money, he recruited the company of his cousin, Eric and embarked on the first holiday he had ever had. The pair had arrived in Windermere two days earlier and climbed Orrest Head, where the sight of “mountain ranges, one after the other” proved a startling revelation for a young man who knew little of the world beyond the “tall chimneys and crowded tenements” of industrial Blackburn. Well it did for Alfred, Eric fell asleep in the grass. There would be no sleeping the following day, however. Alfred, or AW as he preferred, was on a mission and dragged his cousin up High Street because he had read about the Roman Road that once ran over it.

High Street was my first mountain too and for the same reason: I hadn’t yet heard of Wainwright but I had heard about the Roman Road, and the sight of High Street rearing above Haweswater in all its wild, rugged magnificence made the notion seem so implausible, I just knew I had to go up there. In 1998, I made the climb from Mardale Head, following directions in a Pathfinder guide, which I bought expressly because it contained that very walk.

In 1930, AW and Eric ascended Froswick from the Troutbeck Valley and walked over Thornthwaite Crag to High Street’s summit. Wainwright took comfort from the thought that the Romans had walked that way 2000 years earlier. For one unnerving moment, I thought I was coming face to face with a ghostly legion. My ascent along Riggindale Edge had been breathless not only for the exertion but for the richness of the unfolding panorama. As I reached the top of Long Stile, however, my head entered the clouds literally as well as metaphorically. Not that I cared, it was immensely atmospheric, and I was busy imagining cohorts of legionaries marching beside the summit wall. Then all of a sudden, I realised I could hear them. Slowly their outlines started to emerge from the mist, moving two abreast in strict military two step. Part of me wanted to run, but I was rivetted to the spot transfixed by the image crystallising in front of me… It was somewhat deflating to discover their armour was Gore-Tex and their spears were trekking poles. I swear I have never since seen a party of fellwalkers march with such precision.

I made a round of Mardale Ill Bell and Harter Fell, but AW and Eric followed the line of the old road for quite some way before descending to Howtown and walking along the shore of Ullswater to Pooley Bridge. The very next day they set off for Striding Edge:

“In agonies of apprehension we edged our way along the spine of the ridge, sometimes deviating to a path just below the crest to bypass difficulties. We passed a memorial to someone who had fallen to his death from the ridge which did nothing for our peace of mind. After an age of anxiety we reached the abrupt end of the Edge and descended an awkward crack in the rocks to firmer ground below and beyond, feeling and looking like old men.”

The experience filled Eric with dread, but it sparked a passion in AW that would consume him for the rest of his life. In 1955, he published the first of his Pictorial Guides, The Eastern Fells, in which he described Striding Edge as “the finest ridge there is in Lakeland”.

Helvellyn swiftly followed High Street for me too, chiefly because my Pathfinder Guide drew a parallel between Striding Edge and Long Stile. Just as it had for Wainwright, High Street had sparked a passion in me, and I was hungry for more.

Pipe & Socks: Discovering Wainwright

In the weeks between tackling Long Stile and Striding Edge, my wife, Sandy, and I popped into Kendal Museum to see our friend, Meriel, who worked there. She was talking to an outdoorsy couple in front of a display case containing a walking jacket, boots, a pipe, and a pair of old socks that had belonged to Alfred Wainwright. Meriel explained that Wainwright had been Honorary Curator of the museum between 1945 and 1974, and as her own maiden-name was “Wainwright”, visitors frequently assumed (wrongly) that she was related to him. The couple laughed and stared at the socks with a kind of hushed reverence.

Intrigued, I sought out a second-hand copy of one of Wainwright’s Pictorial Guides and immediately began to understand why fellwalkers held him in such esteem. The book was totally unlike my Pathfinder Guide. It contained no handy advice on parking or refreshments. The walks weren’t graded as easy, medium, or hard. The maps were not official OS versions, but hand-drawn impressions that morphed into sketches; yet every page felt sacred, as if the author was imparting arcane secrets. The book communicated an almost religious devotion, a profound understanding, and a deep, deep love for this remarkable landscape.

The weather was kinder to me on Striding Edge than it had been to AW and Eric; I found it utterly exhilarating. Inspired, I went on to tackle Scafell Pike, the Coniston Fells, Great Gable, Crinkle Crags, the Langdale Pikes and more. And yet, somehow, as the years passed, with work, and moving house, and everything else life throws at you, my newfound passion for the fells dwindled. Eventually, in 2015, Storm Desmond flooded the gym I had joined and forced me to think about an alternative form of exercise. I bought a new pair of walking boots and headed for the hills. I never renewed my gym membership.

I bought all the other Pictorial Guides and immersed myself in them. Yet to start with, I would cherry pick my walks, always favouring the high fells. Two years on, my great friends and neighbours, Paul and Jeanette would persuade me to attempt all 214 hills that AW documents. Some of the smaller ones have the most spectacular views, they said, and your understanding of how everything fits together grows exponentially.

All of which is why I am now heading towards Lanty’s Tarn with a mind full of memories. You see my Pathfinder guide took me over Helvellyn via its Edges, but it missed out Catstycam. When I repeated the walk several years ago, I made the same omission. Today, Catstycam will be my 214^th Wainwright, and I shall reach it by repeating one of my first mountain experiences: Helvellyn via Striding Edge and Swirral Edge.

Nature’s Cathedrals—Striding Edge

As I climb the slopes of Keldas, I’m gifted a glance at Ullswater, shining like a silver plate, the backward scene a moody wash of early morning monochrome, but ahead, the sun breaks through the leafy canopy to render all in summer colours, the tarn a sparkling cut of aquamarine. I remember spotting a red squirrel here, twenty three years ago, the first I had seen since moving to the Lakes.

Today should have been a shared celebration with friends, but unexpected events forced a last-minute reschedule. No-one else was free today, but the weather forecast was perfect, and I was too impatient to wait longer. Yet as vivid memories of first fell walks flood back, part of me is grateful for the solitude to indulge them. Today marks a significant milestone in a journey, not only physical but emotional, through a landscape that has come to possess me entirely, just as it did the man whose footprints I have been following.

I emerge from the trees into Grisedale and follow the path that climbs steadily to the Hole in the Wall—up slopes where pink foxgloves rise like beacons from a rippling sea of green bracken. Two magnificent ridges dominate the forward view: one rising dramatically to enclose Nethermost Cove and attain the summit of Nethermost Pike, and beyond, the airy majesty of Dollywagon’s craggy Tongue. I’m yet to climb either—so while I’ll attain the last of Wainwright’s summits today, there are many more adventures lurking in the pages of his guides.

Grisedale -The path to the Hole in the Wall

From the Hole in the Wall, I’m greeted with the glorious vision of Helvellyn, looking every bit like an immense organic castle, its summit a broad stronghold rising above the languid navy moat of Red Tarn. It is defended on either side by the crenelated walls of its Edges, terminating in conical pyramid of Catstycam; to reach it via two of Lakeland’s most dramatic ridges promises to be the finest of adventures—a precarious negotiation along craggy crests and plunging precipices.

The going is easy at first but gets craggier from Low Spying How. Soon the rocky turret of High Spying How looms. This is Wainwright’s black tower. Partially glimpsed through mist, its true height unknown, it must have been an intimidating prospect for two fledgling fellwalkers. In today’s brilliant light, it is less daunting, yet still imparts a frisson of nervous excitement, as on reaching the top, you are greeted with the sight of Striding Edge tapering to a slender Toblerone before rising in a steep upward sweep to the summit plateau high above.

But where are all the people? Reports of late have suggested Striding Edge is overrun, and I was worried I’d be joining a thronging queue. I’m not entirely alone—I’m one of a handful of walkers, but we’re well spaced out, and no-one else is currently in view. It’s reassuring to know that if you pick your time, even on a Saturday in summer, there are still opportunities to wander lonely as a cloud.

I pass the memorial that did so little for AW and Eric’s peace of mind. It reads:

“In memory of Robert Dixon of Poolings Patterdale who was killed on this place on the 27th day of Nov 1886 when following the Patterdale Fox Hounds.”

On reaching this point in Terry Abraham’s Life of a Mountain film, Stuart Maconie professes, “I’m not sure I’m a fan of memorials on mountains—sends out the wrong message.”

A narrow bypass path runs below the crest on the right, but it feels more adventurous to clamber along the naked rock. Besides, I find three points of contact more reassuring than walking along a narrow ledge where one misstep could send you tumbling.

I recall the exhilaration I felt when I first stepped out on Striding Edge, and the years have done nothing to diminish the feeling. To my left, the slopes drop abruptly into the wild green bowl of Nethermost Cove, and to my right, to the inscrutable blue waters of Red Tarn.

A little further along, I glance back to High Spying How. The ridge looks every bit like the spiky spine of a fossilised dinosaur.

The King & the Pen Pusher

AW grew up in poverty. His father was an alcoholic stonemason who drank what little he earned between long bouts of unemployment. AW adored his mother who made sure the children never went hungry even when it meant going without herself. Despite exceptional academic promise, AW left school at 14 to help put food on the table.

He started as an office boy in the engineer’s department at Blackburn Town Council, but soon transferred to the Treasurer’s office and studied at night school to become an accountant. He embraced work with a passion and attributes the failure of his first marriage to the mismatch between his own ambition to climb the professional ladder and his wife’s reluctance to leave the bottom rung. At Kendal, he rose to become Borough Treasurer, and it’s easy to think of his move to Cumbria as the logical next step in an upward trajectory. But it wasn’t. It was a voluntary step down, which involved a pay cut. Reaching the next rung was no longer his motivation. He moved here to be closer to the hills, and although he remained diligent about his work, his heart now belonged to the mountains:

“Down below I was a pen pusher. Up here I was a king; a king amongst friends.”

The fells were to give the spiritual nourishment that organised religion had failed to provide:

“At Blackburn I had attended chapel. Now I worshipped in nature’s cathedrals”.

For me too, these hills have become hallowed ground.

Helvellyn

Striding Edge ends in an abrupt drop—a scramble down a craggy chimney. As bad steps go, however, it isn’t Lakeland’s worst—hand and footholds abound, and with due care and attention, it is tackled with relative ease.

What remains is the stiff climb to the summit plateau. On the approach, it looks daunting, but it’s an illusion that serves to test your resolve. Close up, the gradient is less severe and a plethora of options reveal themselves. It is worth pausing on the little rocky platforms to gaze back at Striding Edge, which now looks razor sharp. The aspect is best seen from the top, where a smug smile of self-congratulation is permitted.

The author in front of Red Tarn and Striding Edge

A memorial to Charles Gough, who died here in 1805, is a poignant reminder of the dangers. Gough’s death made him, or more particularly his dog, something of a celebrity, but to learn more of their story, you’ll either have to climb Striding Edge or read my first ever blog:The Stuff of Legend— http://www.lakelandwalkingtales.co.uk/grisedale-tarn-helvellyn/

Looking west from the summit, I recall AW’s remark about “mountain ranges, one after the other”, but today, it’s the north-eastern aspect, over Red Tarn to Catstycam, that sets my pulse racing.

Swirral Edge & Catstycam

A large cairn marks the start of Swirral Edge. People talk of Swirral Edge as the less difficult of the two, but the initial scramble down bouldery rocks is the rival of anything on Striding Edge. The going gets easier after that and all too soon, I’m climbing the slope of Catstycam.

Red Tarn from the scramble on to Swirral Edge

At the summit, I delve into a rucksack for a prop that I have painstakingly placed between sheets of stiff cardboard to protect it. In our age of social media, it’s customary on completing the Wainwrights to take a summit selfie with a sign saying “214”. Sandy is an artist, so I asked her if she could draw me a doodle of a pipe—well I thought it more iconic than the socks. She did much better than that and produced a larger-than-life cardboard cut-out beautifully painted to look like a 3D pipe, replete with a puff of smoke bearing the magic number.

The trouble is there’s no-one else here and my arm is barely long enough to to take a selfie that fits in me, the pipe, and Ullswater curving away in the distance. After several squinting attempts, I just about manage it. Shortly afterwards, a girl arrives and grins as she obliges by snapping me with a wider sweep as the backdrop. The views are majestic, and I sit long in quiet contemplation.

In places, Ex-Fellwanderer descends into the rant of an old man at odds with the modern world. Yet the digs are not directionless. His most extreme suggestion—that convicts be used in vivisection experiments—is not just Daily Mail style vitriol but part of a passionate plea against performing such atrocities on animals. AW loved animals and poured the royalties from his books into building an animal sanctuary—a selfless act in a decade that celebrated selfishness.

Even before the 1980’s, the quest for ruthless efficiency was driving out values AW held dear:

“I retired from the office early in 1967, and was glad to go. I had enjoyed the work immensely but methods of accounting were changing…Computers and calculating machines and other alleged labour saving devices, which I could not understand, were coming in and pushing out the craftsmen”.

A master craftsman is exactly what Wainwright was: a man whose ledgers were almost works of art, and who would go on to pen his stunning Pictorial Guides in the same immaculate copperplate handwriting. It is wrong to think of these are mere guidebooks. Guidebooks are functional things, carefully targeted at specific segments of the market. Wainwright’s books are works of spiritual reverence. His devotion to nature was a form of worship he knew could cure many modern ailments. He describes the fells as “the complete antidote to urban depression”.

A party of energetic young people arrives on the summit. One lad is curious about the pipe. He’s heard of Wainwright and comes to sit beside me, eager to know more. I fish out my copy of the Eastern Fells and watch as he turns the pages, transfixed. When they leave, he turns back to me and says, “I’m going to get that book. I’m going to get them all”, and I feel as if I have passed on a little piece of magic.

Eventually, I leave too, and make my way down the lonely north-west ridge to the old Keppel Cove dam. As I follow the steep path, I remember the dedication at the start of Ex-Fellwanderer: “for those who tread where I have trod”; and I feel proud to count among them.

Wonderwall – The hidden world of Crinkle Gill

July 30, 2021 George Kitching 18 Comments

Crinkle Crags via Crinkle Gill

A breathtaking scramble on to Crinkle Crags, through the ravines and rock pools of Crinkle Gill, is nearly blocked by a waterfall known as “The Wall”.

The Mists of Time

Trepidation and euphoria are the two faces of that coin we flip each time we step out of our comfort zone. Apprehension and self-doubt weigh heavily, cajoling us to wriggle out of the challenge; and yet rarely do we feel more alive than when we conquer our misgivings. For me, that has a habit of happening on Crinkle Crags.

My forays into the fells began twenty three years ago. These days, when I find myself tutting at ill-equipped fell-walkers, it does me good to remember that that was me back then. Walking like John Wayne for the best part of a week after attempting Scafell Pike on the hottest day of the year taught me that jeans are not a fellwalker’s friend, but it was Crinkle Crags that was to give me my first real wake up call.

I had a decent guidebook, an OS map, and a compass, but I didn’t know how to use the latter properly. If I had, I’d have realised it was little more than a toy, capable of pointing north, but with no facility for taking a bearing, even if I’d known what one was. Fortunately, on this occasion, just knowing which way was north would prove my salvation.

I hadn’t intended to be reckless: my guidebook warned that Crinkle Crags was a walk for a fine day, the path along the ridge being sketchy and hard to follow in mist. As I left Stool End Farm, the sky was a clear expanse of blue, but by the time I reached Red Tarn, clouds were gathering, and by the time I reached Long Top, the summit, they were down. Crinkle Crags is a ridge comprising 5 peaks (the Crinkles) running in a straight line south to north. Long Top is the second. With moderate visibility, they unfurl in front of you and you simply follow the ridge between them. Now, in the clag, I couldn’t see the third, let alone the fourth and fifth. I could make out a path, however, and the security of knowing I was following in the footsteps of others gave me courage enough to continue.

Pretty soon what started as a mild thrum of unease built into a cacophony of anxiety. This was wrong. I was descending. My rudimentary compass was at least capable of showing I was heading west. Carrying on in this direction would deposit me in the wilds of Upper Eskdale, miles from my car, miles from anywhere. I retraced my steps back to the crest and forced my rookie self to forgo the faux security of the trod and venture north into the pathless mist. I can still remember the heady mix of elation and relief when the murk resolved into the Third Crinkle.

Before I reached the fourth, I heard the welcome sound of voices, and out of the gloom appeared a party of about twenty fell-walkers. Relief must have been written large on my face as they welcomed me to their number, urging me to “stick with us. Martin’s very good. He knows what he’s doing.”

Martin was their leader, an officious little man, somewhat pumped up with a sense of his own importance. Not that I was complaining—confidence born of experience was exactly what I wanted, and I was happy to be led.

Or at least, I was until we started descending towards Eskdale again. Having made this mistake once, I was anxious not to repeat it, and I spoke up. Martin dismissed my concerns, and several of his disciples turned to repeat, with pious assurance, that “he knows what he’s doing”. To me, the evidence said otherwise, and for the second time I had to make a difficult wrench in favour of reason over apparent security. Only this time, I wasn’t alone. A Liverpudlian couple walked over and confided that they were thinking the same. Together, we left the party, regained the ridge, and found the two remaining Crinkles. At Three Tarns, lurking beneath a shadowy Bow Fell, we found the path down The Band that led us back to Great Langdale.

That evening, I watched the local news with dread, awaiting a story about a group of fellwalkers missing on Crinkle Crags. Thankfully, no such report emerged. Perhaps Martin knew what he was doing after all. But I had learned a valuable lesson. The next day I bought a proper compass and started learning how to use it.

The next time I was on Long Top, I tackled the Bad Step, a short but near vertical scramble out of a gully blocked by chockstones that I had baulked at on that first occasion. This time, I would learn that patience and persistence pay dividends, yielding handholds not obvious on first inspection.

Over the subsequent years, Crinkle Crags had come to feel like an old friend, still richly endowed with dramatic scenery, but no longer a keeper of secrets to set my pulse a racing. I was wrong.

Answering the Call

When the phone rang, it was Richard, “Jaclyn and I are doing Crinkle Crags via Crinkle Gill on Thursday. We wondered if you’d like to come?”

We’d been planning to meet up, but I’d envisaged something a little less demanding. I was still to fully lose my lockdown legs. Richard has a knack of taking me out of my comfort zone, however, (we did Sharp Edge and Jack’s Rake together), and his enthusiasm is infectious: “It’s like entering another world, you’ll forget you’re in Great Langdale. It’s nothing you can’t handle, mainly walking, some easy scrambling and just a couple of big waterfalls near the end that are a bit tricky”.

It was the “bit tricky” part that provoked the tingle of misgiving, but even so, I heard myself agreeing.

“Good”, said Richard. “Bring microspikes and a helmet”.

Oxendale Beck and Browney Gill

Oxendale Beck is formed where three principal gills that collect the run-off from Crinkle Crags commingle. Buscoe Syke starts as a trickle near Three Tarns at the northern end of the ridge and flows south-east to become Hell Gill, before cascading majestically over Whorneyside Force; Browney Gill tumbles down from the waters of Red Tarn, nestled between Pike O’ Blisco and the southernmost Crinkle. Between them, Crinkle Gill flows east, cutting a deep ravine in the slopes beneath the Third Crinkle. Once we’re out of the trees around the Old Dungeon Ghyll Hotel, we can see it—a purple scar on the pale green face of the fell.

A popular route to Crinkle Crags climbs above Browney Gill to Red Tarn and tackles the ridge south to north. We follow it as far as Oxendale Beck, but turn right, tracking the bank a little way before descending to its bouldery bed. A spell of dry weather has reduced the weight of water, leaving a broad tumble of rocks, worn smooth and round, their grey faces streaked yellow with lichen. Between the boulders, jets of water hiss white and collect in limpid pools of mineral hues: green, turquoise and rust.

Wet stone is slippery as hell and we pause to don microspikes, which grip damp rock as effectively as they do ice. This is where we suffer a setback. As Richard stretches the rubber harness over his left boot, it snaps—an unseen tear from a previous trip finally giving out.

He’s determined to continue, “I’ll just have to keep out of the water”, he says. “It shouldn’t be difficult today, but I’ll probably have to bypass the waterfalls.”

I can see the disappointment in his face. Jaclyn looks relieved.

“You can still do them!” he exclaims to her with a smile. She laughs, then turns to me to explain that she has long had a phobia about water, which she’s desperate to overcome for the sake of their four-year-old daughter. She’s been making tremendous progress, but this will be her biggest test to date. My comfort zone suddenly seems much closer than hers.

We stride on up the beck, clambering over the boulders, Richard hugging the dry ones, Jaclyn resisting the urge to do the same. Shortly before the confluence of Crinkle Gill and Whorneyside Gill, a narrow tree-lined ravine opens on the left, its walls of mottled rock so straight it resembles a railway cutting. Water cascades over littered stones to form a languid pool at its mouth. This is the entrance to Browney Gill. Browney Gill and Crinkle Gill quickly diverge, but in their initial stages, they are separated only by a grassy tongue. Crinkle Gill starts as an open boulder bed, so Browney Gill holds more initial interest. We enter the narrow leafy gorge and scramble gently upstream. Everything is bathed in dappled light, shifting hues of yellow and green. Langdale already seems distant.

Crinkle Gill – The Pool and the Dam

As the ravine begins to widen, we make our exit up the bank of the grassy tongue running down from Gladstone Knott. We cross the thin trickle of Isaac Gill and drop into the bed of Crinkle Gill itself. It’s not long before it too cuts into a ravine. As walls of mossy rock converge, green with bracken and overhung with rowan, our eyes are drawn to the distant Crinkles, looming like majestic pyramids ahead. They are our lofty destination, but we have many hurdles to cross first.

Now the walls become steeper, the tree canopy obscures the wider world, and Crinkle Gill becomes its own realm, pushing Great Langdale and Crinkle Crags out of mind. Richard’s mental map divides the gill into four distinct sections. Each harbours obstacles which the scrambler must overcome. He has names for them all. Overhead, a fallen tree spans the banks like a bridge and heralds our first challenge, The Pool, a deep basin collecting the water that shoots over a barrage of boulders. The scramble looks simple, but the pool has no obvious bypass. Richard explains the way around involves a tricky traverse of the ravine’s nigh vertical right wall. I anticipate a soaking, but as we reach the water’s edge, we find some enterprising soul has manoeuvred two large rocks into the bottom to make a ford. We’ve been spared our first trial.

We venture on over water-rounded rocks. Everywhere, boulders hiss with swishing cascades, and we wade through crystal pools, copper green and iron red. All are but overtures, however, for what lies ahead. The first section ends in a barrier that Richard calls The Dam, a 10ft wall formed around a large chockstone. I stare in wonder. It’s beautiful. It looks like the fantastical head of a giant insect: atop the mossy green armour of its mandibles is perched a giant eye of black granite, while the crashing cataract at its centre resembles a probing white proboscis, plumbing the myrtle green waters below. I’m roused from this flight of fancy by the need to circumvent it, which is accomplished easily enough, in the event, by pulling ourselves up the pitched rocks to its right.

Crinkle Gill – The Chute and the Overhang

The gill bends left to start its second section and narrows to a long course of rapids, which Richard calls The Chute. The rocks on the right provide an obvious climb. The stone is green with moss, but mostly dry. Richard tackles the damper sections with caution but encounters no difficulties. Jaclyn climbs last, apparently unfazed by the crashing torrents to her left.

At the head of The Chute, the wall of the ravine becomes a large slab of overhanging rock with the beck forced into a narrow gap beneath it. Scrambling up the cascade and ducking under the overhang is awkward, but we tackle it stoically, aware that greater tests lie ahead.

Crinkle Gill – The Canyon of Carrion

Now, the ravine deepens, hemmed in by high walls of crag comprising dark slabs of gun-metal grey. Richard calls this section, The Canyon. Surprisingly, there are sheep here, hardy Herdwick mountaineers drawn down by the prospect of water, or shelter, or some tasty flora not to be had on the grassy slopes above. As we enter the mouth, three ewes bolt past us, escaping the confines for a grassy rake that leads to open fell. A little further on, we disturb a raven feasting on dead flesh. As it takes flight, the walls echo with its indignant croaks and the downbeat of big black wings. Then the putrid stench of carrion assaults our nostrils and we find the body of a ewe. She must have fallen from the crag above. Beside her is a smaller carcass—the young lamb that loyally followed her to its death.

As we emerge from the tunnel, sunlight illuminates the rocks, and a small frog hops over white stone crackle-glazed with charcoal lines. As we look up our eyes are greeted with remarkable vista: the Third Crinkle rears above the head of the gill, a colossal white dome, defended by plunging walls. Shadowy gullies hint at lines of weakness, breaches that might afford an upward passage.

Crinkle Gill – The Wall

But the way ahead is barred by the biggest obstacle we will face: a large waterfall, which Richard fittingly calls The Wall. It is a formidable rampart. The watercourse is defined by slabs, worn to the shape of a man rising from a crouch. A sparkling cataract shoots down his torso, crashes into his lap, before running over his knee to drop vertically into the pond beneath. It’s a sight both exhilarating and terrifying. When we’re standing right in front of it, looking up in anxious wonder, Richard points out a grassy rake behind us that leads out of the gorge—an escape should we desire it. But we don’t—it’s time to step out of the comfort zone; everything we have encountered so far feels like a rehearsal. But Richard won’t manage this safely without microspikes. It occurs to us that if I go first, I can throw mine down for him to use. I’d hoped to watch and learn, but strangely, I’m not fazed. I can see the route, and my confidence is bolstered when Richard talks me through it, pointing out a shallow ledge that is the key to the upper section. From there, I’ll have to put a knee in the stream to get over the lip, he tells me.

I walk around the glassy pool to the sheer face of slate grey stone, its damper sections maroon with algae. At its foot, a narrow ledge leads to the cascade. Stepping over onto the boulders, I climb slightly away from the water to a grassy bank which leads, in turn, up to slab of exposed stone. Moving back beside the torrent now affords the footholds I need to reach the lap. Before I know it, I’m standing on the narrow shelf we spied from below. My outstretched hand is level with the parapet. There is another good foothold, but I can’t reach it without something to grip, and I can find nothing but precarious tufts of grass. I spend what feels like an eternity hunting around. Just when I wonder whether I’m stuck, patience and persistence pay off. My hand chances on a smooth spur of stone. It’s all the grip I need to pull myself up high enough to get a knee in the water and a hand on to the rock at the far side. I’m now lying firm but prostrate over water gushing off a steep lip. A final inelegant heave, part shuffle, part wiggle, part crawl gets me over the edge. I stand up in triumph and throw my microspikes down to Richard. Much to Richard’s delight and surprise, Jaclyn opts to come next, tracking my route and my long hunt for handholds. For a horrible moment I think she’s going to slip, but she doesn’t, and she effects a similar wriggle over the edge (perhaps with a tad more elegance). I expect Richard to make it look easy, but even with his experience, the hunt for handholds in the final section is long and tense.

Crinkle Gill – The Fallen Man, Dour End, & the Amphitheatre

Beyond The Wall, a massive, toppled boulder rests like a buttress against the side of the ravine. Richard tries to think of a name for it. Its top resembles the chiselled face of an Eastern Island head; “The Fallen Man”, he declares.

The Fallen Man, Crinkle Gill — The Fallen Man

The head of the gill now opens into a savagely beautiful amphitheatre: a vast natural cathedral of craggy pillars, lofty domes, and cavernous alcoves. I take a moment to stare enrapt, feeling hopelessly small amid this hidden temple of mountain grandeur.

The Amphitheatre, Crinkle Gill — The Amphitheatre

Three gullies diverge like aisles, the leftmost is the nave, and this is the one we follow. It leads us to our last major obstacle—a shadowy waterfall, which Richard has christened Dour End. It’s a challenge, but we are now veterans of The Wall, and we have its measure. I go first again so I can throw back my spikes. Jaclyn shows no hesitation in following. The top section is smooth like a water slide and I see no way up it, so opt for steeper pull over rock and grass to its right. When Richard appears over the parapet, it’s obvious he found a way to follow the water.

Crinkle Crags

We climb through a gully littered with fallen trees and emerge on to open fell. We stand on a grassy knoll and drink in the heady views over Great Langdale and the Langdale Pikes. After hours immersed in world of cascades and canyons, dappled light and dramatic vistas, crystal rock pools and crashing cataracts, it’s a shock to be back on familiar ground.

Our journey replays on fast-forward in my head, and for an instant, I am back on The Wall, groping for an elusive handhold, the water crashing vertically down the sheer face; and now I’m hit with the trepidation I was too focused to feel before. As it subsides, a warm wave of euphoria washes over me. I look at Jaclyn, who’s face is etched in a quiet smile—her phobia well and truly conquered—and I see Richard beaming with pride.

The Third Crinkle is bathed in sunshine, but Long Top is shrouded in low lying cloud, and suddenly, I’m transported back twenty three years, reliving that one small step into the clag and that one giant leap in my outdoor education. Crinkle Crags—ever a mountain for overcoming misgivings.

Skiddaw Stories

June 27, 2021 George Kitching 21 Comments

Skiddaw House, Great Calva, Bakestall, Skiddaw

How Skiddaw spawned the world’s first rock band; why England’s loneliest dwelling sparked a constitutional crisis; the tragic death of a child at a shepherds’ meet; and the night a founder member of the National Trust set Skiddaw’s summit ablaze. I walk over Great Calva and Bakestall to one Lakeland’s highest peaks in search of Skiddaw stories.

Music of the Stones

The Skiddaw Rock Band live at the Victoria Hall, Keswick all sounds a bit Spinal Tap until you notice the byeline says “musical stones” not “musical stoners” and the date is 22nd September 1891. The “rock band” in question was a large lithophone—think xylophone or glockenspiel but with strips of stone rather than wood or metal. It was assembled by Joseph Richardson, a Cumbrian stonemason, using hornfel stones he collected from a quarry on Skiddaw. Hornfels are produced when the extreme heat of volcanic lava bakes the surrounding rock, metamorphosing it into a fine-grained, crystalline form. The name derives from the German meaning horn-stone, a reference to its tough and durable nature, reminiscent of animal horns. When struck with wooden mallets, hornfels produce a musical sound, superior in tone to the slates more commonly used in lithopones.

It took Richardson thirteen years to diligently collect, shape, and assemble his lithophone. It was not the first Lakeland example: in 1785, Peter Crosthwaite, founder of the Crosthwaite museum, a forerunner of Keswick museum, collected a set of “musical stones” from the sand beds of the River Greta. Thirty years later, a Mr Todhunter of Kendal assembled a second set. But Richardson’s was the most impressive, spanning a full eight octaves. The work consumed him and plunged his family into poverty. From 1837, however, the finished Rock Band would start to bring Richardson and his sons significant renown as musicians, as they toured Britain and the Continent. By 1848, the lithophone had been augmented with steel plates and Swiss bells, and one year later, the Richardsons would perform selections from Rossini and Handel for Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace.

Joseph Richardson died in 1855, but the Rock Band’s appeal endured, hence the advert for a concert at the Victoria Hall, which appeared in an 1891 edition of the English Lakes Visitor. The lithophone is now housed at Keswick Museum. In recent years, Brian Dewan and Jamie Barnes, transported it to the shore of Coniston Water to perform a new work, composed by Dewan, for the Coniston Water Festival. The performance was broadcast on the radio and repeated in 2006 in both Leeds and Liverpool. In January of that year, BBC Radio 4 aired a documentary about the stones, titled, “The World’s First Rock Band”, presented by percussionist, Evelyn Glennie.

Now, the door is open for Richardson’s sounds to grace cutting edge electronica, courtesy of Virtual instrument developers, Soniccouture, who have sampled the lithophone to create a sound library for electronic music composers. Their website offers some intriguing demo pieces: the tones are transporting, beautiful and haunting: they evoke wide open spaces, air, light, spiritual exuberance; the lonely majesty of mountain landscapes. As Soniccouture themselves note, they sound ancient, far older than the lithophone itself—but of course, the lithophone was built from little strips of Skiddaw, and Skiddaw is 500 million years old.

Skiddaw – The Treeless Forest

Lonely is perhaps not a word anyone making the steep climb over Jenkin Hill on a weekend would associate with Skiddaw. But there is more than one way up this mountain, and a long trek along its eastern flank, following a section of the Cumbria Way, to tackle it from the north via Bakestall, is one you’re much more likely to have to yourself.

I leave the small Gale Road parking area at 7:30 am (with Lakeland acting as post lockdown magnet, I bagged the last space). I start up the Tourist Route toward the Hawell memorial, a fine Celtic cross, commemorating three members of a shepherding family respected for their Herdwicks which grazed these slopes. The inscription includes a verse by National Trust founder, Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley:

“Great Shepherd of thy Heavenly Flock
These men have left our hill
Their feet were on the living rock
Oh guide and bless them still.”

Shortly before the cross, the Cumbria Way parts company with the beaten track to cross a beck and skirt the toe of Lonscale Fell. It soon rounds the foot and heads along the eastern flank, looking down on Glenderaterra Beck, which cuts a narrow gorge between the Skiddaw massif and Blencathra. The sky is clear, the September sun making good on its promise of an Indian summer, but the seasons are starting to turn: the Green Man’s face is already ruddy with the first blushes of Autumn, russetting large swathes of bracken and turning the heather brown. These treeless slopes are known as Skiddaw Forest. Wainwright describes it as “a place incredibly wild and desolate and bare, its loneliness accentuated by the solitary dwellings of Skiddaw House, yet strongly appealing and, in certain lights, often strangely beautiful”. It is a place of pyramids. Ahead, over the yellowing shoulder of Burnt Horse ridge, Great Calva rises like a shaded pencil impression of Giza’s great tomb. From the foot of the ridge, Lonscale Fell’s pointed eastern peak commands the rear view—a soaring mass of sculpted slate, nearly five times as high as Egypt’s man-made imitation.

A Cenotaph

Skiddaw’s mines and quarries yielded more than slate and musical hornfels. In the years following WW2, Harold Robinson of Threlkeld climbed Blencathra many times. On each occasion, he filled his pockets with pieces of white quartz from the lead mine where he worked. He used the stones to build a large cross on the Saddle as a memorial to his friend, Mr Straughan, who was killed in active service in 1942. Straughan had been the gamekeeper at Skiddaw House, perhaps England’s most secluded dwelling, now visible ahead, among a Spartan stand of trees.

Lonscale Fell East Peak and Burnt Horse Ridge

Skiddaw House – England’s Loneliest Dwelling

Skiddaw House was built in 1829 as a shooting lodge for George Wyndham, Earl of Egremont. The building was divided in two. The gamekeeper lived in one half and the shepherd in the other. It also had rooms for the Earl and his shooting parties. Wyndham’s descendants became the Lords Leconfield. One of these, George Henry Wyndham, the 3rd Baron Leconfield, resumed his military career (after a 19 year break) to fight in WW1. In 1919, he put part of his estate, Scafell Pike, in the custody of the National Trust in commemoration of those who died in the Great War. And so it is that two of Lakeland’s best known mountain memorials have links to this lonely hostel.

So sequestered is Skiddaw House that it caused a constitutional crisis in 1890. On September 6th of that year, the Westmorland Gazette published the following article:

“THE SHEPHERD OF SKIDDAW FOREST

A Constitutional Nut to Crack

The remote township of Skiddaw, in Cumberland, is the scene of a constitutional struggle. In Skiddaw, there is no church, no post office, no police station, and indeed no population save the solitary occupant of the only house of which the population boasts. It is by and on behalf of this individual that the struggle with the state is being carried on. He is the shepherd of what is known as Skiddaw Forest, although the term is used to designate a region that is destitute of anything that may be called a tree. Being neither a pauper, a criminal, nor a lunatic, living in his tenement continuously, and at peace with himself, he claims the right of a British citizen to exercise the franchise. It is here that the difficulty has arisen. There are no overseers of Skiddaw to make out a voters’ list, and, further, there is no place of worship or public building whereon to post it. Overseers of adjoining townships decline to meddle in the matter and the result is deadlock. In ordinary circumstances a refusal to pay taxes would probably elicit from some quarter or another some ingenious solution of the difficulty. But unfortunately the rates appear to be paid by the landlord’s agent to the Cockermouth Union, so that our luckless shepherd makes no direct payment that might be witheld. In the old days had he been possessed of resources, not to say local influence with himself, he might have bribed himself, voted for himself, and unanimously lent himself to sit in Parliament for Skiddaw. But this royal road was long ago closed for repairs, and has never been reopened. Under these circumstances, it is not easy to see what the shepherd of Skiddaw Forest is to do. If he were to get himself appointed as a local census clerk, to count himself next April, then his house, where this operation would be conducted, might perhaps at a stretch be called a populous place within the meaning of the Act. But even then there would be no overseer to post his name upon it, and he would have to remain without the privilege and the dignity of the franchise unless he could be made an overseer as well. It is to be feared that the noble British Constitution has been framed in ignorance of the needs of Skiddaw.”

Demoralization and Neglect – a Tragic Death

In 1863, Skiddaw House made the news for an altogether sadder reason. On August 6^th, the Whitehaven News carried a story about “The shocking death of a boy from intoxicating liquor”. Lord Leconfield’s gamekeeper, Donald Grant, had hosted a shepherds’ meet at which the drink flowed a little too freely. Grant’s 10 year old son, Peter, was cross-examined at the inquest, and told how the shepherds had encouraged him and his friend, Thomas Hodgson, to drink rum and gin. The shepherds denied this, although one did admit to giving Hodgson gin and water when he asked for it. The quantity Thomas imbibed proved fatal, and the examining doctor had “no hesitation in saying that he died from the effects of drinking intoxicating liquors producing congestion on the brain”. The shepherds were spared manslaughter charges because the Coroner was unable to trust any of the evidence—all present (including little Peter) had been drinking, so their recollections were unreliable. The paper reported the Coroner’s concluding remarks: “(he said) it was a sad thing to think that boys of such tender years should be allowed to take drink, and he thought it showed that those who had given the drink to the boys were in a sad state of demoralization… They had killed the deceased through sheer neglect”.

The Hostel

In 1957, the Leconfield estate was broken up and Skiddaw House sold to a local farmer. Shepherd, Pearson Dalton, stayed on to work for the owner and, for twelve years, lived in Skiddaw House alone (except for goats, a cat and five dogs). His residency earned him a rare human cameo in Wainwright’s Pictorial Guide to the Northern Fells.

John Bothamley leased Skiddaw House in 1986. He renovated it, and it was run as a hostel by the YHA until 2002, after which, it fell into disrepair. It was rescued by a registered charity, the Skiddaw House Foundation, and reopened as independent hostel associated with YHA. In a recent episode of the excellent Countrystride podcast, former wardens, Martin Webster and Marie-Pierre Gaudez, talk to host Mark Richards about their many years in residence there, recalling operating by candlelight, even after installing a generator, and clearing snow from the beds before the roof was fixed. So strong was their attachment, Marie-Pierre becomes quite emotional in recalling their eventual, difficult decision to move on.

Watchtowers – Great Calva and Bakestall

Just past Skiddaw House, a wooden footbridge crosses the stripling River Caldew to the heather-clad flank of Great Calva, the purple of its summer pomp already faded to the chocolate brown of approaching winter. Wainwright describes the heather on these lower slopes as “troublesome” and advises that burnt patches give the easiest passages, but with the gamekeepers long-gone, these are no longer to be found. The path soon peters out, and although we’re out of season for ground-nesting birds, my instinct not to disturb drives me to affect a gait straight from Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks, taking long looping strides in order to land on sparse patches of bare earth. It makes for a tiring ascent, and, nearing the top, the reappearance of a path is a cause for celebration.

Looking down the fault line from Great Calva

Wainwright describes Great Calva as “the watchtower of Skiddaw Forest”, and draws attention to its pre-eminent position at the head of a huge geological fault, which creates a trough through Lakeland, running from the foot of the fell, down the Glenderaterra Valley, through St John’s in the Vale, over Dunmail Raise to cradle the waters of Grasmere, Rydal Water and Windermere. Although AW is somewhat sniffy about it, the northern aspect is inspiring too: it looks out over Binsey, the last bastion of Lakeland, to the Solway Firth and to Scotland. What arrests my eye, however, is the western view of Skiddaw itself. The mountain presents a benign face here, trading grassy slopes for the steep scree and craggy drama it displays to the west; but there is one notable exception: the scooped bowl of Dead Crags, delineating the massif’s northern outpost, Bakestall. Here, it is if the ground has been gauged away leaving sheer cliffs of chiselled granite, buttressed with mighty towers of imposing rock and riven with dark plunging gullies. This is where I head, descending Great Calva’s western slope, to the cascading glory of Dash Falls, and from there, on up the stiff pull of Birkett Edge, which skirts the southern rim of the bowl, affording magnificent views of the crags. The top of Bakestall is another fine viewpoint for the flatlands beyond the fells, but today it is proving a little too popular with a swarm of flying ants. I retreat a long the ridge, gently climbing to the summit of Skiddaw itself.

Summit Smoke

Today, Lakeland’s fourth highest top is basking in sunshine, but on a June evening in 1887, this and several surrounding summits were ablaze with beacons. In the last pomp of empire, and somewhat against the wishes of the Queen herself, Britain pulled out all the stops to celebrate Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, vicar of Crosthwaite, passionate conservationist, poet, and eulogiser of Skiddaw shepherds, was also a big fan of bonfires. The jubilee gave him ample excuse to organise a relay of fell-top bonfires and fireworks with Skiddaw at its centre. The Annadale Observer published this eye-witness account:

“As I got on top of Skiddaw, the last vestige of a smoke-wreath cloud curled away from the top of Pillar Mountain, and far and wide the hills of Cumberland and Westmoreland stood, grey purple, against an almost cloudless sky. The Solway burnt like a flood of gold flushed with rose, for an after-glow of great beauty lay upon the waters… Then I saw torch touch the pile, and in an instant the whole mass leapt into a flame and flung out a great flag of fiery vapour, a perfect sheet of rich gold light that followed just behind a cloud of pitchy black smoke. At the same moment I heard the National Anthem pealing round the fire, and learned afterwards that it was heard in the Crosthwaite valley far below, a weird aerial music that made the folk wonder. I ran towards the top. Ere I had got down the incline and up the rise the Low Man had been enkindled. Grisedale Pike had fired three rockets and was ablaze; Swinside stood out like a pillar of flame, and Catbells was gloriously alight. Far up Borrowdale two more beacons glared; one shone above Manisty on Maiden Moor. Blencathra leapt up into golden tongues of fire, and as I gazed what seemed like a flood of molten lava poured down Catbells towards Newlands, and gleamed in streams of liquid gold; a pretty kettle of tar upset there I suspect.”

For the second time in her reign, music born of Skiddaw had honoured Queen Victoria.

Faeries Wear Boots

May 23, 2021 George Kitching 23 Comments

Green Crag, Harter Fell & Hard Knott

A waterfall liberated from Victorian excess; the southern outpost of Wainwright country; two tragic deaths; and a faery Court of Forlorn Hope, lurking in the shadow of the Scafells… Tales of Eskdale from Green Crag, Harter Fell, and Hard Knott.

Slate-grey faces of fissured rock stare solemnly from beneath a swarming canopy of foliage, a tangled green profusion of liverwort, fern, lichen, and moss. Tall trunks of sparse, spindly trees twist upward to meet a narrow crack of sky, a pale canopy above the steep jungled sides of the ravine. The air is sultry with spray from the pearl-white cascades hissing and crashing down dark walls of crag.

When the railway brought Victorian tourists to Ravenglass, Eskdale’s Stanley Ghyll was high on their must-see schedule, but Victorian curiosity was almost its undoing. Back then, Stanley Ghyll was part of the Dalegarth and Ponsonby estate, which served as a nursery to nearby Muncaster Castle. In thrall to exotica, many country estates were busy planting rhododendron, a novel Asian import that was suddenly all the rage. Muncaster was no exception, and in 1857 various species were planted on the nursery estate, including the common invasive ponticum variety, which soon took hold in Stanley Ghyll. It spreads quickly, outcompeting native flora and forming a dense canopy that shuts out the light and suppresses germination of other plant species.

A hundred years later, Stanley Ghyll was overrun, its celebrated falls mostly obscured; its biodiversity threatened, as were its visitors. Hidden hazards lurked. Rhododendron “root jacks” rock, rendering it loose and unstable; and forty years ago, a tragedy occurred. On Friday 27th June 1980, the Millom Gazette reported that “the neighbourhood of the waterfall has been made very dangerous by earth breaking away, being especially dangerous in wet, slippery weather”. At the time, newspapers were still in the habitat of describing women in terms of their husband’s accomplishments, so we learn little of Mrs Abraham from the article, not even her first name, only that she was the wife of Mr Alfred Abraham, a retired Chemist from Ormskirk. He and his wife had been staying at Eskdale Green, when they decided to pay a visit to Stanley Ghyll. Despite her 75 years of age, Mrs Abraham was described as a “very active woman”. The couple were walking near the top of the waterfall when, tragically, she slipped and fell 60 to 80 feet on to the rocks below. Her husband attempted to climb down but was unable to reach her, so he went for help at Dalegarth, over a mile away, returning with Gamekeeper Massicks, some foresters, and Police-Constable Martin, who despite the considerable difficulty afforded by the dangerous ground, managed to get Mrs Abraham’s body out of the ravine. Alas, she was already dead.

Stanley Ghyll is now a Site of Special Scientific Interest on account of its rare ferns. In 2019, the Lake District National Park (the current owners) began an operation to remove nine hectares of rhododendron to let the indigenous woodland regenerate. In doing so, they discovered several loose and hazardous rock faces and several fallen and unsecured trees lying directly above the path—which is why the upper footbridge is now padlocked. Signs warn of the imminent danger of falling rocks, and of the ongoing work to render the site safe.

Even at a safe distance, the liberated cataracts are magnificent. I turn heel at the gate and walk back through woods, the early morning air fresh with the scent of mossy awakenings.

Stepping-stones lead across the River Esk to St Catherine’s church, just outside Boot. They too look slippery and challenging, and I’m glad my journey continues on this bank.

“On the crest of moorland between the Duddon Valley and Eskdale there rises from the heather a series of serrated peaks, not of any great height but together forming a dark and jagged outline against the sky that, seen from certain directions, arrest the eye as do the Black Cuillin of Skye.” The words are Alfred Wainwright’s, describing the coxcomb ridge that reaches its zenith in Green Crag, which he chooses as the southern boundary of “fellwalking country”. They have arrested my eye many times, usually fleetingly while I’ve been driving across the lonely expanse of moorland that is Birker Fell. But parking up, crossing the boggy scrub, and gaining Green Crag from the high ground would feel like cheating, so I’m making the ascent from the valley (as Wainwright says I should).

I handrail the River Esk as far as Low Birker Farm, where I join the old peat road up to Tarn Crag. For Wainwright, the acquaintance with these old peat roads is one of the defining joys of this walk, characteristic as they are of old Eskdale. As I approach the farm, a cacophony of bleating and barking, clipped commands and sharp whistles drifts over the trees from the open fell beyond. I am about to witness another practice, centuries old, and unlike the peat roads, still an essential part of Eskdale life. The shepherds are bringing their flocks of Herdwicks down from the hill. As I round the wood and gain the open slopes, the peat road forks left but the first of the Herdies are charging in from the right. The sight of me stops them in their tracks. They turn tail and scamper off in the opposite direction. I feel guilty: the shepherds and their dogs haven’t put in hard hours seeking, rounding, herding, and driving these sheep down the narrow fell tracks only to have me turn them back. Luckily, the sheep stop a few yards hence, wary of the dogs further up. They watch as I take the left fork. With me safely out of sight, they’ll return.

With height, the whole spectacle unfurls like an oil painting. Beneath the riven slate of naked crags, over outcrops of mossy grass, and through waves of copper bracken, tireless collies coral the dispersed flock into a funnel of white, chocolate, and charcoal fleeces. Herdies are tough in spirit as well as body, and they confound the will of the dogs as far as they can. Over to the left, clear of the main flow, three escapees hide behind a tree. Out of sight but not out of mind, it seems—the sheep dogs know their game; eventually, a border collie bounds from behind a rock, and their cover is blown. A little further up the track, I meet an old shepherd who tells me he’s heading down this way to thwart those intent on using this track as an escape route: it’s a favourite trick apparently. I can tell his knowledge is hard-won.

Near the top of the track, stands the ruins of an old peat hut. Built to house turf cut from the moor, it is slowly crumbling back into the fellside. In 1960, Wainwright lamented, “Time has marched fast in Eskdale: at the foot of the valley is the world’s first atomic power station, and peat is out of fashion. Alas!”. Three years earlier, a fire at the Windscale reprocessing plant had constituted Britain’s worst nuclear incident. That must have been at the forefront of his mind. But cutting peat also came with an environmental cost. Peat bogs are carbon sponges. Scotland’s peat moors trap more carbon than all of the UK’s woodland put together. After centuries of draining our wetlands to make farmland or stripping them for turf, we’re now scrambling to protect them.

Watching the Herdies, you’d be forgiven for thinking time stands still in Eskdale, but it continues to march fast. Sellafield’s Calder Hall Atomic Power Station closed in 2003, and its Windscale reprocessing plant is due to cease operations in 2021. Eventually, they, too, will go the way of the peat huts.

As I reach Low Birker Tarn, my boots start to squelch, but here is a sight to make the spirit soar. For me, hard wooden pews and the smell of musty hymn books have never managed to elicit a religious response; yet put me before the sheer green force of Stanley Ghyll, or the dark turrets and jagged crags that rise from this windswept moor, and tell me that here be water sprites or faery fiefdoms, and I might just believe you. I cross a moat of sodden peat hags and track beneath the irregular battlements of Crook Crag to the primordial tower of Green Crag. It is well-defended, but a little speculation reveals a breach in the crags, which affords an easy scramble to the top.

Here is the southern outpost of Wainwright country—a fine grandstand from which to survey a brooding autumnal wilderness of drab olive, fiery copper, and maroon, stippled with mauve crag and sparse patches of coniferous green. The capricious sky is overcast, wrapping the shadowy Scafells in thin veils of mist. Eastward, the colossal, cupped hand of the Coniston Fells encloses a sliver of silver—the glinting waters of Seathwaite Tarn, its outlet, a thin white trickle spilling over the gnarly knuckled thumb of Grey Friar.

While Victorian sightseers flocked to Stanley Ghyll, the more adventurous set their sights on Scafell Crag and the nascent sport of rock climbing. Its buttresses and gullies are named for pioneers, and a cross carved into the rock at the foot of Lord’s Rake commemorates a 1903 climbing accident—the worst in Britain at the time. Twenty-nine years later, humble Harter Fell, rising like a pyramid from the pine-green of Dunnerdale Forest, was to claim a horror of its own. On July 29^th, 1932, the papers were preoccupied with the violence erupting on the streets of Germany, where the ascendant Nazis were venting their anger at election results which had (as yet) frustrated their grab for power. An accident on a Cumbrian fell merited only a few words; but the Dundee Evening News found space for several more.

“PINNED UNDER A ROCK
Climber’s Ordeal
A young man, Eddie Flintoff, of Hayworth Avenue, Rawtenstall, was seriously injured whilst climbing Harter Fell, a mountain about 2000 feet high at Eskdale, Cumberland.
He arrived on holiday at the Stanley Ghyll Guest House, Eskdale, a few days ago.
He was one of a party of 35 who set out to climb Harter Fell, three miles from the guest house.
The party, which included a number of women, was in charge of the host, Mr M’Lean, and they reached the summit of the mountain without mishap.
In starting the return journey, it is stated, Mr Flintoff decided to descend by the face of the mountain instead of taking the usual gully route.
Suddenly rocks on which he was standing gave way, and he was carried down a number of feet and partly buried under a rock weighing about 25 cwts (1.25 tons).
Crowbars Useless
Mr M’Lean, who has only one arm remained with the party, while Mr H. Eccles, the guest house secretary, hurried to Askdale (sic) to obtain iron crowbars with which to lever the rock and release Flintoff.
Eight men of the party remained to render assistance, but were unable to release Flintoff owing to the weight of the rock.
Mr Eccles telephoned to Whitehaven, 25 miles away, for the ambulance and a doctor. On his return, Flintoff was liberated. He had been under the rock for two hours, but he had not lost consciousness.”

Dr Henderson sedated Flintoff with morphine and chloroform, and stretcher bearers carried him down to Boot, from where he was taken to Whitehaven hospital.

Eddie Flintoff would never learn where the events in Germany were to lead. He died a few days later of his injuries.

Harter Fell is less than half a mile from the foot of Crook Crag, but reaching it is an adventure. The liminal ground is a quagmire, a sea of unstable sphagnum that sucks at my boots. I set my sights on a drystone wall which climbs the fellside—the OS map shows a right-of-way beside it—but the journey there is indirect. I cross a stream and follow a roundabout route, leaping from heathery tuft to heathery tuft (heather being good indicator of drier ground).

The heather stops a few hundred feet short, and what lies beyond is best described as a lake. Thwarted, I attempt to track right, but the ground near the stream is too soft. After sinking nearly knee deep, I retreat toward Crook Crag, bound the stream at my initial crossing, and try the other side. Thankfully, the islands of heather persist here, and it is with some relief that I gain the slope of Harter Fell.

Green Crag and Crook Crag from the quagmire

The right-of-way on the map does not translate into a path on the ground, but the wall is a handy guide. There are crags above, but the map shows a way between where the contours are gently spaced. My rudimentary navigation skills do not let me down, which is just as well as a couple who I passed at the bottom have decided to follow me. Near the summit, we pick up the path coming up from Spothow Gill. This should have been Eddie Flintoff’s way down. It was my intended route too, but from the summit, the view of the Scafells is ever more bewitching and I decide to strike on for Hard Knott.

By the time I reach the cairn at the top of Hard Knott Pass, it’s 4pm and I’m a long way from my car. The enchantment here is palpable, though, and on this overcast afternoon, it is dark in flavour, steeped in primeval drama. As I climb beside Hardknott Gill, damselflies flit on gossamer wings, slender flashes of yellow and black, their enormous eyes, dense clusters of photoreceptors scanning for prey. The summit cairn stands like an altar before a synod of stone deities: Slight Side, Scafell, Scafell Pike, Broad Crag, and Ill Crag huddle ahead like a congress of colossi holding court: their sharp-chiselled profiles are black in the brooding light, and their muscular crags extend like crouched limbs. They form the Roof of England; and in their shadow lies the realm of a faery king.

In 1607, William Camden published Britannia, the first topographical and historical study of Great Britain and Ireland. At Ravenglass, he noted that the locals “talke much of king Eveling, that heere had his Court and roiall palace”. Three centuries later, in an article for The Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, R G Collingwood dug deeper, unearthing mythical connections between Eveling and Arthurian legend, and concluding “Ravenglass is Fairyland”. Stories of King Eveling diverge: was he husband to Morgana La Fay, the sorceress, who was, by turns, Arthur’s ally and his foe? Was Eveling perhaps another name for Affalach, Lord of the Underworld, Lord of The Isle of Apples, otherwise known as Avalon, where even now, Arthur is said to sleep? An anonymous article on the Brighthelm Stane Library website tells a darker tale: Eveling was King of the Court of Forlorn Hope, a capricious tyrant, grown vain and insular by the time King Arthur came knocking.

Eveling’s court was at Ravenglass, but his Rath, or stronghold, was a ring of stones within the old Roman fort of Mediobogdum, just below the summit of Hard Knott. Arthur had a Dream of Albion, and he travelled the land beseeching princes and chieftains to unite with him. Most bent their knees in homage, but not Eveling. He saw nothing but a naïve boy and took affront that such a nobody should fail to show due deference to the great faery king. He demanded Arthur return to the Rath after dark, when Eveling and his court would be holding a moonlit ball. Then, Eveling would teach Arthur the proper manner of a monarch.

Arthur and his army withdrew to the valley bottom where they camped, quite possibly where the village of Boot now lies. But a solitary figure stayed behind on the hill. When darkness fell, and the faery courtiers began their revelry, Merlin conjured a mist that enveloped the mountain. When it cleared, all traces of Eveling and his court were gone. Well, not quite. According to local superstition, travellers, passing the circle of stones on certain nights of the year, may yet spy the faery throng trapped in their eternal dance. Fall in step with them at your peril, however, as to do so is never to return.

Paint It White

April 18, 2021 George Kitching 29 Comments

Barf via the Bishop and Slape Crag

With their hand-drawn maps & poetic prose, Wainwright’s Pictorial Guides feel less like guidebooks and more like the arcane scripts of a sage, handing down the secrets to another realm. His description of the direct route up Barf reads like an epic quest; its way markers; the Clerk, the Bishop, the Solitary Rowan, the Pinnacle; sound like clues in the unravelling of a mystery. On a glorious day between the lockdowns, I set off for Thornthwaite to answer the call.

Arcane Secrets

Twenty three years ago something special caught my eye. I was upstairs in the Carnforth bookshop, browsing the second-hand section for crime-thrillers, or cookbooks, or music biographies, but what I picked up was none of those. It was a small, dog-eared hardback with a torn dust-jacket and yellowing pages that bore the title, “A Pictorial Guide To The Lake District—being an illustrated account of a study and exploration of the mountains in the English Lake District by A Wainwright. Book Four, The Southern Fells”.

I bought it. I’d heard of Wainwright, I’d even seen some of his artefacts in Kendal Museum, and I was vaguely aware he was revered among fellwalkers. But I wasn’t yet a fellwalker. I was a musician, whose short if promising career had failed to find that elusive breakthrough. By 1995 that dream was over. I retrained as a software engineer, and when my wife was offered a dream job with the Lakeland Arts Trust, we left our home in Newcastle for the South Lakes.

It was the beginning of an exciting new chapter. For the first time, we had a little money and modest prospects, but something was missing. Being in a band had never been about courting fame, you see. It was all about the magic that happens when ideas and understanding gel. Not that they did always, some gigs meant travelling for hours to stumble, without conviction, through a short set to three bored punters and a dog. But on the nights when everything came together, the songs took on a life of their own, and we conjured something that transcended its parts. Audiences were complicit, and everyone’s spirits soared. When it was over, we’d lug our gear back into our transit van and drive off to sleep on somebody’s floor—but we were warm in the afterglow. I missed that transcendence, that soaring sensation of liberty and release. Little did I know, I was about to find it again in the most unexpected of places.

It hadn’t taken long for me to lift my eyes to the fells. I remember standing on the shore of Haweswater, looking up at High Street and a friend telling me that a Roman road used to run over the top of it. I knew then that I had to go up there. I’d invested in a map and a modern guide-book (which would get me to the top of High Street), but this Wainwright guide was entirely different. It didn’t contain any photos, or useful details about parking or facilities. Its maps were not borrowed from Harveys or the OS, but hand-drawn in an idiosyncratic style that morphed into illustration, and the text was rendered in the author’s own hand. It felt like arcane knowledge, the sacred scripts of a sage handing down the secrets to another realm.

And the fells looked like another realm; wrapped in mist, or capped in snow, they seemed to belong more to the clouds than the olive patchwork of fields and woods below. Wainwright’s words transported you there. They made each mountain feel like a quest, and my little second-hand copy was replete with handwritten annotations from previous owners who had followed in his footsteps. It was a call I would answer too, and in doing so I would regain what I had lost. On the summits, I would know again that feeling of exhilaration and humility, the affirmation of being a tiny part of something much grander, and I would learn that music is not the only mode of flight.

A Quest

By 2020, many of the mountains in the Southern Fells had become old friends. I now owned all seven Pictorial Guides, but there were still a few fells I hadn’t climbed, (not a box ticker by nature, I had only recently resolved to climb all of the Wainwrights). On the western bank of Bassenthwaite Lake stands a small group of green, mostly wooded, hills which were still virgin territory for me. As Wainwright so enticingly describes, one of these presents a very different face to the others:

“Insignificant in height and of no greater extent than half a mile square, the rugged pyramid of Barf… yet contrives to arrest and retain the attention of travellers along the road at its base. Its outline is striking, its slopes seemingly impossibly steep, the direct ascent from its foot appears to be barred by an uncompromising cliff. There are few fells, large or small, of such hostile and aggressive character”. Wainwright describes the direct ascent from Thornthwaite as “a very stiff scramble, suitable only for people overflowing with animal strength and vigour”. Yet, perhaps more than any other, his depiction conjures an epic adventure—of the kind that flows from the pen of Tolkien or JK Rowling. Its landmarks: the Clerk, the Bishop, the Scree Gully, the Solitary Rowan, the Oak and Rowan growing together below the rock traverse (the key to breaching Slape Crag), and the Pinnacle (a signpost to the upper escarpment); all sound like esoteric clues in the unravelling of a mystery. Here, for sure, is a quest.

End of the Scree Gully — The Scree Gully

And like all true quests, it is not without danger. In recent years, several people have become crag-fast in the vicinity of Slape Crag and been forced to call for help. I like to think of myself as a responsible fellwalker, who, even at the best of times, takes all reasonable steps to avoid calling for assistance; but September 2020 is not the best of times: Britain is in the grip of COVID-19, and while lockdown restrictions have been eased (temporarily), Mountain Rescue are urging people to stay within their capabilities. There is no way I will attempt this with being certain I can do it, or at least, that I can back out safely. Some further research is needed then.

Wainwright suggests that the rock traverse below Slape Crag recalls Jack’s Rake, except that it is short and easy. I’ve climbed Jack’s Rake, and Sharp Edge, and Striding Edge, and Dow Crag’s South Rake; the received wisdom seems to suggest that if I was OK with those, I should be able to cope with Barf. The excellent Lakeland Routes website gives a step-by-step photographic guide, which instils confidence rather than dread. It also provides an alternative route (now included in Clive Hutchby’s third edition of Wainwright’s guide). This gives slightly easier alternatives to both the rock terrace and the “unpleasant” scree gully. Crucially, it affords a way down, avoiding the scree gully, should I baulk at Slape Crag. I have a Plan B then, should I need it.

The Bishop

Suitably reassured and with an excellent forecast of clear skies and strong September sunshine, I set off for Thornthwaite. Before I reach the parking area at Powter How, I pull over , for here is a view of Barf just as AW sketches it— it looks just as impossibly steep and hostile. With the sun minutes away from clearing Skiddaw, the pyramid’s face is yet in shadow, its grey crags mottled with mauve, morphing into russet where summer heather has succumbed to autumn’s touch. But among the sombre tones of first light, something shines—an upstanding pillar of brilliant white. This is the famous Bishop of Barf. Few rocks in the Lake District are subject to a ritual with such a bizarre backstory.

So the tale goes, in 1783, the Bishop of Derry was on his way to Whitehaven to make the crossing to Ireland, when he broke his journey with a night at the Swan hotel in Thornthwaite. During the course of the evening he fell into drinking with the locals and drunkenly bet he could ride his horse all the way to the top of Barf. He made it just under halfway. At about 700ft, the horse fell in the vicinity of the pillar, killing both animal and rider. They were buried together at the foot of the fell near another rock, known as the Clerk. In commemoration, the pillar was whitewashed and named, the Bishop. Whitewashing the Bishop became an annual ritual for the villagers, organised and rewarded by the staff at the hotel. In recent years, since the hotel closed and was converted into flats, the responsibility has been assumed by Mountain Rescue.

I park at Powter How, opposite the old Swan Hotel, and take the path that leads into the woods. Before long, I reach the Clerk, “a poor drooping individual who attracts little attention to himself”. But all good quests begin with an inauspicious sign, and here the Clerk is it. He marks the point where the adventurer must leave the beaten path (which continues up through the verdant woods beside Beckstones Gill), and head out on to the unforgiving slopes of fractured slate.

The unseasonably bright sun is now fully risen, and as I emerge from the tree cover, the light is dazzling. Ahead is an arid desert of shifting scree and sparse scrub, tilted at an alarming angle, atop of which the Bishop gleams like a beacon. Wainwright counsels that the slope is “arduous to ascend, the feet often slipping down two steps for every one step up—from which it should not be supposed that better progress will be made by going up backwards”. Behind the Bishop, forbidding walls of rock rise in ominous warning. I begin the slog. The semblance of a path is simply a line of erosion, and stripped of the cushion of scree, not always the easiest choice. My quads burn as I follow my instincts, and the Bishop is a welcoming figure when he finally stands before me, resplendent in his gleaming garments. From the front, this seven foot pillar is more redolent of a shapeless glove puppet than an elevated dignitary of the church, but from the rear, he cuts a more refined and human figure: a rounded head on top of a slender neck casts an authoritative gaze over ground that drops abruptly to the patchwork of fields, far below.

Behind the Bishop of Barf — Behind the Bishop

In 1783, the Protestant Bishop of Derry was William Augustus Hervey, the Earl of Bristol, known as “the Edifying Bishop”, on account of his predilection for building churches. He won respect for cross denominational initiatives that benefited Catholics as well as Protestants, but he was famed for his flamboyance. King George III described Hervey as “that wicked prelate”, on account of his womanising (his mistresses included society beauty, Madam Ritz, and Emma Hamilton, who was better known for an affair with Lord Nelson). He was also an eccentric, requiring his clergymen to play leapfrog to determine which parishes they served. It might be entirely believable that such a colourful character died here, in such reckless manner, had he not actually died in Italy, twenty years later (expressing the dying wish that his body be shipped back to England in a sherry cask). How or why Hervey became the subject of such a curious local legend is unknown, but it’s a fabulous story, and it would be a shame to let truth stand in the way of it. In the words of John Ford, “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend”.

The Scree Gully

Behind the Bishop, a path curves right through the heather, avoiding the formidable scree gully that rises, seemingly vertically, between the walls of rock above. But the easy route is not Wainwright’s way, and its presence feels like a temptation designed to lure the pilgrim from his calling. A true quest involves a series of trials, and to rise to the challenge, the scree gully must be negotiated. Wainwright warns “its walls of rotten rock cannot be trusted for handholds and fall apart at the touch. The tiles here pull out like drawers”. Tentatively, I cast around for purchase and pull myself up. In actuality, the gully is not as daunting as the sage suggests, and by the time I reach the rocky outcrop that bars the exit, I’m enjoying myself enough to shun a path that escapes left to a heathery slope and tackle the terminal rocks head on. The slates here are stacked, as if by ancient hands, to form a defensive wall, replete with buttressed turrets, but in the absence of incumbents armed with spears, and arrows, and barrels of burning tar, they are easily scrambled.

The Solitary Rowan

There is some respite now for aching limbs. A gentler heathery slope stretches onward, and up ahead stands the next of Wainwright’s mystical way markers, the Solitary Rowan. Wainwright indulged the notion he was blazing a trail through this wild terrain and was slightly deflated to find the trunk inscribed with the initials of those who had gone this way before. In my imagination, the carvings are ancient runes, a riddle whose meaning can only be unlocked by the worthy. I make out the characters G and T, letters with a clear spiritual connotation that I resolve to imbibe as soon as I get home.

The Solitary Rown, Barf — The Solitary Rown

Despite the encroach of autumn, much of the flora here is still in bloom. Bees are abuzz with pollination duties, and the September sun feels more like June. The desert of shifting scree has given way to fertile swathes of yellow gorse, and purple bell heather, while russet hues of dying bracken herald the turning of the season.

Slape Crag

The respite is fleeting however, the scree returns before the towering fortifications of Slape Crag, which loom above. A lower curtain wall threatens to impede access, but with proximity, a line of shadow on the right resolves into a gully. The passage is narrow and steep, but the rock is firm, a natural stone staircase.

At the top, the easier path winds in from a bield on the eastern side, beyond which the fell disappears in a rapid tumble to the road and the diminutive Swan below. Ahead is the towering face of Slape Crag. That the unwary should become crag fast here is perhaps no surprise. The cliff rises in a sheer white wall of smooth slate, blocking onward progress. With the prospect of descending back down the severe scree an apparent invitation to a broken neck and a seemingly unassailable cliff looming above, those with a vested interest in continued living might well conclude discretion the better part of valour and dial for help. But those armed with the arcane knowledge of a sage, know that all is not lost.

Looking down over the bield to the Swan, Barf — Looking down over the bield to the Swan

Wainwright declares, “this obstacle can be safely negotiated at one point only”. In this, he is actually wrong. The scree falls sharply away to left where the lower part of the cliff rises, but ahead, the shattered slate continues upward to meet the foot of the upper wall. Here, a heather terrace tracks left, along the top of the lower wall. Apparently, it ends in a simple scramble. This is Lakeland Routes’ and Hutchby’s alternative way, thought by some to be the easier option.

Wainwright’s way is harder to spot. It passes below the lower wall. “Bear left at its base”, he says, “to a rock traverse above an oak and a rowan together”. I can see a cleft rock at the bottom, but the scree stops there too. Beyond, the slope becomes a stiff drop, obscured by foliage. If there is a traverse, it must start here, but the sunlight is blinding and it’s difficult to make sense of the impression. As I approach, features start to coalesce, and I realise a tree is growing horizontally out of the cliff. Its trunk is robust and gnarly, and its deciduous leaves still deeply green—it’s an oak. Closer still, I make out a smaller, lighter, spindly trunk sprouting from the rock in front of it. Here then is the rowan, but I still can’t see a path. With the blind belief of Harry Potter running at the wall in King’s Cross Station, hoping it will yield access to all platform 9 ¾, I make steadfastly for the spot. When I’m almost upon it, the impenetrable shadow that looked like a dead end resolves into a narrow trod around the base of the cleft boulder. I track above the rowan and the oak, so focused on discovering the way forward that I’m unfazed by how abruptly the ground falls away, at least until I glance back. This must be the section that revived “lurid memories of Jack’s Rake” for Wainwright, but I’m already beyond it, and a path is now obvious. Before I know it, I’m on to the heathery slope beyond.

The Rock Traverse above the oak and rowan, Barf — The Rock Traverse above the oak and rowan

Around the Pinnacle

All that remains is to breach the upper escarpment. This can be tackled directly with a steep climb through the heather, but Wainwright eschews such a prosaic approach in favour of rounding the pinnacle, a semi-detached needle of rock over to the left. The way is obscure, but again, it is a case of seek and ye shall find. A path slowly reveals itself among sporadic blooms of purple heather, yellow gorse, and fragrant wood sage.

Heather slope below the Upper Escarpment, Barf — Heather slope below the Upper Escarpment

Beyond the Pinnacle, a sheep trod, no more than a furrow in the foliage, tacks back along the top of the escarpment, affording breathtaking views over the line of ascent, and a growing sense of triumph at having survived it.

Two false summits, with tantalising views of Bassenthwaite Lake, lead to the cairn that marks the top. Here the unimpeded view over the lake’s tranquil blue waters is a rich delight. Beyond the eastern shore, the muscular mass of Skiddaw rises, a true Lakeland giant, a Goliath to Barf’s humble David. And yet for all its might, it lacks the myth and mystery, the beauty and intrigue, the sense of unravelling adventure that Barf holds in abundance.

Bassenthwaite from the summit of Barf — Bassenthwaite from the summit

A grassy ridge path leads on to Lord’s Seat, and from there, to Broom Fell, Graystones, and Whinlatter. I shall spend the rest of the day exploring those green and wooded slopes, and they will seem a world apart from the route which brought me here. In late afternoon, I’ll reach the bottom of Beckstones Gill and wend through the woods to the Clerk. I shall look out again from the dappled cover of the trees onto the sun-bleached slope of fractured slate; and I shall spy the Bishop presiding over the progress of a solitary walker, starting up the stiff scree—another pilgrim on a quest, armed, no doubt, with a hand-drawn map and the poetic scribblings of a sage.

Secrets of the Screes

December 13, 2020 George Kitching 22 Comments

Illgill Head, Whin Rigg, Miterdale, Burnmoor Tarn

Two ghost stories, an old corpse road, a hidden valley, a homicide, and a tragic vanishing: I walk over Illgill Head and Whin Rigg to discover the secrets of the Screes.

Silhouettes of branch and twig entwine in a spindly tracery, a filigree of black wood to frame a lake of aquamarine. This sleepy copse still skulks in Sca Fell’s shadow, while beyond the trees, bright morning rays cast Wastwater as a dazzling blue gem. Even at this early hour, the far bank is lined with cars and campervans. Since the end of our first lockdown, this loneliest of Cumbrian lakes has drawn crowds, intent on swapping the beaches of the Mediterranean for these rugged and altogether wilder shores; but here at Brackenclose, beyond the car park and the campsite, there is solitude.

The empty shell of the climbing hut stands like a skeleton beneath a canopy of ancient oaks. Temporary wire fence-barriers block access. This was the Fell and Rock Climbing Club’s first hut, architect-designed and purpose-built on this small tract of land at the head of England’s deepest lake. It opened in 1936, a temple of sorts for those whose spiritual nourishment was to be found in scaling the Scafells. Some did not survive their adventures and lie buried close by in the graveyard of St Olaf’s—England’s tiniest church in the lee of its highest mountain. Last year, the hut was badly damaged by fire and now stands in ruins, a sepulchre to past glories. There is something strangely apt in its mournful ambience, however, for this footpath is an old corpse road.

No-one was buried at St Olaf’s before 1901. The churchyard wasn’t consecrated until then. For centuries before, the people of Wasdale had to carry their dead over the foot of Sca Fell, around the shoulder of Burnmoor Tarn, and across Eskdale Moor to St Catherine’s church in Boot. This ancient right of way was their coffin route.

An old stone packhorse bridge leads over the twin becks of Hollow Gill and Groove Gill; its paving and its walls of local stone look organic, weathered and irregular, as if the mountain had taken pity on the processions of coffin bearers and rearranged its scree to smooth their passage. Beyond the bridge, a rear-guard of solitary rowans marks the last of the tree line, their bright red berries in primary contrast to the aquatic blue of Wastwater. The lake’s far shore is hemmed by clay-red fells, terminating in the fractured bell of Buckbarrow. On this side, the grassy slopes of Illgill Head rise yonder, hiding the precipitous face it presents lakeward.

I leave the corpse road at a gate and follow a drystone wall up the fellside, crossing the wall above Straighthead Beck and climbing soggy slopes toward the ridgeline. With height, a heady vista over Wasdale Head unfurls, like some immense primeval Valley of the Kings. Kirk Fell and Lingmell throw down chiselled ridges, like colossal natural pyramids, mossy green and purple in their lower reaches, rising to dark faces of naked slate. They are mere gatekeepers to Great Gable, which towers above, a sharp angular edifice of sculpted granite. Higher still, Sca Fell lurks in shadow, a muscular presence, intimidating, but as yet, ill-defined. Sunlight floods Yewbarrow, illuminating every crack and crevice of its gnarly, fissured forehead above its eastern skirts of scree. Beyond Mosedale’s hollow, Pillar looms like some gargantuan hippo god, stirring from slumber in a devastating show of strength.

At a little shy of 2000 ft, Illgill Head is a modest foot-soldier in the company of such Titans, but between its summit and that of neighbouring Whin Rigg, it drops to Wasdale so abruptly and with such cascading drama that Wainwright declares, “no mountain in Lakeland, not even Great Gable nor Blencathra nor the Langdale Pikes, can show a grander front”. It is as if some ancient elemental god conjured a storm of such force it shattered the bedrock and gouged a ruptured cliff of plunging ravines and jagged arêtes. These are the Wastwater screes, and the path that hugs the cliff edge promises airy exhilaration.

The summit plateau is smooth and grassy with little hint of the imminent drama. Nearing the edge, scooped hollows reveal sudden glimpses of the lake, then the flank falls rapidly away in a succession of sheer drops, perilous scree gullies and sharp ridges. These arêtes bear names like Bell Crag, Bell Rib, and Broken Rib. The skeletal image is apt—it’s as if the smooth flesh of earth and grass has been torn off to reveal the bones of the mountain.

Of the arêtes, Broken Rib on the Whin Rigg side is arguably the finest. Its name evokes the Arizonian desert, but it protrudes like a Transylvanian castle, hewn straight from the rock, a rampart replete with pointed turrets and hefty buttresses, and a long sheer drop to the bracken-clad scree at its foot. A precarious trod picks a way along its slender top, affording a pulse-quickening prospect over Wastwater to the pyramids at his head. The lake is a polished iridescent pane, Egyptian blue like stained glass. It is astoundingly beautiful, but it is a beauty spiced with danger and laced with loss: for nearly forty years ago, Broken Rib harboured a tragic secret.

In July 1983, French engineer, Francis Marre, and his wife, Michelle, received a postcard from their daughter, Veronique. It said, “It is very nice here. I am enjoying myself. I am disappointed I cannot speak more English. Will see you in two weeks’ time”. But a fortnight later, Veronique failed to arrive home in Paris as planned. The 21-year-old agricultural student had disappeared on July 31^st after setting off from Wasdale Youth Hostel for Grasmere. Her distraught mother would tell reporters, “Veronique would not just disappear of her own free will, I am sure of that. She would have let us know if she could, but I think she has been kidnapped or killed or had some sort of accident”.

Det. Chief Inspector Steve Reid organised one of the biggest searches ever seen in Lakeland. Tracker dogs and mountain rescue teams were deployed, but Veronique was nowhere to be found. Then several months later, divers in Wastwater made a gruesome discovery. What at first appeared to be an old roll of carpet, turned out to be a hessian sack containing the body of a woman. She had been strangled, and her body tied, weighted down, and dropped from a dinghy into the deepest part of the lake. The perpetrator had made a glaring oversight, however. He’d forgotten to remove her wedding ring, which was inscribed with her initials, those of her husband, and the date of their wedding, 15-11-63. This was clearly not Veronique. The body was quickly identified as that of Margaret Hogg, reported missing by her husband in 1976.

With Margaret’s story grabbing the headlines, Veronique’s plight was relegated to the inside pages. The search for her continued, of course, but to no avail. Det. Chief Inspector Reid would say later, “it was as if she had vanished of the face of the earth”.

Detectives and mountain rescue team members never quite gave up hope of finding her, though, convinced she must be here somewhere on the surrounding fells. On May 6^th, 1985, they were proved right. A climber, named Mike Parkin, noticed a piece of clothing that had been washed out by rain. It lay in a gully 300ft below the top of Broken Rib (and about 1000ft above the lake). The remains of Veronique’s body were close by, lying where she must have landed after falling from the arête. The mountain had taken her to its bosom, shrouding her in bracken and heather, hiding her from the eyes of the searchers. Over time, her rucksack had eroded, spilling out the garments that eventually betrayed her whereabouts.

Before her life was cut so cruelly short, I hope Veronique got to see this landscape on a day like this. The visibility is extraordinary. It’s hard to express how edifying it is to see so far. To the west, over a verdant patchwork of coastal plain, the Irish Sea is a sweeping wash of blues and mauves. From its ephemeral shimmer rise the shadowy profiles of Snaefell and the mountains of the Isle of Man. Beyond the island’s northern tip, I glimpse the shore of Ireland; I can see the high ground of Wales and the hills of southern Scotland.

I leave the escarpment, climb over Whin Rigg’s summit, and down to where the deep trench of Greathall Gill divides its grassy slopes like an ancient earthwork. Beyond is Irton Fell. A path drops down its eastern flank into woods filled with the scent of bark and berries, resin and moss; at the bottom lies one of Lakeland’s best kept secrets.

An old stone packhorse bridge, dreadlocked with ivy, leads over the River Mite into the secluded little valley that bears its name, Miterdale. A solitary lane wends in from Eskdale and peters out at a parking area. A young family are paddling in the river. We are the only people around. A donkey wanders down to the edge of his paddock to check me out, but quickly loses interest when I fail to produce Polos.

Across another bridge, I find a languid scene of pastoral serenity, the road now a mettled farm track running beside the river. Even Whin Rigg presents a tamer front. Gone are the wild ferocities of the Screes. Here, its white crags are mere outcrops on gentler slopes of heather, turned mustard and burgundy in anticipation of autumn. Trees soften the lower reaches, giving way to rolling grass, cropped close like parkland. I follow the track to Low Park farm and out though its yard to the river. A ford marks a parting of ways. I stick with the west bank, entering wilder terrain, overrun with gorse, thistle, and bracken. Just before the last stand of trees is Bakerstead farm, once maintained by Wyndham School (in Egremont) as an outdoor pursuits centre, but now boarded up in an eerie echo of a legend that pervades here. For Miterdale Head, a short way beyond, is the haunt of the Beckside Boggle.

In the early 1800’s, High Miterdale farm is said to have been home to Joe and Ann Southward, a sober and industrious couple who’d managed to each save a nest egg from their jobs as farm labourer and servant girl. Eventually, they had enough to wed and buy a farm of their own. An ancient packhorse route ran past the gate, but the old Nanny Horns Inn now stood empty and had fallen into disrepair. High Miterdale was a lonely and remote location. They had each other, however, and before long, they were blessed with a son. Hard work soon paid dividends, and Joe was obliged to visit Whitehaven on business. He would be away for a night, leaving Ann to look after the farm and their young child. That evening, an old woman wrapped in shawl stopped at the door to ask how much further it was to Boot. She had walked far and was afraid she would not make her destination before dark. Ann took pity on her and offered her lodging for the night.

The old woman settled by the fire, supped porridge, and nodded off to sleep. Ann started to doze too, but she was abruptly awakened by a loud clank as something heavy and metallic fell to the floor. To her horror, she saw it was a long sharp open-clasp knife, of the kind carried by soldiers. The woman must have been clutching it under her shawl, only the shawl itself had slipped to reveal the face, not of frail elderly woman, but that of a coarse thick-set man.

Over the fire hung a cauldron of molten fat, which Ann had been heating to make tallow candles. In fear for her life and that of her son, she filled a dipper full of the boiling liquid and poured it over the imposter’s head, filling his gaping mouth and choking him to death.

When Joe returned the next day, they buried the man in the grounds of the old inn, together with money and trinkets he had doubtless stolen from other farms. But his wretched spirit would not lie quiet and haunted them with such ferocity that they were forced to abandon the farm, as were all others who subsequently tried to make it their home. It now lies in ruins.

Ruins High Miterdale — Ruins of High Miterdale farm or the Nanny Horns Inn perhaps?

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the River Mite flows out of Burnmoor Tarn, but you’d be wrong. A slither of land hides one from the other. Burnmoor Tarn’s outflow is Whillan Beck, a tributary of the River Esk, while the River Mite collects the run-off from Tongue Moor, which sits below the summit of Illgill Head. I climb the Tongue and follow a path across its shoulder to the slopes above the tarn. This is another place of ghosts.

The corpse road tracks the far shore. One of the countless funeral processions to come this way is said to have borne the body of a young dalesman. On reaching the tarn, the cortège was disrupted: something unseen startled the horse carrying the coffin, causing it to bolt into the mist. Despite the best of efforts, neither horse nor coffin could be found. The news that her dear young son had been denied a Christian burial proved too much for his mother. Her frail heart gave out, and a matter of days later, another procession set out for Eskdale, this time bearing her own coffin. As they reached the place where her son’s horse had bolted, the same thing happened, and her horse took off in fright too. Another search was mounted, and this time, it fared better. A horse and coffin were recovered, but it was not the mother’s, it her son’s. Her own body was never found, never laid to rest, and ever since, there have been reports of a phantom horse, with a long wooden box strapped to his back, galloping across this lonely moor.

I look down at the dark inscrutable waters, then I raise my eyes to the mountain that towers above. How many lives have played out in Sca Fell’s shadow? How many births, marriages and deaths has it witnessed? It has stood for 450 million years, human civilisation for a mere 6,000. How infinitesimal is our presence compared to its own? We barely register on its timescale. Yet somehow, this humbling realisation produces a profound sense of euphoria. It does us good to be stripped of our pretentions, to recognise our own insignificance in the face of a world so much bigger and so much older. We spend lifetimes striving to be remembered when what really matters is that we are here at all.

It’s a rapture familiar to many fellwalkers, and, given her rapport with the landscape, I’m certain Veronique must have felt it too. I like to think so, as it suggests her life, though short, was richly fulfilled.

Sources / Further Reading

If I’ve left you wondering at the story behind the gruesome discovery of Margaret Hogg’s body in Wastwater, I tell it here:

A Walk on the Wild Side

The details of Veronique’s disappearance were gleaned from contemporary newspapers, particularly the Newcastle Journal 25th July 1984, 8th May 1985, and 6th July 1985 editions.

The most famous account of the Beckside Boggle was penned by Alice Rea in her book, The Beckside Boggle and other Lake Country Stories, published by T Fisher Unwin in 1886, but you can find it online here:

https://www.fivenine.co.uk/family_history_notebook/background/miterdale/beckside_boggle.html

The story of the lost coffin near Burnmoor Tarn is well known, but I first read it in my copy of Lakeland Ghosts, by Gerald Findler: Dalesman Books, 1984 (first published 1969).

Fell Walk, Ghost Story, History, Natural History, Nature

Song From The Wood

November 15, 2020 George Kitching 16 Comments

Rusland Horizons Greenwood Trail 3

With the arboreal serenity of High Dam Tarn, the heather-clad open fell, the mountain panoramas, and the spooky story surrounding the woods at Fearing Brow, Rusland Horizons’ Greenwood Trail 3 is a rich and varied walk. As I learn about the Trust’s conservation work in this beautiful valley between Windermere & Coniston, I discover a link to a man I once knew: a charcoal burner who lived in the forest and made yurts; as it transpires, that was only one chapter in a truly remarkable life.

High Dam, Rusland Heights, Fearing Brow, Finsthwaite

In my recent post about Dixon Heights, the sight of semi-feral fell pony in the soft light of a summer evening provoked a flight of fancy about Rhiannon, the Celtic horse goddess, sometimes depicted as an ethereal white mare. About a week after posting that article, my friend, Sarah, showed me a video she’d taken on Dixon Heights of a young foal. Rhiannon was standing over him protectively. Was Rhiannon the mother, I wondered? Yet, when the foal trotted off to greet a black mare, I realised how big and muscular Rhiannon looked in comparison. Then Rhiannon lowered his undercarriage and there could be absolutely no doubt about his masculinity.

Several days later, I discovered the Fell Pony Adventures’ Facebook page. This Equestrian Centre runs the Hades Hill herd of indigenous fell ponies that graze Dixon Heights (Hades rhymes with shades). I posted a picture of Rhiannon, which they loved and helpfully informed me, “George, this is Hades Hill Geronimo – 8 year old Registered Fell pony stallion who’s running with the mares”.

Geronimo! Definitely not Rhiannon, then.

The page made interesting reading. The Equestrian Centre is committed to the preservation of the breed, now classed as vulnerable by the Rare Breeds Survival Trust, but also to the ponies’ heritage as working animals (a tradition stretching back to Roman times). The centre offers wild camping pack pony treks to hidden corners of the Lake District. Indeed, I had just read Joanna Eede’s excellent account of one in the May/June 2020 edition of Lakeland Walker. Intrigued, I clicked through to their web site to read more about the organisation. The herd is now managed by Tom Lloyd, but it was established in 1957 by Tom’s father, Walter. Walter had been inspired by a letter in Horse and Hound Magazine, contradicting a claim that there were no pure bred ponies running wild in the country any longer. The correspondent, Miss Peggy Crosland, had stated that there were indeed still herds of fell ponies on the Lake District Fells. Walter got in touch and ended up buying two Heltondale mares in foal. Hades Hill lies on Shawforth Common in Lancashire, but in the early nineties, Walter moved to Cumbria with his ponies; Tom took over the herd in 1994, which is how Geronimo came to have the run of Dixon Heights.

Lockdown taught me the joy of waking up to what is right on your doorstep. The Dixon Heights post prompted Mandy Lane to get in touch and ask whether I had done much walking in the Rusland valley. To my shame, I admitted I’d done very little. Mandy explained she was a volunteer with Rusland Horizons, a charitable trust dedicated to conservation of the natural environment in the valley that lies between Windermere and Coniston. The trust also promotes education in the landscape and the revival of traditional rural skills. Mandy told me about the Greenwood Trails, which Rusland Horizons has created with the help of local school children, and she gave me the address of their website. In the About section, I learned that the newly renamed Rusland Horizons Trust is a successor organisation to the Lottery-funded Rusland Horizons Landscape Partnership Scheme. However, Rusland Horizons Trust began life in 1987 as an independent charity called Woodmanship Limited, formed to continue the work of Walter Lloyd, “a well-known coppicer and woodsman in the South Lakes area”.

Might this be the same Walter Lloyd? I Googled Walter and found his obituary in The Guardian. Walter died in 2018, aged 93, after what, by any standards, had been a remarkable life. What hit me first, however, was the picture staring back at me from the page: a kindly face, eyes sparkling with vitality and mischief, framed by a shock of wild white hair and matching moustache; for it was a face I’d known. Not well, and only briefly, over twenty years ago, but someone I’d known, all the same…

When I first moved to Cumbria in 1998, I signed up for Tai Chi lessons in Kendal. Walter was in the same class, an unmissable character, full of warmth, charm, and humour, turning up in battered jeans and a check shirt, smelling of woodsmoke. Despite being in his early seventies, he told me he was a woodsman and a charcoal burner, who made yurts and lived in a horse-drawn wagon in the woods near Newby Bridge.

…I read on and discovered he’d been very much more than that.

Walter grew up in Cornwall, where he showed a greater inclination for roaming the countryside with his donkey than he did for school. In the end, his parents packed him off to boarding school, but when war broke out, the school was evacuated to Wales where Walter met a company of charcoal burners who would prove a seminal influence. With the nation at war, Walter joined the Royal Navy and served off the Normandy beaches on D Day, and on the Artic convoys, for which he was recently awarded a medal by Vladimir Putin. After the war, he gained a degree in agriculture from Cambridge University and turned his hand to farming. After founding the Hades Hill herd, his annual trips to the Appleby Horse Fair and his prowess as a folk fiddle player ingratiated him with the gypsy horsemen society. Walter helped scupper official attempts to shut down the festival.

To supplement his meagre farm income, Walter pursued a parallel career as an Emergency Planning Officer for Greater Manchester, a role which saw him appear on television advising people what to do in the event of a nuclear attack: he pulled a bottle of whisky from his pocket and said “Drink all of it. You’ve got four minutes. Die happy!”. Walter also founded Civil Aid, which trained people to help out in emergencies, and offered a life-saving service at the explosion of free music festivals in the 1970’s: from a second-hand “Green Goddess” military fire engine, he dispensed drinking water, blankets, and vegetable curry to hungry and borderline-hypothermic hippies.

When he retired, Walter moved to the South Lakes where he was instrumental in reviving a number of derelict woodlands and re-establishing traditional crafts, still capable of producing local income from coppiced wood: charcoal-burning, coracle making, swill basket-weaving and rope-making (using Herdwick wool gathered from fences). In doing so, he inspired a generation of would-be artisans to abandon the rat-race and pursue their dreams of living closer to nature, forging a living from the land using almost forgotten skills.

Before Walter’s time, the woods around Stott Park were coppiced to produce birch, ash, and sycamore wood for the Bobbin mill. During the nineteenth century, hundreds of Cumbrian mills supplied the bobbins essential to the cotton industries of Lancashire and Yorkshire. Stott Park is the only working example left. The British textile industry flourished at the start of the twentieth century, but the outbreak of WWI destroyed the export market and the cotton mills closed. With demand for bobbins plummeting, Stott Park adapted its machines to make wooden tool handles and managed to survive as commercial enterprise until 1971. It is now a working museum run by English Heritage. The mill recently won silver in the Small Visitor Attraction category at the Enjoy England awards, (although medium and larger-sized visitors are also welcome, I believe).

Stott Park Bobbin Mill — Start Park Bobbin Mill

The Bobbin Mill is the starting point for Rusland Horizons’ Greenwood Trail 3. As I step out of the car into dazzling August sunshine, I feel I couldn’t have picked a better day to explore Walter’s old stomping ground. I follow the small country lanes towards Finsthwaite and turn right on to a track that passes the National Trust High Dam car park and information boards. The track becomes a rough path, entering Bell Intake woods and climbing beside a stream. Before long, I reach the leaf-green pool of Low Dam. In 1835, Finsthwaite Tarn was dammed to provide a water supply to drive the Stott Park waterwheel. Low Dam is a small catchment pond on the outflow from High Dam, the much larger tarn restrained by the dam wall.

High Dam appears a little further up the slope, a shimmering oasis of arboreal serenity, its languid surface an ephemeral dance of reflected leaves, twigs, trunks, and branches. Sunbeams dispersed through tall trees light the waters in an impressionist palette of greens and golds, sun-kissed yellows, and earthy browns, stippled here and there with blue polka dots of sky. I cross the bridge over the outlet and follow the footpath that encircles the tarn, walking slowly, lazily, bathing in the reflective calm of this little sea of tranquillity. About half-way up the western shore, the Greenwood Trail turns left to follow an old enclosure wall out on to open fell. Too enchanted with the tarn to take the trail on my first lap, I stick with the shore path up around the head of the water and down its eastern bank. A wooden boardwalk provides sure footing over a mire awash with sweet-scented bog myrtle. Electric blue dragonflies flit over foliage, and dead foxgloves stand like rusted fence posts against drystone walls mottled with lichen and softened with moss.

When I reach the trail junction for the second time, I follow the enclosure wall out of the wood to much wilder terrain beneath the slopes of Great Green Hows. The ground turns marshy, but a boardwalk crosses the worst sections. I’ve left all human company behind, but a newt darts over my foot. On reaching a stone stile, I’m met with a sudden sweeping prospect over the Rusland Valley and Grisedale Forest to the Coniston Fells. The Old Man stands proudly centre, flanked by Dow Crag on the left, and Brim Fell, Swirl How, and Wetherlam on the right, all soft grey silhouettes except where the southern tip of the Lad Stones ridge has found the morning sun.

A wooden signpost, replete with a Greenwood Trail arrow, points south to Rusland Heights. The OS map shows no path, but the trod is mostly clear and helpfully marked in indistinct stretches by white-topped posts. The open fell is awash with seasonal colour: green summer bracken interleaved with autumnal copper, outcrops of heather in vibrant purple, soft mauve, and chocolate brown—a last parade of high summer on the cusp of autumn. I pass rocky outcrops and deep green holly bushes, cross another stone stile, and handrail an old drystone wall to the highest point. Here, a grand panorama of Lakeland peaks awaits. The entire Coniston range from Caw to Wetherlam occupies the western aspect, while tracking north, I can see Seat Sandal, the Fairfield Horseshoe, Red Screes, Stoney Cove Pike, Thornthwaite Crag, High Street, and Ill Bell. Froswick is all but hidden in shadow, but Yoke, Harter Fell, and Kentmere Pike are discernible. Dark shadowy forms all, like the ghosts of fells below the celestial snowy peaks of cloud above.

Beyond a wall junction, the path starts to descend then climbs again on slopes of yellow gorse and purple heather. A little detour up a rocky knoll affords a glimpse of Boretree Tarn, its iridescent waters, dragonfly-blue below the wooded rise of Yew Barrow. The path initially skirts the wood, descending through a small rock-walled gorge to a reed-lined pond at its edge, then it dives into the trees and descends steeply to a minor road; a shady stretch, which bears the sinister name of Fearing Brow.

Fearing is local dialect for a ghost or evil spirit, and the ghost in question is that of Margaret Taylor, known since her untimely demise as the Ealinghearth Dobby. In 1825, driven to despair by the cruelty and callous neglect of her father, Margaret resolved to end her misery by drowning herself. She was buried at Finsthwaite, but sadly, her suffering didn’t end with the grave. Her heartless father left her funeral before she was even interred, yet Margaret’s spirit was racked with guilt, and she remained earthbound, locked in an eternal quest to find him, and to profess her devotion despite his disdain. She was said to hitch rides on travellers’ carts or fall in with those that trod the lane, always announcing her presence with strange waffling sound. The story led one eighteen-year-old lad, named Christopher Cloudsdale, to make a fatal choice. One winter afternoon he visited Rusland Smithy on an errand from the Bobbin Mill. It was after dark by the time he set off back, and despite the snow, he wouldn’t follow the road for fear of the Dobby, attempting instead to make his way over Great Green Hows. Disoriented in the dark and with his clogs balled up with snow, he wandered in circles for hours before falling and freezing to death.

From Fearing Brow, the trail doubles back into the wood and follows a shady avenue to Townend, where it crosses the Finsthwaite road and tracks round to the farm buildings at Tom Crag. From here, it climbs through an ancient meadow known as the Dales. The Dales were thin strips of land allocated to villagers, on which they would grow oats, barley, and vegetables. Their livestock would graze the fellside and overwinter in the wood, known as Wintering Park, which the trail now enters. There are sheep here still. I can hear a lamb before I see it. It sounds distressed, and when I catch sight, I realise it has got its head stuck in a wire fence while attempting to eat the perennially-greener grass on the other side. I walk over to try and free it, but the sight of me approaching gives it all the impetus it needs to free itself.

From Wintering Park, the trail crosses fields, named by Norse settlers, to Finsthwaite with its Alpine looking church. The Greenwood Trail leaflet (downloadable from the website) includes a picture of the Hunter family of Finsthwaite weaving swill baskets in Plum Green Yard in 1891. By the 1980’s, many of these traditional skills were in danger of dying out, and much of the surrounding woodland had become derelict. It seems counter-intuitive to think that cutting wood is a form of conservation, but properly managed coppicing can extend the life of trees and create habitats much richer in biodiversity. Thanks to Walter Lloyd and Rusland Horizons, these woodlands and their traditional crafts are flourishing again. A Greenwood sign reminds me this wonderful trail was devised by school children, and I acknowledge the sterling work the charity is doing in education as well as conservation.

Then I think of fell ponies on Dixon Heights, and I remember clumsily stumbling through a Tai Chi kata with a remarkable man I only wish I’d known better.

Green Mind

October 25, 2020 George Kitching 24 Comments

Dow Crag and Coniston Old Man from Torver

All through lockdown, distant Dow Crag reminded me of where I longed to be. No surprise that’s where I would head when restrictions lifted, ascending from Torver, past a magnificent waterfall born of childhood mischief. During the months away, I read Norman Nicholson’s The Lakers. At its core is the environmental message Wordsworth & Ruskin learned from Lakeland. In the time of COVID, it is more relevant than ever.

John Ruskin spoke of a “plague wind”: a “strange bitter biting wind” that would cast the sky in a “dry black veil”, impenetrable to sunshine; it could carry terrible thunderstorms, “rolling incessantly, like railway luggage trains, quite ghastly in its mockery of them—the air one loathsome mass of sultry and foul fog, like smoke”. It would blanche the sun and blight the air before “settling down again into Manchester’s devil’s darkness”.

To Ruskin the wind was a physical phenomenon, as if a meteorological distortion, provoked by the sulphurous smog belched forth by the Victorian cities of England’s Industrial Revolution. But in his book, The Lakers, Norman Nicholson counsels against taking this too literally; at home on the eastern shore of Coniston Water, Ruskin must have breathed some of the cleanest air in England. To Nicholson, Ruskin’s plague wind was a metaphor, a symbol of the spiritual corrosion which mass industrialisation had wrought.

The Lakers is a beautifully written account of Lakeland’s early tourists, its guide-book writers and apostles. It examines how industrialisation and our mass migration to urban living provoked a love affair with Cumbria’s fells and dales. “The Middle Ages had seen the village as a small clearing of order among the illimitable wilderness of nature; the seventeenth century saw the mountains as the last defiance of disorder among the colonies of civilisation”. In the centuries to come, however, a collective desire to escape into England’s last great wilderness would germinate and grow strong. By Ruskin’s time, the urban pride of the seventeenth century was ringing hollow. As Nicholson puts it:

“The first great thrust of the Industrial Revolution had overstretched itself; the muscles were beginning to sag, the energy to fail. In the parlours, the drawing-rooms, the pews, all was still comfortable and secure; but in the back-alleys, the rotting cottages, the slave factories, there was the strain and anger of a society at one and the same time vigorous and stunted, opulent and starved. In spite of all the clangour of the railways, the grasp and grab of trade, the grandiloquence of empire, the flags, the dividends, the Harvest Festivals, the brass bands, the gold watches and Prince Albert himself, there was hidden somewhere in every Victorian a tired, rather frightened, rather lost little dog that wanted to crawl under the table and sleep.”

We had become divorced from nature, shut off from its rhythms and cycles. It had become something to pave over, to hide, to tame; and as we lost sight of our own place within it, it simply became a resource to plunder and exploit. Yet, when the sterility and artifice of urban living began to pall, it was nature we craved as a diversion, as an escape, as therapy, as spiritual replenishment: “The gentry, the manufacturers, the professional people, blowing their noses on the stench and stew of the money-grubbing cities, rushed to the Lakes to forget it all, at least for a fortnight.”

Were Ruskin or Nicholson alive today, 2020 might have brought an uncanny sense of déjà vu: not just Britain, but the whole world is in the grip of literal plague wind, a pandemic, which has forced us through months of domestic confinement in a desperate bid to contain its spread. The meteorological effect of lockdown has been the polar opposite of Ruskin’s apocalyptic vision, however. China’s industrial cities, the twenty-first century’s inheritors of Victorian England’s smog, have seen blue sky for the first time in decades. And here in the post-industrial UK, where air pollution now comes from the incessant combustion of petrol, diesel, and jet fuel, we’ve witnessed a canopy free of vapour trails, and air filled, not with the unbroken hum of traffic, but with birdsong. It might have been a romantic stretch of the imagination, but in those first months of lockdown, it really did seem as if the planet was breathing a huge sigh of relief. Now, our desire to escape to our green spaces is stronger than ever.

From his home at Brantwood, John Ruskin looked over Coniston Water to the Coniston mountains. My house doesn’t share his panorama; trees and foothills obscure most of the range; but I can see Dow Crag. In line with government guidelines and the wishes of Mountain Rescue, I kept away from the high fells until late July. But the sight of Dow Crag, its buttresses and gullies rendered in sharp relief by startling spring sunlight, was a daily reminder of where I longed to be. No surprise then, that I should head for Torver when restrictions relax.

In the days before magazines, songs, poems, stories, and political and religious tracts were distributed in the form of chapbooks—short, cheaply produced publications that were sold by itinerant pedlars and hawkers, known as chapmen. Disparaged in literary circles as “penny dreadfuls” and feared by the establishment as channels for subversive ideas, chapbooks were, for many, their window on the wider world. One such chapbook put Torver on the map. It included a report entitled, “a New Prophesy”—the lurid account of the vision experienced by an 8 year old Torver girl, who had lain in a trance for three days. It was billed as a “an alarm from heaven to the inhabitants of the earth, giving an account how crying sins of the day and time do provoke the Almighty; with strange and wonderful things, as a warning to this last and worst age, agreeable to the Holy Scriptures and divine revelation: the like never published”. In the girl’s revelation, “The envious and discontented were howling like mad dogs: the oppressors of the poor were trodden under foot by the devils in the burning flames; in the midst of which lake were the swearers, lyars, and covetous persons, bearing the wrath of God to all eternity!”

I make a mental note to mind my language as I pull up in Torver and pop the suggested number of coins into the car park’s honesty box.

Wainwright described this way up Dow Crag as “the natural line of approach”, and, “the most attractive, for when the woods of Torver are left behind the view forwards to the great buttresses of Dow Crag grows more dramatic with every step”. He’s spot on. At this early hour, Wetherlam is indistinct in shadow and the Old Man, dark-tinged, but Dow Crag is already vividly illuminated by the morning sun, its wrinkled face a huge elephantine hide, riven by deep gullies into shapes that resemble a petrified parade of prehistoric creatures.

Before long, the path splits. The right hand fork crosses Torver Beck and climbs between spoil heaps to the deep pit of Banishead Quarry. Wainwright’s map notes simply, “there is much of interest to see here”. The Southern Fells was published in 1960, so Wainwright would have researched it in the late 1950’s. Whether the waterfall was yet to exist, or whether it was simply too new and contentious to be guaranteed a future, I couldn’t say, but AW’s circumspection hints at, but never actually mentions, the quarry’s crowning glory.

The waterfall is not a natural feature, it was born of mischief in the 1950’s, and we have three local boys to thank. Their playground was the quarry pit and the beck that ran past its top. One day, in a daring flash of inspiration, they hit on the idea of moving rocks to divert part of the flow into the pit. Their endeavours that afternoon yielded a small trickle, but after tea, one of the boys returned with his brother and a mattock; their renewed efforts produced the cascading majesty of the cataract that now plunges into the pool. An anonymous narrator recounts the story beautifully on the Torver website. So familiar with the finer details is the narrator, he even knows what they ate for tea.

Today, the waterfall is magnificent surprise, concealed until the last minute when it springs a vista as arresting as it is unexpected. A vast chute of white spray hurtles headlong down a vertical wall of cut stone, striped orange and black with lichen. It falls into a dark pool, its surface as glassy and reflective as polished granite, except where it escapes the shadow to turn sapphire, fringed green with a leafy canopy of tree cover.

For most of the Victorian era, the definitive guide to the Lakes was one written by Harriet Martineau and published in 1855. Martineau was a prolific author and social reformer who did much to improve the lot of rural communities in the Lakes. Her early life was dogged with illness, and she was rendered largely immobile when diagnosed with a uterine tumour at the age of 37. Remarkably, five years later, she underwent a course of mesmerism and declared herself cured. She relocated to Ambleside and embraced the outdoors with a physical vigour that matched her formidable mental strength. When I first read some of her suggested excursions, I wondered if she had ever actually walked them. Scafell Pike via Rosset Pike and Esk Hause, returning by Tarn Crag and Easedale Tarn, leaving time to explore Grasmere, before travelling to Ambleside to tackle Nab Scar in the afternoon, anyone? Such reservations are dispelled when you discover that this was a woman who took daily walks of six to eight miles before breakfast at 7:30.

Ahead of me, above an expanse of moorland, lies the Walna Scar road. There can be no doubt that Harriet knew this area, her account is replete with such intimate detail:

“Amidst the grassy undulations of the moor, he (the walker) sees, here or there, a party of peat-cutters, with their white horse; if the sun be out, he looks absolutely glittering, in contrast with the brownness of the ground. It is truly a wild moor; but there is something wilder to come…The precipice called Dow (or Dhu) Crag appears in front ere long; and then the traveller must turn to the right, and get up the steep mountain-side to the top as he best may. Where Dow Crag and the Old Man join, a dark and solemn tarn lies beneath the precipice… Round three sides of this Gait’s Tarn, the rock is precipitous; and on the other, the crags are piled in grotesque fashion, and so as to afford, —as does much of this side of the mountain,—a great harbourage for foxes, against which the neighbouring population are for ever waging war.”

When I reach the old quarry road, the precipice towers ahead, an awe-inspiring wall of cliff and cleft. Wainwright rates it second only to Scafell Crag in its sublime grandeur. Gait’s Tarn, or Goat’s Water, is hidden from view; it is a further climb through the Cove to reach it. That will be my way down. The ridge running left from the summit, over Buck Pike and Brown Pike, will be my way up; so I turn left and follow the Walna Scar road up to the Walna Scar pass, detouring right to visit the tranquil oasis of Blind Tarn, an ephemeral ripple of mossy reflection under the green skirts of the crags.

From the pass, I follow the steep path up Brown Pike, where a stone shelter offers respite long enough to sip coffee and look back at the long silver sliver of Coniston Water, glimmering in the distance. Along the onward path, the hunched shoulders of the Old Man form an imposing bulk of blue and green beyond the slender pyramid of Buck Pike. From the top of Buck Pike, a grassy ridge leads to Dow Crag’s summit. Along its precipitous edge, slender crevices plunge into the deeper chasms of Great and Easy Gully. A simple scramble gains the highest point. To the west, across a sea of green foliage and white rock, the darker summits of the Scafells are constantly retouched by the fleeting flicker of sun and shadow: a scene of wild vitality; a Van Gogh painting animated into life.

I follow the ridge path down to Goat’s Hause, and with my lockdown legs bearing up, continue up on to the Old Man, where a small party of young women are in jubilant spirits; the euphoria of the peaks after the shackles of lockdown, perhaps, but it seems like something more. One of them is draped in an Olympic cape. I ask her if they’re raising funds for charity.

“No,” she says. “The cape is from the Olympics. I was part of the women’s hammer-throwing team. But since then, I sustained a serious back injury that put me in hospital for ages. I was told I might never walk again. I was determined to prove them wrong, and I made a bucket list of all the things I wanted to do when I got better. Climbing the Old Man was one.”

“I’m a bit sweaty,” she grins when I congratulate her. “It’s hard work. Give me an Olympic final, any day!”

As I descend the zig zag path to the shore of Goat’s Water, I’m elated to be here again; but at the same time, I’m as reflective as its copper-green surface. Last time I took this path, three shepherds and their tireless dogs were bringing a Herdwick flock down off the fells, a practice that goes back centuries. My thoughts return to Nicholson. At its heart, his book is study of folly. The folly of the Picturesque. The folly of “landscape”. Most of those early apostles of the Lake District were as guilty as the industrialists in misunderstanding the land and our relationship with it. They saw it as something distinct from us; something to be marvelled at; something to be captured on a canvas and hung on the wall of a civilised townhouse. William Wordsworth was different. He understood how disconnected we had become from the ecosystems we are part of. In the traditional farming communities of the Lakes, he saw a unity between man and the land, which he exalted as a blueprint for how things ought to be. By Nicholson’s time, Wordsworth was massively popular, but his message had been largely lost. He’d become the Sunday School impression of a poet, a purveyor of pretty words about lakes, and daffodils, and quaint rustic traditions.

Dow Crag over Goat's Water — Dow Crag over Goat’s Water

Yet these days, Wordsworth is enjoying something of a re-evaluation as an early environmentalist. The need to heed his message has never been more urgent: COVID-19 is the latest in wave of viruses that have made the transition from animals to humans, a phenomena scientists are linking directly to our relentless destruction of habitats and wild places. Today’s extinction rate is hundreds, maybe even thousands, of times higher than the natural base rate. The first species to go are usually larger mammals. Their disappearance, in turn, triggers an explosion in the populations of smaller mammals like rodents—those species most likely to spread disease to us. Declining insect populations affect pollination and result in crop failures. The devastating wildfires in Australia and California are directly linked to global warming. And yet we describe environmental initiatives as “saving the planet”, as if the planet is some nice-to-have pleasure park that we enjoy at weekends. By destroying ecosystems that we are part of, we are, quite simply, sowing the seeds of our own destruction. It’s not just about saving the Black Rhino or the Amur Leopard, ultimately, it’s about saving ourselves. To think otherwise is to be a man relentlessly sawing away at the branch that he’s sitting on while his companion begs him to stop for the sake of the bird’s nest further along.

We urgently need to change: to find more sustainable ways of sustaining ourselves. Yet, it seems a problem so insurmountable, we are inclined to bury our heads in the sand: slam activists as scaremongers, deny climate change; deny COVID, even. And yet, if lockdown has taught us anything, it’s that we are actually very good at adapting. When the offices closed, huge numbers of employees switched to homeworking in days; complex systems that companies had procrastinated on for years were deployed in weeks. All of a sudden, vast numbers of us discovered we can do our jobs from anywhere, without burning daily excesses of petrol, diesel, or jet fuel. Innovation abounds. When we up against it, we are capable of the most remarkable things. I think of Harriet Martineau’s miraculous recovery, and of a jubilant girl in an Olympic cape, conquering the Old Man of Coniston.

Nicholson dreamed of a time when we would achieve a “new synthesis of the scientific and imaginative vision”:

“Then perhaps, we may be able to look at the fells of Cumberland with a new understanding. For they rear themselves in the middle of our civilisation like an ancient boulder lying in a garden. An archaism, belonging to the world of nature as it was long before man came to look at it; belonging, also, to the world which will survive man. They are a sign both of what man comes from and what he is up against. They may be mapped, footpathed, sign-posted, planted with conifers, gouged with quarries, titivated with tea-shops. They may even, in some gigantic explosion, be blown out of shape. Yet they will remain the same, for they are a fact, a fact we cannot alter and perhaps cannot even understand. They are the past which shaped us and the future in which we shall have no shape. To talk of preserving them is both irrelevant and irreverent. All that matters is how long they will allow us to preserve ourselves”.
– Norman Nicholson

Sources/Further Reading

Read the story of how the Banishead Waterfall came into being as told by one who was there:

http://www.torver.org/torver-history/banishead-quarry

David Attenborough’s Extinction sets out the science that links destruction of habitats and our current biodiversity crisis with the rise in pandemics (still available to view on iPlayer at the time of writing).

http://bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000mn4n

Norman Nicholson’s The Lakers is well worth a read, if only for the beauty of his writing. It is out of print, but second-hand copies can be found. Here are the details of the Cicerone paperback edition:

Nicholson, Norman. 1955: The Lakers. Milnthorpe: Cicerone, 1995

In this excellent edition of the CountryStride podcast, farmer and author, James Rebanks, explains how he, and many of his neighbours, are moving to a more sustainable and wild-life friendly form of farming: Lakeland farmers returning to the traditions that inspired Wordsworth:

https://www.countrystride.co.uk/post/countrystride-38-james-rebanks-english-pastoral

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

Thorn Of Crowns

August 23, 2020 George Kitching 29 Comments

The Rites of Spring & the Secret of Crummock Water

May 12th, 2019

In 1988, divers made a grisly discovery in Crummock Water: they recovered the body of a woman, chained to a car cylinder head. Her name was Sheena, and she has become the forgotten Lady of the Lake. Thirty one years later, I walk from Ennerdale Water over Great Borne, the air filled with the song of the cuckoo and the fragrance of hawthorn blossom. These traditional harbingers of spring are the stuff of folk ritual, but as I reach Red Pike and look down on Crummock Water, I recall Sheena’s story, and I wonder whether ancient beliefs may yet have something to teach us.

“I have a friend who’s a radio announcer. He stops talking when he walks under bridges”—just one in a rich seam of dry one-liners from the skewed imagination of US comic, Steven Wright. It’s a joke that may be lost on anyone who’s grown up with digital radio, unless, of course, they drive over Corney Fell. Here invisible bridges eat digital radio signal at regular intervals, so I miss most of what Radcliffe and Maconie are saying about the harbingers of spring, but I do catch something about superstition and the May Tree.

The radio show might have dissolved into stuttered fragments, but the view is unswervingly impressive. We’ve not been starved of sunny days recently, but the light has often been hazy, rendering the landscape as a washed-out impression. Today is different. Everything is in high definition. The pepper pot of Stainton Tower is pin-sharp and the Irish Sea bluer than I’ve ever seen. The Isle of Man rises in the distance like a mythical kingdom from a skirt of sea-mist. The rites of spring are afoot, and the staccato radio reception seems somewhat appropriate, for what are superstitions if not stuttered fragments of once coherent beliefs.

Before long, I’m edging down the single-track lane to Bowness Knott on the shore of Ennerdale Water with Herdus’s western ridge rising impressively ahead. As I step out of the car, another harbinger of spring reaches my ear: the slow repeating call of the cuckoo. In days gone by, people believed the cuckoo morphed into a hawk during the winter or took refuge in the faery kingdom. When it returned in its familiar form, it brought the spring with it. It’s the first cuckoo call I’ve heard this year. There are many half-forgotten customs you are supposed to enact in response. I seem to remember one about placing a stone on your head, running as far as you can, and launching it into the air. Wherever it lands, a stash of money will await when you return the following day. I think better of it. I’m in a car park after all. Knowing my luck, it’ll fly through someone’s windscreen and end up costing me a great deal more.

Another old belief says that every repeat of the first cuckoo’s call marks a year of your life. I’m encouraged that it shows no sign of abating as I stroll back along the track toward Rake Beck.

A pungent natural perfume reaches my nostrils from the white blossom of the hawthorn trees. This is the May Tree of Radcliffe and Maconie’s mention, so called for its May flowering. In Celtic tradition, it is the tree of Beltaine, the ancient festival that celebrates the start of spring and the coming of summer; like Beltaine, the hawthorn symbolises fertility and rebirth.

The fair maid who, the first of May,
Goes to the fields at break of day
And washes in dew from the hawthorn tree,
Will ever after handsome be”

Crag Fell from Bowness Knott — Crag Fell and hawthorn trees

Hawthorn boughs were cut and woven into May Day crowns or placed in the porches of houses to bring luck, but bringing them inside the house was taboo:

“Hawthorn bloom and elder-flowers
Will fill a house with evil powers”

The tree contains trimethylamine, a chemical found in decaying animal tissue. In medieval times, its blossom was said to smell like the Great Plague, and its presence indoors was associated with death. But this is perhaps a later superstition based on an unsavoury aromatic association. In earlier times, hawthorn was the tree of new life; it was her sister tree, the blackthorn, that was the tree of death.

In witchcraft, the blackthorn belongs to black magic, while the hawthorn (or white thorn) is the tree of the white witch. Blackthorn is the Celtic tree of Samhain, the festival that marks the coming of winter. Its bitter fruit, the sloe, sweetens after the first frost.

In Ireland, it was considered unlucky to chop down hawthorn trees as they were said to be home to faery folk. Indeed, thirteenth century Scottish mystic, Thomas Rhymer, met the Faery Queen by a May Tree. She gave him a brief tour of the underworld. It only lasted a matter of hours, but when he returned, he discovered he’d been gone a full seven years. By contrast, the blackthorn is a gateway to communing with the dead. This is not as macabre as it sounds. In ancient belief, communing with the dead helped the living prepare for what must come to us all eventually.

The same dichotomy applies in traditional healing: blackthorn is an astringent and a purgative; it heals by bringing your pain and darkest thoughts to the surface; it intensifies suffering in order to banish it. Hawthorn is a balm; it soothes pain and eases troubles.

Blackthorn and whitethorn; winter and summer; death and rebirth; the perpetual cycle of life; and here on the shore of Ennerdale Water, in the warm sunlight, with the tang of new growth, the scent of tree blossom and the call of the cuckoo, all things more likely to trigger a hard-wired religious impulse (in me, at least) than psalms and psalters and thorny theological concepts of original sin.

During WWI, large amounts of wood were needed for the war effort. In 1919, the Forestry Commission was established to ensure the UK always had a steady supply of timber. In its early years, the Commission adopted a utilitarian approach, planting vast amounts of fast growing conifer. In Ennerdale, dense sitka spruce plantations blighted the natural landscape, replacing the indigenous flora. Wainwright called this “dark funeral shroud of foreign trees” an act of vandalism. But in 1968, the Commission refocused on conservation, and since 2003, it has been a partner in the Wild Ennerdale project, which is rewilding the valley, thinning the conifer and allowing the old woods to reassert themselves. Perhaps some of the ancient magic is returning.

I leave the road by a stile, cross Raise Beck and follow a path that climbs the fell side to gain the western ridge of Herdus. Across the valley, Crag Fell sprawls: a gargantuan beast in slumber—its shadowed crags an elephantine hide, its sunlit slopes a pink underbelly, and Anglers Crag its wrinkled snout. The lake is a plate of polished lapis lazuli. As I gain height along the ridge, I look down on Bowness Knott, its rounded top a fishbone pattern of forest green and stone white clearings.

Traditionally, Herdus is the name for this whole fell, with Great Borne a name for the summit only, but the OS map assigns Herdus its own summit. This is marked on the ground with a cairn and acknowledged as a Birkett. The classification may confuse boundaries, but it does at least do justice to this remarkable viewpoint.

Great Borne’s summit lies east across a boggy depression. The circuitous path keeps to firmer ground, crossing the head of Rake Beck and joining the path that climbs beside it. As I approach the trig point and shelter that crown the top, the muscular mass of Grasmoor, Whiteside, Wandhope and Whiteless Pike rises in the northwest, dark and shadowy, like an angular edifice of chiselled granite.

Two fell runners are tracing a route with their fingers. It circuits the whole valley: Starling Dodd, Buttermere Edge, Haystacks, the Gable Girdle, Kirk Fell, Pillar, Scoat Fell, Haycock, Crag Fell.

“Are you going to run all that?” I ask, incredulous.

“Not today,” the girl replies, “but it’s what we’re in training for.”

I follow their dust down to the col and up the gentle grassy slope to Starling Dodd. They’re long gone by the time I reach its twin cairns, one of stones and one a twisted twine of rusted iron fence posts.

Ahead, the slanting pyramid of Red Pike is a sharp end to the High Stile ridge, and to the north, Crummock Water is glimpsed, an indigo lustre beneath Grasmoor. Grasmoor itself, now free of shadow, is painted chocolate with veins and crests of cinnamon. Southwest, over Ennerdale Water, the Irish Sea is a band of pale blue beyond the green flatlands of the coast.

Between here and Red Pike, Little Dodd is a mere hummock, but its modest summit reveals more of the unfolding panorama, Loweswater now peeking coyly between Melbreak and Hen Comb. The peerless grandstand, though, is Red Pike. I eschew the path and scramble an easy gully to get there. As I reach the parapet, there’s a woosh of air and a paraglider takes flight. I watch it soar westward then arc round over Crummock Water. What a perfect day to have a hawk’s eye view. I look over at the small band of walkers assembled on the summit—everyone is rapt, everyone is smiling, all is well with the world.

But all was far from well in the world of Kevin Owlett when he stepped from his car by Crummock’s shore and dragged his wife’s body from the boot. He’d wrapped her in chains to which he’d tied a car cylinder head and an open plastic barrel. He waded out into Crummock Water, pulling her corpse behind him. When she began to float, he swam out further and submerged the barrel so it filled with water and dragged her under. He nearly joined her. His foot had become snagged in the electrical wire he’d used to secure the barrel. But he managed to struggle free. So it was just his wife’s body that members of a sub aqua club discovered in 1988.

Her name was Sheena. She is the forgotten Lady of the Lake. The names of Margaret Hogg (found in Wastwater in 1984) and Carol Ann Park (found in Coniston in 1997) are better known. In 1988/1989, the Piper Alpha oil rig disaster and the Hillsborough stadium tragedy conspired to keep Sheena’s story from the front pages.

The Wastwater case had been an uncanny precedent. When he was tried for murder, three years earlier, Peter Hogg claimed his wife had been having an affair which she made no effort to disguise. On the fateful night, she tired of merely taunting him and physically attacked him. In a fit of rage he grabbed her by the throat and squeezed too long. He hadn’t meant to kill her.

Kevin’s defence was remarkably similar: Sheena had mocked his sexual prowess, boasted of having an affair and accused him of sleeping with a work colleague. When the shouting stopped, she’d attacked him with a wine bottle.

I’m not convinced a modern jury would have shown leniency in either case, but in 1985, jurors at the Old Bailey found in Peter’s favour and acquitted him of murder. He served three years for manslaughter and an additional year for perjury.

It didn’t work for Kevin. Even in the 1980’s, the apparent degree of planning that had gone into Sheena’s disposal made it impossible to believe her death had not been premeditated.

What degree of pain and desperation drives someone to go that far? How screwed up do you have to be to kill someone you presumably loved once. It’s tragic when a relationship breaks down, but there should be life beyond a broken marriage for both parties. Sitting here now, I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if Kevin had simply come here first. Just wandered, breathed this in, taken time out to think.

Doctors are increasingly waking up to the mental health benefits of the great outdoors; some prescribe country walks ahead of anti-depressants. Modern living divorces us from natural rhythms. Cities never sleep; they are places of perpetual light, heat and noise, where everything is always available, no matter what the season. It’s artificial and it disconnects us from who we really are. It makes us forget something that we have always known; something deep in our DNA: that we are children of nature, and nature works in cycles. Pain is an inescapable part of living, but however intense, and however great the effort to overcome it, it passes. And when it does, it gives way to joy, just as night gives way to day, and winter gives way to spring. Death and rebirth. Samhain and Beltaine. Blackthorn and hawthorn.

When I arrive back at the shore of Ennerdale Water, the cuckoo is still calling. I’ve a good few cycles left, it seems.

For more on Wastwater and Margaret Hogg, see my blog, A Walk on the Wild Side

A Walk on the Wild Side

Rhiannon

July 26, 2020 George Kitching 15 Comments

A Midsummer Night’s Dream on Dixon Heights

One of the positives of lockdown has been waking up to what is right on your doorstep. With its ruined tower, Bay views, and fell ponies, Dixon Heights (Newton Fell South) is a Wainwright outlier, rich in enchantment. Its mention in the Annals of Cartmel reads like a nineteenth century episode of Father Ted. As I discover, on the eve of midsummer, it can prove veritably dreamlike.

“Things seen, things remembered, and things imagined are blended together into a delicate landscape which is half reality and half dream, but in which the dream helps to clarify rather than to obscure that which is really there.”
– Norman Nicholson

In its heady days as a watering hole for coach and horses, High Newton boasted three inns. Now there’s only The Crown, a fine pub, but closed this evening, due to lockdown. Newton was once a stop on the horse-drawn omnibus route from Lancaster to Ulverston. As 19^th century interest in the Lakes awakened, a steady stream of curious sightseers made the journey, inspired in part by the hyperbole of early apostles of the picturesque, like William Gilpin. In 1820, a new turnpike opened through Levens, Lindale, and Newton that offered an alternative to the perilous race over Morecambe Bay. In his guidebook of 1842, J Hudson commends the route to “those Tourists who dislike to cross the sands”, adding, “the road is excellent, and passes through a pleasant and agreeable country”.

For the best part of two centuries, High and Low Newton suffered their share of pass-through traffic. Fifteen years ago, you needed your wits about you to cross this road. It was a single carriageway bottleneck on the A590, and an accident black spot. In 2006, however, work began on a bypass that would transform village life here. The new stretch of dual carriageway opened in 2008 and reduced traffic through the villages from 17,900 vehicles per day to 550. This midsummer evening, with the road journeys restricted further by COVID, I see none. The prevailing sounds are the distant bleat of lambs and a sudden downbeat of big wings as a buzzard takes off from an overhanging branch.

Our house looks out on Newton Fell, the long low heather-clad ridge that runs north through the woods of Chapel House and Simpson Ground to the rocky summit of Gummer’s How, perched above Windermere. Wainwright features Newton Fell in his book of outliers, dividing it into two separate walks which he calls Newton Fell North and Newton Fell South. No right of way exists between them, and although much of the ground is now open access, there is still a portion that is not, an untempered legacy of an 1806 land-grab—the enclosure of the Cartmel Commons.

With lockdown keeping me from the mountains, I’ve been taking a deeper interest in what is right on my doorstep. The trek along the ridge from the Newton reservoirs over the tops of Saskills (Newton Fell’s summit) and the weathered crag of White Stone has become a fast favourite, but until last week, I’d never climbed the southern tip, Dixon Heights. It is the shortest of fell walks but rich in enchantment, and on this balmy midsummer’s eve, I’m eager for some solstice magic.

Dixon Heights from Bishops Tithe Allotment

Wainwright climbed Dixon Heights from Lindale, but his route is bisected now by the dual carriageway. Happily, there is an alternative that starts closer to home for me. Opposite Yew Tree Barn Antiques in Low Newton, a track skirts a farm and narrows to a public footpath, little more than a furrow through the bracken. As I leave the road, I disturb a grazing roe deer. It darts away through dense foliage, a ripple in the fern. Beyond a gate, the path forks. The lower prong hugs the wall, but the higher one climbs through a sea of leafy green, dotted purple with the cascading bells of foxgloves. Red admirals flit over canary coloured tormentil, and as the trod meanders toward the ridge line, craggy outcrops spring from the undergrowth like eroded ruins of ancient temples. To the right of Buck Crag, over the lush flatland of Cartmel valley, I catch my first glimpse of the Bay.

Bracken, foxgloves, and rocky outcrop, Dixon Heights

The first summit is Bishop’s Tithe Allotment, a name echoed in a portion of neighbouring Hampsfell, which suggests the church may have been an early beneficiary of the enclosures. The elevation is a humble 620 feet, but it boasts fine views. The Bay stretches out to the south, and Arnside Knott rises across the Kent Estuary. The eastern skyline is dominated by the dark distant shapes of the Pennines, the Howgills and Ingleborough. Closer at hand, across the Winster valley, is another Wainwright outlier, one of his favourites, Whitbarrow Scar. Its western flank is long and wooded, but it presents a 200 foot escarpment to the A590, and to the turnpike that preceded it. To J Hudson, writing with all the poetic overstatement of his age, it was, “a huge arched and bended cliff, of an immense height”.

Down in the valley, the River Winster forms a natural parish boundary. A country lane runs from High Newton to Witherslack, borne over its waters by the twin arches of an old stone bridge. According to James Stockdale’s Annals of Cartmel (1872), here in April 1576, stood the gibbet from which Richard Taylor swung, deliberately conspicuous from the road, a macabre moral lesson to all would-be ne’er do wells. Stockdale writes,

“The highway road from Newton-in-Cartmel to Witherslack, after the steep zigzag descent of Towtop, crosses the river Winster at Bleacragg Bridge (so spelled in the Ordnance map, 1850). On the Lancashire side of the river, and adjoining the south-western end of the bridge, is a small rocky knoll, on which some Scotch fir and larch trees now grow; this knoll has always had the name of “Gallows Hill,” which may be accounted for by the above register, though all other tradition of the crime and its punishment has been lost.”

The church register, from which Stockdale quotes, states, “April 10. Richard Taylor was buryed whoe suffered the same daye at Blakragge bridge end for murthering wilfullye Richard Kilner of Witherslack.”

If Bleacrag bridge supplies Stockdale with a dark tale, Buck Crag, on the western slope of Bishop’s Tithe Allotment, furnishes a lighter one. At the start of the 18th century, the farmhouse at its foot was home to Edmund Law, the curate and schoolmaster at Staveley. Stockdale praises Law for his “pedestrian achievements” and calculates that by walking the eight miles there and back to the church and school every day, over his forty-nine years in post, Law must have clocked up 122,696 miles—“a distance more than equal to five times the circumference of our globe”. Edmund remained a humble footsore curate, but his educational prowess propelled his progeny into high office: his son became the Lord Bishop of Carlisle, and his grandsons went on to become variously, the Bishop of Elphin, Baron Ellenborough, and the Bishop of Bath and Wells.

Stockdale describes the house at Buck Crag as “one of the most homely and lonely places in these realms”, but evidently, it held such a fascination for Law’s grandsons that, in 1818, one of the bishops arrived on the doorstep, replete with an entourage of clerics and a secretary, and much to the astonishment of the farmer who now lived there, requested a thorough tour of the premises. Apparently, “t’Bishop inquir’t t’dog tail aut a-joint”. Meanwhile, a scene straight from Father Ted was playing out on the fell: “Whilst all this was going on, some of the younger clergymen took the opportunity, under the guidance of the farmer’s two daughters, to scale and scramble over the precipices of Buck Crag and the mountains adjoining; but whether it was the delightful scenery or the presence of the ladies that rendered them oblivious, they certainly quite forgot ‘that time hath wings,’ and having kept the bishop a long time waiting, they did not escape some mild reproof for tarrying so unnecessarily long on the top of Buck Crag”. The Bishop himself, it seems, left with his grandfather’s old armchair from “i’ t’ingle neak” as a keepsake, despite some mild reluctance from the farmer who had grown rather fond of it.

Top of Bishop's Tithe Allotment — Bishop’s Tithe Allotment above Buck Crag

From the summit, the ridge continues south, dropping 130 ft to the saddle with Dixon Heights. At the bottom of the depression, Tom Tarn nestles beside a copse. In wetter times, a stone wall divides its waters, but after weeks of little rain, it’s dry, distinguished only by a small expanse of cracked mud. Whitbarrow Scar to the east and Hampsfell to the west are renowned for their limestone pavements, but Newton Fell is an outcrop of older Silurian mudstone, muddy siltstone, and muddy sandstone of the Bannisdale formation. In times past, the slopes down to the tarn were quarried for slate and flag. I lose the path amid prolific undergrowth. To regain it, I affect an easy scramble over a grey face of cut slate, now prettily laced with white and pink petals of English stonecrop. I disturb a skylark. It shoots skyward, its flight a succession of deft tacks on the arc of white-tipped wings.

A gate by the tarn leads through to Dixon Heights. The wall disappears into the deep tree cover, but ahead, there is a grassy clearing, mown close by the carefree grazing of the wild ponies that dwell here. Beyond, a hawthorn covered bank rises to the grassy top. Here stands a ruined tower.

In 1827, architect George Webster, acquired Dixon Heights and built an elegant country mansion, Eller How, at its foot. Webster made his name extending and remodelling stately homes like Hutton in the Forest, Dallam Tower and Holker Hall. He also built Kendal Town Hall and several local churches. Eller How became his home. It is often supposed that Webster erected the summit tower as a romantic folly, but in his book of 1849, succinctly named, A History, Topography, and Directory, of Westmorland: And Londsdale North of the Sands, in Lancashire Together with a Descriptive and Geological View of the Whole of the Lake District, P. J. Mannix calls it an observatory. Wainwright says it was used by the Home Guard during the war but suggests its origins are obscure. According to Wainwright, a local legend claims it was “a lookout for the observation of smugglers in the estuary”, but he admits it’s equally likely that it was “merely a decoration of the Eller How estate”.

Whatever its original purpose, it is a romantic ruin now and a fine viewpoint over the estuary and the Bay. As I settle on its old stones and surrender to the charm of midsummer solitude, the soft light of evening weaves a gentle magic.

I’m not quite alone. A feral white horse is grazing at the edge of the summit plateau, its taught muscular frame, flowing tail and unkempt mane, the epitome of wild majesty. Backdropped by the shimmering mudflats of the estuary, shores braided with dark woodland, and lit by an opal sky feathered silver with cirrocumulus, the whole scene is beguilingly beautiful. The horse looks ethereal, not quite of this world: a vision of something simpler, something older, something finer. I’m entranced, and I watch for a long while, lost in the rarefied poetry of the moment. It’s a wrench to tear myself away.

Below the summit, on a wooded bank above the track that leads to Eller How, there is a weathered arch. This was certainly a folly, likely built by Webster as a mock ruin; the vogue for the picturesque prized ruins in the landscape, and it became fashionable to build your own. William Gilpin, a devout apostle of the movement, frowned on such contrivance, but after two and half centuries, nature has conspired to turn this arch into the very thing it was meant to mimic, a gothic relic. Wainwright sketched it with more battlements than it boasts now, so perhaps Gilpin would relent, and admire the effect of time and weather on these chiselled stones. After the dreamlike wonder of the white horse, the arch assumes an air of Arthurian romance.

One version of the Arthurian legend can be found in the Mabinogion, a collection of Welsh stories composed in the 13th century from older Celtic tales. When waves of pagan invaders pushed into Cumbria, its Celtic priests and poets fled to Wales, taking their traditions with them, so it is entirely possible that some of the stories of the Mabinogion are Cumbrian in origin.

Also featured in the Mabinogion, is Rhiannon, a woman of the Otherworld, who appears to Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed, astride a horse. Smitten with her beauty, Pwyll follows her, but despite her gentle pace, he can never catch her until he implores her to stop, which she does willingly and rebukes him for not asking earlier. Rhiannon then reveals she has chosen Pwyll to be her husband. Pwyll and Rhiannon marry, but their son is abducted on the night of his birth. Fearing execution for their negligence, his nursemaids kill a puppy and smear the sleeping Rhiannon with its blood. Just as they plan, she is accused of murder and cannibalism. Pwyll refuses to abandon her and retains her as queen, but she is obliged to undergo a penance. Every day, she must sit outside the castle by the stable block and profess her crime to visitors. She must then offer to carry them into the castle on her back, like a beast of burden. Eventually, a vision of a foal being stolen from a mare by a dark presence leads to the baby’s rescue and to Rhiannon’s exoneration.

Rhiannon is associated with the Gaulish horse goddess, Epona, and often portrayed as a maiden. But in some depictions, Rhiannon, herself, is an ethereal white mare.

“Things seen, things remembered, and things imagined are blended together into a delicate landscape which is half reality and half dream, but in which the dream helps to clarify rather than to obscure that which is really there.”

Whisky in the Jar

June 21, 2020 George Kitching 27 Comments

Great Gable via Grey Knotts, Brandreth & Green Gable

To cover the high ground from Honister to Great Gable is to walk with a significant slice of British history beneath your feet, and to tread in the footsteps of smugglers, bootleggers, and a Victorian climbing pioneer who lost his lunch on Gable Crag. Last August, I made the trek and discovered why we really don’t have as much lead in our pencils nowadays.

Alan Coren suggested that things get invented in the wrong order—how marvellous would the advent of the pencil seem to someone struggling with a word processor? I once had a job as assistant to two guys who serviced industrial lathes. The younger one told me he always took a photo before he took a lathe apart so he knew how all the bits went back together. The older guy said he just made a pencil sketch: “that way, if there’s a bit left over, I can rub it out”.

It may be a cliché to talk of history beneath our feet, but on Grey Knotts, it really is the case. As the slopes fall away to Borrowdale, they bear scars inflicted by the hands and feet of wadd miners. “Wadd” and “black lead” were colloquial terms for graphite. Elsewhere in the world, graphite occurs in flakes or shales, but in this small stretch of Lakeland, a particularly pure form occurs as solid lumps in long pipes and sops.

So the story goes, the mineral deposit was discovered in the 1500’s when a mighty storm uprooted an oak and revealed a glistening black substance beneath. It was first used by the monks of Furness for marking sheep, but by the beginning of the 17th century, Italy’s prestigious Michelangelo School of Art was using Cumbrian wadd for somewhat more artistic mark making.

Pencil manufacture become a cottage industry in Keswick, but in the 17th century, the gun proved mightier than the pencil, and the primary demand for wadd was in the casting of cannon and musket balls, where it was used to line the moulds. As England’s fractious relationship with its European neighbours escalated into an arms race, the value of wadd rocketed. At its peak, a ton would fetch £1300. Whenever a new pipe was discovered, it could yield such a quantity so quickly that it would be easy to flood the market and damage the price. Proprietors controlled the flow and protected their profits by keeping their mines closed for long periods.

Robbery and smuggling were rife. The mines employed armed guards, and miners were searched at the end of their shifts. In 1752, stealing or receiving stolen wadd became a felony, punishable by whipping, hard labour, or deportation. Even pocketing the pickings from spoil heaps was an offence, but it didn’t deter locals with a keen eye. Children would follow the carts, scouring the ground for anything that fell off. Some risked more: a woman known as Black Sal became so adept a thief that she was supposedly hunted to death by the mine owner’s dogs; William Hetherington was ostensibly a copper miner, but the most profitable part of his workings was the secret door into his neighbour’s wadd mine.

In my neighbouring village of Lindale, there stands a tall iron obelisk. It commemorates John Wilkinson, Iron Master. This Cumbrian industrialist pioneered a cylinder boring machine capable of much greater precision than had been previously possible. It produced cannon barrels that fired with greater accuracy, and it enabled James Watts to perfect the steam engines that powered the industrial revolution. Wilkinson went on to design the first iron boat and supplied the iron for the world’s first iron bridge over the River Seven at Broseley. Known as “Iron Mad” Wilkinson, John slept in an iron bed, supplied his local church with an iron pulpit and kept an iron coffin in his garden at Castle Head, Lindale, ready for his own demise. He also designed the enormous obelisk that was erected over his grave in the garden, when he died. The subsequent owner of the house wasn’t so keen and had Wilkinson’s remains exhumed and reburied in the churchyard. The obelisk was removed, toppled, and left to rust among the weeds. (It was rescued some years later and re-erected on its current spot). Perhaps, the new owner had a vested interest in wadd, for John’s Dad, Isaac, nearly did for the Borrowdale mines.

Isaac Wilkinson was, himself, an innovative ironmonger. In 1752, he devised a means of casting cannon balls using sand, so by the time Napoleon’s armies were on the move, cannon and musket ball manufacturers no longer needed costly Cumbrian graphite. Fortunately for Borrowdale, demand for pencils had increased dramatically, and the world’s first industrial-scale pencil-making factory opened in Keswick, in 1832.

It proved only a stay of execution for the wadd mines. Following the French Revolution, with the Republic deprived of English graphite, Nicholas Jacques-Conté devised a method of making pencil lead by baking lower quality powdered graphite with clay. The greater the amount of clay, the harder the lead and the finer the line. Different types of pencil could be created for different purposes—the start of the h/b grading system we know today. Luckily for Cumberland, Conté’s method was not known in America, where attempts to mix powdered graphite with wax produced poor quality implements, and the demand for the English product remained high. Eventually though, Henry and John Thoreau hit on Conté’s secret, and the need for pure Cumbrian wadd plummeted. The Borrowdale mines were abandoned in the 1890’s.

So if anyone tells you that men don’t have as much lead in their pencils as they used to, they’re right. And you can blame the French.

With the unhurried but persistent march of the wild, Grey Knotts is reclaiming its mine levels; their openings are hidden among trees, scrub and boulder; marker stones bearing the names of the owners are no longer proud emblems of industrial prowess but fading relics of a bygone age—split and scoured by the elements.

Mine ownership marker, Seatoller Fell (Grey Knotts). Photo by Richard Jennings

Writing in 1749, a travel correspondent, credited only as G.S., describes how he and his guide disturbed a gang of locals picking over spoil for wadd. This aroused his curiosity, but reaching the summit left him profoundly unsettled:

“the scene was terrifying; not a herb to be seen, but wild savine growing in the interstices of the naked rocks; the horrid projection of vast promontories, the vicinity of the clouds, the thunder of the explosions in the slate quarries, the distance of the plain below, and the mountains heaped on mountains that were piled around us, desolate and waste, like the ruins of a world we have survived, excited such ideas of horror as are not to be expressed”. “The whole mountain is called Unnesterre, or I suppose, Finisterre”.

I park among the sterile grey spoil of the Honister quarry and follow the rusting wire fence that climbs the fell. With height the despoliation is quickly diminished. By the time I reach the twin rocky outcrops that grace the top, the Honister workings are nothing but a grey boil, and Dubs quarry, a small scab on the flank of Fleetwith Pike. The thunder of the explosions aside, it was not the scars of industry that so unnerved G.S., but the savage grandeur of the scene that now succeeds it, the heady swell of summits and the sublime sweep of the valleys.

Buttermere Edge rises like a colossal walrus from the blue waters of Buttermere; High Pike is its nose, replete with tusks of ivory scree; while behind, High Stile is the umber round of its head, with a shadowed hollow for an eye. In the valley, the crescent of Crummock water swings out from the inward curve of Buttermere, forming a glittering S, meandering, under mottled slopes, toward the hazy oblivion of the Irish Sea.

The Victorians were the first visitors to become entranced rather than terrified by this wild majesty. Victorian climbing legend, Owen Glynne Jones, did much to popularise it, recounting ground-breaking climbs in warm, humorous prose, full of dash, vigour, and a zest for life. Jones’s book, Rock Climbing in the English Lake District, appeared in 1887. A second edition followed in 1890, posthumously—Jones had died the year before in the Alps. He was not to survive the world that held him in such rapture.

When I reach the grassy top of Brandreth, the forbidding feature that must have terrified G.S. stands proud and noble ahead. Gable Crag, the Ennerdale face of Great Gable, is a monumental bulwark of buttresses and gullies, the northern defensive wall of a dark and mighty dome. Jones reckoned Brandreth is the only spot where you can appreciate its full immensity.

From Green Gable, the lonely majesty of Ennerdale stretches out below, nestled between Haystacks and Kirk Fell, with Pillar rising beyond, like a chiselled Egyptian lion, couchant, his long angular back towards me, his maned head gazing down on the cool blue of Ennerdale Water. Drunk on sun-dappled flanks, I descend to the col of Windy Gap, and climb the steep scrambly path up behind the crags, which form a rugged eastern ear to Great Gable’s northern face.

At the summit, there is a memorial to the members of the Fell and Rock Climbing Club who perished in the Great War. In Westminster, the act of remembrance has been deftly politicised, draped in pomp and pageantry. But here, high above the turbulence and tumult of human activity, it is easier to feel a genuine connection to the fallen. These men were fell-walkers, climbers, and mountaineers. They too stood here and felt the same rush of awe and wonder. That is our eternal bond.

Gable is not the only mountain cenotaph. The FRCC bought and donated this and twelve surrounding fells to the nation in honour of these men. Lord Leconfield donated the summit of Scafell Pike in memory of all the nation’s fallen. Castle Crag bears a plaque to the men of Borrowdale, Great Carrs is crowned with a cross commemorating the crew of a bomber that crashed there, and the stone cross on the saddle of Blencathra is an unofficial memorial to a gamekeeper from Skiddaw House. As we have become increasingly secular as a society, these lonely summits have become natural cathedrals.

The summit offers a heady vista over Wasdale, but there is a finer viewpoint. It lies a little to the south-west where the Westmorland Crags plunge to meet the confluence of Great and Little Hell Gate, the rivers of scree that delimit the freestanding castle of the Napes below. Here, in 1876, the Westmorland brothers erected a large cairn to mark what they considered the finest view in Lakeland. The aspect over Wastwater takes some beating.

The col of Beckhead lies at the foot of the thin ridge that marks the western edge of Gable Crag. It is long and steep and demands plenty of help from the hands. At the saddle, I ready my camera for a shot of Kirk Fell, but on rounding an outcrop, I surprise a bloke attempting a discreet nature wee. He asks if I’m intending to photograph his appendage. His mate laughs and suggests I’d need a telescopic lens.

Kirk Fell over Beckhead from Great Gable

From the top of Kirk Fell, Great Gable is a sheer-sided tower. Here, Jones studied the line of the Oblique Chimney that runs up face of Gable Crag. Over Christmas 1892/3, he learned that at party led by Dr Collier had forced a way up it, and he decided to have a go himself, although he had to concede his climbing partner was less than ideal:

“My companion that Christmas was a learned classic, weary of brain work, whom I had induced to take a little climbing in Cumberland as a tonic. Some people cannot take quinine, others apparently cannot benefit by rock-climbing… the sore limbs and torn clothing he never seemed able to forget, far less enjoy”.

Nevertheless, Jones convinced the Classic to come along, if only for the walk, and persuaded two other accomplished climbers, K. and A., to join them. And so, they set off:

“An ancient path with the strange name of Moses’ Sledgate leads up Gavel Neese till the level of Beckhead is nearly reached, and beats away on a traverse over the screes round to the middle of the Ennerdale side of the mountain, there to lose itself in the wilderness of the stones that are bestrewn all over that desolate region.”

The party crossed the boulders to the far end of the cliff face, where, “the classic assured us that he would much prefer ascending Stony Gully to the top of Gable, and that it would give him extreme pleasure to carry our lunch up to the cairn and wait for us there. We let him go, and promised to meet him again by three o’clock in the afternoon. Thus did we lose our lunch, not to find it again for another week.”

Jones, K., and A. set off on the high level traverse to the foot of the chimney, which they found despite an enveloping mist. Conditions had worsened in the few days since Collier’s climb and the rocks were lined with ice. Jones describes jamming his back against one side and his feet against the other, then forcing himself upward until the walls diverged. As he paused precariously to consider his next move, the effort required to hold himself in place cramped his muscles and left him unable to budge any higher. Eventually, he saw a way of edging himself right to some jammed stones and hauling himself up that way. His limbs responded better to the change in motion, and the jammed stones held firm. The others followed, and all three found themselves beneath a cave-like overhang. The way up was still to be negotiated, but the climb had already taken much longer than expected, and ravenous with exertion, they bitterly regretted handing over their lunch: “My jacket pocket still held the crumbs of a pulverized biscuit that I had taken up Snowdon the week before. These and a fragment of chocolate we scrupulously shared”

At six thirty on that December evening, the three men emerged on to a dark and snowy summit. Neither the Classic nor their provisions were anywhere to be seen. They consoled their rumbling tummies with the assurance that, if they followed a compass bearing, they could descend Little Hell Gate, return the way they had come, and make it back in time for supper.

Unfortunately, they confused the poles of their compass and ended up at Windy Gap on the opposite side of the mountain. A tortuous return down glazed paths resulted in countless slips and falls, but miraculously no broken bones. At 10:30 pm, they arrived back at the hotel to find the Classic fed and bathed and baffled as to why they were so hungry. He had left their lunch under a stone and taken great pains to draw all manner of asterisks and arrows in the snow to direct them to it. Alas, a fresh snowfall had obscured his efforts.

At Beckhead, I pick up the path of Moses Sledgate, or Moses Trod as the OS map calls it. It still gets lost in the wilderness of boulder below Gable Crag but emerges again on the other side to climb the bank of Brandreth, where I will follow it all the way back to Honister. It is named after Moses Rigg, a legendary slate worker. Gate means path, and sled refers to the sledges that were used to haul slate across the fellside before the advent of tramways. According to the stories, Moses’ sled carried a little more than slate, for he was a notorious wadd smuggler. Wainwright declares there is not a shred of historical evidence that Rigg ever existed, but he is still inclined to believe in him.

Rigg was supposed to have distilled his own whisky in a hideout, high on Gable Crag. Bog water from Fleetwith Pike made the best moonshine, apparently. Wainwright marks a spot he calls the Smuggler’s Retreat, and Jones, writing seventy years earlier, describes it too:

“A little higher up this scree slope, on a small platform out to the left, the remains of an old stone-walled enclosure could once be distinguished. It may have been the haunt of whisky smugglers or the hiding place of some miserable outlaw. It is to be regretted that the remains are now in too bad a state of repair to be recognised as artificial.”

Writing in the 1980’s, Harry Griffin lamented he could find no trace of the structure. However, two decades later, an expedition by Jeremy Ashcroft, Guy Proctor and Tom Bailey from Trail Magazine set off in search of it. With Ashcroft feeding out the rope, Proctor scrambled down the rocks from the top of Gable Crag to find a small and obscured plateau with what looked like the remains of four stone walls and a stone floor. On a small shelf, the size of a soap dish, were two lumps of wadd.

Sources/Further Reading

Jones, Owen Glynne. 1900: Rock Climbing in the English Lake District. Keswick: G. Abraham

Baron, Dennis. 2009. A Better Pencil – Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Bridge, David. ‘Wad‘. Industrial History of Cumbria: https://www.cumbria-industries.org.uk/wad/

Lakestay: The Wad Mines worth a King’s Ransom: http://www.lakestay.co.uk/wad.htm

Proctor, Guy (2005) ‘Great Gable’s Big Secret’. Trail Magazine: https://www.livefortheoutdoors.com/inspiration/Latest/Search-Results/Features/Great-Gables-Big-Secret

Fell Walk, General, History, Nature

Sheep & Wolf’s Clothing

May 17, 2020 George Kitching 22 Comments

Eagle Crag

Its north-west face is a daunting rampart of rock, its eastern flank, a sheer wall. From the confluence of streams where Greenup meets Langstrath, Eagle Crag looks unassailable, but Wainwright isn’t fibbing when he says there’s a single line of weakness in its defences. Just over a year ago, I made the exhilarating ascent to reach a summit that was, once, the territory of a wolfman.

It is harder for a rich man to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a camel to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Something like that—I may have all the right words not necessarily in the right order, but you get the gist—the biblical lesson about excessive wealth being a bit of a disadvantage in gaining entry to the Pearly Gates. Even us atheists might recognise a metaphorical truth in that, but in 1195, the warning was taken very literally. Especially, if your name was Alice de Rumeli, and you were heiress to the Barony of Allerdale. Alice was a deeply pious woman, but she was also a very wealthy one—hence her anxiety about needles and camels.

When her only son died in a tragic hunting accident, Alice vowed to make many a poor man’s son her heir. She decided that the surest way to avoid eternal damnation was to donate her land to the Cistercian monastery at Fountains Abbey. Well some of it anyway. Not the fertile farmland around Cockermouth, obviously. That was highly productive and supplied her with a good revenue in feudal taxes. No, she would donate her Borrowdale estates at Crosthwaite, Wanderlath and Stonethwaite. The land had been forest until about three hundred years earlier when Norse settlers made clearings to provide summer grazing for their cattle. In agricultural terms, it was still very poor, yielding just enough to feed the villagers but with precious little left for their feudal overlord. It would make a fine gift for the Abbey, and it would guarantee salvation for Alice’s soul (so long as The Almighty was too busy being all-knowing and all-seeing to bother with a survey).

The monks were not afraid of a bit of hard graft, and they were canny enough to realise the land would support sheep better than cattle. Despite a statute from 1380, which described Borrowdale’s wool as the ‘the worst wool in the realm’, the monks turned Alice’s gift into profitable farmland along the lines that it is still worked today. In fact, they made such a decent fist of it that their rivals at Furness Abbey took exception. This may have had something to do with the fact that in 1209, Alice sold her Cockermouth estate to Furness Abbey for £156 13s 4d—a princely sum back then. Being charitable Christians, their hearts full of humility and healthy disdain for material wealth, the monks of Furness complained to the King about the terms of ownership. The King settled the dispute by claiming the Borrowdale land as his own; then he sold it back to Fountains Abbey for £2. Quite how that all left everyone in regard to the camel, I couldn’t tell you, but it does at least explain how the valley as we know it now took shape.

Ruin of a sheepfold in front of Eagle Crag — Ruin of a sheep fold in front of Eagle Crag

From over the fence, a Herdwick hogg eyes me with indifference. A National Trust information board proclaims the charity’s commitment to protecting these indigenous Lakeland sheep against agricultural shifts in favour of more commercial breeds. That this Stonethwaite meadow is about 90% full of Texels makes it look like a losing battle; but hardy fell sheep lamb a little later than the lowland breeds. Over the coming weeks, the new-borns and their mothers will be moved into these in-bye pastures for the richer grass, and Herdies will again predominate.

As I’m counting sheep, a teenage girl in a pink top skips past me. She doesn’t look kitted out for a long walk, but as I cross the bridge over Greenup Gill and turn right beside the drystone wall that tracks its course, I catch the odd fleeting glimpse of pink through the trees. A little further on, I find her sitting on a small wooden footbridge, staring wistfully down the valley. Perhaps this her favourite spot, but something in the look of wonder on her face suggests she’s here on holiday, escaping the town for the Easter weekend and already transfixed by this novel environment. In the hazy sunlight of early morning, it does seem the stuff of magic.

Across Greenup Gill, people are emerging from a parade of tents, yawning, stretching and looking equally awe-struck, for a few hundred metres further on is a sight of breathtaking magnificence. At the confluence of two streams the formidable face of Eagle Crag splits the valley into Greenup and Langstrath. In geographical terms, the fell is simply a northern buttress of High Raise, but anyone with a beating heart and the faintest spark of fire in their blood cannot help but agree with Wainwright that “it is, to the eye of the artist or the mountaineer, a far worthier object than the parent fell rising behind”. Its north western face is a daunting rampart of rock, rising defiantly skyward, impregnable. Its eastern flank is a sheer wall. In between, the initial slope is grassy if alarmingly steep, but it gives way to crags well below the summit. It would seem unassailable, but I’ve done this walk before, and I know Wainwright isn’t fibbing when he says there’s a single line of weakness in its defences.

Eagle Crag from Stonethwaite — Eagle Crag

When I reach the confluence of streams, Langstrath opens up to the west, stretching out to Bow Fell and Esk Pike. A footbridge affords a way across Greenup Gill, and a plaque reveals it was rebuilt to commemorate Gordon Hallworth, a member of the Manchester Mountaineering Club who died of exhaustion in the valley in 1939. I register quiet relief that Gordon didn’t die trying to scale Eagle Crag, then I realise that’s uncharitable and unlikely to aid my chances of passing through the eye of a needle, should the need ever arise.

Over the footbridge, I turn left, climb a stile, and cross two fields at the foot of Eagle Crag. Through a gap in a tumbledown wall, I reach the beginning of Wainwright’s ascent and start up the unforgiving incline, heading for the knoll of Bleak How above. A path emerges, swinging beneath the knoll then climbing to a fence and a rickety wooden stile. The valley already looks a long way down, and opposite, the slopes of Ullscarf are a calotype of umber shadow and sepia sun-bleached earth.

Beyond the stile, the narrow stony path climbs between a wall of crag and grass slopes that fall away alarmingly (but the cliffs above are peppered with spindly rowan trees, and rowan trees are the Celtic symbol of life and protection, so I watch my step and place my trust in an ancient belief).

I scramble up a small gully to a heathery knoll beneath a cliff. Here, the path turns right, but a short detour provides a magnificent view of Eagle Crag’s vertical face: a brutal wall rising indomitably from the valley below.

I cross a narrow ledge to a series of rock terraces above Heron Crag. The great stone bulwark of Sergeant’s Crag rises to a dome ahead, its steep side plunging to Langstrath Beck. The long knotty ridge of Glaramara encloses the valley on the other bank, with the iconic profiles of Great Gable and Honister Crag (Black Star) standing proud beyond. At the valley’s head, the slopes rise abruptly toward England’s highest ground.

Above me, a series of small rock walls, white in the sunlight, separate the heather-clad terraces. They rise in a succession of narrowing tiers toward the summit. The heather is turning olive with new growth, and it’s leavened by lighter shoots of bilberry.

The terrace tapers to almost nothing as it approaches Sergeant’s Crag, so the only way is up. A faint path exists (for the eagle-eyed). It zigzags up through the levels, but it’s easily lost, and the real trick is to look for any breach in the rocks that allows access to the ground above. Spotting the way becomes a game—a real-life Snakes and Ladders (without the snakes, hopefully). It’s exhilarating, and it’s almost too soon when I reach the sloping slab of rock and the modest cairn that mark the summit.

It was here, in 1975, that a woman got a nasty shock, for attached to this very slab was a plaque inscribed with the words, “You are now in Wolfman country”. Terrified, she fled the scene and complained to the National Trust. The Wolfman was, in fact, a Borrowdale resident by the name of John Jackson, so nicknamed for his red hair and extravagant beard. The plaque had been carved as an affectionate joke by a stonemason friend, but given the alarm it caused, The National Trust removed it, and it stood for many years by the door of the café at Knotts View in Stonethwaite.

Wolfman or no, this summit is an eyrie worthy of an eagle, and a peerless lookout over Alice’s gift.

For the full Wolfman story, visit Richard Jennings’ website:

The Wolfman of Eagle Crag

This article first appeared in the March/April 2020 edition of Lakeland Walker magazine:

http://www.lakeland-walker.com/

Fell Walk, General, History, Literature

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

The Good, The Sad, and the Crafty

Crag Quarter

The Poet of Kentmere

Reservoir Dogs

Hall Cove—Source of the Kent

The Mock Tithe Commissioner

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