Category Archives: History

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

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.

The Skiddaw Hermit

March 14, 2021 George Kitching 26 Comments

The Victorian era opened the floodgates for Lakeland tourism, and a fair few of those visitors made their way up Skiddaw. Most came back down again and went home, but the mountain took one troubled soul to its breast. He lived wild on the fell and became known as the Skiddaw Hermit. A trawl through an archive of 19^th century newspapers reveals the poignant story of a gifted man, suffering with mental health issues and seeking solace among the summits and woodlands of Lakeland. It’s a story I won’t attempt to retell. I’ve collated the reports—I’ll simply let them speak for themselves.

The Westmorland Gazette and Kendal Advertiser—9th June 1866

Reproduced from an article that first appeared in the Edinburgh Courant:

“The vagaries of a man who has turned recluse and taken up his abode in a cave on Skiddaw are exciting the attention of tourists in the Cumberland Lake District this season. It appears that about three years ago an eccentric-looking man, of tall and slender build, a pale complexion, and speaking with a Scotch accent, paid a visit to Keswick, where he occupied lodgings for a week. During that period, he made frequent excursions up Skiddaw, always returning with his clothes covered with mud, and his mysterious wanderings excited considerable attention at the time, various stories being set afloat of his search for precious metals or a hidden treasure. In the course of a few days, however, the man left his lodgings and disappeared, and the mystery that had surrounded his frequent expeditions up the mountain was solved. It was found that the eccentric being had been searching for a cave in which he might take up his abode; but not having met with much success, he had made himself a “nest” on the breast of the mountain, and there he had taken up his abode for the last three years. A tourist who had visited the man, thus describes the strange “cave” and the personal appearance and habits of the recluse.

‘A visit to the place showed us a circular hole, situated about 300 yards up the breast of the mountain, and partly on the edge of a cliff; it is about three foot in depth, and four foot in diameter, which, after assiduous labour, he has contrived to line with moss, &c. The roof, or lid, is portable, and made of reeds brought from the edge of the lake, and curiously wrought together in the form of an umbrella, so that when he retires to rest he shuts it down from the inside. He has resided there nearly three years, and has stood alike the scorching rays of summer and the snow and storms of winter, although it has been seen nearly half filled with water. His appearance is ludicrous in the extreme. His hair is thrown over his shoulders and hangs far down his back, and forms the only protection to the head; his clothes seem to have been the height of fashion 20 years ago, and are quite threadbare; he wears no shoes, and goes on his peregrinations in stockinged feet. He gives the name of Smith, and judging by his language, belongs to Scotland, but when questioned on the subject gives an evasive answer. He makes almost daily visits to Keswick, where he purchases tea and sugar, mixing and eating them dry. His only cooking apparatus is a small pan, in which he cooks messes of very questionable ingredients, boiling them by the aid of a lighted tallow. Through the limited accommodation of his habitation he is obliged to lie in a circular position, much resembling a dog in a kennel. He has quite a passion for water-colour drawing, and has proved himself no mean artist. He enjoys very good health, considering his mode of living, but occasionally has a touch of rheumatism.’

The cave on Skiddaw is not, however, his only haunt. He occasionally favours Helvellyn with a visit and at times extends his peregrinations to Saddleback. Occasionally he seems to assume the appearance of a religious fanatic, and wanders about the hills preaching to the sheep; but in some of his descents into the vale his appearance frightened some of the peaceful inhabitants, and the police having had their attention directed to him he recently underwent incarceration in the county gaol for disorderly conduct at Keswick. While in prison he painted a good portrait of the governor, but it had been a great grief to him to have his hair cut. Having finished his term of imprisonment he has now gone back to his old haunts, a cleaner if not a wiser man.”

The Banffshire Journal—7th Dec 1869

“The recluse… does not confine himself to a solitude as strict as that of a medieval hermit. On the contrary, he is often to be met with on the roads or among the fells, carrying under his arm the sketching board and painting materials he uses in his secondary and more common-place vocation of travelling artist. His appearance is striking in the extreme; and anyone encountering him unawares on one of the lonely roads of the district might well be startled at first sight of so singular a being. No matter what the weather be, the Hermit is never provided with more clothing than a canvas shirt, open at the breast, and trousers, or rather knickerbockers, of coarse material. Shoes, stockings, and hat he despises altogether. His features are strongly marked, and his countenance betokens more than ordinary intelligence. A profusion of black, matted hair thickly covers his head and the lower portion of his face.”

Temporarily quitting his Skiddaw quarters, he has at present encamped in a wood a little above the village of Greenodd…

(The correspondent meets the Hermit on the road and engages him in conversation…)

“The morning was bitterly cold, the fells being white with snow, but the Hermit was, as usual, only clothed in the scanty attire I have already described. He was by no means averse to entering into conversation and informed me that from a boy he disliked wearing much clothing, and otherwise conforming to the restraints of civilised society, and that, to quote his own words, ‘he could not live except when free and in the open air’. He stated that when he is in his tent he is always in bed, said bed being either a collection of brackens or whins placed on the bare earth. In this recumbent posture he paints, his tent being so situated so that, from an aperture in front, he obtains an extensive view, and studies the effects of sunrise and sunset. On these occasions he eschews even his canvas shirt and trousers, and is in a state of complete nudity. Discovering him to be a Scotchman by his accent (a fact which I had not known before), I enquired what part of the old country he came from, and received the somewhat evasive answer, ‘Far North’. “Inverness,’ I suggested? “No; Aberdeenshire.’ ‘Turriff?’ ‘Yes, near there.’ By dint of questioning, I then extracted from him the following information.

His name is George Smith. His parents were ‘country people’ living in the neighbourhood of Turriff. He knew Banff well, having lived there for a short time about the year 1848, when he occupied himself in painting, and he revisited the town in 1859 for one day, when the death of a relative brought him to the district. He attended Marischal College for one session, and appears to have conducted himself creditably, but the confined mode of living proving extremely distasteful to him, he abandoned his studies prematurely. He did not inform me when he adopted his present wandering life and singular habits. He occasionally, but rarely, enters towns, where his extraordinary appearance gets him into trouble. He is, however, quite harmless, unless when under the influence of drink, which excites him for the time to frenzy. His natural abilities are evidently of no mean order, and it is to be regretted that he has allowed himself to lapse into his present semi-savage condition.”

Westmorland Gazette – 8th February 1890:

W. J Browne of Troutbeck writes:

“After leaving Skiddaw, the hermit took up his residence near the foot of Windermere Lake. Here, however, he did not remain long; but sometime in 1870, he made his appearance nearer to the head of the lake. The place he selected this time was New Close Wood, a wooded hill, about mid-way between the Low Wood Hotel and the village of Troutbeck; and certainly, on this occasion, his selection of a locality for his residence did much credit to him as judge of romantic and picturesque scenery. The appearance of the hermit whenever he took his “walks abroad” in the Windermere district, differed some what from the account given by the tourist in the Keswick district. His habilments were nothing more or less than simply an old shirt and pair of trousers, the latter either cut short or turned up to the knees. As for shoes and socks, he eschewed them entirely; and how his “poor feet” escaped being cut and lacerated by the many sharp stones of the district was a marvel. His hair, which was black, was not so long as previously described, but was thick, matted, and unkempt. His appearance, especially when seen in the gloaming, was of a weird and uncanny description. It was while he was residing here in the spring of 1871, that the writer of this notice made his personal acquaintance in connection with the taking of the census of that year. To find the hermit “at home” it was necessary to visit him fairly early in the morning. Accordingly, the hermit was found between seven and eight reclining in his tent, or perhaps wigwam would be the more correct term. This was a heap of brushwood, locally called “chats” that protected him from the dampness of the ground; upon this was spread an old blanket in which he rolled himself up at nights, and over all was stretched something that looked like part of an old tent covering to keep off the rain. The wigwam—if it may be so termed—was just sufficiently large to allow him to lie down at full length, and turn over. Upon the schedule being presented to him to fill up, which, in his case, would not be a very lengthy operation, he readily entered into the matter, and promised to have it filled up by the appointed time. Upon looking it over, he observed that the last column specified whether “insane, lunatic, or imbecile” and, looking up with a droll expression on his face, he inquired how that column was to be filled up. At that time, he was considered to be more eccentric than insane; or perhaps like the immortal Don Quixote, he was sane on every subject but one; as his conversation at that period was both rational and intellectual. Upon the schedule being examined, it was found that his name was George Smith, and that he was a native of Scotland; his age was given as forty-six, and the insanity column was left blank. It appears he had come of respectable parentage, as he had received a very liberal education at one of the Scottish universities. He was no mean artist, and was patronised by many of the yeomen, farmers, and inn-keepers of the district, who employed him to paint their portraits. These portraits were executed in oil upon a species of mill-board, demy size, specially prepared for the purpose. Had he given his mind more to the purpose, he might have turned out some very fair specimens. But as it was, he just worked enough to supply his immediate pecuniary wants. He remained in New Close Wood for some time longer, until several benevolent and liberal-minded gentlemen made an effort to reclaim and civilise him. For this purpose he was provided with decent and suitable clothing; and when thus equipped he was not at all like the same man. As Smith, as we must now call him, was gifted with a fair amount of artistic skill, a situation was obtained for him in the photographic studio of Mr. Bowness, of Ambleside. Here, however, he did not long remain. His insanity appeared to increase, and, although his friends might suitably clothe him, they could not clothe him in his right mind. Soon after this he wandered back again to Scotland…”

Banffshire Reporter—18th July 1873:

“At present, he has paid a sort of professional visit to his native parish of Forglen, and he has taken up house in a way that seems most congenial to his fancy…The “house”, which is entirely of his own manufacture, is of the most primitive kind and could be erected with much less trouble than the wigwam of an American Indian. It simply consists of branches of broom built in the form of a rustic arbor…It is situated a few hundred yards up the private road to Forglen Home Farm…It is not at all unlike a large bird’s nest, and in the present weather, it looks to be dry and comfortable enough, although the proprietor does not think it would be impervious to a continued shower of rain…It is in a very romantic situation, the artist’s eye evidently having been charmed with the beauty of the surroundings…Of the man himself, so much has already been said by those better able to speak on such a subject than us, that we would prefer to leave him as he is. In appearance, he is far from repulsive, as many people with an aberration of intellect are…That there is a decided want of “balance” no-one who listens to him five minutes could doubt.”

The Edinburgh Evening News—10th June 1876:

The East Aberdeenshire Observer of yesterday states that George Smith, “The Skiddaw Hermit,” who was an object of much interest some years ago, has escaped from Banff Lunatic Asylum, and is supposed to be making his way back to Skiddaw. He was an artist of great skill, but has always been subject to insanity, and has lately been suffering from religious excitement, believing he was an Apostle, and could work miracles. His friends belong to Banffshire, and had placed him in the asylum.

Westmorland Gazette – 8th February 1890:

“Besides being a very clever portrait painter, he (the hermit) was endowed with phenological skill, and a writer of his life adds that he often heard him, “delineating characters with as much minuteness and truthfulness as if he had known them all their lives… He was converted by Captain S. V. Henslowe, of Seacombe, near Liverpool, who preached the Gospel several times in Bowness Bay. Soon after his conversion he paid more respect to his dress, and instead of appearing in his Skiddaw outfit—a pair of trousers rolled up to his knees, and a wincey shirt—he was attired in a new suit of clothes, and wore, what he had seldom done before, a hat to cover his profuse, dark, bushy hair. With respect to his dislike of sectarianism, he could not endure it in any form. If he was averse to the habits of society in the past time of his life, much more was he averse to the formula and rules of the various churches and chapels. Nothing but the “one thing”—The word of God, without rule, law, or system added—would he have to do with. Once he was persuaded to go into a chapel at Windermere, but he came out with the protestation, “Ye worship he know not what”. In 1873 he left Windermere and went home to his friends in Banffshire, but with the full intention of returning to his friends in Windermere, amid the scenes he loved so well. But it was otherwise ordered, and he was soon placed… first in Banffshire Asylum, then Aberdeen Asylum, and finally into Banffshire Asylum again, where he died on the 18th of September, 1876. Dr. M. Cullock, of that asylum, writing to a friend respecting him, wrote:—That although of weak mind, “I do believe he was a true Christian. He was fond of his Bible to the last”. I think enough has been given to show what spirit he was of, and even amid much weakness of mind, he had a very fine intellect, which even then stood out in beautiful outline through the fading light of his last days on earth. Once to a friend near Bowness, he said, “I am a worshipper of Nature. But, ah! she is a fickle goddess. I never know where I have her. Sometimes I lay down on a mossy bank, and she is so lovely that I drop asleep, while she bathes my face in sunshine, and fans my locks with soft breeze; and lo! when I wake up again, in hour or two, she is frowning on me coldly, and clattering the hailstones against my teeth”.

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

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, History, Legend, Literature, Natural History, Nature

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

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

An Unkindness of Ravens

January 19, 2020 George Kitching 20 Comments

How Castle Rock of Triermain got its name

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guendolen has an ulterior motive for seducing the unsuspecting king:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Is My Church

November 24, 2019 George Kitching 29 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jones describes the Pinnacle as;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lord’s Rake from The Rake’s Progress

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

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

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

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

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

The Pinnacle and Pisgah from the West Wall Traverse

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

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

Wastwater from the top of the Lord’s Rake

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

Great Gable from the top of the Lord’s Rake

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

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

The Pinnacle and Pisgah from the plateau above Deep Ghyll

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

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

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

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

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

Pedestrian Verse

October 20, 2019 George Kitching 21 Comments

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

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

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

Grisedale Tarn and Seat Sandal from Fairfield

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grisedale Tarn between Fairfield, Seat Sandal and Dollywagon Pike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And beer”, replies the other.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grisedale Tarn and Dollywagon Pike from Seat Sandal

To the Shores of Lake Placid

September 15, 2019 George Kitching 20 Comments

Landscape of Liberty: from Auschwitz to Ambleside

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

Lingmoor Fell

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

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

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

Windermere from Brown Haw — Windermere from Brown How

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Merz Barn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Auschwitz to Ambleside

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jewish Prisoners Arrive at Theresienstadt

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

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

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

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

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

Exhibitions and Further Reading

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

Lake District Holocaust Project
Windermere Library
Ellerthwaite
Windermere
LA23 2AJ

Tel: 015394 88395

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

Visit the Merz Barn at:

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

Telephone: 015394 37309

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

Fell Walk, General, History, Nature, Scramble

Hit the Rake Jack

August 18, 2019 George Kitching 23 Comments

Jack’s Rake and Dungeon Ghyll Force

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking down the first section of Jack’s Rake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Green Crag, Harter Fell & Hard Knott

Further Reading / Sources

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The Westmorland Gazette and Kendal Advertiser—9th June 1866

The Banffshire Journal—7th Dec 1869

Westmorland Gazette – 8th February 1890:

Banffshire Reporter—18th July 1873:

The Edinburgh Evening News—10th June 1876:

Westmorland Gazette – 8th February 1890:

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