Category Archives: History

Postcard from the Edge

July 21, 2019 George Kitching 28 Comments

Blencathra via Sharp Edge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I think he’s in shock,” he’s says.

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

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

Author on the Edge (photo by Richard Jennings)

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

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

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

Sharp Edge and Scales Tarn from Atkinson Pike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ocean Rain

June 23, 2019 George Kitching 26 Comments

Red Screes, Mountain Bagging and Memories of War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zoe Little on Red Screes summit — Zoe Little

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links

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

Hayley Webb Mountain Adventures

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

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

Fell Walk, General, History, Legend

UNDERWORLD

May 26, 2019 George Kitching 9 Comments

Glenridding Dodd, Sheffield Pike, Greenside Mine & Operation Orpheus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glenridding Dodd and Ullswater from Heron Pike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Riddle of the sands

March 24, 2019 George Kitching 18 Comments

Humphrey Head

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mountains and Margarine

January 20, 2019 George Kitching 20 Comments

Bonington, Beatrix, Kurt & the Borrowdale Caveman

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

Man vs Mountain

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

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

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

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

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

The Professor of Adventure

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

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

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

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

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

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

Millican Dalton's Cave — Millican Dalton’s Cave

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

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

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

Mier Bitte

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mrs Heelis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fell Walk, General, History, Legend

The Beauty of Buttermere

October 28, 2018 George Kitching 8 Comments

Rannerdale, Black Sail, Haystacks & High Stile

Buttermere is a valley of astounding natural beauty. A journey around its hills and hostelries uncovers stories of Dark Age battles, confidence tricksters and a shepherdess whose face and misfortune wooed the nation.

“I’m sure it’s her”, says Tim emphatically. We’re intently watching a girl swim across Crummock Water. This isn’t as lecherous as it might sound: we’re on the summit of Rannerdale Knotts, so she’s far enough away to render any essential features scarcely discernible. Indeed, the idea that she’s a “she” is, at best, wildly speculative, which does kind of call into question Tim’s sudden conviction that she’s the author of a wild swimming blog he’s been reading.

“How do you know?” I ask.

“She has a trademark orange toe float”, he explains.

She is indeed trailing something orange. I get the concept of a water-tight container in which to put your keys, phone, flip flops, T shirt and shorts, but why on earth would you tie it to your toe? Evidently, I think this out loud.

“TOW float, duck egg!”, exclaims Tim, in disbelief. “T.O.W. as in something you tow behind you, not something you tie to your toe.”

(Ever wished you’d thought it through before asking a question?)

In spring, Rannerdale Knotts is famed for the abundant bluebells that carpet its flanks. It’s also supposed to be the scene of an epic battle, where indigenous Celts and Norse settlers joined forces to see off the invading Normans. According to legend, the bluebells sprang from blood of the vanquished. Now, in August, they’re long gone, replaced with ubiquitous bracken, but the colossal mountain backdrop of Grasmoor, emerging from cloud, is enough to inspire visions of Valhalla.

Dark age warriors are centuries departed, but a Herdwick lamb peeks over the crenellations of a little rock tower, looking every bit the king of the castle. According to one theory, the Herdwicks came over with the Vikings, so perhaps this one’s guarding the top against marauding French ewes like Charmoise or Charollais. I can’t speak for Tim’s lineage but my Dad’s forays into family history suggest ours was a Viking name. The lamb regards us with relaxed indifference; perhaps he senses a common bloodline.

It’s late Thursday afternoon. We arrived in Buttermere as the rain stopped and took advantage of brightening horizons to climb up here. The air is seldom sweeter than after rain, and as the emerging sun vaporises the damp, this exquisitely beautiful valley works profound enchantments.

A couple of hours later we’re sitting outside the Fish Inn. In Wordsworth’s time the pub was home to Mary Robinson. A shepherdess and muse to the Romantic poets, this landlord’s daughter was known as the Beauty of Buttermere. Writer and journalist, Joseph Budworth described her thus: “her face was a fine oval face, with full eyes and lips as sweet as vermillion”, (which is a bit strong, given she was only fifteen at the time).

Budsworth’s words made Mary famous, and men came from far and wide to set eyes on her. By the time she was twenty-five, she’d attracted the attention of a dashing aristocratic colonel by the name of the Augustus Hope. Hope swept Mary off her feet with a proposal of marriage, which she gladly accepted.

All was not as it seemed, however. When Coleridge waxed lyrical about the wedding in a London newspaper, friends of the real Augustus Hope, unmasked Mary’s husband as an impostor. In reality, he was James Hatfield, a confidence trickster and bigamist, already wanted in connection with a string of thefts and forged cheques.

Hatfield fled to Wales, where he was apprehended, then convicted and hanged in Carlisle, leaving Mary with a baby that tragically died of pneumonia. But her story tugged at the nation’s heartstrings, and Mary was crowdfunded out of hardship; she later happily married a Caldbeck farmer.

It’s not the Beauty of Buttermere that’s fanning the ardour of the stag party at the next table, it’s Ursula Andress. They’re all getting misty-eyed and nostalgic about “that scene” in Dr. No, where she emerges from the waves in “that bikini”. All bar one that is. The young lad at the end, who’s half their age, has no idea who they’re on about. He has to endure a round of hectoring on how he has missed out in life, and he resigns himself to making do with his generation’s Bond movie equivalent—Daniel Craig in budgie-smugglers.

Up the road in the Bridge Inn, It’s a dog that stealing hearts. A beautiful, big (and I mean BIG) Gordon setter, who’s brought his own blanket and dragged it under a table barely large enough to accommodate him. He now lies napping to the universal dotage of the bar.

Back at the Buttermere Youth Hostel (our home for the night), we sit outside on a wooden bench, sharing a hip flask of single malt with some young Scottish lads. They’re on a road trip around the north of England. As night falls over the water, and nothing but the distant sound of waterfalls and the occasional hoot of a Herdwick disturbs the tranquility, they don’t take much persuading to abandon tomorrow’s trip to Hadrian’s Wall and spend another day in heavenly Buttermere.

We awake to heavy rain, but heartened by an improving forecast, we resolve to wile away a lazy morning in the village. We decamp from the hostel to Croft House Farm Cafe for cake and the finest wines known to humanity (well coffee at any rate). Outside, amid the procession of wet people, the Gordon setter from the Bridge drags his owner along the pavement.

Around lunchtime, we wander up to the church, not sure whether the rain is really easing or if it’s just our wishful thinking. Inside, a small plaque in the window commemorates the surrounding fells’ greatest apostle, Alfred Wainwright. The inscription invites us to raise our eyes to Haystacks, where his ashes lie. As we do, the rain stops.

We’re staying at the Black Sail Hut tonight. Once an old shepherd’s bothy, it’s now England’s remotest Youth Hostel, tucked away in the wildest corner of neighbouring Ennerdale. With the forecast holding good, we’ll take in Haystacks en route.

We grab our rucksacks and head down to the waterline and the path that tracks the south-western shore, under the wooded lower slopes of Red Pike and High Stile. In the warm humidity, with low cloud wisps hugging the fells, Buttermere assumes a tropical demeanour. After weeks of drought, the downpours have brought forth a multitude of green, the air vital with the scent of fresh growth. The cloud rises above fell tops, and bands of purple heather colour their upper contours. Ahead, the plunging profile of Fleetwith Edge emerges teasingly by degrees: mists disperse to reveal a daunting ridge, resplendent in precipitous drama. Buttermere, becalmed, is a platinum mirror, a fuzzy-edged reflection of everything above.

When we reach the water’s end, we follow the stream to Gatesgarth farm and track around the nose of Fleetwith Pike to find the path that climbs from Warnscale Bottom.

I lose Tim momentarily as he stops to admire a dry-stone wall. This is becoming a regular occurrence. Tim lives in Sheffield and does occasional work for a friend who runs a walling business. He’s developing an artisan’s eye for craftsmanship. He tells me the Human League’s Phil Oakey is often to be seen about the city, looking every bit the country gent in immaculate tweeds walking immaculately groomed dogs, but Tim’s boss has come to dread their encounters. Not that Oakey isn’t friendly and convivial, quite the opposite, he’s just so interested in the art of walling, he’ll talk so long and ask so many questions that it’s impossible to get any work done. This plays out in my head like a Viz cartoon: “Oh no, it’s Phil Oakey”—wallers with deadlines diving for cover behind their half-laid structures as a rueful Phil saunters by, singing Don’t You Want Me Baby.

The path climbs steadily above Warnscale Beck. Across the stream, Haystacks’ northern face is a sheer wall of crag. Height brings fresh perspectives on Buttermere below, molten silver now as a blanket of cloud hangs above. In the distance, arcing right, Crummock Water glistens under brighter skies pregnant with promise.

False promise as it turns out. By the time we reach Dubs Bottom it’s mizzling. We shelter in Dubs Hut bothy to see if it blows over, but as the drizzle sets in, we retrieve waterproofs and juggle layers to affect a balance between dryness and heat exhaustion. Then we head out.

The stream is in spate and the crossing at the ford, precarious. An enterprising soul has turned a narrow plank into a makeshift bridge and we try our luck on it. It’s something of a balancing act, being so thin and bending worryingly in the middle. Once across, we climb through the crags into cloud.

Today, Innominate Tarn is a scene from Arthurian legend, its solemn waters evaporating into mist. This is where Wainwright’s ashes were scattered, and we pause to pay our respects. In the murk, this most beguiling of fells has its other treasures well-hidden. We strike out for the summit but peak too early (literally), and with the fog thickening, it seems sensible to head down. Discernible landmarks recrystallise as we approach Scarth Gap, and by the time we reach Black Sail Hut, the rain has stopped and there’s a hint of sun.

We’ve stayed twice before, and I’ve blogged about each visit. The first, A Walk on the Wild Side, starts at Wastwater and recalls the murder of Margaret Hodge, dubbed The Lady in The Lake by the press, when her body was discovered by a diver. The second, Back to Black Sail, riffs on the close resemblance of one of our fellow guests to Danny, the drug dealer from Withnail and I. James, the warden, greets us like old friends and reveals he’s been reading the posts.

“You’re not detectives, are you?”, he asks with a smile. “There’s always a murder or something nefarious”. He glances at the register, “I’ve put you down as Sheffield and Steel”.

Tim heads off for a shower. I buy a nice cold beer and take it outside, where two parties of women are already basking in the peace and disarming beauty of valley. One lot are from Whitley Bay and full of stories of the Northumbrian trails. The others are up from Kent for a weekend “off grid”. I can see from their faces, Ennerdale is already working its magic.

They’re also two Proseccos in, so when Tim emerges from shower in nothing but a skimpy towel, he has to run a gauntlet of wolf whistles. (Move over Daniel Craig). Tim dives for the sanctuary of the men’s dorm and meets Dermot, a lovely guy who’s walked over from Borrowdale by way of Sty Head.

Over supper and a few drinks, the conversation flows easily. There’s much laughter and much discussion of tomorrow’s plans. Most of us are heading for Buttermere via routes of varying ambition.

When he finishes his shift, James joins us for a drink and we learn that he grew up round here, went off to university, but came back— so strong was the lure of the valley. Working with people and keeping this close to nature is his ideal. He speaks with such passion about the landscape and the wildlife. He talks about stumbling upon abandoned SAS camps: the SAS conduct field training here, and when they make a camp, they construct fantastic windbreaks from woven branches—a lucky find for walkers or wild campers. Take note, however: if an iron tripod is still in place over the fire ashes, it means they’re coming back. James is sure he must spend hours in their crosshairs when they’re conducting sniper training.

In the morning, I write in the visitors’ book, “That concludes our enquiries for now, but further investigations will be necessary—Sheffield and Steel”.

We step out into sunshine and head up to Scarth Gap. Near the top, we catch up with the party from Kent. They’re staying another night and plan to spend the day exploring Buttermere. As we exchange goodbyes, June, the chief wolf-whistler, says earnestly, “Last night was so nice, I really hope the conversation this evening is as convivial”. A little further on we bump into Kathryn, a friend of mine, who says she’s just seen a group of teenagers heading for Black Sail with a massive ghetto blaster, blaring out bass-heavy beats and auto-tuned inanities. Oh no. I’m sorry, June.

We’re heading for Buttermere too, over the High Stile range, but with a clear sky above, we’re compelled to revisit Haystacks first. The summit is not so coy about revealing its riches today, and we join a procession of pilgrims all scrambling up its stony paths to wander around its heather-clad plateaux, climb its rocky turrets and linger by its glistening tarns. Across Ennerdale, Pillar is a redoubtable giant, thrusting forward a muscular shoulder; over Warnscale, Fleetwith Pike and Dale Head wear matching cloaks of purple and viridian.

Buttermere is deep metallic blue as we return to the col, shadowed by the waves of cloud rolling over High Crag. As we reach Scarth Gap, they clear, revealing High Crag’s sheer pyramidal profile. There’s no other way up but straight. It’s a relentless slog, but strangely exhilarating. We get into an impromptu relay with a Geordie couple as we take turns at pressing on and pausing to rest. At the top, the views rob what little breath the ascent has left us.

Ahead, the higher summit of High Stile is crowned with cotton wool. As we approach, we climb into the cloud. It’s thin and wispy and not as oppressive as yesterday, but still a tad disorienting. In the gloom, we meet a couple who have lost their bearings. Like us, they’re aiming for Red Pike, but they’re walking back towards High Crag. We check the map and take a compass bearing, and all set off together in what we hope is the right direction. We find reassurance in a line of cairns, and as we start to descend from High Stile’s summit, the cloud lifts and Red Pike lies before us. The way as far as the summit is easy, but the descent to Bleaberry Tarn drops down loose scree as steep as the slopes of High Crag. It’s not without its thrills, but it’s still a relief to reach the water’s edge, and we sit awhile, watching the ripples lap the rocks.

A succession of walkers passes us, then we notice someone waving. It’s Dermot. He’d been thinking of walking over Brandreth and Fleetwith Pike to Honister, then ascending Dale Head and wending his way back to Buttermere over Robinson and High Snockrigg. In the sober light of morning, he clipped his ambition and basically followed our route, but ascended Haystacks from the back, via the Coast to Coast route that climbs to the col with Brandreth. It’s great to see him again. He joins us by the shore, and after a while, we make the descent to Buttermere together. On the way down we discover Dermot was at university in Sheffield. He asks about all his favourite haunts, and Tim updates him on which are long gone, which have changed beyond recognition and which are still much the same. We swap walking stories, marvel at the magnificence of Buttermere and Crummock Water and plan new adventures: Fleetwith Pike, The Newlands fells, Mellbreak, Ard Crags, Whiteless Pike and Grasmoor.

Below Grasmoor, lies Rannerdale Knotts. In six or seven months, it will be blue with flowers budded on the blood of fallen Normans. When you gaze on the utter beauty of this valley, it’s no mystery the Celts fought so fiercely to defend it.

Cumbria was one of the last strongholds of the Ancient Britons. When the kingdom eventually fell to the waves of European invaders, many of its Celtic poets, chieftains and churchmen fled to Wales. And England became England. Angleterre: land of the Angles (German) and the Saxons (German), and later, the Vikings (Scandinavian) and the Normans (French).

Which, I suppose, begs the question: does the truly hard-line position on freeing ourselves from Europe and regaining our sovereignty mean kicking us English out of England and giving it back to Wales?

Rees-Mogg’s a decidedly Welsh-sounding name, don’t you think?

Fell Walk, General, History, Legend

This Land is Your Land

August 19, 2018 George Kitching 7 Comments

A Dragon’s Back and a Right to Roam

An away trip to the Peak District, to walk the iconic profile of Chrome Hill, provokes a rumination on the right to roam, the mass trespass of 1932, and the fact I owe my life to the Ramblers’ Association. En route, we get spooked by the Quiet Woman in Earl Sterndale and have a chance encounter with the Sundance Kid.

Revolution

In 1917, the tyranny of the Russian Tsar had fallen to the hammer and sickle in a matter of months, but in Britain, a slow-burn revolution smouldered. Every inch as rooted in class conflict and social injustice, its aims were humbler: they demanded not the overthrow of the ruling elite, but the right to roam; the right for open access to land that had once been common, but for the last four centuries had been systematically enclosed—taken from the many and given to the few. Enclosure had swept away the old feudal system, where land was worked collectively for subsistence, and created a nation of landless poor and landed gentry. The land itself had become a commodity to be owned and worked for profit. Protest songs didn’t start with Bob Dylan—in England, a sixteenth century bard penned this:

Hang the man and flog the woman
That steals the goose from off the common
But leave the greater felon loose
That steals the common from the goose.

With industrialisation, the massed ranks of rural poor flocked to the cities to work the mills, mines and factories of the industrial north. New hardships, diseases and health problems awaited. By the beginning of the twentieth century the physical and spiritual benefits of the great outdoors were widely appreciated. In increasing numbers, men and women would escape the urban sprawl at weekends to seek out clean air and green space, and increasingly, they found their way blocked. England’s green and pleasant land had become a playground for the rich elite, populated with game and shooting lodges. Commoners were not welcome.

“We ramblers, after a hard week’s work, in smokey towns and cities, go out rambling for relaxation and fresh air. And we find the finest rambling country is closed to us … Our request, or demand, for access to all peaks and uncultivated moorland is nothing unreasonable”. So spoke Benny Rothman in his own defence at Derby Assizes. Twenty-one-year-old Benny was on trial for helping organise the mass trespass of 1932: on April 24^th, over four hundred men and women left Sheffield and Manchester to walk together in protest over Kinder Scout, in what is now the Peak District. The land was owned by the Duke of Devonshire, and he deployed a band of keepers armed with clubs to forcibly deter the trespassers. A full-scale fight broke out, and the keepers were easily overwhelmed. But the judge’s sympathies lay with the landowner, and Benny was jailed, along with four of his friends.

The sentences caused outrage and fuelled popular support for the right to roam. In 1935, the Ramblers’ Association was formed to advocate for walkers’ rights at a national level and to promote the benefits of rambling to ordinary people. Their efforts eventually bore fruit: in 1951, the Peak District became England’s first National Park. It was known as the “lungs of England”. By the end of the decade, the Lake District, Snowdonia, Dartmoor, Pembrokeshire Coast, North York Moors, Yorkshire Dales, Exmoor, Northumberland and Brecon Beacons had all followed suit. It took until the year 2000, however, for the Countryside and Rights of Way Act to secure open access for the public to all uncultivated upland and downland.

Away Trip

This is on my mind for two reasons: I’m driving south on the M6 for a weekend’s walking in the Peak District with my friend Tim; and the other night, my mum mentioned that my granny and grandad met on a Ramblers’ Association walk in the Lake District. I never knew. A love of treading the Lakeland fells had evidently skipped a generation in our family, but now my mountain passion seems less like an aberration and more a resumption of an older family tradition. My granny came from the mining village of Astley, near Manchester. She was warm, outgoing, outspoken and would laugh easily and heartily. My grandad was a southerner—serious, reserved, shy and meticulous. They complimented each other perfectly, but they most likely would never have met had it not been for the Ramblers’ Association—so without the Ramblers’ Association, I wouldn’t be here.

Beyond the urban sprawl of Greater Manchester, I crawl through Glossop. Under an overcast sky in dimming light, it appears drab and austere. I give way to a pedestrian at a pelican crossing. He’s in his early twenties, shoulders hunched, belly spilling over his belt, lank, greasy hair, plastered thinly across a forehead that wears the perennial look of defeat; his T-shirt bears the moniker, “the Sundance Kid”.

As Glossop’s answer to Robert Redford recedes into the distance, something magic happens: the buildings stop, the road leads uphill past a sign for “Snake Pass”, and without warning, I’m launched out into the sublime sweep of lonely, windblown, wilderness that is the Dark Peak. I’ve made this journey many times, and the soaring rush of exhilaration that kicks in at this point never ever diminishes. I think of Benny Rothman and how hard he fought for the right to roam here.

From here on, the drive is pure joy. The stresses of the week evaporate as this dramatic landscape casts its spell. Eventually, beyond the mesmeric glint of the Ladybower reservoir, the bright lights of Sheffield appear. Soon after, I’m knocking on Tim’s door, which he opens in a pinny with a bottle of wine in hand. This is good news—he’s a great cook.

Over dinner and several glasses of wine, Tim rattles off suggestions for tomorrow’s adventures. Kinder Scout is mooted, but intriguingly, he also ponders going further afield, to the White Peak, to walk the Dragon’s Back.

I keep a careful eye on the time. Tim’s kitchen is built on a wrinkle in the space-time continuum. I’ve been caught out many times before: if you let the hands of his clock reach half past midnight, you’ll look up a couple of minutes later to find it’s half past three (which doesn’t make for the best start to a day out rambling). I sneak off to bed at twenty-nine minutes past twelve.

The Dragon’s Back

Over breakfast, the Dragon’s back idea wins out, and we set off for the Dove valley near Buxton. The Peak District is a single National Park but encapsulates two very different terrains. The northern part, which juts up against Sheffield, is the Dark Peak, a dramatic expanse of untamed moorland: savage, intimidating, unkempt, and in early spring, still looking every bit the desolate winter scrub. Huge swathes of earthen colour—bands of brown, yellow and rust—are punctuated by long escarpments and outcrops of gritstone, weathered into smooth, rounded, surreal-looking formations like piles of pebbles on a giant’s beach.

As we cross into Derbyshire and Staffordshire, the aspect changes character completely. We find ourselves amid gentle rolling hills and green pastoral valleys. This is the White Peak—the Dark Peak’s prettier, softer sibling. Yet as we crest the top of a hill and head towards Longnor, Tim directs my gaze right, to an astounding sight, quite out of keeping with its surroundings. It’s as if two colossal dinosaurs, hibernating beneath the valley floor, have awoken and thrust their arched backs up through the earth, their spines ridged with jagged plates; and due to some inscrutable ancient mystery, they have become fossilised in the process, their skins turned to grass, and their armour plate into limestone pinnacles.

These are the iconic profiles of Chrome Hill and Parkhouse Hill, known collectively as the Dragon’s Back. In 1997, writer Jeff Kent brought Chrome Hill to wider attention, when he discovered it boasts a double sunset. If viewed from Parkhouse Hill or Glutton Bridge, on or around the summer solstice, the sun appears to set, then re-emerges and sets again. In an ideal world, we’d have read Jeff’s book, and we’d be visiting on the summer solstice to observe the spectacle. As it is, we’re two months early and I won’t find out about the phenomenon until I browse Wikipedia, a few weeks later. Nevertheless, I can’t wait to get my boots on when we park in Longnor.

The long easy walk-in takes us to Hollinsclough, past its chapel, and down through fields to a stream, where the dampness of the grass sends me tumbling for an early mud bath. The going gets firmer as we gain height. After a prolonged winter, the recent rain and warm April sunshine lend a spring vitality to a day that might almost be summer, were the trees not still bereft of leaves.

We reach a brow and Chrome Hill rises before us in all its quirky, spiky magnificence. We sip coffee at its foot then start to scramble up between its craggy pinnacles, minding our step—wet limestone is nearly as slippery as wet grass.

At 1394 feet, Chrome Hill stops some way short of a mountain, but on character alone, it outranks grassy domes more than twice its height. The Hill has a mountain personality and a mountain’s power. The narrowness of its ridge emphasises the steepness of its sides, and the rolling pastures of the White Peak stretch out forever below.

On the summit, two men and a dog are gazing out over the expansive views. We’re all beaming with the sheer exuberance of the experience (especially the dog).

The descent is severe, and we worry how we’ll stay upright, but these south-east slopes have been sun-kissed for several hours, so the grass is dry and the going proves easy enough. At the bottom, the slimmer, sharper, lower ridge of Parkhouse Hill rises enticingly, but there’s no right of way shown on the map, and we’re unsure of its status. Later, we’ll learn that it has been classified as open access under the 2000 act, but it was long disputed, and I realise the right to roam is not just the story of Benny’s battle from a previous century, but still very much a living, burning, contentious issue.

Our route meanders beside meadows alive with bouncing lambs and grazing ewes. You can almost feel the surge of new life bursting from the ground, and to walk amongst it is an emotional tonic just as much as a physical one. We find a bench-like boulder beside a dusty country lane, under trees chirruping with bird song, and tuck into our grub. Tim’s local baker has supplied a pork pie of Brobdingnagian proportions, forged with a finesse that would embarrass Heston Blumenthal. Tim has also packed veritable house bricks of Yorkshire brack, smothered with butter to a depth that James Martin would readily endorse. After gorging greedily on this fine fare, Tim checks the map and starts to chuckle.

“Guess where we are”, he says.

“I’ve no idea”, I reply.

“We’re in Gluttondale”, he smirks.

The Quiet Woman

After a couple of miles, the lane leads into a village. Tim, who’s a couple of yards ahead, stops abruptly and looks up with purpose. I follow his lead and my eyes meet a pub sign that’s immediately disquieting. It takes a minute to work out why. The artwork is slightly garish, bearing the hallmark of Hammer House of Horror film poster from the 1970’s. The pub is called the Quiet Woman and bears the inscription, “soft words turneth away wrath”, beneath which is a crude painting of a woman, presumably the landlady; only, something is missing… Oh yes, it’s her head.

The sign seems to be implying that a woman should be seen and not heard, and the most effective means of achieving this is decapitation. The exterior of the building is dark-beamed, and the windows latticed. Their glass reflects the afternoon sun, rendering them utterly impenetrable. It makes the Slaughtered Lamb in American Werewolf look positively hospitable. Suddenly, eerily, it feels as if we’ve arrived in Royston Vasey. In actual fact, it’s Earl Sterndale, which, as names go, is even more intimidating.

The story behind the pub sign is every bit as dark as you would imagine. The original landlady was an incessant nag and gossip, known locally as Chattering Charteris. Her relentless mithering proved too much for her beleaguered husband, who cut off her head. Far from provoking outrage, his action won the wholehearted approval of the villagers who clubbed together to pay for her headstone.

Someone is waving at us from one of the tables on the beer terrace out front. It’s one of the guys from the summit of Chrome Hill. They seem to be enjoying themselves, but perhaps they haven’t seen the sign, and now they’re walking unknowingly into a terrible trap, like Edward Woodward in the Wicker Man. Or perhaps they’re locals, and they’re in on it. We smile wanly and hurry on in the faint hope that our gender might spare us from the village executioner.

A little further on, a woman leans over the fence of a paddock where two children and a dog are trying to corral some young lambs. She greets us warmly and we chat. It’s a delightful scene that quickly dispels the darker suspicions of moments ago. Well almost. What if it’s a buttering up exercise, a diversionary tactic to lull us into a false sense of security, while the men of the village sharpen the axes or weave the last canes into the body of the wicker man?

We take our leave and walk on briskly past the arresting pyramidal hill of High Wheeldon, through a quagmire of mud and cow muck, and back to the safer environs of Longnor, where we risk a relaxing pint in the Market Square. Or at least, I do. Tim has a Coke, because he wants to stop on the way home to introduce me to a new micro pub in Sheffield, called the Itchy Pig (or the Itchy Anus as it’s affectionately known).

Just as we’re leaving, the two guys and the dog from the Quiet Woman arrive in the square. We wave less cautiously this time, relieved to see they’re still sporting their heads.

Outside the Itchy Anus, Tim insists we sit in the car for thirteen minutes, until the clock strikes six and the parking becomes free. Well when in Yorkshire…

Inside, I order two pints of a particularly fine IPA and some chilli pork scratchings.

“They’re hot”, says the barman, looking me right in the eye. “Very hot.”

I nod and carry them back to our table where we dig in. I look around and clock the barman staring over, waiting to gauge our reaction. I smile and hope he can’t see the plumes of steam that are now pouring out of my ears, and the fact that my face has turned crimson. I have it on the good authority of a contact in the chilli trade that Heston Blumenthal, with the help of an MRI scanner and a hapless sous chef, has proved that hot chilli activates the areas of the brain associated with happiness.

So, perhaps it’s the pork scratchings, or perhaps it’s escaping execution in Earl Sterndale, or perhaps it’s the grateful recognition that men like Benny Rothman have won us the freedom to roam edifying natural phenomena like Chrome Hill, but after an inspiring journey through Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Yorkshire, I’m believe I’m grinning like a Cheshire cat.

Sources/Further Reading

The Ramblers’ Association. (No date). General History. Available at http://www.ramblers.org.uk/about-us/our-history.aspx (Accessed Aug 2018)

Eric Allison (2012). The Kinder Scout Trespass: 80 years on. The Guardian, 17 April. Available at

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/apr/17/kinder-scout-mass-trespass-anniversary (Accessed Aug 2018)

Fell Walk, General, Ghost Story, History, Legend

Reconstruction of a Fable

July 22, 2018 George Kitching 7 Comments

The Fairfield Horseshoe and the Skulls of Calgarth

In which I walk the fine mountain ridges of Fairfield Horseshoe, tell the spooky story of the Calgarth skulls, bag a free beer in Rydal, become a social pariah in Ambleside, and learn a life lesson from Laurence Fishburne.

The Skulls of Calgarth

As I drive through Troutbeck Bridge, I pass a sign for Calgarth Park, offering two-bedroom supported retirement apartments. Viewings are available. I’m sure both my age and my bank balance disqualify me (although one is depressingly nearer than the other). All the same, I’d be tempted to have a peek—the building has an interesting history, and a sinister backstory.

The house is an elegant lakeside villa—all Georgian pillars and neatly manicured lawns—overlooking Windermere. It was built by Bishop Richard Watson in 1790. In its early years, it played host to such eminent neighbours as Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge. During the First World War, it was transformed into a hospital, and later became a children’s orthopaedic unit, specialising in TB and polio.

When Bishop Watson bought the estate, it already had a hall, but he didn’t much like the look of it. Perhaps it was the cold and austere demeanour. Perhaps he was a forerunner of Kevin McCloud’s Grand Designers and fancied something modern, handsome and hospitable. Or perhaps, he knew about the skulls.

In the sixteenth century, a humble cottage stood on the spot. It was the home of Kraster and Dorothy Cook. They weren’t rich, but they worked hard, and they ran a productive and profitable farm.

Living and working in such an idyllic location should have brought endless happiness, but there was a fly in the ointment. Their land was coveted by a rich and influential justice of the peace, named Myles Philipson. He was a greedy man. His estate was substantial, but it wasn’t enough. The Cooks had something he wanted, and it consumed him. He swore he’d acquire the land by any means.

It proved harder than he thought. Money didn’t work: the Cooks were simple, honest folk, who appreciated what they had and wanted nothing more. Philipson tried bullying, but the Cooks were strong and stood firm.

In the end, their steadfastness paid off. Philipson backed down. Indeed, it seemed he’d had a complete change of heart and deeply regretted his behaviour. To make amends, he invited them round for dinner on Christmas Eve.

Dorothy and Kraster must have felt their troubles were over, but they were rudely awakened the next morning by soldiers demanding to search their cottage—Philipson had accused them of stealing a silver goblet. It was soon found in Dorothy’s bag—precisely where the maleficent magistrate had snuck it.

The Cooks were arrested and imprisoned, awaiting trial. They must have been scared stiff, but they had faith in their own innocence and in the British justice system. Imagine their dismay when they entered the courtroom to find Philipson presiding.

Philipson declared them guilty and sentenced them to death, decreeing that all their land be signed over to him as compensation. He quickly set about demolishing their cottage and building a hall on the same spot.

From the gallows, Dorothy uttered a terrible curse: for as long as the Philipson family remained in residence, Kraster and she would haunt them night and day, and their business affairs would never prosper.

One year later, the hall was complete and the Philipsons moved in, but any celebrations were derailed when they found two skulls on the bottom stair. They had their servants throw them out and retired to bed, but they were kept awake by a terrible screaming and wailing. When they rose in the morning, the skulls were back.

Over the coming months, Myles had the skulls crushed, burned, buried and thrown in the lake. Whatever he tried failed: the infernal screams persisted, and every morning the skulls returned.

Living under such a curse quickly put paid to visitors; the family became reclusive and their business affairs suffered. In the end, Myles had to sell everything but the hall to cover his debts. He bequeathed the hall to his son, but the curse remained. Only once the Philipson family quit the hall for good, did Kraster and Dorothy lie quietly in their graves.

The Fairfield Horseshoe

Each lake has its own character: Wastwater is feral and fiercely beautiful; Coniston, tranquil; Ullswater dark and mysterious (especially when cloud envelopes the fell tops); but Windermere has grandeur. It’s a grandeur that has little to do with her flotillas of yachts or the moneyed mansions that line her eastern shore. A daunting profile dominates her northern skyline, her head cradled by a ring of high fells, a vision of strength and drama. Dressed in snow and reflected in the long mirror of the lake, the Fairfield Horseshoe is a sight to stir the blood and quicken the heart; in the spring sunshine of this May Day Bank Holiday, its slopes are gold and green, softer than in winter but every bit as inspiring.

I park in Ambleside and head up Nook Lane to Low Sweden Bridge, following a wide track that then winds its way up the lower reaches of Low Pike. A dry-stone wall meanders in from the left. The track swings right in search of a gentler ascent, but a narrow path handrails the wall, heading up over steeper ground to Low Brock Crag. This way signals greater adventure.

A short and easy scramble brings me to the crest of Low Brock Crag. Windermere commands the backward view, nestling languidly in a glacial groove—long cool and periwinkle blue.

The summit of Low Pike is further half-scramble, rising in a rocky outcrop like a bouldered earthwork, wedded to the wall, which curves away below like a castle’s outer curtain. Dropping down from this little tower, I land in its shallow moat. The ground between here and High Pike is a soggy morass. In the weeks to come, an extended heatwave will dry Lakelands’ most pervasive bogs, but for now, I have to pick my path with care.

By the time I reach the top of High Pike, the wall is broken down in places, blending ever more closely with the crag, as if born of the mountain, it aspires to revert.

After a long grassy rise, I reach Dove Crag’s summit cairn, and gaze out again over Windermere—its further reaches now visible beyond the headland, stretching out toward a white sheen of Irish Sea, blurring the distinction between earth and sky. In February, I stood on this very spot, when snow, cloud and soft light conspired to blend lake, sky and fellside in an ambient glow of pink and white. Now the soft blue haze of imminent summer inflects the lowland, and the slopes are olive green with young bracken; shafts of sun stage shadow plays across the crags ahead.

This ancient landscape of immutable rock is in a constant state of flux. Pinnacles, crevices, crags and gullies are thrown into sharp relief, then retreat into shadow; hues of red and yellow, mauve and purple streak fleetingly across the slopes, then blur and are swallowed again by dark recesses of green. It’s an animated impressionist painting of ever-shifting ephemera.

Mountains are restless chameleons. As John Berger expresses it so beautifully, in Hold Everything Dear: “There are moments of looking at a familiar mountain which are unrepeatable. A question of a particular light, an exact temperature, the wind, the season. You could live seven lives and never see the mountain quite like that again; its face is as specific as a momentary glance across the table at breakfast. A mountain stays in the same place, and can almost be considered immortal, but to those who are familiar with the mountain, it never repeats itself. It has another timescale.”

From Hart Crag and over Link Hawse to Fairfield’s rocky shoulder, the terrain grows more rugged and dramatic; precipitous crags plunge to Dovedale and Deepdale and I’m compelled to make small diversions to gain a better view.

On reaching one of Fairfield’s summit shelters, I sip coffee from a thermos and stare over at St Sunday Crag, rising like a dinosaur across Deepdale Hause. In sun, its livery is flecked with gold and purple, and streaked with stripes of exposed stone like strips of armour plate. Captured on canvas and hung in a gallery, critics would think it a stylised exaggeration, and yet the reality is more intense.

I head south, following the cairns down the western spine of the Horseshoe to the summit of Great Rigg.

Between 1955 and 1966, Alfred Wainwright published his Pictorial Guides to the Lake District, a series of seven books that document 214 peaks with hand-drawn maps, pen and ink drawings, practical direction and poetic description. The series has been continuously in print, and to climb all 214 has become known as “bagging the Wainwrights”.

The desire to bag Wainwrights now infects my judgement. Where once, I’d have been content to continue directly down the main ridge, the prospect of ticking off Stone Arthur waylays me, and I make a detour to the right, descending rapidly over ground that will all have to be regained.

It’s not obvious where the summit is as it isn’t really summit at all, just an outcrop on the ridge—and there are several. I meet a couple who are asking themselves the same question. We alight hopefully on the first contender (hopefully, because it’s not too far down the slope—but somehow, we know this would be too easy). They check their GPS and confirm the elevation is too high. We carry on together down the incline.

They tell me they’re attempting all the Wainwrights in a year, so the Horseshoe, with the addition of Stone Arthur, is like concocting several syllables from all the high-ranking Scrabble letters and landing on a triple word score—a grand total of nine ticked off for about eleven miles of effort.

When we reach the proper “summit”, the vivid blue of Grasmere beguiles below.

It’s a slog back up the slope to Great Rigg and a great relief to finally descend toward Heron Pike, with the forget-me-not fingers of Windermere and Coniston Water outstretched below. The final stretch down the pitched zigzags of Nab Scar overlooks Rydal Water, glittering like a teardrop in the green of the valley.

When I reach the bottom, fatigue kicks in, and I sit on a wall above Rydal Mount, looking at a sign for the Coffin route to Grasmere (and trying not to read it as a suggestion).

I walk on through the grounds of Rydal Hall where a girl is emptying paper plates into a bin. She looks up and smiles and says, “Do help yourself to a beer if you’d like one.”

I pinch myself to make sure I’m not dreaming, but she’s still here, and she’s gesturing behind me, where three kegs are perched on the wall.

“We’ve had a wedding reception but there’s some beer left over, so we thought we’d offer it to walkers. We’ve no glasses so you’ll have to make do with a jam jar—they’ve all been washed”, she explains brightly.

I thank her and pour myself a sparkling jam jar of Jennings Cocker Hoop. We chit chat for a minute or two, then she heads back inside. As she reaches the door, she turns and says, “take it with you if you want—we don’t need the jam jar back.”

A good cool hoppy ale never tastes better than after a long walk. Sipping this unexpected trophy, I head on down the wide Rydal-to-Ambleside path, where I pass several groups of strollers: not sweaty fell walkers now, but smartly dressed, respectable types, out for a gentle Bank Holiday peramble.

And they’re giving me decidedly funny looks. The third time it happens, I check my flies. Then it dawns on me—I’m carrying a jam jar that’s now about a quarter full of frothy amber liquid. They think it’s a urine sample. And I’m swigging it.

To Have or to Be

As I drive back past Calgarth Park, I notice that the next lane is called Old Hall Road. Out of curiosity, I turn down it. After a few hundred yards the road narrows and a large sign warns, “Private Road—Keep out”. I wonder about continuing and try to think of a cover story, but better judgement prevails.

Later, I’ll wonder if it actually said “no access”, but “keep out” is the message I get, loud and clear, and right now this feels hostile. Perhaps it’s the apparent terseness of the wording or just the abrupt end to the freedom of the fells; or perhaps it’s the recollection of a newspaper article about the scandal of London councils selling social housing to luxury property developers. Perhaps it’s because She Drew the Gun’s Poem has been playing on the car stereo, “How long before they put up a wall and call it a private city?” But all of a sudden, the story of the Calgarth skulls seems very real.

This is when I realise it’s not a ghost story at all but a morality tale about a man haunted to the edge of insanity by his conscience.

In the 1970’s Erich Fromm wrote a book called To Have or to Be. He suggested people are governed by a having orientation—the desire to possess things—or a being orientation—the desire to experience things. Those of us who tread the fells have our walking boots firmly in the being camp. (That said, perhaps our desire to bag summits and tick off Wainwrights betrays an underlying having orientation. Here, I should probably confess I got all this from an episode of CSI. I did buy the book, but I haven’t read it yet, so for now, this is coming via Laurence Fishburne.)

While the being orientation is the likelier path to happiness, Fromm predicts that our western obsession with consumerism means the having orientation will predominate. Forty years on, we’ve already travelled a long way down that road.

Beware the skulls.

Find a route map and directions for this walk at https://www.walklakes.co.uk/walk_42.html

Fell Walk, General, History

Away from the Numbers

June 24, 2018 George Kitching 12 Comments

Grey Friar, Great Carrs, & Dow Crag from Seathwaite

It was to be my 100th Wainwright. Not quite halfway, but a minor milestone nevertheless. The day begins inauspiciously with a series of farcical calamities worthy of Basil Fawlty, but en route to the Seathwaite reservoir, the disarming beauty of the Duddon valley works its magic. After a splendid ridge walk, I celebrate in the rural charm of the Newfield Inn—the scene of a violent riot, 114 years ago, which ended in the fatal shooting of a navvy. Hard to believe these days, but I’m on my best behaviour just in case.

It’s not as if I was expecting fanfares, a red carpet and a Champagne breakfast on the terrace. That would be ridiculous—we haven’t got a terrace. But on a morning that marked a minor milestone in my fell walking career, I did, at least, want things to go smoothly.

It wasn’t to be. I awoke to find the cat had thrown up over the sofa cushions. He’d even managed to hit a car rug perched over the arm. The scatter pattern suggested he’d been projectile vomiting while spinning like a whirling dervish. Was he violently ill or possessed by a legion of demons? It didn’t look like it.

I’ve seen enough episodes of CSI to know how to work a crime scene, and here I found grass and a sizeable clump of matted fur (quite possibly not his own). Cat lovers will know that grass is an emetic which cats imbibe deliberately to shift fur balls. The ensuing upchuck is relatively controlled, so this extravagant distribution was clearly a matter of choice. The proud perpetrator was now standing by his bowl, demanding his breakfast.

After half an hour of intensive fabric cleaning, I stuffed Wainwright’s Pictorial Guide to the Southern Fells into my rucksack and set off for Seathwaite.

I’ve lived in Cumbria for twenty years and I’d never been into the heart of the Duddon valley. I’ve gazed down on it many times from the tops of the Coniston fells, ever struck by its lonely beauty. In autumn, the Seathwaite reservoir had shone like a sapphire on a baize of burnished gold. Today, the fields and trees are a swatch of fresh June green, licked into life by the early morning sun. I could easily lose myself in carefree reverie, but I need to concentrate because I’m not entirely sure where I’m going.

After Seathwaite, the map shows a fork in the road, with the right-hand prong giving way to the old quarry track that leads up to the Walna Scar Pass and on to Coniston. The reservoir track starts from the same point. Sure enough, the road forks where expected and there is even a sign saying “Coniston, unfit for cars”. But as the winding single-track road narrows to no more than my car width, I start to question why it is I think there is off-road parking at the end of it.

The road ends abruptly in a gate—with no parking space anywhere to be seen. A farmer on a quad bike is approaching from the other side. He clearly wants to come this way. I recall a distinct lack of passing places and the road is too narrow for a three-point turn. There’s nothing for it but to reverse back to the farm I passed quarter of a mile back.

Parking sensors are wonderful things, but they don’t know the difference between dry stone walls and cow parsley. Given the abundance of foliage overhanging the verges, my dashboard is lit up like a Christmas tree and my ears are ringing from the continuous high-pitched beep. I reach the farm, but I’m too close to the opposite wall to back in. I effect a painfully faffing five-point manoeuvre, while trying to avoid the eye of the farmer, who I sense is laughing heartily. Eventually, I manage to let him past. He gives a cheery wave and speeds off down the lane, no doubt dying to get home and tell his wife all about his encounter with Mr Bean.

I follow him back to the Seathwaite road. On the edge of the village, there are four parking spaces. One is still free. Perhaps my luck is changing.

It’s a rash hope. I open the hatchback to find the top isn’t properly on one of my water bottles and it’s emptied itself entirely into one of my boots—the one I’d put my socks in. I pour 500ml of water out of the boot and wring out the socks as best I can, then I squelch one and a half miles back up the road to the gate. I go through and just on the other side, I find the parking spaces.

Then, I step in a cowpat.

As I tramp up the reservoir track, I feel every bit like Basil Fawlty scouting around for a branch with which to give the day a damn good thrashing… But subconsciously, I start to change gear. There’s a song going around in my head. It’s The Waterboys’ Don’t Bang the Drum—it was playing on the radio on the way here:

“Here we are in a fabulous place
What are you gonna dream here?
We are standing in this fabulous place
What are you gonna play here?
I know you love the high life, you love to leap around
You love to beat your chest and make your sound
But not here man – this is sacred ground
With a Power flowing through
And if know you you’ll bang the drum
Like monkeys do”

The song warns of being so pumped up with our own self-importance, or perhaps with peeved indignance at the banana skins life leaves littered in our path, that we can stand in the most astounding of places and fail to realise.

I stop to apply sun cream, and I wake up to where I am. The epiphany strikes like an earthquake. A minute ago, the Duddon valley was a place of cowpats, frustratingly hidden car parks and wet feet. Now it’s a place of astonishing power and disarming beauty.

Across the valley, a conspiracy of sun and shadow renders the Scafells as an Art Deco railway poster—broad, flat, angular and stylised.

To the east, the sheer green slopes of Brim Fell, Dow Crag and Walna Scar form a colossal rampart to rend the valleys of the Duddon and Coniston. And straight ahead, rising over rippling foot hills, is the grassy dome of Grey Friar—the only Coniston fell I’ve yet to set foot on. Except, it isn’t really a Coniston fell at all. As Wainwright points put, Grey Friar belongs entirely to the Duddon.

Grey Friar from the Seathwaite reservoir track

Ticking off all the Wainwrights hadn’t been a goal. I was more interested in getting to know my favourites well—experiencing all their ascents and ridge walks. However, some gentle hectoring from my neighbours, Paul and Jeanette, convinced me that tackling the full 214 is a great incentive to explore new ground. They’re right, and since committing to the challenge, my knowledge of the peaks has grown exponentially.

I’ve climbed all the other mountains in this range at least twice and some (like The Old Man) as many as eight times. But Grey Friar, I’ve been saving. It will be my 100th Wainwright.

The OS map shows no path, but Wainwright sketches two that wend in parallel up the south western ridge. The first, a grass rake, is clearly visible from the track, but the intervening ground is marshy. AW suggests continuing to the reservoir and starting from just beyond the outtake channel. His second path is more direct and starts from the same place.

After a mile or so, I crest the hill and the long buttressed curve of the dam wall appears at the foot of dark shadowy slopes. As I reach the walkway that traverses the top, the sun slips behind a cloud, so now over the parapet, the dark waters stretch out—a long black placid pool, cool and inscrutable.

The reservoir’s tranquillity belies the violence in its construction. The ancient tarn was dammed in 1904, to extend its capacity as a water supply. The summer was a scorcher; the work was hard, and tempers were frayed. In such a small and remote community as Seathwaite, tensions were strained between locals and the labourers drafted in to sweat and toil. It would only take a spark to ignite the tinder.

In the event, alcohol proved the accelerant. According to Dick Sullivan’s book, Navvyman (Coracle Press, 1983), Owen Cavanagh had been drinking heavily since 9am. By noon, the landlord of the Newfield Hotel (now the Newfield Inn) judged he’d had enough. As Cavanagh’s rowdiness threatened to get out of hand, the landlord demanded he and his mates leave the premises. The men refused. They smashed up the pub and stole bottles of whisky, then they spilled into the street where they pelted the church and the vicarage with rocks. The publican, a barman and an engineer confronted the rioters with firearms. Shots were fired wounding three—fatally in Cavanagh’s case. The gunmen were arrested but later acquitted on the grounds their actions were legally justified in protecting property.

A primeval peace pervades now. The ghosts of rampaging navvies don’t haunt the fruits of their labours. I follow the walkway along the top of the dam and cross the footbridge over the main and auxiliary tarn outlets.

Between the crags of Great and Little Blake Rigg, Grey Friar’s slopes are more forgiving—grassy terraces peppered with rocky outcrops. Where Wainwright shows the start of his direct route, the tiniest of cairns hints at a faint path. I augment the cairn with a couple more stones—now you’ll have to blink a fraction longer to miss it.

In places, you have to rely on instinct and common sense to determine the line of the path. In others, it’s more pronounced, but nowhere is there any difficulty. A moderate pull up grassy slopes attains the ridge, and I make for the summit. Two cairns, a little way apart, stake equally convincing claims. Wainwright judges the north-eastern contender to be the true summit but concedes the south-western has the better views. He’s right, I pull myself up a rocky step and hunker down beside it to gaze across at Harter Fell and the Scafells.

A blue haze, like a sea mist, transforms the peaks into a mythical realm, where black spires, full of menace and foreboding, rise above dappled flanks, pretty and beguiling, and dark hollows harbour mysteries, old as the hills themselves.

One hundred Wainwrights under my belt is still seven short of halfway. Even so, it’s a ton, a nicely rounded sum, and it feels like an accomplishment. Grey Friars was a fine choice. It’s an underrated mountain, but away from the numbers, these are the kind that can reward the most. It’ll be a different story across on Scafell Pike. At this time of year, walkers will be arriving by the coach load. The Let’s Walk the Lakes Facebook group are tackling that today. Three weeks ago, I climbed Skiddaw with them. It was my first outing with the group, and a nicer bunch of like-minded people you couldn’t hope to meet. I wave in their direction and look forward to our next hike together. Then I set off for Great Carrs.

Just shy of the summit is a memorial cairn to the wreck of a Halifax bomber that crashed here in 1944. I’ve written about that at length in Ghost of Canadian Airmen, so I won’t repeat myself here, but the cairn with its cross and its plaque, together with the little wooden crosses people plant among the stones to commemorate their own departed loved ones, never fail to move me.

I don’t know how this looked in Wainwright’s day. It’s been rebuilt, so perhaps its appearance is more poignant now, but I find AW’s casual dismissal of it as a pile of aeroplane wreckage a tad perplexing. I’ve always suspected his curmudgeonly character was a slightly tongue-in-cheek persona: the bonhomie and humour in his writing suggests someone a little better disposed to people than is commonly supposed. But this throwaway line in the Grey Friar chapter does seem to reveal a more damaged individual, either lacking empathy, or perhaps, so used to burying his feelings he found them awkward to deal with when they surfaced.

I cross the shoulder of Swirl How and head over Brim Fell. The sky darkens, and it spots with rain. The hills are now a solemn grey, the Seathwaite reservoir a sombre sheen. But the dark clouds above Dow Crag are clearing and the ones overhead are insubstantial. They lack the ammunition for a proper downpour. Halfway to Dow Crag’s summit, the sun breaks through in triumph. By the time I reach the top, it’s glorious.

I read a number of walking blogs, and I enjoy Tessa Park’s, not only because it’s called Mountains and Malbec (which scores double points in my book), but because she champions the use of the ARSE CRAMPON. The concept is not entirely new, Wainwright remarks on the usefulness of the posterior, particularly in descent, but Tessa coined the phrase and she deserves a shout-out as I make liberal use of this piece of equipment in scrambling off the summit rocks.

Dow Crag’s buttresses and gullies are some of most dramatic features to be found anywhere in Lakeland. Its top is peppered with plunging vistas of heart-stopping beauty. Intrepid climbers perch on precarious outcrops high above the blue glimmer of Goat Water.

On the way down over Buck Pike and Brown Pike, Coniston Water is a hazy aquamarine wash to the east, while to the west, a band of barley forms a golden heart in the Lincoln green of the Duddon Valley. On reaching the Walna Scar Road, I turn right and descend past the old quarry into the pastoral perfection of Dunnerdale. Harter Fell looms ahead and Tarn Beck burbles over rocks as I meander lazily back to Seathwaite.

The Duddon valley from the Walna Scar track

The Newfield Inn is the epitome of a charming rural pub. I sit in its pretty beer garden, enjoying the warm sunshine and a cool hoppy pint of Mosaic from the nearby Foxfield brewery. It’s impossible to imagine this was the scene of a violent riot and fatal shootings one hundred and fourteen years ago.

I’m quite sure the landlord doesn’t keep a loaded firearm behind the bar anymore, but just in case, I return the glass, thank him kindly and take extra care not to break anything on the way out.

Fell Walk, General, History

Jimmy Hewitson and The Howitzer

April 8, 2018 George Kitching 10 Comments

Coniston, Tarn Hows, Black Fell & Holme Fell

“Some men become national heroes for superlative acts of bravery in service to their country. Others become heroes locally, because they stand up for the underdog when the establishment runs roughshod over them.” Jimmy Hewitson was both. I hear his remarkable story from his grandson, John. It’s a story of courage, compassion and the redemptive power of the Cumbrian landscape.

Courage

On the radio, a mother bravely describes losing her son in the Manchester Arena bombing. She says, “as soon as I heard about the explosion, I knew he was dead”. Some unfathomable maternal instinct tapped into something deeper than radio silence and sensed a severed emotional connection. By morning, she knew for certain that he hadn’t been admitted to any of the city’s hospitals, but it took a full twenty-four hours for the police to confirm her worst fears.

I can’t begin to imagine how those twenty-four hours felt. What that poor woman went through. What she is still going through. Every hour must have seemed an eternity, hoping against hope she was wrong, powerless do anything but wait for that dreadful knock on the door.

Benjamin Kirkby’s mother waited almost a year.

Ben was a Coniston lad and a quarryman. When World War One broke out, Ben, like many of his mates, answered Lord Kitchener’s call for volunteers. He enlisted in the King’s Own Lancaster Regiment (now the Duke of Lancaster’s) and was assigned to 1/4 brigade. Ben didn’t see action until the Somme, on 8th August 1916; after that, he would take no further part in the war. He was killed that day, as were two of his friends, Richard Usher and Sol Robinson. Richard and Sol’s deaths were confirmed within days, but Ben was reported as wounded, then wounded and missing. It was a full eleven months before his parents heard their son was dead.

Benjamin Atkinson Kirkby (courtesy of the Ruskin Museum)

I’ve just come from The Ruskin Museum in Coniston where curator, Vicky Slowe, has been showing me a file of remembrance; it has a page for each of the soldiers. A display case holds some personal artefacts: Ben Kirkby’s commemorative scroll; Richard Usher’s death penny and the official army communique to his parents, informing them of their son’s death. It also holds a painting by Richard of a boat on a lake, presumably Coniston Water. It looks peaceful and serene, evoking a long, lazy, carefree afternoon. A happy memory he held with him, perhaps, in the bitter, bloody turmoil of the trenches.

Ben Kirkby Commemorative Scroll (courtesy of the Ruskin Museum)

Beside the display case is a Matchless motorcycle that belonged to James Hewitson, another local lad who fought beside Ben, Sol and Richard in The Somme. Vicky and I were joined by John Dodd, James’s grandson, who recounted his grandfather’s remarkable story.

Some men become national heroes for superlative acts of bravery in service to their country. Others become heroes locally, because they stand up for the underdog when the establishment runs roughshod over them. Jimmy Hewitson was both. His grave lies in the Coniston churchyard, beside the fine Celtic cross of the war memorial, designed by W. G. Collingwood, who founded the Ruskin museum and designed Ruskin’s gravestone, as well as a series of war memorials including those at Hawkshead, Ulverston and St Bees, and the plaque on top of Great Gable.

Coniston war memorial — Coniston War Memorial (courtesy of the Ruskin Museum)

In 2018, on April 26^th, a new plaque was laid beside the Coniston memorial to mark the 100^th anniversary of the action that earned James Hewitson the Victoria Cross.

Hewitson survived the Somme; by 1918, he had been promoted to Lance Corporal, and his brigade had moved to Givenchy. A photograph in the museum shows a boy, seemingly too young for the military uniform he is wearing, but his courage and daring on April 26th were outstanding. He was recommended for the Victoria Cross in May 1918, and on 28^th June, this report appeared in The London Gazette:

“For most conspicuous bravery, initiative and daring action. In a daylight attack on a series of crater posts L/Cpl Hewitson led his party to their objective with dash and vigour, clearing the enemy from both trench and dugouts, killing in one dugout six of the enemy who would not surrender. After capturing the final objective, he observed a hostile machine-gun team coming into action against his men. Working his way round the edge of the crater he attacked the team, killing four and capturing one. Shortly afterwards he engaged a hostile bombing party which was attacking a Lewis gun post; he routed the party, killing six of them. The extraordinary feats of daring performed by this gallant non-commissioned officer crushed the hostile opposition at this point.”

King George V presented James with his Victoria Cross in France, on 8^th August 1918. It must have been a day of bittersweet emotions for him, as it was the second anniversary of the Somme action that killed his friends.

James Hewitson's Grave — James Hewitson’s Grave

Defiance

When the troops returned home in 1918, the mood was very different from the surge of patriotism that had seen so many enlist, four years earlier. The men bore deep scars, emotionally as well as physically. Today, we recognise post traumatic shock disorder. Back then, it was little understood and was known crudely as shell shock. Soldiers showing symptoms in the trenches had been shot for cowardice or desertion; demobbed squaddies kept shtum and suffered in silence. Many others were conspicuous by their absence.

The survivors were less reticent when it came to demanding change. Across Britain, there was a feeling among veterans that if they were going to risk their lives fighting for their country, they wanted a say in how it was governed. The Representation of the People Act of 1918 gave the vote, not only to women, but to all working-class men.

In a politically opportunist attempt to recapture some patriotic fervour and whip up a sense of triumphalism, The War Office presented many British towns and villages with war trophies. Ulverston received a German tank which stood at the bottom of Market Street until the 1960’s (the roundabout on the A590 is still known as “tank square”).

Coniston was presented with a German howitzer. It’s hard to imagine a more clumsy and insensitive gesture to a community licking its wounds and mourning its dead than to foist upon it the very instrument of its grief. It would be an understatement to say it didn’t go down well with the residents, especially those who had served. One evening, some young veterans were enjoying a pint when the conversation turned to the hated gun. Opinion was unanimous: they’d all spent enough time staring at the front of one of those things; there was no way they wanted to stare at the back of one now. After a few more pints, they decided to do something about it.

Jimmy Hewitson was at home, but such was his standing, they decided to run their plan past him, first. Jimmy’s wife answered the door; her husband had already gone to bed. When they told her what they were planning, she ran straight up the stairs to rouse him. It took no time at all for Jimmy to shout his response from the landing, “Give me a minute to get some pants on, and I’ll give you a hand”.

The howitzer had been placed outside the Ruskin museum. Being a field gun, it was on wheels. The men got behind it and, with a lot of heaving and shoving, managed to push it down the back street, past the Black Bull, over the bridge, and down to the lake. It must have been a struggle to keep something that heavy under control on the downhill stretch. They were aiming for the steep drop into the deeper water, but in the dark, they steered to the left of it, near the stone-built jetty, and pushed it into the shallows. It didn’t sink very far.

A half-submerged howitzer wasn’t quite the act of good riddance they’d been hoping for, so one of them suggested they have a word with Prissy. Priss was the captain of the Steam Yacht Gondola that ran daily excursions up and down the lake, acting as a water bus for locals and a sightseeing experience for tourists. He was only too happy to help and told them to be ready in the morning when he’d sail the Gondola past the spot on the way to her first pick up. The next day, they tied a rope around the gun and threw the end to Priss; he towed the howitzer out into the middle of the lake, where he left it to rust on the bottom.

John was only little when his grandad died, but his older brother recalls hearing the story first hand. John does remember seeing the howitzer exhumed sometime in the very late 1960’s or early 1970’s. It was pulled from the lake, loaded on to a trailer without fuss or ceremony, and swiftly driven away to sit in some private collection.

Purification and Renewal

In his post-war years, James Hewitson dug ditches, cut hedges and repaired roads, but he was hospitalised several times for shell shock and for surgery to remove shrapnel. Like many of his peers, Jimmy’s heroism came at a high personal cost. As a nation, we were ill equipped to help. Shell shock was seen as form of a neurasthenia: a supposed mechanical exhaustion of the nerves (it’s no longer a recognised condition in western medicine). Treatments were experimental and sometimes barbaric. We can only hope Hewitson escaped our worst medical follies. Certainly, he seems to have seen some improvement in later years: he was able to attend two regimental reunions and the museum has a wonderful photograph of him as an old man astride his beloved Matchless motorbike.

On leaving the museum, I walk down through a field of charcoal-fleeced Herdwicks to Coniston Hall, on the lake shore. In the soft grey light of an overcast afternoon, the rugged grandeur of this Elizabethan building appears sculpted from the earth, rough-hewn from Silurian stone, abandoned to ivy, repurposed as farm-house, a wide grassy ramp rising to its once opulent hall stripped of its oak panelling in its rebirth as a barn. Its conical chimneys stand tall and turret-like against a pale wash of sky.

Beyond is the lake, the water gently ridged with ripples, a soft bluish pewter, silver where it escapes the shadows. I walk the shore path to Torver, and most of the way to Brown How. Underfoot, the beach is mud, stone, moss and shale, overhung with a twiggy latticed canopy of naked branches, as if lightly sketched in soft graphite where they spring from heavily shaded trunks. I pass stone boat houses and little wooden jetties where an orange dinghy and an orange buoy are isolated splashes of colour amid the soft, earthy monochrome. To the north, is the high mountain drama of the Fairfield Horseshoe, stark in snow, a skyline rigidly defined, mighty and intimidating. But here, beside the water, is tranquillity.

I think of Richard Usher’s painting. Is this where he came in his head to escape the harsh reality of French battlefields? I think of the lake’s benevolence in swallowing the gun, and I think of James Hewitson’s battle with shell shock; I wonder if he found solace here. Across the beach lies the uprooted trunk of a silver birch, its branches outstretched like limbs reaching out to touch the water. The Coniston war memorial is a Celtic cross. In Celtic mythology, the birch was a symbol of purification and renewal.

Two days later, I’m at Tarn Hows. After some harsh weeks of winter, spring is here, pregnant with the promise of light and warmth. In a few hours, the circular shore path will be thick with sightseers, but at half past eight, I have it almost to myself. The water is a perfect mirror, rendering the dark curtain of trees in ink wash. The shore is a Ruskin watercolour of russet and brown. I pass a bench that bears an inscription: “In memory of Jane Aldworth (1959 – 1995) who loved this place”. Thirty-six is a tender age to die. War is not the only thief of youth. I wonder what happened to her; what comfort she found here. And again, I’m struck by the redemptive power of the landscape. Purification and renewal.

I leave the shore and climb a path that joins the Cumbria Way, which I follow east for a few hundred yards, then turn left to climb to the wilder summit of Black Fell. As a landscape yawns awake from hibernation, it’s possible to experience all seasons at once. Black Fell is a perfect podium for the humble punter. The Fairfield Horseshoe is draped in thin grey clouds, like wisps of Herdwick wool; on Red Screes and the Kentmere Fells, flecks of snow cover mellow tints of autumn. Windermere is a long stretch of sombre silver, Esthwaite Water, a white shimmer, disrupted by the hatched reflections of branches. Tarn Hows is a prelude to Coniston, pale blue beyond; Wetherlam is mighty, dark and wintery, and largely lost in cloud. As I watch, Bowfell and Crinkle Crags are swallowed entirely. And yet above, a summer-like sky is blue and streaked with the slenderest wisps of cirrus. A church bell rings below in Hawkshead, and I shed an outer skin, warm in spring sunshine.

I walk on through a landscape of seasonal transition, of spring skies and winter trees, of distant snow and imminent growth. I pass a farmhouse where a woman skilfully executes a Tai Chi kata. I cross the Coniston to Ambleside road and climb the track past a paddock of belted Galloways to Hodge Close quarry. Sheer faces of rock, tunnelled with caverns and streaked with rich veins of red mineral, fall to a deep pool of copper blue. Many of the King’s Own Lancaster volunteers were quarrymen. Some may have worked here. Now it’s a playground for climbers and divers.

Beyond the quarry, I follow a path up to the old reservoir, an azure jewel in a cloak of russet and straw grass. A boggy expanse leads to the craggier outcrops of Holme Fell. I scramble up a rock step to reach the summit. Coniston Water stretches out below, a languid sheen of white sparkle. I drink coffee from a thermos and think about Jimmy Hewitson and the howitzer.

In January 2014, the then Education Minister, Michael Gove, wrote a piece for the Daily Mail in which he attacked dramas such as Oh What a Lovely War, The Monocled Mutineer and Blackadder for perpetuating “left-wing myths” that depict World War One “as a misbegotten shambles – a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite”. His point seemed to be that criticism of the war and the military tactics somehow “denigrate(s) virtues such as patriotism, honour and courage”. As Philip Hedley pointed out in The Guardian, Gove was so keen imagine a left-wing conspiracy, he conveniently ignored a significant fact: “important source material (for Oh What a Lovely War) came from the Tory MP Alan Clark’s book, The Donkeys, the title of which came from the phrase describing the soldiers as ‘lions led by donkeys’.” Gove was being disingenuous: historians may argue over the donkeys, but the courage of the lions has never been in question.

Mr Gove may not agree with the wide-held view that The Somme was the “epitome of military futility”, but Vicky told me there is some evidence that Sol, Ben and Richard came under friendly fire. I’m not really sure it would have made much difference to their mothers whether it was German, French or English hands that fired the fatal rounds. They’d have been devastated it was anyone.

If you re-read Michael Gove’s piece now, you’ll find he’s keen to draw parallels with modern challenges: “migrant populations on the move, rapid social upheaval, growing global economic interdependence, massive technological change and fragile confidence in political elites” – themes he’s revisited several times since, in the context of the European Union. In retrospect, it reads very like a politician hoping to use the WW1 commemorations to lay the groundwork for a referendum campaign. Whatever your view on Brexit or contemporary politics, manipulating the memory of ordinary men who made an extraordinary sacrifice, is cheap. It’s political opportunism, not a million miles away from placing a German howitzer in front of a grieving population. If you’d pulled a stunt like that on men like Jimmy Hewitson, Michael, I have a sneaking suspicion they’d have told you to jump in a lake.

For a map and directions for the Tarn Hows, Black Fell, Holme Fell walk, visit WalkLakes:

https://www.walklakes.co.uk/walk_111.html

Fell Walk, General, History, Natural History

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March 4, 2018 George Kitching 11 Comments

Great Gable, Pillar, Steeple and Black Sail

Sex, fictional drug dealers and plenty of rolling rocks. Tim and I climb Great Gable and search for the iconic Napes Needle. After a misty but moving moment on the summit and a tricky descent into Ennerdale, we arrive at Black Sail Youth Hostel in time for Mexican Night and a very entertaining evening. On the way home, we visit Pillar and Steeple, amid some inspiring mountain scenery.

A Coward You Are, Withnail

“But the path goes left.”

“No, that’s Moses Trod. It would take us to Beck Head.

“Isn’t that where we’re going?”

“Eventually, but Wainwright says if we carry straight on up we’ll join the South Traverse. We can take a detour right and have a look at Great Napes and the Needle, first. It’s part of the Gable Girdle – the finest mountain walk in the district that doesn’t include a summit, apparently.”

Tim looks suspiciously at the severe slope of loose stone. “And what does he say about this bit?”

I delve into the book, locate the paragraph, and read aloud, “at 1500’ Jekyll becomes a monstrous Hyde. Here the grass ends and the scree begins… ahead is a shifting torrent of stones up which palsied limbs must be forced. Only Moses Finger, 100 yards up, gives secure anchorage for clutching hands until a cairn is reached fifty swear words later…”

He casts a last wistful glance at Moses Trod, shrugs, and starts the painstakingly slow, slip-sliding ascent.

We’ve exhausted our fifty swear words by the time we reach Moses Finger, the slender middle digit of rock that sticks up insultingly. We pause and look back over Wastwater. It’s already a heart-stealing vista and little diminished by the bank of cloud that has conspired to hide the sun. It’s rendered in sombre, muted tones, a great beauty lost in melancholy, reflective and subdued. Everything has a blue tinge – although that could just be our language colouring the air. We resume as low-lying cloud descends on the mountain above.

As the sky darkens, I wonder what qualifications you need to become a weather forecaster. Would an account with William Hill and your own copy of the Racing Post do? Or do they press gang people coming out of Ladbrokes? Arrest them for pinching those little pens and sentence them to five years hard labour with the Met Office. I hope whoever dreamt up today’s hasn’t bet the family silver on Bring Me Sunshine in the twelve-twenty at Aintree. “Dry, with sunny intervals and excellent visibility”, it said. The top of Great Gable is already lost in mist. We trudge on as it starts to rain.

The Great Napes is a wall of crag that stands slightly apart from Great Gable’s southern face. Wainwright describes it as a castle with side and rear walls. It is riven by gullies into four distinct ridges with names that evoke the Wild West: Arrowhead Ridge, Eagle’s Nest Ridge, Sphinx Ridge. In the Cumbrian drizzle, it’s hard to imagine Comanches hiding in the crevices, waiting to claim our scalps.

The Napes are bounded on either side by two big rivers of scree. They go by the formidable names of Great and Little Hell Gate. We reach a cairn of sorts and bear right along the South Traverse. It’s not so much a path as a line of least resistance between boulders. Before long, we arrive at the banks of Little Hell Gate, a torrent of white water turned to stone and frozen in mid flow. The loose scree is easily awakened by the soles of walking boots and ever threatens to start moving again. Halfway across, I look up toward the summit. Little Hell Gate disappears, between pillars, into a realm of mist. Or is it the smoke of hell fire? Alarmingly, a hitherto unknown masochistic side of me thinks a fine challenge for another day would be to tackle the summit this way. I’d have to work on my fitness, and I’d certainly need a larger vocabulary of profanities.

Across Little Hell Gate, we pick our way along the South Traverse in search of Napes Needle, an iconic freestanding rock pinnacle, oft photographed and a popular challenge for experienced rock climbers. It’s ascent in 1886 by William Walter Parry Haskett-Smith is widely held to have been the moment when rock-climbing was born as a sport, rather than just a means to an end for mountaineers. The trouble is we can’t find it. The OS map confuses us by printing its name below the path. On re-consulting Wainwright, we realise this is simply a convenient place to put the words – they relate to a small dot in the densely hatched area above the path. AW offers a clue to our difficulty: “the Needle is in full view from the Traverse but does not seem its usual self… and on a dull day is not easily distinguished from its background of rock”. I have a begrudging vision of today’s bright forecast scribbled on the back of a betting slip in a Ladbrokes pen.

Still unconvinced we’re in the right place, we carry on along the path as far as Great Hell Gate. Tim crosses to explore the other side. I indulge my new-found masochistic streak and ascend a little way to see if I can spot the Needle from the side. Progress up the scree is hard won. Every few feet gained are half lost as I slide back repeatedly, but the sheer, intimidating magnificence of the mountain makes it a price worth paying. Suddenly, with Tophet Bastion towering above, I glimpse the Needle. We’d been standing right underneath it.

We reconvene on the Traverse and I point out the Needle. It’s easy to miss head on. The classic photographs, some of which adorn the walls of the Wasdale Inn, were taken from a rocky ledge, known as the Dress Circle, on The Needle’s western side. This is where I had wanted to go, but the climb up to the base looks steep and loose, and the rain is turning the rock very slippery. It’s a further scramble to the ledge. From there, I’d planned to make a higher traverse along the bottom of the crags to re-join Little Hell Gate, just below Cat Rock (or Sphinx Rock – depending on your direction of view). Wainwright warns there is a tricky section. He says… well I won’t repeat what he says. His attitudes to women are, at times, shall we say, unreconstructed. There are plenty of brave women who wouldn’t flinch at tackling this route in these conditions, but I’m neither a woman, nor brave, and I resolve to leave it for a drier day. Tim’s not arguing.

We retrace our steps along the Gable Girdle and continue around the western slopes towards Beck Head. The drizzle is easing off, but the summit is still in cloud. Beck Head is the saddle between Kirk Fell and Great Gable. Our detour to the Napes has taken a lot longer than we’d allowed. Black Sail has a rigid supper-at-seven policy, so to attempt both Kirk Fell and Gable now might be to risk going hungry. Kirk Fell’s summit is cloud-free. In some ways, it’s the more attractive option, but we’ve been warned about the descent from Kirk Fell to Black Sail before…

We stayed at Black Sail two months ago and sat up chatting with a couple of guys from London. We christened one “Danny” for his uncanny resemblance to Ralph Brown’s character in Withnail and I. Danny is the sleazy, laid-back but dangerous drug dealer who has some of the best lines in the film: “they’re selling hippie wigs in Woolworth’s, man. The greatest decade in the history of mankind is over. And as Presuming Ed here has so consistently pointed out, we have failed to paint it black”. Tim and I love his coolly menacing riposte when Withnail rashly challenges him to a drug taking competition: “very, unwise”, he sneers.

Let’s be clear, our short-haired, clean-cut acquaintance looked nothing like Ralph Brown, but his voice… his voice was a perfect match… At first, I thought Tim had nodded off. He wouldn’t have been alone – after a hard day’s walk, a good meal and several beers, everyone was heading that way. But, then I noticed the half-smile at the corner of his mouth and I knew exactly what he was doing. He was semi-closing his eyes, so he could imagine it really was Danny sitting opposite, in a long leather coat, smoking a spliff, and recounting his mountain adventure in a laconic nasal drawl, laced with spite and schadenfreude. I started to do the same. It was just so delightfully incongruous that the man who invented the Camberwell Carrot should be here, telling us about Kirk Fell.

“But then,” continued Danny dramatically, as if describing a drug deal gone bad, “I had to descend through some pretty hairy crags to get down to the Black Sail Pass. I didn’t enjoy that greatly. I kept thinking I’d slip and break me neck.”

“Not the cleverest choice of route, then?” Asked Tim, if only to prove he was awake.

“No,” said Danny, “very unwise.”

Danny’s warning is only half the reason we’re favouring Gable now. Despite being under cloud, it’s still our primary goal for the day, and after exploring its dramatic cliffs, we can hardly leave the summit untouched. Besides, there’s still a chance that Bring Me Sunshine will make a late run and win by a nose.

Connection

The ridge that runs beside Gable Crag soon demands hands as well as feet. By the time we’re climbing into cloud, three points of contact are a must and extra care is needed on the slippery surface. We meet an ashen-faced man coming down. He’s clearly out of his comfort zone, but he’s coping well. We reassure him he hasn’t far to go before the gradient relaxes, the cloud dissipates, and Beck Head is reached.

The mist is thick on top and I lose Tim momentarily. As I follow the cairns, a large, finely-chiselled form crystallises. It’s the Fell and Rock Climbing Club’s memorial to its members lost in The Great War. In their honour, the survivors bought Great Gable and twelve surrounding fells, and they vested them in the care of the National Trust. Every year, on Remembrance Sunday, a large crowd assembles to pay their respects. To see this polished slab of black stone emerge from the mist is a haunting experience and intensely moving. A familiar voice expresses the same sentiment. It’s Tim. We stand and read the names. These men are commemorated here because, in life, they loved these mountains. We have that in common. A connection. That’s all it takes to bring home the horror of what happened to them.

We take a seat by the summit, looking towards Wasdale (although we can’t see it). We’re not alone and soon we’re joined by several more. We’re all facing the same way. It’s as if we’re in a theatre, waiting for the curtain to rise. Then, fleetingly, it does. A fabulous view of the lake is unveiled, and we cheer in unison. But Wastwater is a fickle leading lady today, and she refuses to entertain us for more than a few seconds. Great Gable is a chorus of deflated sighs as the cloud again descends. With an encore unlikely, we take a compass bearing and head off in search of Windy Gap.

Mexican Night

The first part of the descent into Ennerdale is steep scree. We settle into a sliding rhythm. As the gradient eases, things get harder. The path tracks the stripling river Liza, but the heavy rainfall of recent weeks has rendered the ground a marshy swamp. To avoid sinking, we stick to the rocks, but these are wet and slippery. Progress is so painfully slow that the prospect of a pint before supper is receding fast. Tim looks at his watch and picks up the pace, but he’s got two walking poles and longer legs. I can’t keep up. I slip and almost topple into the stream. “Very unwise”. Ahead, Ennerdale is an oil painting, but I daren’t lift my eyes from my feet. It’s a long and pleasure-less slog. When the Black Sail hut finally appears, it couldn’t be more welcome. James, the manager, is delighted to see us. I think he’s anticipating a boost in the bar takings. We manage a swift half before dinner.

It’s Mexican night – chilli and chocolate fudge cake. We take a seat at one of the communal tables opposite two eleven-year-olds and their grandad. It transpires the “eleven-year-olds” are actually eighteen and on a gap year before university. Grandad (who isn’t really much older than us) doesn’t belong to them. He’s lost in his own thoughts, busily annotating a copy of Wainwright, but the school leavers are very chatty. Tim points out they’re providing a rare service by justifying the “youth” in Youth Hostel. The girl laughs and tells us the YHA keep stats on how many people aged under twenty-five they attract. She knows this because she’s been working in a Youth Hostel, earning the money to go travelling before she starts at Cambridge next September.

They’re both fiercely intelligent, but what strikes us most is their confidence and self-assurance. Tim and I agree we’d have been nervous and taciturn had we been subjected to small-talk with middle-aged strangers at their age. Tim’s convinced we’ll see the girl on the telly in a few years’ time, interviewed as head of some major corporation or government department. She seems so pleasant and idealistic. I hope she’s famous for something positive: a ground-breaking equal-opportunities scheme, perhaps; or a planet-saving innovation; not for a corporate scandal involving cocaine, supplied by dealer from Camberwell she met while backpacking.

I ask where they’re heading tomorrow.

“Coniston,” she answers brightly.

“On foot?” I say, puzzled.

“Yes,” she beams, then senses my surprise and adds, “I know it’s a long way, but we can cut the miles down if we stay high”.

She means altitude – I glance around – Danny’s definitely not here.

But damn right it’s a long way. They could probably follow the coast-to-coast route for some of it, but that must be nearly thirty miles. I try to picture the high-level alternative, then realise I don’t have to – there’s a large map on the wall. Windy Gap, Esk Hause, Esk Pike, Bow Fell, Crinkle Crags, Red Tarn, Wrynose Pass, Wet Side Edge, Great Carrs, Swirl How, Levers Water… that would take me at least two days!

Because I always imagine everyone else is better at this than me, I conclude they must be ferociously fit. But, somehow, it doesn’t ring true. They tell us about their walk today. It was remarkably modest. When they reveal they gave up half way, had a pub lunch and called a taxi, the alarm bells go off. I really don’t want their first press appearances to be in the obituaries, so I try to persuade them they’re being a little over-ambitious. James appears from the kitchen and I call on him for a second opinion. He raises an eyebrow at the plan, thinks for a minute, then gently suggests they walk to Rosthwaite, or perhaps Honister, and get the bus from there.

The guy we took for their grandad finishes his notes, puts down his Wainwright and shuffles along to join in. He clocks our beers and starts extolling the virtues of real ale. He runs a Beers and Books club, apparently. But he’s drinking spring water – I don’t quite trust him. The conversation turns to the surrounding fells. He’s done them all. His walks are all summarised succinctly in his Wainwright. Haystacks, “grey and overcast”; High Stile, “cold and rainy”; Fleetwith Pike, “dull and miserable”. I ask if he was on Great Gable today. He denies it, but I’m not sure I believe him.

We’re a little concerned to learn that this Pied Piper of Precipitation plans to walk the ridge from Pillar to Haycock tomorrow. We’ll be heading over Pillar to Scoat Fell and Steeple. There is a ray of hope, however. He’s going to make a very early start. If he pulls the cloud behind him, Pillar might be free of it by the time we get up there.

When they all go off to bed, we join the couple in the corner, Ben and Karen (I’m terrible with names so that probably isn’t what they’re called). When James disappears, they smile sheepishly and sneak a contraband bottle of wine from their rucksack. Karen looks at ours and asks if we bought it here. When we answer yes, she explains they didn’t realise there was a bar. She feels a bit stupid now for lugging it all the way over the fells.

They’re in their mid-twenties, obviously infatuated with each other, and savouring this time together as Ben is working on an environmental project in the Cairngorms while Karen is in Bristol. They’ve been staying with her aunt, who is a little traditional and has allocated them separate bedrooms. Fortune has smiled tonight, however. The future captains of industry have hired the private room, so Karen has the women’s dorm to herself. We turn in for bed and leave them canoodling on the doorstep.

I’m awakened at around four by someone going out to the loo. He returns five minutes later, but just as I’m drifting off again, someone else comes in. I can’t see who it is, but I sense it’s Ben, the Cairngorm Canoodler. I can hardly blame him for spending the night in the women’s dorm. What amuses me is that he feels obliged to sneak back here afterwards to maintain appearances. Perhaps it’s residual guilt over the wine bottle.

Rewilding

By the time we get up for breakfast, the sun is out, and it has all the makings of a lovely day. A low-lying cloud hangs over Pillar, mind. Beer and Books set off a couple of hours ago. That should place him firmly on the summit.

Outside, the future captains of industry are putting on their boots and nervously eyeing the big black Galloway cattle that have come right up to the hut to graze. James appears and feeds one of the cows slices of apple, straight from his hand. The teenagers relax. I ask them if they’re going to take James’s advice about Rosthwaite or Honister. It seems they’ve scaled their ambition back further: they’re just going to walk over Scarth Gap and along the lake shore to Buttermere village and get the bus from there.

I ask James about the Land Rover emblazoned with the name of the hostel. He says it was a donation and it’s proving a godsend. Delivery trucks can’t make it up here, so they unload everything at Ennerdale Youth Hostel. James uses the Land Rover to collect. Because frozen food can’t be out of the freezer for more than thirty minutes, the drivers give him an hour’s notice so he can be there to meet them. He’s expecting a call later this morning. The teenagers shoot each other opportunistic glances. I think they’re going to ask for a lift. Ben emerges from the men’s dorm and makes a big show of stretching – hoping to imply he’s been there all night. We all wander in for breakfast.

Two hours later, we’re sitting on top of Pillar as the last of the cloud lifts and drifts along the ridge to Haycock. The breeze has teeth, but a stone shelter shields us long enough to watch shadows play across the slopes. This entrancing landscape looked like a rolling sea in July. It’s still has spidery fingers of green, but broad-brushed tones of red and brown encroach as we edge into autumn. The valley is dressed in a mossy, golden velvet, lined with the dark braid of Sitka spruce.

Coledale Fells Across Ennerdale and Buttermere

The spruce forests were a clumsy, insensitive intrusion. Dense planting began in the 1920’s and displaced the sparser indigenous flora. I look across towards Wainwright’s resting place on Haystacks. He hated the evergreens with a passion. I haven’t read his Coast to Coast, but Tim assures me he’s still ranting about the “dark funereal shroud of trees” when he’s all the way over in Yorkshire. He’d be heartened to hear of the Wild Ennerdale project that’s been rewilding the valley since 2003, slowly thinning the conifer and allowing the woodland to diversify naturally.

Ennerdale Water’s days as a reservoir are also numbered. To ensure the survival of wildlife, including a rare mollusc, United Utilities will desist from drawing water here, altogether, by 2025. West Cumbria’s supply will be pumped instead from Thirlmere. As the damage of past decades is undone, Ennerdale is set to become a triumph of conservation over commerce.

Across Windgap Cove, Steeple stands like the wild, craggy spire its name suggests; or Poseidon rising from the depths, scattering a tumbling wash of surf and seaweed in the folds of his long flowing beard. He’s bathed in brilliant light. Bring Me Sunshine has come from the back to win the day. Either that or Beer and Books has gone home early. I hope not. He deserves to see these slopes, for once, in sunlit splendour.

For us, now, Steeple is calling, and we have no mind to resist.

Fell Walk, General, History

Born To Be Wild

December 26, 2017 George Kitching 8 Comments

Millican Dalton and Castle Crag

Wainwright called the Jaws of Borrowdale, “the loveliest square mile in Lakeland”. In the first half of the twentieth century, a cave on the slopes of Castle Crag was home to Millican Dalton, who quit his job in a London office to become a self-styled “Professor of Adventure”. On this walk up Castle Crag, I consider his life, visit his cave and recall a WWI Christmas story that seems to echo his essential message.

The Other

In David Guterson’s novel, The Other, Neil Countryman is an English teacher and an aspiring writer – his desk drawers are full of unpublished novels. Despite being the first Countryman to go to college, he identifies himself as someone “familiar with the middle of the pack”.

Countryman formed a deep and enduring friendship with John William Barry; “The Hermit of the Hoh”, as the newspapers dub him when his body is discovered in the riverside cave that had become his home. Barry was a rich boy, privately educated and heir to a fortune. He met Neil running track and the two bonded over a slightly rebellious outlook and a love of the outdoors. Rebellion to Countryman meant cutting classes and smoking the odd joint. To Barry, ultimately, it meant rejecting civilised society and adopting a life of primitive isolation, deep in the woods of Washington state.

The novel is Neil’s retrospective examination of their friendship and a search, perhaps, for understanding. John William was undoubtedly troubled and, as the pieces of the jigsaw fit into place, an impression is formed of a tormented young man, driven to an ascetic life by personal demons.

On a mundane Monday morning, which of us hasn’t dreamed of escaping the rat race and living a life of adventure closer to nature? For most of us, though, the perfect outdoor expedition ends with a cold pint and a hot bath. If we hear of someone who really has gone feral, we suspect a Barry figure, replete with deep emotional scars. But John William is a fiction. The reality can be surprisingly different…

The Professor of Adventure

“Meet Mr Millican Dalton. He is one of the creatures of the wild. He lives in a cave up in one of the wooded crags that are the glory of Borrowdale… Mr Dalton is 73½ years of age, is tall, spare, hard as a fell toad and if you were to meet him you would agree that in his Tyrolese hat, decorated with a heron’s plume, his plaid drawn over a brown tweed coat, his green corduroy shorts, sinewy legs, sometimes encased in puttees and climbing boots, he looks a fine figure of a man.”

Millican Dalton's Cave, Borrowdale — Millican Dalton’s Cave, Borrowdale

Thus, began an article in the Whitehaven News on January 30^th, 1941. It went on to quote a gloriously upbeat Millican. ‘I was a clerk in a London office. The life stifled me. I longed to be free. I gave up my job and ever since I have camped out. Today I live rent free, rate free, tax free. It’s the only kind of life worth living.’ ”

Dalton was born in 1867, in Nenthead, Cumbria, near the borders of Northumberland and Durham. His family moved south when he was seven and he spent many of his formative years in Chingford, Essex, close to Epping Forest, where he and his brothers embarked on endless adventures, camping and tree-climbing. Holidays in the Lake District saw Millican graduate from tree climbing to rock-climbing and experiment with raft-building. When he left school, he found the working week dull by comparison. He spoke of feeling “constricted, like a caged animal” and longed for the outdoor pursuits, which afforded him full self-expression. A vegetarian and ardent socialist, Millican placed little value on material things (apart from Woodbines, which he smoked with a passion). In 1904, he decided to treat his life like a “chemical experiment” and jack in the humdrum in favour of a life of adventure and romance.

Dalton spent his winters in the south, initially in Essex and later in Buckinghamshire, where he swapped bricks and mortar for a wooden cabin. His summers, he spent in the Lake District, and from around 1914, moved into the cave on the slopes of Castle Crag. Dalton became an accomplished mountain guide, building a loyal following, keen to experience his advertised “Camping Holidays, Mountain Rapid Shooting. Rafting. Hairbreadth Escapes.” He made his own clothes and pioneered lightweight camping equipment. He was an early member of the Fell and Rock Climbing Club, documenting trail-blazing ascents, such as Dove Crag, in their journals. Unconventional through and through, Millican had little truck with the prevailing notion that rock climbing was an exclusively male pursuit. He introduced several women to the sport, most notably Mabel Barker, whose initiation took her to the top of Napes Needle. Barker went on to become something of a figurehead for women’s climbing and remained a lifelong friend of Dalton’s.

In 1940, the Blitzkrieg wrought destruction on London. With his Buckinghamshire home, a little close to comfort, Dalton opted to over-winter in Cumbria. By now, he was something of a national celebrity. The Daily Mirror declared, “Today this seventy-three year old hermit is less affected by the war than any man in Britain”. This was wrong on two counts.

Living in a cave was about the only thing Dalton had in common with Guterson’s “hermit of the Hoh”. Millican hadn’t taken to the woods to escape from people. Indeed, his campfire played host to a constant stream of visitors, coming to sample his home-baked bread, home-grown vegetables and engage in lively conversation with this most convivial, gentlemanly and strongly opinionated of characters. Mabel Barker recalled, “in long association, I never knew him charge anything for his services beyond a trifle for camping expenses”. What he would readily accept in lieu of money, were Woodbines and newspapers (specifically, the Daily Herald). This was not a man, hiding from society. Quite the contrary, he had a keen interest in politics and current affairs. Had he stuck with insurance, he might have become a middle manager. As it was, he became a self-styled “Professor of Adventure”.

The Daily Mirror was also wrong to suggest Millican was untroubled by the war. At the behest of blackout wardens, he had to put out his campfire and brave the winter nights in an unheated cave. He obliged, but was far from happy with the arrangement, and wrote to Winston Churchill several times, demanding that he stop the war as it was impinging on his personal liberty.

Dalton’s opposition went deeper than a dispute over a campfire, however. He had been in his forties when the First World War broke out, so was too old to serve in either. Had he been younger, as a committed pacifist, he would almost certainly have been a conscientious objector.

Despite his gargantuan appetite for Woodbines, Millican remained fit as a fiddle all his life. Every spring, he climbed Napes Needle, with the promise that as soon as it proved too much for him, he would retire from climbing. He never did, but his outdoor existence did finally catch up with him. On returning to Buckinghamshire, he inadvertently burnt down his cabin. Millican survived the fire, but attempted to see out the rest of the winter under canvas. January 1947 was particularly harsh, and this proved too much for his seventy-nine-year-old body. A month later, he died in Amersham hospital of acute heart failure, pulmonary bronchitis and bronchopneumonia.

Today, Millican Dalton’s cave is something of a shrine for those who love the outdoors, but his appeal is broader. Like Neil Countryman, many of us find we are familiar with the middle of the pack. Hopefully, few turn out as troubled as the hermit of the Hoh; but perhaps, a little part of the Professor of Adventure lives in all of us (even if its expression has nothing to do with caves and mountains). Dalton’s story inspires because it says, “to hell with convention”, “be who are you are and live the way that makes you happy”.

Into the Jaws of Borrowdale

It’s early November, when I decide to pay the cave a visit. Between the flanks of High Spy and Kings How, Borrowdale is squeezed to a narrow passage, barely wide enough for the road and the river Derwent to co-exist. This dramatic opening is aptly named “The Jaws of Borrowdale”. Castle Crag is the impressive incisor, rising from the river on the western side. At just under 1000 feet, Bill Birkett considered it too small to include in his Complete Lakeland Fells. Wainwright took a different view, however: “Castle Crag is so magnificently independent, so ruggedly individual, so aggressively unashamed of its lack of inches, that less than justice would be done by relegating it to a paragraph in the High Spy chapter.” He goes on to describe the Jaws of Borrowdale as “the loveliest square mile in Lakeland”.

The River Derwent, in the Jaws of Borrowdale

I climbed High Spy in June when the slopes were as green as a Granny Smith. Now, deep into autumn, they resemble a Russet or a Cox’s Orange Pippin. I park in Rosthwaite and take the track beside the Flock Inn Tearoom that leads through a farmyard to the river. The trees are already sparsely leaved, allowing golden sunlight to gild the waters and do ample justice to Wainwright’s eulogy. I cross the pretty stone arch of New Bridge and bear right along the bank. Castle Crag rises ahead, and I can pick out the direct path to the summit. This will be my way down.

By the water, a herd of Galloway cattle grazes lazily on hay. I stick on the path that skirts the slope and follows the river into the trees.

Where Guterson depicts the forests of Washington State as a savage wilderness, High How Woods are a sylvan idyll. They would be a harsh home in winter, mind. The Daily Mirror piece had photo of Dalton in his cave, standing before a curtain of giant icicles. To camp out here in January, with no campfire, would take a hide considerably thicker than mine.

The path snakes away from the river and, before long, a cave appears on the left. This was not Millican’s, but according to my directions, his lies above. I follow a sketchy path that climbs behind it, turning into a semi-scramble over rock and a spoil heap. On reaching the top, a cavern lies ahead, but it is shallow and dripping with water – by no means inhabitable. I notice a better path rising from the right, which continues upwards to a more likely cave. Someone has chalked a heart and “MD” on a slate by the entrance, so I know this is the place.

It’s roomy and the opening provides just enough light that my head torch isn’t really needed. I switch it on anyway and the beam reveals the unexpected grandeur of the rock. I’d imagined uniform walls of slate-grey, but here, dark charcoal gives way to sparkling white crystal and strata of red, ochre and terra cotta.

Millican Dalton's Cave, Castle Crag — Millican Dalton’s Cave, Castle Crag

I climb the loose stone staircase to the upper level, which Dalton called “the attic”. This was where he slept; someone has bestowed his bed with a fresh mattress of bracken. The Whitehaven News gave a vivid insight into how this looked in Millican’s time: “Everything within is ‘wondrous neat and clean.’ Cleverly packed is the cave-dweller’s camp equipment and cooking utensils, which have all been picked out of village dumps. There was a place for everything and everything was in its place. In one corner was Millican Dalton’s lying-up place. Bracken for a bed and a plaid and an eiderdown for covering. And on this deadly cold night Millican had, as is his wont, taken off his day clothes before he stretched himself out to sleep. Which of us accustomed to the luxury of a bed in a well warmed house would not have been frozen stiff?”

Looking up to the attic, Millican's cave — Looking up to the attic, Millican’s cave

Millican Dalton's bed of bracken, Castle Crag — Millican’s bed of bracken, Castle Crag

By the entrance, just beyond his bed, a motto is carved into the rock: “DON’T!! WASTE WORRDS Jump to conclusions”. The inscription may not be Dalton’s, but that of a Scottish friend, whom he frequently chided for doing just that – chiselled, no doubt, as a joke after an infuriating debate.

Inscription in Millican Dalton's cave — Don’t waste words…

Incription in Millican Dalton's cave — Jump to conclusions

Below the cave, I follow the river through the woods, then turn left along the bridleway to Honister. As I climb beside Broadslack Gill, Castle Crag rises in a sheer cliff to my left, while behind, the valley is a patchwork of autumnal pigment as it bows to Derwent Water and the imperious summits of Skiddaw. Just past the cliff face, a path forks sharply left, climbs a stile and zig zags up the steep gradient toward the summit. On the way, it passes a bench and stone plaque to Sir William Hamer, the former landowner, in whose memory, his wife Agnes, bequeathed this land to the National Trust. Agnes made this bequest in 1939, at the onset of the Second World War. Several years earlier, the couple had bequeathed the summit, in memory of their son, John, who died in World War One.

The path winds through spoil heaps to the summit quarry, where successions of walkers have arranged slates into a makeshift sculpture park. Many stand on end like tombstones to by-gone industry and the many millions of boots that have marked this passage. Others are more ambitious in their arrangement. One resembles a creature with the back of a stegosaurus and the toothy jaw of a shark. A large beehive cairn crowns the southern extent and marks a spectacular view, over the neat, green meadows of Borrowdale, to the wild, precipitous face of Eagle Crag. A red squirrel hops among the trees and for a while I’m undisturbed. It’s deeply peaceful and a strange, beautiful equanimity settles; a profound ease; a quiet, unruffled calm; a serene, sense of belonging.

Castle Crag war memorial — Borrowdale from Castle Crag quarry

No Man’s Land

A grassy path leads up, above the quarry, to the summit proper. Set into the rock is the memorial, not just to John Hamer but to all the men of Borrowdale who died in the trenches. A poppy wreath from the Association of the Royal Engineers has been placed below. My Dad was a Royal Engineer. Perhaps that’s why the plaque holds my attention; or perhaps it’s the backdrop of Derwent Water; or the little wooden cross with the ballpoint inscription, “Danny Glynn”; but as I read the roll of names, I’m very moved by these young lives, cut so cruelly short.

Simple hilltop memorials, like this, speak louder to me than the televised parades and pageantry that accompany Remembrance Sunday. I think of Wilfred Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth:

“What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, –
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing down of blinds.”

These men of Borrowdale were barely out of boyhood. Had they returned, they might have spent summers trading Woodbines for hairbreadth escapes with Millican Dalton. In years to come, they could have climbed Castle Crag with their grandchildren; and told tales of the eccentric old man in a Tyrolean hat, who lived in the woods and taught them all they knew about the fells.

That journey across the Channel may well have been their first outside the county. If they left seeking glory, it wasn’t what they found. Across the fields of Flanders, they faced men just like themselves. Farm workers, colliers, shopkeepers, railwaymen, butchers and miners. Ordinary blokes with simple aspirations and little sway or interest in world affairs. The kind who care for family and friends and a beer or two on a Friday night; all sent to the slaughter for the blind folly of oligarchs.

Deep down, they knew it too: on Christmas Eve, 1914, men on both sides put down their rifles and climbed over the barricades to trade jokes, swap cigarettes and play football. Bloke-ish things that ordinary fellers do. For a few fleeting hours, a bunch of soldiers at the centre of a brutal conflict, did what Millican Dalton had done all his life. They defied the expectations of others and stayed true to themselves. In the dark heart of No Man’s Land, a brief candle of humanity shone very brightly. And that, forever, is a Christmas message worth repeating.

For detailed direction for this walk, visit Walk Lakes

For more on Millican Dalton, I recommend Matthew Entwistle’s book, Millican Dalton A Search for Romance & Freedom

Fell Walk, General, History, Natural History

Summer’s Almost Gone

November 12, 2017 George Kitching 13 Comments

The Kentmere Round

The Kentmere valley is a slice of heaven. It was gifted to Richard De Gilpin in 1206 as a reward for slaying the Wild Boar of Westmorland, and it remains one of Lakeland’s most remote and most beautiful spots. The river Kent begins life high in the fells that ring the valley head. A circuit of these peaks is a long and exhilarating hill walk, known as the Kentmere Round. As I follow the route on a glorious late summer day, I discover the valley is home to a vanishing lake, and also, it seems, a vanishing mountain.

The Wild Boar of Westmorland

Drive along the Crook Road from Plumgarths to Bowness and you’ll pass high-end hotels with names like The Wild Boar Inn and the Gilpin Lodge. Their billboards tempt the well-heeled traveller with warm hospitality and fine cuisine, but their names recall a time when this journey risked much more than a waxing waistline and damage to your wallet.

At the start of the 13th Century, a holy cross stood at Plumgarths and a chantry chapel on St Mary’s Isle, Windermere. Both sites were stops on the pilgrim trail, but it took a righteous faith to make the journey between them for the woods around Crook were inhabited by a ferocious boar with a fearsome reputation for attacking unfortunates who happened across its path.

Mercifully, deliverance was at hand. Richard De Gilpin, known as “Richard the Rider”, had accompanied the Baron of Kendal to Runnymede for the signing of the Magna Carta. His assistance was invaluable as the baron could neither read nor write. However, for De Gilpin, the sword would prove mightier than the pen. On his return to Westmorland, he tracked the boar through the forest to its lair near Scout Scar and engaged it in a fierce battle, eventually slaying the beast and emerging as a hero. The Baron of Kendal was so grateful, he rewarded Richard with the lordship of the manor of Kentmere.

Kentmere Tarn

De Gilpin had been gifted a slice of heaven. Kentmere is one of Lakeland’s most beautiful and remote valleys. Both the valley and the town of Kendal take their names from the river Kent, which has its source high in the fells at the valley head.

Say the words “Lake Windermere” to any good pedant and they’ll tell you that the prefix is redundant as “mere” means “lake”. A hundred years ago, you’d have been forgiven for thinking Kentmere was a misnomer – its mere had vanished. Curiously, industrial interests have been responsible for its reappearance.

Kentmere Tarn lies on private land near the foot of the valley. Its shallow waters provide an ideal habitat for algae known as diatoms. When diatoms die, their organic matter decomposes leaving their hard silica skeletons, called frustules to sink to the bottom and form a layer known as diatomite. Over the centuries, the tarn silted up with diatomite, turning it into a boggy marsh. In the 1840’s, it was drained to improve the surrounding farmland, but the exercise was largely unsuccessful, and the land reverted to marsh.

Diatomite has significant heat-insulating properties and in the 1930’s, commercial operations began to extract the substance for use in insulating boards. Extraction ceased in the 1970’s, when it became cheaper to import, but forty years of dredging had restored the mere. Well stocked with trout, it is now the preserve of angling clubs.

The Kentmere Fells

A fine mountain ridge runs from the Garburn Pass, which links Kentmere and Troutbeck, to the Nan Bield Pass, which once linked Kentmere and the lost village of Mardale Green. Defined by the conical peak of Ill Bell and its smaller mirror-image in Froswick, the skyline is iconic; equally recognisable from the West Coast Mainline or the beach at Bardsea.

Beyond the Nan Bield Pass, the ridge swings around over Harter Fell and Kentmere Pike to Shipman Knotts to form a horseshoe. The full circuit is a long but exhilarating hill walk, known as the Kentmere Round; and it’s my mission for the day.

A single-track road runs out of Staveley, crossing over the River Kent and roughly tracking its bank for about four miles until it reaches the picturesque village of Kentmere. Parking is limited, but it’s only 06:30 am and there are a couple of free spaces by the village hall. Twenty years ago, I might have considered it a “result” to be crawling into bed at the time I crawled out of it this morning. These days, I can imagine no finer time to be out.

It’s August – high summer – a time of dusty tracks and straw-coloured grass, wilting and yellowing as long warm days edge lazily toward autumn…

Only that doesn’t really happen anymore. Such notions are wistful nostalgia for halcyon summers, long-since lost to the vagaries of climate change. In recent years, August has become the rainy season. But today is a rare exception. The sky is a clear expanse of cobalt, streaked with slender strands of cirrus, and thanks to all the rain, the meadows are green and vibrant, retaining something of their spring vitality.

From a paddock, a huddle of herdwicks eye me with idle curiosity; birdsong fills my ears and the day feels pregnant with possibility. Faint wisps of mist cling to the valley’s pockets as I start up the Garburn track, passing the monumental Badger Rock: a prodigious rhyolite boulder and a popular challenge for rock climbers. I pass old gnarled trees, with twisted roots protruding, and craggy outcrops, dressed in purple heather. The stony track climbs steadily at first, then more steeply after Crabtree Brow. After about a mile and a quarter, it reaches the crest and I turn right on to the grassy path that climbs to the summit of Yoke.

Beyond the walled green meadows and dark woods of the Troutbeck valley, the long blue ribbon of Windermere snakes south toward Morecambe Bay; the sea, a silver haze, dissolving into the horizon. Across the valley, Red Screes rise above the Kirkstone Pass. Yoke’s eastern face is the formidable cliff of Rainsborough Crag, but on top it is a grassy hill, remarkable mostly for its views. From the summit on though, the ridge assumes a mountain countenance. The path makes a small dip then ascends to the imperious peak of Ill Bell.

A trinity of well-built cairns stands guard; little stone towers that bookend the vista over Windermere. This is a majestic grandstand. Ahead, the ridge sweeps on over Froswick to the wide grassy plateau of Thornthwaite Crag, then curves east over High Street’s shoulder to Mardale Ill Bell – Ill Bell’s namesake – which thrusts out a grassy spur in greeting.

The spur is Lingmell End and it splits the valley head in two. Beyond, lies the Nan Bield Pass, but on this side, Gavel Crag and Bleathwaite Crag enclose the deep bowl of Hall Cove, where the river Kent springs into life. You can trace the nascent stream as it cascades down the fell side to feed the Kentmere Reservoir.

Imagine for a moment, that you’re standing near an old stone bridge in Kendal watching the river gently lap its arches. Games of bowls play out before the Georgian opulence of the Abbott Hall Art Gallery. The scene is one of civic order and serenity; the river a benign presence, whispering an ambient lullaby. Out here though, you realise the Kent is born a wilder beast. When engorged and enraged by a storm like Desmond, it’s not hard to imagine how it could burst its banks and wreak violence on a trusting community that had mistakenly considered it tame… And how it would take a lot more than De Gilpin’s sword to stop it.

Thornthwaite Crag and Hall Cove — Froswick, Thornthwaite Crag, Hall Cove & Lingmell End

Beyond the summit, the stony path drops steeply to the saddle. A fell-runner stops to say hello, breaking her arduous jog up the slope. She’s the first person I’ve seen.

Froswick’s summit stands ever so slightly west of Ill Bell and gives an even grander view down Windermere. Ill Bell itself presents a steep green flank and the Kentmere Reservoir nestles at its foot. The reservoir is not a natural lake but was built in 1848 to provide a controlled water supply to a gunpowder mill, a wood mill, a snuff mill and the James Cropper paper mill, now the sole owner.

It looks half-drained. Perhaps the paper mill is conducting repairs. The water supply is no longer required for paper making, but James Cropper dutifully maintains it with an environmental focus.

Beyond Froswick, the path splits. The right fork leads on to High Street. I take the left and climb to the summit of Thornthwaite Crag, its fourteen foot cairn, known as The Beacon, a stately slate tower commanding attention. A drystone wall runs out to meet it then crumbles into a straight line of stones, stretching out into the distance like a Richard Long artwork.

Perception is easily tricked. You would swear Ill Bell is the highest of these fells – steep sides tapering to a point suggest elevation – but the flatter top of Thornthwaite Crag is higher. Higher still is High Street, the parent peak, rising in a whale-back between Hayeswater and Haweswater. Thornthwaite Crag is part of the High Street ridge, but it has its own ridge too, running out over Grey Crag to encircle the head of Hayeswater.

Gazing back, I spot the second person of the day. He’s carrying a mountain bike up the long slope from Froswick. He must have hauled it all the way from the Garburn Pass. He waves when he reaches the top, then mounts and heads off towards Mardale Ill Bell to ride the Nan Bield Pass. Providing he doesn’t catch a pedal and catapult himself into the reservoir, it’ll be an exhilarating experience. I hope so – it’s a long way to hike with a bike on your back for a thrill that will be over in minutes. Wraparound shades and a helmet can’t hide the look on his face, however. I know it instantly. It’s freedom.

The Missing Peak

After a while, I set off along the ridge towards High Street. I was up there a fortnight ago, so I’ll skip the summit and make straight for Mardale Ill Bell. Before I do, my attention is distracted by the vision to the west. Hayeswater is an azure reflection of the sky, glistening at the foot of sun-gilded slopes. Beyond, wispy clouds part to unveil the brutal bulk of Fairfield and its northern turret, Cofa Pike, dropping to Deepdale Hause to rub shoulders with St Sunday Crag. Behind them, stands the entire rank of the Helvellyn range. Blencathra commandeers the northern sky, while further west, Great Gable rises, an almighty, rough-hewn rotunda, like a prodigious, primeval St Paul’s.

I’m transfixed. With the changing light, the scene is transforming, coming into ever sharper focus. I stop every few yards to take photos in the vain hope I might capture something of its splendour. I’m aware I need to bear right soon, but the sun catches Striding Edge and I’m fumbling for my camera again. I just can’t tear my gaze away.

When I do, I have a disorienting realisation – High Street has disappeared. It should be straight ahead. I wonder if I’ve missed a turn and come too far west. The summit must be further over, but I can’t work out why I can’t see it.

I cross a wall to the east side of the ridge, expecting to see the Kentmere Reservoir. And there, indeed, is water. Only it’s significantly bigger; and it’s gained an island.

There is a fell where Mardale Ill Bell should be, but it’s an entirely different shape. Everything is somehow familiar and yet completely wrong. It’s as if I’m drinking tea but expecting coffee and can’t make sense of it.

I look behind – I can see Thornthwaite Crag, but Froswick and Ill Bell are obscured by a large summit that wasn’t there before. On the left, a long ridge leads up to it, at once alien and familiar, like someone you know, but bump into out of context and can’t place. I reach for the map.

“Are you heading for High Raise?”, a cheery voice asks from behind.

I turn to see a white-haired man with a big smile and bags of enthusiasm. He sees the map and can’t help himself, he’s straight over to compare routes. “We’re missing out High Raise this time and heading straight for Kidsty Pike”, he says and nods at the shape-shifting Mardale Ill Bell.

With those words, I know exactly where I am, I’m just at a loss as to how I got here. I look back at the large fell behind me. The wall runs up over the top with a scraggy path in tow, but a better path traverses the western side, a little below the summit. This is the route I followed, so entranced by the view, that I managed to walk all the way over the top of High Street without noticing.

My new companion is scratching his head. “I can’t make out where we are on here”, he says, puzzling over the contours.

“You won’t”, I reply. “It’s the wrong map”. High Street spans the divide between two. I dig out the one that covers the northern region and fess up about my half-wittery. He chuckles and I bid him farewell as he heads for Kidsty Pike. I look down at the lake where I thought the Kentmere Reservoir should be. It’s a reservoir right enough. It serves Manchester; the remains of Mardale Green lie below its surface. It’s Haweswater.

Across the valley, the ridge has every right to look familiar. It’s Riggindale Edge – the finest way up High Street and a route I’ve taken many times – most recently, just two weeks ago. And yet then, as on every previous occasion, I turned left at the summit and returned over Mardale Ill Bell and Harter Fell. Why have I never come this way to visit Rampsgill Head, High Raise and Kidsty Pike? They look magnificent and I resolve to return.

It’s a promise I’ll keep twice in the weeks to come. The first time, I’ll meet a man from Lincolnshire in the gloom as the cloud descends. Together we’ll seek out these summits in fog. A month later, I’ll retrace our steps in the golden light of autumn. This time, the fells will echo with the bark of rutting stags…

I follow the wall back to the top of High Street.

Last Rays

It starts to cloud over as I reach the summit of Mardale Ill Bell, adding drama to the vistas over Haweswater and Small Water.

The rocky path to the top of Harter Fell looks tough as I descend to the Nan Bield Pass but its bark turns out to be worse than its bite. The path zig zags up through the crags and doesn’t test tired legs as much as I feared. Before long, I’m standing by its strange summit cairn, wrought from old iron fence posts.

From here, I follow the fence south over increasingly boggy ground. The sun retreats behind the building cloud. It’s an unwelcome reminder that summer’s almost gone. As if to reinforce the darkening mood, the top of Kentmere Pike is drab and featureless. The perfect pyramid of Ill Bell rises opposite across a plain of russet grass, but it feels autumnal now – the late summer sunshine I enjoyed on its summit seems an age ago. The wind whips up and starts to nip. I plod on through black mud, trying not to sink.

But like a feisty boar, summer’s not so easily defeated. Ahead, shafts of light pierce the gloom and hit the Kentmere valley, conjuring a vivid green oasis beyond the sombre brown of the fell. As I reach a ladder stile and start the climb to Shipman Knotts, the clouds roll back, and summer’s reign is gloriously reinstated.

Where Kentmere Pike lacked interest, Shipman Knotts is a beguiling maze of tumble-down walls and rocky outcrops. Heather sprouts from the crags and bracken-clad slopes roll away to Longsleddale. All is lit with the warm ember glow of afternoon sun and a sense of deep contentment kicks in.

At Wray Crag, a steep descent down rocky steps brings me to the Sadgill to Kentmere track. I follow the track towards Kentmere, relishing the soft afternoon light. Shortly after joining the road, I climb a stile into the first of two bracken-filled enclosures. They lead gently down to a small wooden footbridge over the Kent. It’s pretty beyond compare – a leafy parade of dappled sunlight, sparkling waters and foliage in every shade of green. I’m still smiling as I walk through Kentmere churchyard and back to the car.

Some days are simply perfect. This has been one of them. A tremendous ridge walk and a late rallying of summer. With the coming autumn, the days will shorten, the green will fade, the leaves will wither, and a damp chill will invade. But today will stay with me and its memory will bring warmth.

Many of our finest poets have extolled the restorative powers of the countryside, but it’s the Foo Fighters who are playing in my head, “Times like these, you learn to live again. Times like these – time and time again”.

To find a map and directions for this route, visit WalkLakes.co.uk

Fell Walk, General, History, Literature

In My Time Of Dying

October 15, 2017 George Kitching 31 Comments

Haystacks and Wainwright.

As a teenager, my overriding aspiration was to move to the city and form a band. It was the start of a journey that would take me from the clubs of Newcastle to the pages of the NME and the very cusp of success, only to change direction and drop me in the wilds of Cumbria. En route, Jimi Hendrix would make room for a Borough Treasurer from Blackburn who disliked music, didn’t much like people, but loved the hills and whose writing opened my eyes to a whole new world. I pay tribute to this unlikeliest of heroes on top of Haystacks, the heather-clad hill where his ashes are scattered.

From Hendrix to the Hills

My heroes were all musicians: Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townshend, Gram Parsons, Paul Weller, Black Francis… I could go on. I grew up in the country among the gentle hills of Wiltshire, but when I was 18, it wasn’t higher fells I craved, it was the city. Somewhere with nightlife and a thriving alternative music scene; somewhere I could join a band and play loud electric guitar in dark, sweaty, smoky clubs.

I secured a place at Newcastle University but my studies came second to my musical aspirations. After some false starts and a few years learning how to make noises other people might deign to listen to, I found friends with the right collective chemistry and we formed a band that was half decent. We were called Hug, and together we achieved most of our teenage ambitions. We toured the country in a transit van; played support to some of our heroes; we secured a record contract and released three e.p.’s and an album. We recorded sessions for Radio 1; and, at the start of 1991, the New Musical Express named us, alongside the Manic Street Preachers and Ocean Colour Scene, as one of their top tips for the coming year.

Unfortunately, we were the exception that proved the rule. While others on the list shot into the arena of international stardom, our journey stalled at the perimeter, performed a three-point turn and deposited us back at the Gateshead DHSS, where our hopes of evading more traditional employment were unceremoniously quashed.

I signed up for a course at Newcastle Poly or Northumbria University, as it had just become (supposedly an eleventh-hour name change, after some bright spark on the committee realised that rebranding it, “The City University of Newcastle upon Tyne” wouldn’t abbreviate well). I was to learn about IT, a far cry from my original vision of a career, but one that might, at least, earn me a living.

I hadn’t long qualified when my wife, Sandy was offered a dream job in Cumbria. I urged her to take it and set about seeking opportunities for myself, eventually securing a role with a small company developing medical software for managing people on dangerous drugs (the prescribed, not the proscribed kind). It seemed an interesting and worthwhile use of my new skills and we settled in the South Lakes.

Our first house was on the edge of a wood, right out in the sticks. It took a few weeks to adjust. I’d never really understood the term, “the roaring silence” until then. When you live in a city for any length of time you stop hearing the constant hum of traffic, but it becomes a vaguely hypnotic backdrop; a subliminal reassurance that the buzz of human activity continues as normal. To have it suddenly removed was disconcerting. I remember lying awake, acutely aware that I could hear absolutely nothing. Then a barn owl screeched outside the open window and I nearly shot through the ceiling. A few months later, I heard the bark of a stag for the first time and thought the Hound of the Baskervilles was coming through the wood.

But the countryside had started to work its magic and, before long, I felt the draw of the mountains. I invested in a set of OS maps and some walking guides, including a set of laminated cards, which I still use, although their age is now apparent from the supporting notes, which advise the intrepid explorer to “invest in a pair of walking stockings and a spare pullover”.

An Unlikely Hero

As my interest grew, I become acquainted with a name that seemed almost synonymous with the Lakeland fells. In the Carnforth Bookshop, I chanced upon a second-hand copy of one of his books, “The Southern Fells” and snapped it up to see what the fuss was about. The pocket-sized tome was a little dog-eared and it had obviously witnessed, first-hand, the summits it described; but it was all the more special for it. Its content, however, was a revelation: a series of pen and ink drawings, part map, part sketch that ingeniously captured the essence of a mountain and rendered it on a 2D page in such a way that the reader instantly understood its character and topography. I had always admired the way artist, David Hockney could convey so much with such an economy of line. Here too, the author accomplished a similar feat; and the accompanying text was pure, heartfelt poetry. It spoke volumes in a few simple paragraphs shot-through with warmth, humour, passion and practical advice.

Suddenly, Jimi Hendrix and Pete Townshend had to shuffle along to make room for a pipe-smoking, whiskered, staunchly conservative old curmudgeon, who went by the name of Alfred Wainwright. An unlikely coalition to say the least – Wainwright once assured a bemused Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs that, “music has never played an important part in my life. It’s never been an inspiration to me. Rather an irritation, very often.”

Born in Blackburn, Alfred Wainwright grew up in relative poverty. His father was an alcoholic, who drank much of what little he earned as a stonemason. The young Alfred was bright and a model pupil at school, where he consistently scored top marks, but he was forced to leave at thirteen in order to support his mother.

He got a job as an office boy with the Blackburn Borough Engineer’s department, but continued his studies at night school and eventually qualified as an accountant, which enabled him to climb the career ladder and become Borough Treasurer.

If the young Wainwright’s diligent attempts to better his lot were an attempt to escape the hardships of his upbringing, poverty was not the only thing he wanted to flee. From an early age, he had shown a keen interest in walking and cartography. He produced his own maps and frequently eschewed the industrial urban environment for long days in the tranquility of the countryside.

At the age of twenty three, Alfred, or AW as he preferred to be known, came to the Lakes for a walking holiday with his cousin, Eric. They climbed Orrest Head, above Windermere, where they witnessed the Lakeland fells for the first time. He described the experience as “magic; a revelation so unexpected that I stood transfixed, unable to believe my eyes”.

A year later, AW entered into a disastrous marriage with Ruth Holden. Throughout their courtship, Wainwright kept his cap on. When he finally removed it on their wedding night, the sight of his red hair revolted her and both parties rapidly came to regret their decision. Despite the birth of their son, Peter in 1933, domestic relations did not improve and the lure of the Lakes as an escape grew ever stronger.

Wainwright’s biographer, Hunter Davies is convinced that had AW found happiness in his first marriage, he would have “walked far less and written nothing”. As it was, his trips to the fells became a weekly pilgrimage and he eventually took a pay cut to move to Kendal in 1941. Eleven years later, he started writing his Pictorial Guides as a “love letter” to the landscape that held him in such rapture.

That AW sought solace among the summits is abundantly obvious throughout his books. He describes finding “a balm for jangled nerves in the silence and solitude of the peaks” and of “man’s search for beauty, growing keener as so much in the world grows uglier”.

An intensely private man, he disliked crowds and disapproved of group excursions as evidenced in his mournful description of the popular route up the Old Man of Coniston: “This is the way the crowds go: the day trippers, the courting couples, babies and grandmothers, the lot. On this stony parade, fancy handbags and painted toenails are as likely to be seen as rucksacks and boots.” This is accompanied by a sketch of a lone walker looking to the fells while a crowd stares in the opposite direction, trying to spot Blackpool Tower.

By his own admission, Wainwright was a shy child who grew up to be anti-social, but the popular perception of an old curmudgeon is a little unfair. Bonhomie toward like-minded explorers runs right through his writing and his dry humour is everywhere.

In a personal note at the conclusion of his final Pictorial Guide, “The Western Fells”, AW lists his six best Lakeland mountains as “Scafell Pike, Bowfell, Pillar, Great Gable, Blencathra and Crinkle Crags”, then quickly qualifies the list, explaining, “These are not necessarily the six fells I like the best. It grieves me to have to omit Haystacks (most of all)”.

Haystacks is not technically a mountain, being just short of the requisite 2000 ft, and AW is being objective in omitting it on these grounds; but this relatively diminutive hill captured his heart more than any other. He describes it as standing “unabashed and unashamed amid a circle of higher fells, like a shaggy terrier in the company of foxhounds”… “For a man trying to get a persistent worry out of his mind, the top of Haystacks is a wonderful cure.”

The “persistent worry” of his home life continued until, in his own words, “my wife left me, took the dog and I never saw her again”. AW eventually found matrimonial happiness when he married an old friend, Betty McNally. She became not only his spouse but his walking companion. After his death in 1991, Betty carried out AW’s long-held wish and scattered his ashes by Innominate Tarn on top of his beloved Haystacks.

Haystacks and Fleetwith Pike

It’s been years since I climbed Haystacks and when I did, the top was shrouded in mist. It’s high time I return. I leave the house at 6:00 am for a glorious drive that runs the full lengths of Windermere, Rydal Water, Grasmere, Thirlmere and Derwent Water. From the high level drama of the Honister Pass, I descend to Gatesgarth with Buttermere stretched out before me, sparkling in the September sun.

I park the car and follow the stream through the farmyard and out toward High Crag, towering ahead. To my left, Fleetwith Edge soars up over Low and High Raven Crags to the top of Fleetwith Pike. This is my intended descent. It looks a little daunting from below, but the views will be outstanding. Between these two loftier neighbours lies Haystacks, a dwarf in comparison but no grassy hillock, its craggy rock-face hints at the interest on top.

I must have slept at an odd angle as I have a stiff neck which the drive has turned into a dull headache. Wainwright famously declared, “one can forget even a raging toothache on Haystacks”, so I’m sure it won’t bother me for long, but as I round a little coppice of trees, I find a sealed tray of paracetamol in the path. I don’t really believe in fate but can’t deny the serendipity and it feeds a strange feeling that I’m somehow supposed to be here today.

I start the climb up to Scarth Gap between Haystacks and High Crag, pausing occasionally to cast an eye back over Buttermere and Crummock Water. On reaching Scarth Gap, I’m greeted with fine views over Ennerdale to two of Lakeland’s heavyweights, Pillar and Great Gable. Pillar’s precipitous northern slopes are bathed in green shadow, sheer and formidable. I try to trace the High Level Traverse between the crags to the magnificent column of Pillar Rock, from which the mountain takes its name. I lose the line of the path (apparently it’s not much easier to follow when you’re on it).

A cloud floats across the face of Gable, a huge dark turret rising from the valley head. Over Buttermere, the bulky mass of Grassmoor dominates, while here, across the saddle, the path climbs steeply to the rocky heights of High Crag. These are the “foxhounds” in whose company the “shaggy terrier” behind me stands “unabashed and unashamed”. I turn around and continue the climb to discover why.

The question is quickly answered as the ascent turns into a scramble; nothing technically difficult, but challenging enough to establish this as mountain terrain, good and proper, and the rival of any of its neighbours. On reaching the parapet, Haystacks’ treasures are revealed in full – a heather-clad castle of rocky towers and tiny tarns, leading eyes and feet in a merry dance of intrigue. Two excrescences of stone vie for the distinction of summit, although the honour is usually bestowed on the farther one, which boasts a cairn as its crown.

Cloud shadows dapple the flanks of High Crag as I look back across a small blue pond that glistens like an overture to the watery expanse of Buttermere beyond. I’m almost entirely alone, but for two distant figures perched precariously atop the turret of Big Stack, framed against the plunging crags of Fleetwith Pike. Everywhere I turn is magical and somehow otherworldly. Haystacks has all the rugged drama of its neighbours but here, in place of a desolate wilderness of boulder, is a wild beauty and a pervading sense of tranquillity.

Walker perched on Big Stack with Fleetwith Pike behind — Walkers perched on Big Stack with Fleetwith Pike behind

High Stile over summit cairn, Haystacks — High Stile over a summit tarn on Haystacks

I cross a depression and clamber to the true summit for another breathtaking panorama; then meander down through the heather, where herdwicks graze happily, to the peaceful shore of Innominate Tarn. AW’s wish to be scattered here is expressed more than once in his writings, but never as fully and eloquently as in Memoirs of a Fellwanderer, where he says this:

“All I ask for, at the end, is a last long resting place by the side of Innominate Tarn, on Haystacks, where the water gently laps the gravelly shore and the heather blooms and Pillar and Gable keep unfailing watch. A quiet place, a lonely place.

“I shall go to it, for the last time, and be carried – someone who knew me in life will take me and empty me out of a little box and leave me there alone. And if you, dear reader, should get a bit of grit in your boot as you are crossing Haystacks in the years to come, please treat it with respect. It might be me”.

I’m transfixed by the gently rippling waters and could easily linger all day. AW was not a religious man. He knew heaven was right here and to mingle with this soil and feed the heather was his hope for an afterlife. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…

To Wainwright, true music was here – in birdsong, or the tinkling of a mountain stream, or the sound of the wind among the peaks. I can’t argue with that. It’s perfect.

Eventually, I wrestle myself away and follow the path as it wends down through some remarkable rock scenery to Dubs Bottom, from where I start the ascent of Fleetwith Pike.

The contrast could not be more striking. The intoxicating spell of a natural Shangri-La is broken by the harsh scars of industry in the spoil heaps and engineered gullies of Dubs quarry. From here, the path follows the line of an old works tramway to the head of Honister Crag, known as Black Star. Wainwright describes Black Star as “a place without beauty. A place to daunt they eye and creep the flesh”. The crag itself is not in view, but on the horizon a spoil heap rises, battleship grey, like a dark and sinister tower. If Haystacks was a fairy tale fortress, the vision ahead is the Castle of the Dolorous Guard, straight from the page of Arthurian legend. “Dub” is a Celtic word for black and right on cue, the sky darkens. It’s enough to send a slight shiver down the spine.

It would be remiss to imply the old quarry workings are a lamentable eyesore, however. Industrial heritage holds its own fascination, especially as it is slowly reclaimed by nature. AW understood that Lakeland isn’t a true wilderness. The hand of man is everywhere, from the intricate pattern of dry stone walls enclosing lush green grazing pastures in the valley bottoms to the shafts and tunnels of old mines that pierce the fell sides. As he put it (in describing Honister), “there is no beauty in despoliation and devastation but there can be dramatic effect and interest and so it is here”.

But the desolate outcrop of Black Star is not my destination and I turn left after Dubs Hut (maintained as a bothy by the Mountain Bothies Association) and climb beside a slate-filled gully to two spoil heaps where I pick up a path left, which meanders over open moorland to the summit of Fleetwith Pike. Here, one of the finest views in Lakeland awaits, looking straight down the valley over Buttermere and Crummock Water with distant Loweswater curving off to the left.

I sit and stare at this majestic scene as I eat my lunch, then begin the plunging descent of Fleetwith Edge. It’s not nearly as daunting as it appeared from below. There are some steep rock steps to negotiate and some minor scrambling, but nothing too difficult if due care is taken. The path follows well chosen zigzags and is impossible to rush, not only because you need to watch your footing, but also because it’s absolutely necessary to pause frequently and marvel at the improving vista.

At the bottom, I join the road and I’m suddenly struck by the hope that my gaitors have done their job. What if I find a bit of grit in my boot? I can’t leave AW in the car park, he hated cars.

I look back and notice the white wooden cross low on the fell side. This marks the spot where Fanny Mercer, a servant girl from Rugby, fell from Fleetwith Edge in September 1887 (130 years ago, this month). Her simple memorial is a sobering reminder that the fells can be treacherous as well as beautiful. It’s heartbreaking to think one so young was robbed of her life on what should have been a joyful excursion.

Fanny Mercer's cross — Fanny Mercer’s cross

Tragic accidents occur daily, some of much greater magnitude than the sad story of a servant girl from over a hundred years ago. And yet this simple cross remains affecting because there’s no objective yardstick for pain. That whole communities are devastated by fire, flood, disease or famine doesn’t negate the suffering of someone bruised by a failed relationship or grieving the loss of a loved one. We all have our crosses to bear, however big or small, but ironically, it’s often hardship that sharpens our senses to the beauty in the world. The most affecting songs are rooted in heartbreak and it was perhaps the pain of a loveless marriage that led Wainwright to find hope, inspiration and validation among these hills. I hope Fanny experienced a little of that wonder too, before her life was cut so abruptly short.

“The fleeting hour of life of those who love the hills is quickly spent, but the hills are eternal. Always there will be the lonely ridge, the dancing beck, the silent forest; always there will be the exhilaration of the summits. These are for the seeking, and those who seek and find while there is still time will be blessed both in mind and body” – A Wainwright.

Crime, Fell Walk, General, History

A Walk on the Wild Side

September 10, 2017 George Kitching 17 Comments

The Mosedale Horseshoe and a Night at Black Sail

A tough but beautiful walk around the Mosedale Horseshoe takes in some of England’s finest mountain scenery and ends with a night at the country’s remotest youth hostel, deep in the wilds of Ennerdale. It begins by the shore of Wastwater, where the sight of divers kitting up in the car park, stirs memories of a notorious 80’s murder enquiry.

The Lady in the Lake

There’s something utterly wild about Wastwater. Forget the pastoral prettiness of Windermere or Coniston, England’s deepest lake is a feral beast; savagely beautiful but ever poised to bare its teeth. On this July morning, the sky is overcast and there’s a distinct chill in the breeze. The choppy waters are gun-barrel grey, rippled with white-crested waves; dark and inscrutable, daring you to guess at the secrets beneath.

In the wooded parking area beside Overbeck Bridge, two men are preparing to find out. As they don dry suits and all manner of sophisticated diving gear, Tim remarks they must reckon it’ll be seriously cold. One of the divers looks up and smiles, “yeah, at 40 metres down, the temperature stays pretty much the same all year round”.

40 metres is the limit for diving with compressed air. Below that, special suits and gas mixtures are needed to survive. For all the lake’s imagined mystery, what most divers find is an endless expanse of mud; or perhaps, if they’re lucky, the gnome garden, introduced by an enterprising soul to add a bit of novelty to the view.

On occasion, though, Wastwater has yielded darker secrets. In 1984, Neil Pritt was diving at a depth of 34 metres when he spied a rolled-up carpet tied to a concrete block. At first, he dismissed it as the efforts of an ambitious fly-tipper, but aware that police had recently searched the lake, looking for missing French fell-walker, Veronique Mireille Marre, Neil took a closer look. His suspicions were confirmed – the carpet concealed the body of a woman.
But it wasn’t Veronique. Whoever she was, she’d been down there some time. The cold had preserved her so well, it was only a matter of days before police made a positive ID. In the meantime, the press dubbed her “The Lady of the Lake”.

When investigators removed her wedding ring, it bore the inscription, “Margaret 15-11-63 Peter”. Detectives made the connection with the case of Margaret Hogg from Guildford, reported missing by her husband, Peter in 1976. Peter was arrested. Under interrogation, he capitulated and confessed to killing his wife but claimed extreme provocation. He told the Old Bailey how Margaret had been having an affair, which she made little effort to conceal. According to his testimony, on the night in question, Margaret tired of merely taunting her husband and physically attacked him. Peter retaliated by grabbing her by the throat and squeezing hard. When the life went out of her eyes, he stopped. When she slumped to the floor, he realised she was dead and coolly hatched a plan that very nearly proved the perfect crime.

After wrapping Margaret’s body in an old carpet, Peter put her in the boot of the car with a rubber dingy, a roll of carpet, and a concrete block. Then he drove through the night to Wastwater. Had Peter rowed out a few metres further, Margaret’s body would have fallen into the “abyss” and sunk all the way to the bottom, at nearly twice the depth a diver could reach. As it was, she came to rest on a shelf just under half way down, where she would remain for the next eight years.

I’m not sure what a modern jury would have made of Peter’s defence, but in 1984, a woman’s infidelity was enough to hand the moral high ground to the man. Peter was acquitted of murder and given three years for manslaughter, plus an extra year for obstructing the coroner and committing perjury in divorce proceedings.

Veronique’s body was later found at the bottom of Broken Rib Crag. The coroner returned an open verdict, but there was nothing to suggest that this was anything other than a tragic accident.

The Mosedale Horseshoe

For all its brooding solitude, Wastwater is magnificently beautiful. The vista over lake, to the fells at its head, has been voted Britain’s favourite view. Great Gable takes centre stage, while in the foreground, resembling the hull of an upturned boat, stands Yewbarrow. Yewbarrow is the start of the Mosedale Horseshoe, an airy circuit that boasts some of the finest mountain scenery in Lakeland. Tim and I are going to walk the ridge to its highest point on Pillar. From there, we’ll descend into the wilds of neighbouring Ennerdale for a night at England’s remotest youth hostel – the Black Sail hut.

We leave the car park following the stream, cross a stile, and turn right on to a steep and unrelenting grass slope. Ahead is the formidable face of Bell Rib. There doesn’t appear to be a way up for mere mortals. Indeed, Wainwright declares it “unclimbable except by experts”, adding, “maps showing paths going straight over it are telling fibs”. Fortunately, the Ordnance Survey is less aspirational. Their route skirts left and climbs between Bell Rib and Dropping Crag. Such is the gradient, we’re looking for the fork long before we reach it.

The path ends abruptly at a steep, stone-filled gully. We put hand to rock and start to climb. At just over 2000 ft., Yewbarrow is the baby of the group, but it’s no mean mountain and won’t surrender its summit without a struggle.

At the top, a grass slope leads to a narrow ridge beyond Bell Rib. Behind us, Wastwater is a shimmer of silver beneath the whitening cloud. When we reach the crest, a dramatic cleft in the crags, known as The Great Door, frames a canvas of rich but sombre tones: the shadowed lake a dark sash of royal satin, deep and vivid blue; hemmed by the solemn Screes, their slopes mottled with daubs of gold and green, and deftly flecked with feathered brushstrokes, like copper flames that flicker up to kiss a scarf of purple heather.

Poised above the water’s edge, a dark vestigial verge of coppice, a lone patch of fur on an else clean-shaven pelt.

Cupped high among bottle-green spires, Burnmoor Tarn is a glint, a duck-egg glimmer, a hint of hidden brightness, cajoling the bashful sun to break cover.

A few easy rock steps remain between here and the summit. When we arrive, the panorama is remarkable; Pillar rises like barnacled leviathan from the mossy sea of Mosedale; sunlight gilds the green skirts of Kirk Fell and, to the east, the Roof of England is cloaked in cloud, Mickledore just visible through the mist like a gateway to Middle Earth.

Across a depression, we stride up Stirrup Crag and glimpse our onward path. Thin wisps of cloud float like wood smoke around the top of Red Pike. A faint path snakes through charcoal crags to a carpet of olive green above.

The way lies across Dore Head, some 300 feet below. If we’d studied the contours we’d have known the path that swung left, a little way back, was the easier proposition. As it is, we stick with the one we’re on and climb down the crag itself; descending abruptly through a maze of chimneys; easing down bulwarks on jagged ledges; stepping back from dead-ends that stop in sudden drops. It’s slow and a touch unnerving, but there’s only one sticky moment: a parapet I think I can shimmy down in two small stretches. But I misjudge. Now, over-committed, I’m obliged to jump – a little too far for comfort. Thankfully, I land well, with all extremities intact, and manage not to career over the next edge.

Once down, we’re slightly shocked at how severe Stirrup Crag looks from below and wonder if we’d have attempted it had we known. I later read that Wainwright left a trail of blood over these rocks and feel relieved they weren’t craving a fresh sacrifice. For some reason, Tim chooses now to mention that the Black Sail Youth Hostel cancellation policy includes a plea to the effect – “let us know if you are not coming. If we’re expecting you and you don’t show, we’ll send out Mountain Rescue.” I’m not sure whether it’s a comfort or a concern.

A party of around 15 fresh faced teenagers has arrived at Dore Head ahead of us. They took the sensible path. In fact, they may have bypassed Yewbarrow altogether. They’re now comfortably ensconced in a rest and refreshment break that looks set to extend indefinitely. If they’re going to tackle the full round at this rate, it could prove a very long day. I hope they’re not descending from here, though. The traditional way down to Mosedale is a notorious scree slope. Once the delight of scree runners, it’s now so dangerously eroded it looks concave from below. A grass rake offers an alternative but even that looks severe. I think of Veronique Marre and conclude some risks just aren’t worth taking; then try not to think about that as I look back over Stirrup Crag on the way up Red Pike.

Once on top, isolated shafts of sunlight steal through cracks in the cloud. Scoat Tarn sparkles to the south, the adamantine lustre of lost treasure, scattered in the bracken. Haycock is now in sight, while, northward, Great Gable rises over Kirk Fell, a pyramid no more, but a mighty dome, surged from the earth in an ancient eruption of volcanic violence. Beyond the summit, we perch on crags above Black Combe and eat pies, looking across to Pillar and the stiff stream of scree tapering to the col of Wind Gap.

Out of the breeze, it’s warm. Certainly, warm enough for midges to swarm around Tim. Apparently, he only had space in his rucksack for one bottle, so it was a toss-up between sun cream and midge repellent. He went with sun cream, which is probably why the sun has, so far, been so coy. Tim swears by a midge repellent that’s marketed by Avon as a moisturiser. It’s called Skin So Soft and whenever he produces a bottle, he feels compelled to assure me “it’s what the SAS use”. He retreats into the breeze and the midges turn on me, so I’m compelled to join him.

We climb the saddle to Scoat Fell and catch our first sight of Ennerdale Water, a pale sheen against the dense green of the pine plantations on its banks. The summit lies a little to our left and a fine ridge runs out to Steeple, which looks as inspiring as its name. It’s all too tempting for anyone with fire in their blood. But we’ll have fire in our bellies too and we still have some way to go before we reach Black Sail. Supper is served at seven, so to arrive ravenous and find we’d missed it would be miserable. There’s also that thing in the cancellation clause that convinces us to press on to Black Crags without detour. From there, we descend to Wind Gap and begin the tough pull up to Pillar. With the exertion, any residual disappointment at skipping Steeple turns to quiet relief.

Few labours reward so richly, however. As we reach the summit, the sun breaks through, illuminating the landscape in way that is nothing short of magical. Pillar Rock rises majestically above a sward of conifer; Great Gable is a tower of rugged glory; Broad Stand, finally free of cloud, a brutal bastion on the ramparts of Sca Fell. But as shafts of sunlight dance across the slopes, this terrain of intransigent rock manages to evoke nothing so much as a swirling Turner seascape: the white splashes of exposed rock are surf and spray; dark crags, the welling eddies; the wave upon wave of rolling peaks, a surging ocean, every shade of green.

High Crag, Robinson and Hindscarth from Pillar

All the way down to Looking Stead, I linger, attempting to capture this on camera. It’s beyond my skills and if I lavish words, it’s only to try and convey what pictures fail to tell.

At the top of Black Sail Pass, we meet a man who asks us if we’ve seen a party of 15 teenagers. They’re not late, he’s just bored of waiting. Something tells me he’s in for a long day.

Black Sail Hut

We descend into Ennerdale, where, in the remotest corner of this wildest of valleys, lies an old shepherd’s bothy: The Black Sail Hut, now a Youth Hostel and our home for the night. A warm welcome and cold beers await. We sit outside on wooden benches in the golden light of evening and watch the Galloway cattle, that roam free like big black bison, old as the hills.

Tim disappears for a shower and I watch a small figure wend her way down the long path from Windy Gap, between Great and Green Gable. When she arrives, she unshoulders her pack, grabs a beer and joins me outside. We compare notes on our routes. As we chat, I suddenly realise why she looks familiar. It’s Yvonne, a friend of my wife’s from about ten years ago. Yvonne is a high-powered consultant to head gardeners. I’ve only met her once, when she led a tour of the grounds in a Lakeland stately home, dispensing invaluable tricks and tips, some of which I wrote down and perpetually promise to put into practice. She asks about Sandy and we laugh out loud at the odds of meeting like this. Tim reappears around the corner, and the midges make a bee-line for him. Yvonne proffers a bottle of repellent. “Skin So Soft” he beams delightedly, then drops his voice an octave and adds “the SAS use it, you know”.

Great Gable from Black Sails Hut — Great Gable from Black Sail Hut

Relaxing at Black Sails Hut — Relaxing at Black Sail Hut

After supper, we sip beers and swap stories with two guys sharing our dorm. They’re old friends from London, who have moved out of the capital in different directions but meet up once or twice a year for walking holidays. They’ve been in the Lakes all week, tramping the hills and staying in hostels. There are three of them but the third has turned in for an early night. Unsurprisingly, he’s the first up in the morning. I join him for a coffee while we wait for breakfast. He tells me how they got a light soaking on top of Haystacks late yesterday afternoon.

“That’s odd” I say, “we were on Pillar around that time, looking down on Haystacks. It looked as if it was in sunshine.”

He looks puzzled, then shrugs, “perhaps it was earlier – three-ish possibly”. Very localised showers are possible in the hills, but it still doesn’t quite add up.

“We stayed at Honister Youth Hostel, last night”, he continues.

“No, you didn’t”, I shout (silently), “you stayed here. I’ve just seen you get out of bed”.

“We’ve been lucky today though”, he goes on, “it’s been dry all day”.

Incredulous, I want to scream, “It’s quarter to eight in the morning. You’ve not been anywhere yet and besides, it’s bucketing it down”… but then I realise, he’s just a day out. By “today”, he means “yesterday”, “yesterday” means the day before. Suddenly, everything makes sense. It’s pretty much the same account we got from his mates – you just have to subtract a day.

It’s an odd idiosyncrasy, but I can think of two possible explanations: he’s either a timelord or, after several consecutive days on the fells, the days begin to blur. I’ve been out for one night and I can already understand that.

Everything that seems so integral to our existence – the bustle of the working week, its routines, schedules, deadlines – simply dwindles in importance out here; it’s all fluster, all folly, all “sound and fury, signifying nothing”. Our own inflated sense of self-importance, seems equally ridiculous. Set against the timeless scale of this primal landscape, our hive and industry seem no more significant than the swarming of midges.

I scratch the bites and the simile suddenly seems poignant – we too do disproportionate damage. Wainwright called Ennerdale’s pine plantations an act of vandalism – a defacing of the indigenous landscape – but we do much worse than this. And with a climate change denier in the White House, efforts to curb our excesses are under threat.

In the 60’s, a NASA scientist called James Lovelock wrote a book called GAIA, in which he argues the Earth acts like a single living organism. Its ecosystems adapt and evolve to marginalise or eliminate threats. If he’s right, even now, the planet could be developing a natural strain of Skin So Soft to send us blighters packing.

My mind wanders back to the here and now where my new acquaintance is finishing his account. I conclude he’s a timelord and we refer to him thereafter as the Doctor.

With the cloud down and heavy rain set in, we abandon plans to climb Great Gable and head back over the Black Sail Pass. It’s an opportunity postponed, not lost, as one thing is certain. We’re coming back here.

Blencathra via Sharp Edge

Further Reading

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Red Screes, Mountain Bagging and Memories of War

Links

Mountain Bagging:

Let’s Walk the Lakes

Let’s Talk the Lakes (LTTL)

Hayley Webb Mountain Adventures

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Glenridding Dodd, Sheffield Pike, Greenside Mine & Operation Orpheus

Further Reading

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Humphrey Head

Further reading:

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Bonington, Beatrix, Kurt & the Borrowdale Caveman

Man vs Mountain

The Professor of Adventure

Mier Bitte

Mrs Heelis

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Rannerdale, Black Sail, Haystacks & High Stile

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A Dragon’s Back and a Right to Roam

Revolution

Away Trip

The Dragon’s Back

The Quiet Woman

Sources/Further Reading

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The Fairfield Horseshoe and the Skulls of Calgarth

The Skulls of Calgarth

The Fairfield Horseshoe

To Have or to Be

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Grey Friar, Great Carrs, & Dow Crag from Seathwaite

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Coniston, Tarn Hows, Black Fell & Holme Fell

Courage

Defiance

Purification and Renewal

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Great Gable, Pillar, Steeple and Black Sail

A Coward You Are, Withnail

Connection

Mexican Night

Rewilding

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Millican Dalton and Castle Crag

The Other

The Professor of Adventure

Into the Jaws of Borrowdale

No Man’s Land

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The Kentmere Round