Category Archives: Natural History

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

Secrets of the Screes

December 13, 2020 George Kitching 22 Comments

Illgill Head, Whin Rigg, Miterdale, Burnmoor Tarn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources / Further Reading

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

A Walk on the Wild Side

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

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

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

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

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

Song From The Wood

November 15, 2020 George Kitching 16 Comments

Rusland Horizons Greenwood Trail 3

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

High Dam, Rusland Heights, Fearing Brow, Finsthwaite

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

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

Geronimo! Definitely not Rhiannon, then.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stott Park Bobbin Mill — Start Park Bobbin Mill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thorn Of Crowns

August 23, 2020 George Kitching 29 Comments

The Rites of Spring & the Secret of Crummock Water

May 12th, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crag Fell from Bowness Knott — Crag Fell and hawthorn trees

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Walk on the Wild Side

Rhiannon

July 26, 2020 George Kitching 15 Comments

A Midsummer Night’s Dream on Dixon Heights

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dixon Heights from Bishops Tithe Allotment

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

Bracken, foxgloves, and rocky outcrop, Dixon Heights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whisky in the Jar

June 21, 2020 George Kitching 27 Comments

Great Gable via Grey Knotts, Brandreth & Green Gable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kirk Fell over Beckhead from Great Gable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources/Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

Before the flood

February 23, 2020 George Kitching 21 Comments

Raven Crag & the Flooding of Thirlmere

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harriet Martineau, in 1855, adds to the picture:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources/Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wikipedia is also good on the history of the reservoir:

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

Fell Walk, General, History, Natural History, Nature, Scramble

This Is My Church

November 24, 2019 George Kitching 29 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jones describes the Pinnacle as;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lord’s Rake from The Rake’s Progress

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

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

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

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

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

The Pinnacle and Pisgah from the West Wall Traverse

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

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

Wastwater from the top of the Lord’s Rake

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

Great Gable from the top of the Lord’s Rake

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

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

The Pinnacle and Pisgah from the plateau above Deep Ghyll

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

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

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

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

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

A Big Day in the North

April 28, 2019 George Kitching 11 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sharp Edge”, he nods.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sympathy For The Devil

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

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

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

Riddle of the sands

March 24, 2019 George Kitching 18 Comments

Humphrey Head

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s where the story ends

December 26, 2018 George Kitching 12 Comments

Paw Prints of the Plague Dogs part II

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

Seathwaite Tarn, Dow Crag, Caw & Brown Haw

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seathwaite Tarn from copper mine — Tarn Head Moss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ravenglass and Drigg

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

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

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

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

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

Drigg Low Level Nuclear Waste Repository

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fell Walk, General, Natural History

The Deer Hunter

September 16, 2018 George Kitching 14 Comments

The Nab & the Rut

In Martindale, it’s antlers at dawn as Britain’s largest land mammals fight for the right to party, and I pay a tribute to a sly old fox for inspiring me to walk The Far Eastern Fells.

On a chilly October morning, Ullswater is the colour of cold steel, ridged with dark ripples where it laps the jetty, a moody pool, carved from the frozen earth by a river of ice, and a keeper of mysteries. A small huddle of pilgrims has gathered on the pier at Glenridding, ready to set sail across its brooding waters in search of an ancient rite.

The red deer is the largest British land mammal; stags stand well over a metre at the shoulder and weigh up to 190Kg. 11,000 years ago, they came to Britain from Europe, and their meat, hides and antlers provided Mesolithic man with an important source of food, clothing and tools. With the advent of agriculture, much of their natural habitat was lost, and they disappeared from many parts of England, but they remained well-established in Scotland. The Victorians bolstered the population by cross-breeding them with wapiti and sika; numbers and distribution have increased ever since, but some pure-bred red deer herds still remain in England. The oldest inhabits the Martindale Deer Forest, which is maintained by the Dalemain estate as a sanctuary.

Autumn brings the breeding season, known as the rut. Between September and November, stags return to the females’ territory and do battle for the right to mate. It’s a winner takes all scenario, so testosterone levels run high. The victor gets to sow his seed throughout the herd, while the losers spend a celibate year drooling over pictures of pretty hinds, pouting provocatively from the pages of The National Geographic, distributed by gamekeepers to maintain their interest and prevent them from taking up alternative hobbies like stamp collecting or computer games. During the rut, the males establish dominance by roaring and strutting like Steve Tyler on steroids; but if that doesn’t work, they fight—sometimes, to the death.

The Deer Forest isn’t accessible without specific permission from the estate. Luckily, we’re on a special expedition arranged by the RSPB in conjunction with Ullswater Steamers, so clearance has been granted. As we board the steamer, I realise we’re a motley crew, clad in autumnal hides of microfleece and Gore-Tex; dominance appears to be established not by the size of antlers but by who has the biggest binoculars. And I’ve forgotten mine, so I’m already at the bottom of the pecking order.

As the steamer glides over primordial waters, the world of concrete and tarmac dissolves. An isolated shaft of sun embroids a bright golden braid on the sombre fell side below Helvellyn, and a sense that we’re venturing somewhere older, wilder, more primal pervades.

On the heather-clad slopes below Place Fell, belted Galloways graze; then a ripple of excitement runs through the boat as pair of antlers appears on the skyline. A slender stag makes a fleeting appearance. He’s only young—too small to entertain serious hopes of quenching his ardour this year.

An RSPB steward directs our attention to the crags above. He’s spotted a peregrine. Massed ranks of binoculars are raised in unison. My wife, Sandy, a professional photographer, aims a long telescopic lens. I fumble with the zoom on my little compact camera in an effort to join in. It comes as no surprise to anyone that I fail to spot it. The steward takes pity and lends me his eyeglasses. As a flock of ravens appears, he explains peregrines and ravens are arch-enemies. They compete for the same eyries, and ravens will often join forces to mob an invading falcon. I see an opportunity to improve my standing within the group as I’ve actually witnessed this. I recount standing on the summit of High Street, not far from the trig point, and hearing a raucous squawking overhead. I looked up to see a peregrine pulling ahead of pursuant mob of angry ravens, all apparently vying to peck at its tail feathers. The peregrine was much faster, and in a few wingbeats had gained a good lead, but just as I thought the action was over, it did something I wasn’t expecting. With a dazzling display of aerobatic agility, it performed a tumble-turn and sped back, like an Exocet missile, straight at the unfortunate raven it had ear-marked as victim. The ravens dispersed instantly, the target only just getting out of the way in time.

The steward nods knowingly. “Quite a spectacle that, isn’t it?”, he says with a grin. “I’ve seen it where the raven didn’t get away. It ended in a sickening thud and a flurry of black feathers.”

We disembark in Howtown, where a minibus awaits to ferry us up the hill to a track below Beda Fell, where three more stewards have set up telescopes: one pointing up the slope, and one pointing across to The Nab. I wait my turn on the latter. When it comes free, the steward directs my gaze to the lower slope where a large herd of hinds is encamped. It’s all very laid back: they’re lying down, basking in the autumn sunshine (or at least they would be, if there was any). The resident stag sits smugly amid his harem, awaiting challengers. He doesn’t seem overly concerned—probably because he’s the cervine equivalent of Arnold Schwarzenegger, a huge muscular brute with a formidable pair of antlers. Up wind, on the other side of a broken-down wall, are two young hopefuls. They’re recumbent too, desperate to keep out of Arnie’s sight while they summon the courage to take him on. I wouldn’t bet on that happening any time soon.

As we chat, the steward tells me they’ve be running these excursions for a few years. It hasn’t always gone to plan…

Since we wiped out the wolves and bears that once roamed our forests, the red deer have no natural predators. If left unchecked, their numbers would grow unnaturally large, and the health of the herd would suffer. As a consequence, some culling is necessary. It’s a fact that doesn’t sit well with those of a sensitive disposition, but on balance, having the free run of Martindale and taking your chances, occasionally, with a skilled gamekeeper armed with a rifle and a remit to reduce numbers by removing the weakest, sounds a better deal to me than being cooped up on an intensive farm, then being shipped to the abattoir. I don’t know whether the Dalemain Estate offers paying clientele the opportunity to shoot deer for sport, and quite why anyone would take pleasure in killing such magnificent creatures is utterly beyond me. I have no issue with humane culling, or with killing animals to eat, but if I had to do it, I’d be choking back the tears.

…As such, I can fully imagine the horror of the nature lovers who took this trip, a year or two back, and heard shots, then had to stand aside for an estate quad bike towing the blood-spattered carcass of a hind. (Consequent discussions between the estate and the RSPB have resulted in a less distressing coordination of activities.)

It’s all hotting up on Beda Fell where another herd is grazing. Their stag is similarly reposed, but perhaps, not for long. A young contender has appeared on the skyline. He’s sniffing the air and assessing the situation. I take my turn on the telescope. A girl in an RSPB jacket asks me if I have an iPhone. She explains it’s possible to point your phone’s camera at the telescope’s eyepiece and get a reasonable close-up picture. I try, but all I can see is a ball of white light.

“Follow the light”, she explains, “and when you’ve got it centred, take the pic”.

It’s a lot harder than it sounds. She smiles sympathetically and asks if I’d like her to have a go. She takes my phone, waves it at the eyepiece for a couple of seconds and skilfully snaps the stag.

“There’s a knack”, she says with a smile. “I’ve had a lot of practice”.

Suddenly, the young male starts down the slope. The action causes a commotion in the herd and the incumbent stag jumps up to meet his challenger. He’s even bigger than Arnie. The young contender takes one look and suddenly remembers he might have left the gas on. He tries to slink away nonchalantly, as if this was his intention all along, and those hinds? Just not his type. We don’t have to be budding David Attenboroughs to realise we’re unlikely to see locked antlers today. It matters little. Just being in the presence of these majestic creatures is edifying.

A year later, I’ll climb Rough Crag on High Street to a cacophony of red stag roars, the wind lifting their war song out of Martindale and into the peaks where it resonates around the crags that surround Blea Water and Riggindale, disembodied and amplified, the bloodcurdling battle cry of invisible duellists, berserk with hormonal rage.

It’ll be another nine months, before I stand on the summit of The Nab…

I set out later than usual, hoping to give low cloud a chance to lift. I park in Hartsop, round Gray Crag and follow the stream up to Hayeswater to climb the slopes below the Knott. I’m heading for Brock Crags and Angletarn Pikes, but I can’t resist bagging three more Wainwrights first. As I reach the summit of the Knott, a wispy veil hides High Street’s upper reaches, but to the north, the low white blanket has cleared Rest Dodd.

Beyond lies The Nab. As Wainwright astutely notes: from below, it resembles the cluster of Dodds that ring the head of Ullswater. Its steep sides rise to a slender dome, with Rest Dodd a second hump, like the back of a Bactrian camel. From above, however, you realise Rest Dodd is the Daddy, and the Nab, no more than an impressive façade.

Down the ridge from the Knott, I turn up Rest Dodd’s grassy slopes. As The Nab sits entirely within the deer sanctuary, there’s no direct public access from below. The top, however, is open access land, so you can legally gain the summit from here. That said, there are conditions. The Dalemain website suggests: “the area may be closed at times between September and February for deer management and possibly at other times as required. To avoid any disappointment it is important to check that access will be available before your visit.”

It’s a request worth following for your own sake, as well as for that of the deer—it may save you from being skewered by a randy stag or shot by a stray stalker’s bullet. Unfortunately, I didn’t know this at the time so plead ignorance as my defence.

What deters most walkers from crossing to The Nab is the substantial peat bog that lurks in between; AW describes it as “one of the worst in Lakeland”. I hate boggy ground and derive no pleasure from picking a painstaking path across a soggy morass, testing every step and somehow still ending up with bootfuls of black water. Luckily for me, it’s mid-July and Lakeland is in the middle of a prolonged drought. The deep peat hags are bone dry, and I cross without so much as a damp sole.

On the summit, I see no deer, but I do acknowledge a debt to Wainwright—not just for fuelling a fledging passion with sketches that perfectly capture the character of each fell; not just for his flights of poetic eulogy and stabs of wicked humour; but also, for his diligence and detail in dividing these hills into coherent clusters and devoting a book to each. The majority of my walks in the past twelve months have been devoted to the Eastern and, particularly, the Far Eastern Fells. Looking out from here, I relive a year: Rampsgill Head and High Raise in the amber light of autumn; Steel Knotts, Wether Hill, Loadpot Hill, Arthur’s Pike and Bonscale Pike in baking June sunshine, sweetened by a summer breeze. To the west is Beda Fell, and the site of the RSPB excursion.

Beda Fell from Rest Dodd — Satura Crag from Rest Dodd

In a while, I’ll look out from Brock Crags over Pasture Beck and remember the start of spring on Stony Cove Pike (before a dicey descent, down frozen rock steps to Threshthwaite Mouth, suggested winter hadn’t quite departed); or sheltering from a biting breeze behind the Thornthwaite Beacon and breaking a trekking pole on the steep wet grass of Gray Crag. From Angletarn Pikes, I’ll recall the Dovedale round in snow, when the air was as crisp and new as the year.

I’m not short of mementos, I have photos, I have blogs, but while I’m able, I shall never tire of renewing my relationship with these summits. I’ve heard people lament finishing the Wainwrights and wonder what to do next. Come back! They’re never done. Do you imagine they suffer diminishing returns? There’s a man who walks the Old Man of Coniston every day. And every day, he gains something new from the experience.

So inevitably, I’ll return to The Nab. Perhaps next time, I’ll ask permission; but I will stick to the Rest Dodd route; direct ascents from the deer sanctuary are out of bounds for good reason. The animal lover, Wainwright, makes the plea, “PLEASE DO NOT INTRUDE”, beside a sketch of a stag.

Only, where Wainwright is concerned, it’s rather a case of do as I say and not as I do—as the sly old fox adds this:

“The author carried out his explorations surreptitiously, and without permission (not caring to risk a refusal); he was not detected, but this may possibly have been due to his marked resemblance to an old stag, and other trespassers must not expect the same good fortune. Walkers in general should keep away. The keen ‘peak-bagger’ who is ‘collecting’ summits over 1886’ must settle the matter with his conscience, and, if he decides he cannot omit The Nab, he may best approach it unobtrusively (but with permission) by way of the ridge from Rest Dodd, returning the same way. The following notes on direct ascents will therefore be of little interest to anybody but deer with a poor sense of direction.”

Red Deer, Martindale — Wainwright in Martindale

Sources/Further reading

The British Deer Society (2015). ‘Red Deer’. Available at:

https://www.bds.org.uk/index.php/advice-education/species/red-deer (Accessed Sept 2018)

Richards, Mark (2014). ‘Park and Stride—The Martindale Skyline’. BBC Cumbria, November. Available at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cumbria/content/articles/2006/07/21/parkandstride_8_martindale_feature.shtml (Accessed Sept 2018)

Wainwright, A. 1957: A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells—Book Two, The Far Eastern Fells. 50th Anniversary Edition. London: Frances Lincoln, 2005.

+ the imperfect memory of the author, which may, at times, be prone to flights of poetic fancy.

Practical note:

I believe the Dalemain Estate is now more amenable to granting permission than perhaps it was in Wainwright’s day. Their web site even gives details of permitted routes from Martindale (although you must phone first). For details and contact numbers, visit:

https://www.dalemain.com/house-and-garden/the-nab/

Fell Walk, General, History, Natural History

Back to Black Sail

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, 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, Natural History

All That Glitters…

August 13, 2017 George Kitching 16 Comments

The Newlands Horseshoe

The wild scenery of the Newlands valley is spectacularly beautiful and surprisingly famous, prized by both Beatrix Potter and Queen Elizabeth I for very different reasons. On this inspiring high-level circuit, I learn why the Earl of Northumberland lost his head and how a hedgehog may hold the key to happiness.

The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-winkle

“Once upon a time there was a little girl called Lucie, who lived at a farm called Little-town. She was a good little girl – only she was always losing her pocket handkerchiefs.”

So begins Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-winkle, in which a little girl goes looking for her lost pinafore and pocket handkerchiefs. As she scrambles up a hill called Cat Bells, she discovers a door in the hillside. She knocks. The door opens, and she’s invited into the tiny kitchen of Mrs Tiggy-winkle, a washer-woman who launders clothes for the local animals. Not only has Mrs Tiggy-winkle found Lucie’s lost linen, she’s washed and pressed it all for her.

Out of gratitude, Lucie helps Mrs Tiggy-winkle deliver clean clothes to the animals. Once back at the stile, she watches Mrs Tiggy-winkle scamper home and notices now her friend suddenly looks smaller and seems to have swapped her clothes for a coat of prickles. Only then, does Lucie realise that Mrs Tiggy-winkle is a hedgehog.

Some think Lucie fell asleep at the stile and dreamt the whole escapade, but they can’t explain how she returned home with her freshly laundered pinafore and missing handkerchiefs.

The tale was Potter’s sixth book and the first to use a real-life setting. Cat Bells is a well-known Lakeland landmark, familiar to those visiting Keswick as the distinctive hill rising over the far bank of Derwent Water. Its western slopes run down to the Newlands valley. At the valley’s wild heart is Littletown, a tiny hamlet comprising a farm and a few cottages.

In the summer of 1904, Potter took a holiday at Lingholm, just outside Portinscale, at the foot of the valley. She spent her time sketching Newlands, Littletown, Cat Bells and the mighty Skiddaw, whose summits dominate the skyline to the north-east. These pen and ink drawings were reproduced in the finished book, virtually unchanged. Even the door in the hillside had a basis in reality – it probably shuttered an old mine level. With its publication, one of the quietest and most secluded of Lakeland valleys became well known to millions of children around the world.

The Rising of the North

But Newlands found fame long before Potter’s time. Goldscope, on the lower slopes of Hindscarth, was the most renowned of the Cumbrian mines, yielding rich seams of copper, lead and even small quantities of gold and silver. The German engineers, who spearheaded the works, named it Gottesgab, or God’s Gift (eventually corrupted to Goldscope). Elizabeth I considered the mine so strategically important that she requisitioned it from its owner, Thomas Percy, 7th Earl of Northumberland, and refused to pay him royalties. Percy took the Queen to court, and, unsurprisingly, he lost. A catholic and supporter of Mary Queen of Scots, the earl was already ill-disposed to the protestant Elizabeth and the loss of revenue from his land proved the last straw. In 1569, he joined forces with The Earl of Westmorland and several other Catholic nobles in the Rising of the North, an armed insurrection against the Queen. The rebellion was quashed, and Elizabeth parted Percy from more than his mine. She cut off his head.

The Newlands Horseshoe

Newlands is ringed by a mighty horseshoe of fells. The eastern prong comprises Cat Bells, Maiden Moor and High Spy, while the western side splits into horseshoe of its own, with an outer wall of Robinson and High Snab Bank, and an inner curtain of Hindscarth and Scope End (Goldscope lies beneath). Dale Head stands exactly where you’d expect – a grand centrepiece.

On a beautiful June morning, I park up in Littletown and take the track opposite the farm, signposted Hause Gate and Cat Bells. Scope End rises invitingly across the valley. Wainwright says we should “make a special note of the Scope End ridge: this route on an enchanting track along the heathery crest, is really splendid… In descent, the route earns full marks because of the lovely views of Newlands directly ahead.”

I’m here to tackle the horseshoe, but heeding Wainwright’s advice, I leave Scope End for last and follow the track eastwards up the fellside, bearing right on to a grassy bridleway. The path crosses a stream then zigzags up to the col of Hause Gate between Cat Bells and Maiden Moor. The sudden eye-watering aspect over Derwent Water and Bassenthwaite to Skiddaw is enough to quicken the pulse if it wasn’t already racing from the ascent. It’s only 9 o’clock, and even at this hour, there’s strength in the sun. The Newlands slopes are shades of green so vivid they assault the senses, but a summer haze paints the distant shores in watercolour.

I forego Cat Bells (it’s in the opposite direction to the rest of the horseshoe) and turn right for Maiden Moor. Maiden Moor’s summit is a featureless plateau, but from here on, the horseshoe is an airy, high level circuit that is never short of spectacular. The drama increases as soon as the crags of High Spy North Top appear. Its rocky outcrops afford the last sparkling mirage of Derwentwater.

The true summit lies a little further onward. At its western edge, the precipitous cliffs of Eel Crag plunge to Newlands’ floor. Across the valley, the rocky face of Hindscarth rises in counterpoint like a dark grooved pyramid on an upward sweep of green, the spires of Coledale beyond. Borrowdale unfolds viridian below, and further round, a tsunami of white cloud breaks over Great Gable, engulfing the summit in a surging wash of foam, the surf plunging below the skyline.

It’s Olympian. I seem to have reached the top of the world. Such a scene would have undoubtedly inspired the Great Masters to paint lavish depictions of God

As I stare in wonder, I notice a solitary figure sitting on the horizon, legs outstretched, gazing down on creation. Could this be the Almighty on a tea break, taking five to review his work?

I draw nearer. Now, I see that the Great Masters got it all wrong. There’s no long white beard or flowing robes. No muscle-bound Adonis hurling thunderbolts. No Bacchanalian feast. Just an old chap in a plaid shirt and a battered fishing cap eating corned-beef sandwiches from a Tupperware tucker box. As a vision of The Almighty, it’s perfect.

I notice how the summit cairn is a work of art – a perfect cone, worthy of Andy Goldsworthy. Perhaps, it was a divine commission. As I pass, I shout a greeting to God. He responds with a brief salute and returns to his sandwiches.

Top of the World - High Spy — Top of the World – High Spy

The seasoned mountaineer, Bill Birkett, describes the pull up Dale Head as “strenuous”, so I’m ready for a stiff climb, but I have to say, it doesn’t look all that much higher. Only once I’m over the crest do I realise quite how far the path drops to Dale Head Tarn first. On the way down, the cloud inversion is ever more beguiling. It makes the loss of altitude worthwhile. I indulge my eyes in the certain knowledge my quads will pick up the tab shortly.

A large stone shelter sits above the tarn. I rest a few minutes, staring straight down the valley to Skiddaw, then wander down to the waterline. The surface is an oasis of cool blue glittering among the reed beds. It’s a lovely spot to while away a sunny day. But I must put these thoughts from my mind, I have another mountain to climb.

The ascent is steep but mercifully short, and the effort is gratuitously rewarded. Dale Head’s sculptural cairn makes High Spy’s look like a preliminary sketch. The real show-stopper, though, is the magnificent view down the entire length of the Newlands valley – a perfect, glacial, U-shaped example. In geological terms, Dale Head is the junction between two major Lakeland rock formations: sedimentary Skiddaw Slate to the north and Borrowdale Volcanic to the south; systems of stone separated by fifty million years of planetary evolution.

The view south over the dark mossy crags of Fleetwith Pike to the distant brooding leviathans of Great Gable, Kirk Fell and Pillar is every bit as arresting. I walk west along the long flat top, pausing frequently to savour it all. As the path drops to the depression before Hindscarth, a magnificent prospect gapes open over Buttermere to High Stile and her henchmen, High Crag and Red Pike. A photographer mounts a massive lens on a tripod. I take a photograph, surreptitiously, and try not to feel inadequate about my little point-and-shoot.

It’s the perfect spot to pause and eat some lunch.

A crunch of scree below. Two fell-runners are jogging up the stiff gradient. When they reach me, they pause for breath and we chat. They’re attempting a section of the Bob Graham Round, a leisurely little leg-stretcher, in which contestants conquer 44 peaks in under 24 hours. They’ve run over Robinson and they’re heading for Great Gable. After the briefest of respites, they resume, and I watch in bewilderment. Apparently by pushing your body to that kind of physical extreme, you experience an endorphin-induced euphoria. I’m perched on a rock, eating a pie – it’s euphoria enough for me!

Redemption

After lunch, I stroll down to the depression and follow the path right, to the summit of Hindscarth. Across Little Dale, Robinson is a mirror image, dropping abruptly to High Snab Bank, as I drop down to Scope End.

Wainwright was right about Scope End. The ridge is utterly enchanting. As I walk amongst the Bilberry and Bell Heather, I realise I’m smiling. This is hardly remarkable: I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy, it’s a beautiful day and I’m walking the fells. But I’ve been out of sorts all week. Sometimes, it seems as if the current is against you and you expend all your energy just treading water. On top of that, a friend is seriously ill in hospital and the prognosis is not good. If the worst happens, people I care a great deal about face a very painful time ahead.

Being out here doesn’t change that, but somehow it makes it easier to accept. We spend much of our lives so divorced from the natural order of things that we are easily shocked and outraged, even terrified by its realities. Immersing ourselves in the natural world for a short while, helps put things in context. Out here it’s easy to see how precarious our lives are. This landscape is hundreds of millions of years old, the whole of human existence, but a few thousand. Our tiny sparks of life are the briefest of candles, but to have been lit at all we’ve beaten overwhelming odds. Our time is short, but the fact we are here is astonishing. The only possible response is to seize life firmly with both hands and wring out every last drop of value. What that actually means is different for each of us, but what it definitely doesn’t mean is dwelling too long on the past or fretting so much about the future that we fail to embrace the present. My friend has never been guilty of that. Neither will I be.

As for all that other stuff – well it seems to have shrunk drastically in significance. Spend too long staring at your shoes and the obstacles in front can seem like mountains. Climb a real mountain and you see them for what they are – trifling impediments, easily overcome with the smallest of steps.

Beatrix Potter understood. Some literary critics, like Ruth MacDonald, felt the plot of Mrs Tiggy-winkle was “thin”, perhaps dated because of its apparent concern with the domestic chores traditionally associated with girls; perhaps also, because Lucie appears to learn nothing of herself as a consequence of the story. Others, like Humphrey Carpenter, think the book explores the theme of nature-as-redemption. In this respect, the linen is allegorical. Something is missing from Lucie’s life; her world is disordered. In Mrs Tiggy-winkle’s kitchen, Lucie immerses herself in an older, slower, natural Arcadia where she finds a temporary refuge. When she returns home, what was missing has been restored.

Potter was not just an author but a hill farmer; a firm believer in conserving the landscape and its traditional ways of life. The existence of the Lake District National Park owes much to her bequest, and she would undoubtedly be delighted to learn her legacy has achieved UNESCO world heritage site status. Given Potter’s beliefs, I feel Carpenter’s interpretation must be right. It’s surely no coincidence that Mrs Tiggy-winkle is the first of Potter’s books to be set in a real-life location, she cared so much about.

I reach the valley floor and look back at its sweeping green majesty. To my left, the beck glitters like a bed of jewels. Scope End’s eastern flank bears a small scar, however. Two spoil heaps mark the entrance to Goldscope mine. It looks far too tiny to have such a turbulent and far-reaching history; feuds fought, and lives lost over the small seams of metal encased in its rocks.

The quantities of gold and silver extracted here were negligible, but Elizabeth I used its copper to debase the national currency – swapping silver coinage for copper and keeping the silver for herself. How much of human history has centred on the ruthless pursuit of metal we deem “precious” by dint of its being glittery and rare? Homo Sapiens: “wise man”. On the vast timeline of evolution, we’ve only been around for about five minutes; perhaps we’re not quite as evolved as we think we are.

As I walk down toward the footbridge, I pass a wooden bench. It bears a commemorative plaque:

“Brian Gudgeon Machin

1924-2000

He drew strength from the fells”

You and me both Brian – and a little girl called Lucie who was always losing her pocket handkerchiefs.

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

Ghosts of Canadian Airmen

July 16, 2017 George Kitching 21 Comments

Wetherlam, Swirl How & Great Carrs via Steel Edge

An Andy Goldsworthy sheepfold and the wreck of a wartime bomber bookend a thought-provoking walk over the Coniston fells, ascending Wetherlam by a route that evaded Wainwright.

Sheep Folds

Good art transforms a space. It introduces something new, often forged from foreign materials like canvas, paint, bronze or stone and worked into a form that redefines and enriches its setting. It can bring the outdoors in, or life to a sterile cityscape.

But placing artworks in natural settings can be problematic. The Countryside Code compels us to leave no trace of our presence, so the notion of introducing something man-made is counter-intuitive. Even given an artist’s skill in complementing their surroundings, it seems somehow arrogant to assume we can improve on nature.

And yet we do this all the time. Agriculture and horticulture are both attempts to instil an artificial order on the natural world, editing out the bits we don’t want and cultivating the bits we do. Why should a well-tended flower bed be somehow less of an aberration than a sculpture made from concrete and steel? Perhaps because the garden showcases our stewardship of nature while the sculpture is an attempt to impose something alien upon it. A wheat field and a quarry are both examples of harvesting natural resources, yet one appeals to our sense of aesthetics while the other offends it. For all their artifice, the garden and the wheat field are part of nature; born of the wild, their order is ephemeral – if left untended, they will quickly revert.

We may embrace art in the landscape, but we often find it less controversial when in the ordered environment of a garden or sculpture park; or perhaps, like Gormley’s figures on Formby beach, where we expect human activity.

Placing artworks in wilder settings takes a special skill and sensitivity. It’s these qualities that have enabled Andy Goldsworthy to succeed. Goldsworthy seldom imposes foreign objects on the landscape. Instead he works with materials that are already there, like pebbles, petals, twigs and ice. His sculptures are designed to be washed away by waves, melted by sunlight, scattered by the wind. He simply reorganises parts of the environment so they assume a fleeting new identity then lets the natural order reassert itself. Usually, the only enduring evidence is photographic.

Some of his works persist a little longer however. In 1987, he was commissioned by Grizedale Forest to produce “Taking a wall for a walk”, a dry-stone wall that snakes in and out of the trees as if the pull of nature had compelled it to abandon its straight, utilitarian function and revert to a more organic form.

Andy Goldsworthy Touchstone Fold, Tilberthwaite

Goldsworthy’s initial thought was to source the stone from a quarry but as he started to work with wallers he learned that, where possible, they try to reuse existing stones. The significance of this was not lost on Andy, “Originally I felt that I shouldn’t even touch a mossy old wall, but then this idea of an old wall becoming a new one is very important to the nature of the way walls are made… What looks like randomly placed stone has been selected, touched, worked, and when one waller touches a stone worked by another waller he knows that. There’s a wonderful connection there.”

Again, it was intended that slowly the work should be reclaimed by nature – clad in moss, dislodged by wind, toppled by the spreading roots of trees – until it returned to the tumble-down disarray in which it started. Ironically, its popularity is such that it has been repaired several times.

1996 was The Year of The Visual Arts and Goldsworthy was commissioned to create an ambitious series of works in Cumbria. His proposal was to rebuild a large number of old sheepfolds turning each into a sculpture or using it to enclose a sculpture.

In some cases, the only evidence of the original sheepfold was its mark on an old map, but by the end of the project in 2003, Goldsworthy and his team had restored and transformed nearly fifty of them. Some enclose perfectly formed stone cones; others surround boulders carefully selected for their shape and form.

Before the emergence of the railways Cumbria was a major highway for the movement of sheep and cattle from Scotland to Yorkshire and Lancashire. Using old maps, Goldsworthy carefully traced these old “drove” routes and constructed sixteen sheepfolds as way markers, temporarily enhancing each in turn with a small red sandstone arch that he transported all along this ancient thoroughfare, assembling and dismantling it at every stage.

Elsewhere Goldsworthy worked in other features that define the landscape. A striking example is the large square Touchstone fold at Tilberthwaite. The four stone walls are inset with rectangles of local slate. Each rectangle encloses a circle. The slates in each circle are set at a unique angle, so each deflects light differently and collectively they suggest the cycles of the sun and the seasons.

Andy Goldsworthy Sheepfold, Tilberthwaite

Goldsworthy has a fascination with slate and its inherent layering. He describes it as “an extraordinary book of stone… as you lift one piece off another, you’re looking back in time really”.

As an artwork, The Touchstone Fold possesses the perfect geometric beauty of a Barbara Hepworth, while the way the sloping slate plays with sunlight makes your eyes dance in the way a Bridget Riley painting does. But Goldsworthy’s work has an even stronger sense of place. Tilberthwaite and Wetherlam (the mountain above) have been quarried for slate for centuries. In Thomas West’s 1779 Guide to The Lakes, he wrote of the Coniston houses, “all are neatly covered with blue slate, the product of the mountains”. Goldsworthy conceived his sheepfolds as a monument to agriculture, but The Touchstone Fold is much more than that. It is monument to the industry wrought from these slopes; indeed; a monument to the mountain itself.

Steel Edge

Steps lead up from the parking area opposite the sheepfold to a path that skirts the south-eastern bank of Tilberthwaite Gill. The first thing you encounter is a disused quarry. It’s easy to imagine quarries as ugly grey scars, but here rivers of colour run through the mineral rich rock; veins of red, yellow, green, blue and purple marbling its milky face.

From Elizabethan times, deep levels were driven into the sides of Tilberthwaite Gill to extract copper. Cheaper imports eventually killed the domestic industry, but the Victorians, who had just begun to revere the Lakeland landscape as a place of beauty, re-purposed the remaining wooden bridges as platforms for viewing the waterfalls. Along the path, the sound of the falls is ever present but sightings are confined to an occasional sparkle through the foliage.

The path crosses the head of the gill and fords Crook Beck. A little further along I come to a wooden footbridge. Crossing here would join the route that leads over Birk Fell to Wetherlam Edge. This is the ascent that Wainwright describes from Tilberthwaite, but I’m going to leave that for the way down. Up to my left lies a route that evaded Wainwright – the short, steep ridge of Steel Edge.

Steel Edge is named on the OS map but there is no indication of a path. A sketchy semblance of one does exist, however, and climbs beside an old mine level to the crest of the ridge.

Here rocky outcrops give way to a grass ramp. The ground drops steeply on either side but the back is broad, so doesn’t feel overly exposed. It’s a glorious May morning and the wintry landscapes of past months have transformed into a palette of new growth: the olive and umber of the lower fell side giving the way to the vibrant green of the lowland fields, dappled with darker clusters of forest as they roll east to Coniston Water. To the north, beneath a clear blue sky, blankets of cloud smother the hill tops like snow.

After a short while, the grassy slope terminates in a tower of rock and an easy but exhilarating scramble ensues. I climb through a gully of white stone, streaked with rust and patterned with intricate black lines like a Jackson Pollock painting. A rudimentary lesson in local geology at Coniston’s Ruskin museum suggests this might be Paddy End rhyolite, a glassy rock formed when fine particles of ash fused together in the intense cauldron of volcanic eruption some 450 million years ago.

Steel Edge delivers me to the largest of three tarns that skirt the Lad Stones route up from Coniston. I turn right to cover the remaining ground to the summit, pausing more than once to admire the magnificent views across Levers Water to The Old Man. On reaching the top, a jaw-dropping vista opens over Great Langdale to the Pike O’ Stickle. Wetherlam Edge drops away to Tilberthwaite below, but the day is young and I’m not done with the peaks just yet. I decide to press on over Swirl How to Great Carrs in search of a mountain top memorial to a tragic misjudgement.

Pike O'Stickle from Wetherlam — Pike O’Stickle from Wetherlam

LL505 S for Sugar

At 02:05 pm on October 22nd, 1944, Halifax bomber LL505, named “S for Sugar”, left RAF Topcliffe in Yorkshire on a navigational exercise. With the exception of one Scotsman, the crew were all Canadian. At 33 years old, navigator Francis Bell was by some stretch the eldest. Pilot John Johnson was 27 and the rest were aged between 19 and 21. By 6pm they had become disoriented in fog. Topcliffe dispatched a Mosquito, equipped with the latest night navigation gear, to guide the bomber home, but unaware of its proximity, Johnson took a fateful gamble. He decided to descend so Bell could get a visual fix on the ground. The Mosquito arrived just in time to see “S for Sugar” crash into the top of Great Carrs.

Locals rallied to reach survivors. It was an effort that would lead in time to the formation of Coniston Mountain Rescue Team. Sadly, on this occasion it ended in failure – all the crew had been killed.

The RAF posted sentries to guard the wreck until the munitions could be recovered. It was impractical to remove the plane itself, so it was broken into pieces and pushed down the steep cliff into Broad Slack where bits of it remain. Some items have since been salvaged and one of the Merlin engines is now on display at the museum in Coniston.

The undercarriage still lies on top of the mountain where a large cairn has been constructed and topped with a wooden cross as a memorial. A stone plaque bears the names the dead.

Memorial to the Crew, Great Carrs — Memorial to the Crew

I descend to Levers Hawse and climb the steep path of the Prison Band to Swirl How. From here a sickle shaped ridge curves round to the right over the plunging crags of Broad Slack to the top of Great Carrs. A little shy of the summit, the wreckage comes into view.

The cross stands proud against a dramatic skyline of Sca Fell and Scafell Pike. As I approach, a patch of red catches my eye. People have laid wreaths of poppies and placed little wooden crosses in amongst the stones. Some of the crosses have words scratched into them – people’s personal messages to their own departed loved ones: “Pete – gone but not forgotten”, “Dad, love Mick”. Others have photographs attached. It’s incredibly moving. I read the names and tender ages of the airmen and wonder if their families know this simple mountain memorial has become a shrine where strangers come to share their loss.

Mountain Top Memorial, Great Carrs — Mountain Top Memorial

Haunted

John “Jack” Johnson’s widow probably did, thanks to a curious tale involving a retired electrical engineer from Bath. Ken Hill was described as “level headed” and not hitherto someone likely to have given much truck to the supernatural, but after visiting the Great Carrs memorial and pocketing a small fragment of metal as a memento, he became convinced he was being stalked by the ghost of the dead pilot.

On the journey home, Ken felt a distinct presence in the car with him. Over time, the impression faded. Then on the day the Merlin engine was recovered from the fell side, Ken’s bedside radio started switching itself on and off at random. Hill was convinced that it was Johnson making his presence felt. Later the airman appeared, clear as day, leaving Ken with the conviction he was supposed to contact the pilot’s family. It wasn’t an easy task but after some years of trying, Hill finally tracked down Johnson’s widow, Nita, in Canada.

What Nita made of it, I don’t know. But whether or not you believe in the supernatural, love and loss are the deepest and rawest of human emotions and here, beside this hill top shrine, the strength of feeling is palpable.

Monuments

As I retrace my steps over Swirl How and Wetherlam the sun catches the slopes of Bow Fell and the Langdale Pikes, bathing them in a haunting light, and I think (with apologies to Rupert Brook) that if there must be a corner of a foreign fell that is forever Canada, there can be no finer spot.

Like many scrambles, Wetherlam Edge is probably easier to ascend than descend. I spend time weighing options, lowering myself gingerly down rock steps and scouting around for the path. Things improve as I near Birk Fell from where an obvious route leads down to Dry Cove Bottom (named with irony) and along the near side of Tilberthwaite Gill.

Back at the start, the shifting sun has affected a subtle transformation in the sheepfold, lighting slates that lay in shadow before. I recall Goldsworthy’s words about looking back in time – I’ve been doing that all day. It’s been a poignant, thought-provoking journey, punctuated by two monuments: one to a way of life; one to life extinguished; and both inextricably bound to the mountain.

For a route map and directions for this ascent and descent of Wetherlam, visit Walk Lakes. Please note, these directions do not include the detour over Swirl How to Great Carrs.

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