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

North of the Fateful Sands

April 7, 2024 George Kitching 27 Comments

A Cartmel Peninsula Round & The Perilous Past of Morecambe Bay

The Cartmel Peninsula with its ring of outlying Wainwrights boasts a landscape rich in contrast, but ever close are the perilous sands of Morecambe Bay. In the mid 19th century, they claimed 23 lives in just 11 years . I mark the summer solstice with a 24 mile round and recount the victims’ stories.

In 2020, lockdown did me an immense favour. It woke me up to where I live. With the mountains out of bounds, I grew to appreciate what was right on my doorstep, and when restrictions were sufficiently slackened, I began to explore the Cartmel Peninsula with a new-found fervour. I found a landscape rich in contrast: open fell, woodland, grazing pasture, salt marsh, limestone pavements, and of course, the expansive watery desert of Morecambe Bay. Even after Mountain Rescue had given the green light, I was slow to return to the high fells—too eager to keep exploring my home turf. The Cartmel Valley, with its ring of outlying Wainwrights, quickly laid claim to my heart. I developed favourite routes and favourite haunts: Dixon Heights, Hampsfell, Humphrey Head, How Barrow, Bigland Tarn, Bigland Barrow, and slowly I kindled a desire to join them all up—a grand 24-mile Cartmel Valley round. What better time to embark on such a long local ramble but the Summer Solstice—the longest day of the year.

I book the day off work and spend the preceding week cursing the weather forecast for predicting thunderstorms. At the eleventh hour, it relents and announces an outlook of dry, settled weather with sunny spells and gentle summer breezes. Ideal.

I leave the house at 6am and follow the road to Low Newton. Opposite Yew Tree Barn Architectural Antiques, a track skirts a farm and follows a right-of-way into a wood. Just past a gate, the path divides, and I take the left fork that climbs through bracken, under hawthorn and crab apple, to open fell. Newton Fell forms a long low spine, which runs from Lindale all the way to Gummer’s How above Windermere. In his book, The Outlying Fells of Lakeland, Wainwright splits it into two, Newton Fell North, Saskills—its true summit—and Newton Fell South, Dixon Heights—its southern tip. He gives short shrift to the part in between. In his day, it was private ground with no rights of way, but this section, Bishop’s Tithe Allotment is now access land, and Wainwright was remiss to dismiss its rugged charm.

Jagged outcrops of lichen-clad rock rise from a green sea of bracken, stippled purple with peals of foxglove bells. From the top, I look northwest to the grey silhouettes of the Coniston Fells, and north to Red Screes, Caudale Moor and the Kentmere Fells. Closer to hand, to the northeast, Whitbarrow Scar rises across the Winster valley, and to the southwest lies Hampsfell. They form part of a ring of low limestone hills into which Newton Fell intrudes, an older imposter, formed of Silurian mudstone. This prominence of sedimentary rock, risen over millennia from the seabed, now overlooks the tidal waters of Morecambe Bay.

The Ruined Tower on Dixon Heights from Bishop’s Tithe Allotment

The ground drops away abruptly to the col with Dixon Heights. In the hollow nestles Tom Tarn, a watering hole for the goats and fell ponies which graze the grassy slopes beyond. The drystone wall that divides the two enclosures runs right through the middle of the water. Beyond, a grassy ramp affords a passage to the top of Dixon Heights, up slopes stoutly defended on either side by craggy outcrops and dense thickets of hawthorn. The summit is crowned by the ruin of an old tower, known to locals of certain age as The Colour Pole. Old pictures show a tall turret with a flag flying from the top. Its purpose has been lost in the mists of time. Some speculate it was an observatory, though whether for the stars or smugglers in the bay remains open to debate.

Ruined tower known as the Colour Pole on Dixon Heights

I return on the lower path through the wood, fragrant with dog rose and oxeye daisy, follow the road under the dual carriageway and do battle with bramble and nettle down an overgrown bridleway, lined with meadowsweet, then I cross farmland to the foot of Hampsfield Allotment, the lightly wooded slope that leads to the top of Hampsfell. Hampsfell’s crowning glories are its magnificent limestone pavements and its panoramic views of the Lakeland fells, the high Dales fells, and of course the vast expanse of Morecambe Bay. When the tide is out, the silver sands stretch as far as the eye can see in a hypnotic dance of spiralling patterns and glistening reflections.

Dog rose in the wood at the foot of Newton Fell

Meadow Sweet on the bridleway to Hampsfell

On the summit stands the Hospice, a squat stone tower, built by Thomas Remington, the vicar of Cartmel in 1834 as a gesture of thanks for the beauty he beheld here daily. Stone steps lead up to the roof and a viewfinder with a key listing the names of all the visible fells. Hampsfell is another Wainwright outlier. Indeed, Wainwright suggests its magnificent views of the mountains make it an ideal destination for the ageing hill walker whose legs can no longer negotiate the higher summits. A place to come and relive past glories. To the south lies a third Wainwright outlier, Humphrey Head, the jutting promontory that forms the southerly tip of the Cartmel Peninsula.

The most direct route is via Allithwaite and a section of the Cumbria Coastal Way, but I shall return along that section before striking westward, so I opt instead to descend beside Eggerslack Wood into Grange-over-Sands, not only because, in Higginsons, the town boasts the finest pie shop known to humanity, but in a walk of contrasts, I want to experience the period charm of its Victorian promenade. In 1857, the coming of the railway saw Grange prosper as popular seaside resort. However, its name dates back to twelfth century and the founding of the priory in neighbouring Cartmel. The monks crushed and burned limestone from the fell for use as a fertiliser and built a grain store for their harvests at Grange. Its name derives from the French for granary.

In Victorian times, the River Kent flowed past the the mile-long Prom, providing a stately contrast to the ornamental gardens that line the civic side, but over the years, it has changed its course, leaving the Promenade bordered by a sprawling expanse of salt marsh, and turning it into the frontline between ordered Edwardian elegance and the encroaching wild. Where the Prom ends, a footpath leads below gardens to Kent’s Bank. En route, formal planting gives way to bindweed and thistle, and a railing and the railway become the dividing line between civilisation and coastal wilderness.

Ornamental Gardens Grange-over-Sands Promenade

Kent’s Bank Railway Station is the start for Wainwright’s favoured approach to Humphrey Head. He talks of evading the eye of the station master to shin the wall. These days, no such shenanigans are necessary, a gate leads out on to the marsh and wilder terrain. At Kirkhead End, I leave the concrete parapet at the foot of the railway embankment, and step out on to the mudflats, jumping streams and keeping an eye out for the abundant bird life. On this side, Humphrey Head presents wooded gentle slopes, but on the other, an impressive limestone cliff drops abruptly to the beach, the jutting rocks striped yellow with maritime sunburst lichen and blooming with little crops of foliage and wildflowers.

By the outdoor centre, I take a path that leads up over the gentle grassland above the escarpment to the trig point at the summit. Then I descend to the pointy fingers of low rock that run down to the beach. Humphrey Head is famous for being the spot where the last wolf in England was slain (or so local legend maintains). It has also been prized for centuries for its natural spring waters that have long been held to have healing powers and have attracted everyone from Roman legionaries to lead miners from the Northeast. The sun warms the rocks as I sit and gaze across the spawling sands of the Bay.

Humphrey Head, north of the fateful sands of Morecambe Bay

Until 1974, when they were absorbed into the newly created county of Cumbria, the Cartmel and Barrow Peninsulas were an enclave of Lancashire, known as Lancashire North of the Sands. A county cleft by the tide was reconciled whenever it ebbed, but the exposed sands provided an uncertain passage, imperilled by quicksands and the speed of the incoming tide. Nevertheless, for centuries the Sands were the principal thoroughfare, and a guide was appointed initially by the monks of Cartmel Priory, and later by the Duchy of Lancaster to try and ensure safe crossings.

In 1857, the guide was James Carter. He was on duty from sunrise to sunset and in the habit of remaining later should he be asked. Not that George Ashburner had any intention of troubling Carter on the evening of Friday 30^th May. Why should he? He knew the Sands as well as the Guide and was in the habit of crossing at least three times a week. He even knew of his own ford across the channel. Ashburner was a badger or cadger in local parlance, a cart driver and seller of wares, in Ashburner’s case, these were most likely fish, being as he was in the employ of Mr Benson of Flookburgh, a cart owner and fisherman. Ashburner appeared to be in good spirits when he stopped for a drink in Wilcock’s Kents’ Bank Hotel. The manager, Thomas Ball would later tell the Coroner that he had observed Ashburner standing with his back to the fireplace, singing a song. He also recalled serving a glass of porter to one of Ashburner’s companion’s, John Bell. The tap room was packed, it being the start of the Whitsun weekend, which was traditionally a time for fairs and hirings in Lancashire towns. Ashburner had arrived from Flookburgh with a party of 12 or 13 young men, many of them labourers in the employ of farms on the Holker estates, like Old Park or Winder Hall. They had engaged Ashburner to drive them to Lancaster to spend Whitsuntide with family or look for new work. The party might have been one more. Mr Cowperthwaite, an iron-founder from Lancaster expressed a wish to join them, but Ball dissuaded him—not that Ball envisioned any danger, but he thought the company unfitting for a gentleman of Cowperthwaite’s years. When asked whether Ashburner was intoxicated, Ball could not say, but another witness, John Pedder described him as not drunk but “sharp fresh”.

Ashburner’s cart left at about 10pm by railway time. This should have given them adequate time to cross to Hest Bank before the tide swept in, but Ashburner made a fatal misjudgement. He appears to have attempted a short cut, which took the cart about three-quarters of a mile below the normal coach route, splashing through the shallows in the direct line of Priest Skear, a notorious blackspot on the Sands, about a mile and half from the coast at Hest Bank. Here a projecting rock causes an eddy in the water to form a deep hole.

When hats, and boxes and other belongings washed ashore at Morecambe on the Saturday, John Matthias Maudsley, landlord of the Morecambe Hotel, went out in a boat with James Carter and Robert Cockin. At Priest Skear, they found the overturned cart, the drowned horse, and the bodies of seven of the young men lying in close proximity. An eighth lay 400 or 500 yards away. Others were later discovered further up the coast. In the absence of more specific evidence, the Coroner returned a verdict of “Found drowned”.

Some papers suggested Asburner set off too late, but this appears to have been a confusion of railway time with local farmhouse time. Until the mid-1800’s, British towns kept their own time based on local sunrise and sunset times, but the advent of the railways necessitated standardisation, and by 1857 most public clocks were set to railway time (although this would not become law for another 23 years). The stopped watches of the victims were set to local farm-house time, however, which was about half an hour or so later. Ironically, the coming of the railway to Grange and Ulverston in 1857 made crossing the Sands by coach largely redundant, but the trains came just too late to avert what was, until then, the Bay’s biggest tragedy.

After a paddle in the shallows beneath the colourful cliffs, I follow a section of the Cumbria Coastal Way to Allithwaite and pick it up again beyond Templand and Birkby Hall. This section boasts a leafy canopy bathing the wide track in dappled sunlight. It cuts through the Holker Estate, beside fields that would have been worked by some of the victims of the 1857 drowning. Young men like Thomas Hardman, Thomas Robinson, Henry Parkinson, Richard Houghton, and John Williams. I leave the track and take a faint path that climbs to the summit of How Barrow and rest awhile, looking back over the valley and the Bay.

Leafy avenue Cumbria Coastal Way approaching How Barrow

From here, the view of the Sands is of the western stretch than separates the Cartmel Peninsula from the Barrow Peninsula. Prior to the railways, travellers from Lancaster to Ulverston would have to make a second perilous crossing over this section. Just eleven years before Ashburner’s fatal journey, this stretch of the Bay claimed its own tragedy, which is remarkably similar in detail.

On 13^th June, 1846, the Westmorland published this solemn report:

“It’s our painful duty this week to have to record the loss of the greatest number of lives ever remembered upon Ulverston Sands. It appears that the unfortunate persons, nine in number, were returning from Ulverstone fair on Thursday, the 4th instant, in a cart belonging to Thomas Moore, fishmonger and badger, of Flookburgh, and it is reported that he was at the time worse for liquor, and had entrusted the reins to one of the persons in the cart not so well acquainted with the Sands; they, however, got safe over the channel, during the crossing of which they were observed by others following in the same direction, who on a sudden lost sight of them, when it appears they had got into a hole called Black Scarr, and without any alarm whatever having been made, all, as also the horse, had perished. Had the least cry for assistance been made they might have been heard from a great distance, the night being calm but no doubt in a moment all were swamped by the upsetting of the horse and cart.”

Unlike the 1857 tragedy, where the victims were itinerant labourers, hailing from a variety of Lancashire and Westmorland towns, all nine victims of the earlier disaster were from the neighbouring villages Flookburgh and Cartmel. Their joint funeral and burial in Cartmel churchyard drew a crowd of 1200 to 1500, on what must have been a bitterly sad day for the parish.

Cumbria Coastal Way entering High Stribers Wood

I follow the spine to Spiel Bank, where I again pick up a section of the Cumbria Coastal Way. It takes me up through High Stribers Wood to Bigland Heights and the tranquil elegance of Bigland Tarn. From here, I make my way to the final Wainwright outlier—the panoramic viewpoint of Bigland Barrow. It has been a journey rich in visual contrast: pastoral valley, wild salt marsh, open fell, period seaside elegance, and distant mountain drama; but the one constant has been the expansive view over the shimmering, spiralling sands of the Bay, a beguiling but deadly muddy bronze desert.

The Awesome Power of Pillar Rock

November 19, 2023 George Kitching 17 Comments

First scaled by a shepherd and eulogised by Wordsworth, Pillar Rock is a mountain cathedral that lured a Victorian vicar to his demise. It holds an enduring allure for climbers, but Wainwright declares it out-of-bounds for walkers. I enlist the help of a mountaineering & climbing instructor to get me to the top.

“You see yon precipice—it almost looks
Like some vast building made of many crags,
And in the midst is one particular rock
That rises like a column from the vale,
Whence by our Shepherds it is call’d, the Pillar.”
William Wordsworth

Mariner’s Mourning

In his poem, The Brothers, William Wordsworth tells the tragic tale of a mariner named Leonard, who returns to his home in Ennerdale to discover his beloved brother, James has died after falling from the top of Pillar Rock. Flushed with the success of his ascent, James had stretched out on the summit heath and fallen asleep, but his tendency to sleepwalk—a habit developed many years before, while pining for his seafaring brother—proved his literal downfall.

The poem was published in 1800, in Vol II of the Lyrical Ballads. In his notes, Wordsworth claims his inspiration came from a story told to him in the valley. If true, it would be the first known ascent of Pillar Rock, the dramatic freestanding outcrop from which Pillar Mountain takes its name. Sadly, Wordsworth’s ballad is the only written record.

Shepherd’s Delight

“An isolated crag on the breast of a mountain flanking one of the most desolate of our Lake District dales. The very remoteness of its surroundings, as well as the apparent inaccessibility of its summit, no doubt fascinated as well as awed the shepherds.” So wrote H. M. Kelly in the 1923 guide to Pillar Rock he produced for the Fell and Rock Climbing Club. The first verified ascent, in 1826, was indeed by a shepherd and cooper, named John Atkinson. Rock climbing had long been a technique used by mountaineers to reach a summit, but during the nineteenth century, it evolved into a sport in its own right. Kelly recognises Atkinson’s feat as “the first seed”.

And that seed bore fruit. The same year, three more shepherds, J. Colebank, W. Tyson, and J. Braithwaite followed in Atkinson’s footsteps, and in 1870, Miss A. Barker became the first woman to make the climb. The second was Mary Westmorland, who climbed the rock in 1873 with her brothers, Thomas and Edward (best known for building the Westmorland Cairn on Great Gable). But Thomas’s subsequent report in the Whitehaven News provoked a sniffy but anonymous rebuttal:

“(I read) With incredulous amazement, the rhythmical account of an alleged ascent of the Pillar by two gentlemen and a lady, that in all probability what the Westmorland party climbed was not the Pillar Rock but Pillar Mountain a route which did not involve rock climbing to the summit”.

The Westmorlands were incensed, but their claim was soon verified when their friend and accomplished climber, George Seatree performed his own ascent. Seatree found a bottle on the summit containing the names of those distinguished individuals who had reached the spot before him. Thomas, Edward, and Mary were on the list.

The Patriarch of The Pillarites

The anonymous correspondent consequently broke cover and retracted his remark. He was a retired clergyman and veteran of the Battle of Waterloo, named James Jackson. Jackson was an enthusiastic fellwalker with a talent was for self-aggrandisement. Some years before, while serving as Vicar of Rivington, he gained a level of local fame (or notoriety) when the weather cock blew off the church. Local steeple jacks refused to make the climb, so Jackson took it on himself to do so, successfully scaling the spire and repairing the weathervane. The act divided his congregation, some applauded his courage while others condemned it as foolhardy. Jackson of course subscribed to the former view and penned a short verse for the local paper:

“Who has not heard of Steeple Jack,
That lion-hearted Saxon,
Though I am not he, he was my sire,
For I am Steeple Jackson”

Jackson had set his heart on Pillar Rock but must have imagined it beyond his abilities. As an incorrigible chauvinist, he clearly took umbrage at being upstaged by Mary, but now saw an opportunity to distinguish himself as the eldest person to conquer the Pillar. He wrote to George Seatree asking him to be his guide, but Seatree refused. Undeterred, Jackson sought the guidance of a climber named John Hodgson, who took the seventy-nine-year-old to the summit via the Slab and Notch route. Jackson duly proclaimed himself, to anyone who would listen, The Patriarch of the Pillarites.

Pillar Rock from the path to Pillar summit

Hallowed Ground

By the late 1800’s, rock climbing had gained significant popularity, spearheaded by such notable pioneers as W P Haskett Smith, John Robinson, and Owen Glynne Jones. Jones’s book, Rock-Climbing in the English Lake District became a bestseller. The book was published and illustrated by climbers and photographers, George and Ashley Abraham, who accompanied Jones on many of his exploits. In the W. M. Crook memoir that prefaces the second edition, George Abraham recalls:

“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.”

Graham leads the way up on to Pisgah from Jordan Gap — Graham Uney climbing out of Pisgah (on Pillar) the hard way, from Jordan Gap

Scafell Pinnacle and Pillar Rock demand a similar reverence. Jones said of Pillar Rock, “It springs up vertically from the steep fellside like a cathedral-front 500 feet high”. Wainwright described Scafell Pinnacle and its surrounding crags as a great cathedral. Each is buttressed by an easily scrambled rock called Pisgah, which takes the aspiring climber to within spitting distance of the true prize, only to find they are separated from it by a sheer drop, called the Jordan Gap. The common names for these distinct features are inspired by the book of Deuteronomy, where God leads Moses to the top of Mount Pisgah and points across the River Jordan to the Promised Land.

Out of Bounds

Pillar Rock exerts an enduring allure for climbers and scramblers, but Wainwright declares it out-of-bounds for walkers—which presents a problem for anyone hoping to complete the Birketts. Bill Birkett’s guidebook, The Complete Lakeland Fells presents a list of Lakeland peaks over 1000 feet. They include 211 of the Wainwrights and 330 additional smaller summits. But there’s a sting in the tail. Birkett was a mountaineer who thought nothing of including Pillar Rock.

Fortunately, mountaineering & climbing instructors like Graham Uney offer roped and guided scrambles to fellwalkers who are ready to step out of their comfort zone. Last year, I climbed Pinnacle Ridge on St Sunday Crag with Graham, and this year, I signed up for Pillar Rock.

Plans seldom survive contact with the weather, and the persistent threat of thunderstorms has meant we have had to reschedule three times. Sadly, my friend Nikki Knappett, who accompanied us on Pinnacle Ridge, has had to drop out. Finally, with the first week of September heralding the return of warm sunshine, we are able to fix a date for the Wednesday.

Pillar Rock – The Mountain Cathedral

In the meantime, my friend, John Fleetwood gets in touch. John is an accomplished scrambler, who has revised the Cicerone scrambling guides to the Lakes. He is also a brilliant photographer who deeply understands the spiritual rapport we develop with wild places. He has just published a book called Beyond the View, in which he gives full expression to this sense of rapture. It contains a chapter which presents mountains as nature’s cathedrals. John knows I am due to climb Pillar Rock with Graham and asks if I would like to go and have a look at it in advance. To him, like Owen Glynne Jones, it is a mountain cathedral, but to fully appreciate its awe-inspiring countenance, we should approach it the way Jones and Wordsworth describe. From below. From Ennerdale.

We park at Gatesgarth and climb Scarth Gap in early sun, Buttermere a tranquil mirror reflecting the chiselled majesty of Goat Crag. As we start to descend into Ennerdale, we fork right on a well-maintained path to cross the River Liza at a footbridge. As we enter the trees to start our ascent, the upward slope is severe, and the countenance of the walk abruptly changes from an amiable summer ramble to unforgiving slog. Pillar Rock is over 1000 ft above us, and to reach its foot is itself a challenge.

John is a natural mountain hare. His pace doesn’t slacken. I fall behind and the order of the day is established—the hare’s swift legs will carry him far ahead, only to pause periodically to let his tortoise companion catch up.

Beyond the trees are stiff slopes of scree and stone, but with necks craned, the Rock towers into view above, an intimidating and awesome spectacle. Nervous anticipation serves as fuel to twinging calves, and the demanding terrain begins to feel like a quest or a pilgrimage—a test of our commitment.

Eventually, we reach its foot. A low rampart hugs the foot of the sheer northern cliff. Kelly calls it The Green Ledge. Above the ledge, slender plates of jagged slate rise skyward in a vertical array of niches and jutting icons, abstract and organic, vast and awe-inspiring, reinforcing the impression of an immense savage cathedral. It is daunting and humbling, and I feel my pulse quicken. And we can’t even see the top! This is the muscular buttress of Low Man. High Man, the summit, is set further back and not visible from this angle.

Walker’s Gully

We track round to the left where dolorous cleft of Walker’s Gully splits Pillar Rock from Shamrock, so named as from the east it appears to be part of the Pillar but is divided from it from it by a hollowed amphitheatre, a wide funnel of scree dropping into this sheer, narrow, dark and dank gully. Walker’s Gully is a highly misleading moniker. Could anywhere be less walker-friendly? Indeed, it is named after an unfortunate young man who fell here in 1883. Jones made this ascent in 1899, deep in winter and after days of torrential rain. His party were obliged to stand under an icy waterfall, and Jones had to remove his boots to climb out of a cave through a narrow hole in the roof. Standing barefoot in the snow nearly gave him frostbite. Despite his immense achievement, Jones’s chief account of Pillar Rock is of seconding John Robinson on an assault of the formidable north face. The Walker’s Gully report is included as an appendix, penned by George Abraham. Jones never got the chance to write it himself. He died some months later in an accident on Dent Blanche in the Swiss Alps. The second edition of his book was published posthumously.

The Old West Route (as a Spectator)

We track beneath the Green Ledge and climb the steep slopes on the western side on a sketchy sheep trod. John perches on a rock and gazes up at the west face, High Man now towering above us like a jagged pyramid.

“Are you going up?” I ask.

“Thinking about it,” he replies. “Do you want to give it a go?”

He points out the line of the Old West Route (the way Atkinson ascended nearly 200 years ago). It looks doable, but it disappears on to Low Man, and John tells me it gets trickier after that. We don’t have a rope, so I would have to be sure I could get down again. Eventually, I decide discretion is the better part of valour and decline. John picks his way up the diagonal rake, and I watch conflicted, my heart desperate to follow, but my legs relishing the rest. I watch climbers on the northern corner of the west face and soak up the astonishing power of this vast natural edifice. Eventually, I hear a shout and look up to see John waving from the top. His descent is more circumspect, and when he reaches the bottom, he tells me I made a good decision. The rock on this side has escaped the morning sun. It’s still very wet and much trickier than anticipated.

Slab and Notch

We work up the stiff scree beside Pisgah and make the comparatively easy scramble to its top. The top feels tantalisingly close to High Man, but a sheer drop to Jordan Gap and the formidable wall beyond bar progress. Down to the east, we watch climbers traversing a crack in a large sloping slab. John tells me this is the slab of the Slab and Notch route and points out the notch some way above it. This is the route I’ll be taking with Graham. It looks dry, and suddenly I can’t wait for Wednesday.

Looking down to the Slab and Notch route

Mountain Memorials

When the day arrives, I meet Graham in the car park at Wasdale Head and we climb the path to Black Sail Pass, deep in conversation. The sky is clear, the sun is beating down, and it feels more like June than September. I’m parched by the time we reach Looking Stead, where we leave the main path to Pillar Summit and descend on to the High Level Traverse. This was the route popularised by John Robinson and his fellow Victorian climbers. Two thirds of the away along stands the Robinson Cairn, built in 1907 as a memorial to the great man by 100 of his comrades and friends.

At the eleventh hour, Jen Hellier has stepped in to take Nikki’s place, and she’s arranged to meet us here. She’s beaten us to it and is waiting when we arrive. After a brief chat, we set off for Great Doup (Pillar Cove on OS maps). Jen and Graham have both served with Mountain Rescue and are soon swapping anecdotes. I listen with deep interest and a burgeoning respect for the dedication involved. With the heat, our water bottles are already half depleted. Fortunately, Graham knows of a half-hidden spring. As he replenishes our supplies, I look around. Somewhere near here, there is an unobtrusive cross carved into the rock with the initials JJ. It was commissioned by John Robinson, Charles Baumgartner and one other in 1906. It commemorates James Jackson, who having succeeded in a second attempt to climb Pillar Rock, tragically fell to his death on a third. A cairn and iron cross erected on the spot where he was found were destroyed by storms, so the cross was conceived as an enduring memorial. The third commissioner was George Seatree, who, despite his initial misgivings, maintained a regular correspondence with Jackson and clearly warmed to him.

James Jackson's Memorial Cross (photo by Jen Hellier) — James Jackson’s Memorial Cross (photo by Jenny Hellier)

Hand to Rock

Ahead the cliffs of Shamrock rise like a wall, as yet indistinguishable from Pillar Rock itself. A broad sloping pavement cuts across, rising diagonally. This is the Shamrock Traverse. When we reach the far end, the sham is revealed. The broad sloping dish of the amphitheatre separates Shamrock from the much larger Pillar, which now looms above.

We stash our rucksacks at the base of Pisgah, refuel with a quick snack, and retrieve the rope, climbing racks and harnesses. It’s time to tackle Slab and Notch.

Scrambling up to the start of Slab & Notch

We descend into the amphitheatre. The way is steep and loose, and I accidentally dislodge a stone, prompting a tongue-in-cheek rebuke from Jen. When, to my shame, I do it again, she names me the Phantom Rock Slinger. We scramble up to the start of our climb. There are two ways on to the Slab. The first is easier, but then requires working down the Slab. Graham would find it hard to protect us with a rope this way, so he opts for climbing an 8 ft cleft in the wall. It’s somewhat daunting as to the right is a sheer drop, but we rope up and once on belay, we follow his lead, Jen going second and me last. As soon as we put hand to rock, the sense of exhilaration soars, and we’re already buzzing as we step out on to the Slab and start to traverse the crack, now performing the manoeuvre I watched from Pisgah, four days earlier.

Graham climbing up on to the Slab — Graham climbing up to the Slab

Jen and George on the Slab - photo by Graham — Jen and George on the Slab (photo by Graham Uney)

The Notch is high above us, and we watch Graham scale the rocky shoulder that leads up to it. Jen has a little climbing experience, which makes me the out-and-out novice. I relish the opportunity to learn and watch how Jen deftly tackles the same moves. Hand and foot holds are plentiful and soon, we are climbing through the gap to join Graham on the ledge beyond. We traverse around a corner to a smooth rock beneath a vertical wall. Graham walks straight over it, while Jen tracks below for better handholds—it takes her right out on the edge. Lacking Graham’s balance and Jen’s courage, I opt for walking over, my palms pressed against the wall in the hope of staying stable. The next pitch is a rocky ladder. We attach ourselves to the cam Graham has wedged in the rock and watch as he climbs and disappears from view.

Jen after being lowered into Jordan Gap — Jen in Jordan Gap towards the end of our adventure

A minute or two later, we hear him exclaim, “Oh no, oh no!”

We look at each other in alarm, but Jen is perceptive, and her expression changes to one of recognition.

“That’s not ‘oh no, there’s something wrong’”, she suggests. “It’s ‘oh no, there’s something unpleasant’”.

A minute later, we hear Graham’s voice, “Someone’s had a poo up here!”

I don’t know whether I’m relieved or revulsed. Then I realise it’s both simultaneously. We climb the rocks above with an uneasy sense of anticipation and arrive at a natural alcove, big enough for the three of us to stand in a circle, only there is a tiny cairn in its midst—Graham’s commendable attempt to bury the unwelcome human offering—presumably an involuntary reaction to the significant exposure. I clamber onto a rocky shelf to give us all more room and look up. The contents of the cairn are forgotten instantly as I take in just where we are. Vaulting walls of rock reach skyward, a cavernous gully—the nave of the great savage cathedral.

Jen on the rocky staircase to the summit

Our onward route lies along a narrow ledge and up the final craggy staircase to the summit. As Jen seeks out holds for the final climb, she turns to me and says exactly what is going through my own mind, “I don’t want this to end”.

Approaching the summit - photo Graham — Approaching the summit (photo by Graham Uney)

The summit is unexpectedly broad and grassy, and the views are utterly edifying. Wispy strands of cirrus fleck a deep blue sky over the mottled green of High Stile and the darker distant peaks of Newlands and Coledale. While Graham secures a rope to lower us into Jordan Gap before our final scramble up and over Pisgah, Jen and I wander round enrapt, drinking it all in. It would take a lot of bottles to hold the names of all those who’ve made this ascent since Seatree’s time, but it still feels as if we’ve joined a select band; and the experience, though tame by the standards of Atkinson or Jones, or Fleetwood and Uney, is something that will stick with me forever.

Info / Sources / Further Reading

Find Graham Uney on Facebook at:

https://www.facebook.com/grahamuneymountaineering

… or through his website:

https://www.grahamuneymountaineering.co.uk/classic-scrambles

John Fleetwood’s book, Beyond the View is a beautiful and thought-provoking exploration of our spiritual rapport with wild places. It is available here:

https://payhip.com/b/ghKFq

H. M. Kelly’s guide to Pillar Rock and Neighbouring Climbs can be found in PDF form here:

Click to access Journal-1923.pdf

Frank Grant on Footless Crow and Raymond Greenhow on Scafell Hike have both written fascinating and detailed pieces on the Reverend James Jackson. Both are well worth a read:

Footless Crow:

http://footlesscrow.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-pillarite-patriarch.html?m=1

Scafell Hike:

https://scafellhike.blogspot.com/2019/06/reverend-james-jackson-memorial-cross.html?m=1

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

The Savage Temple at the Heart of Scafell

July 23, 2023 George Kitching 26 Comments

Wainwright compared Scafell Crag to a great cathedral where a man may lose all his conceit. I set off for Lord’s Rake and the West Wall Traverse with Wainwright archivist, Chris Butterfield and Lakeland Routes author, Richard Jennings to rediscover a sense of awe, experience the spiritual power of savage places and ponder whether we all need to reconnect with the sublime.

Cults of Nature

Norman Nicholson called it a cult of nature. Even at this early hour, a long line of pilgrims snakes up the grassy zig zags to Lingmell Col, above which the boulder field awaits: the desolate rocky desert at the summit of England’s highest mountain—Scafell Pike.

The author looking up at Mickledore Pikes Crag, Great Gable and the Lingmell Col path in the background - photo by Chris Butterfield — The author looking up at Mickledore; Pikes Crag, Great Gable & the Lingmell Col path in the background – photo by Chris Butterfield

All this began with a book. Until the late 1700’s, no-one visited Lakeland for pleasure. It was seen as a savage wilderness. Then in 1756, Edmund Burke published A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, in which he ascribed aesthetic taste to two fundamental instincts: self-propagation and self-preservation. All objects perceived by the senses appealed in some degree to one or other of these. Objects that were pleasing and gentle, suggesting comfort and safety, appealed to the instinct of self-propagation, those that were great and vast, suggesting fear and wonder aroused the instinct of self-preservation. The category of things that appealed significantly to the instinct of self-propagation, he called the Beautiful; the category that aroused the instinct of self-preservation, he called The Sublime.

The Sublime inspired the Picturesque movement in art. Suddenly, gentle pastoral scenes and sylvan idylls were out of fashion and savage wildernesses were in vogue. Apostles of the Picturesque like William Gilpin and Thomas Gray visited Lakeland and published accounts of their travels, exaggerating the height of the mountains and peppering their prose with heady hyperbole—the crags were terrible (in the literal sense of terror-inducing), and the towering heights were awful. They had found a sublime landscape—one that could shock and awe, and their early guidebooks fanned flames of interest.

Then came the Romantics. For the Lake Poet, William Wordsworth, the rugged integrity of the dalesmen and their close harmony with nature offered a panacea for all the ills industrialisation and urban living had inflicted on society. Gray never ventured much further than the Jaws of Borrowdale and thought the idea of climbing Skiddaw comically impossible, but Coleridge narrowly escaped death descending Scafell’s hazardous Broad Stand and experienced a religious-like rapture at having survived. William Hutchinson had described Wasdale as a valley infested by wildcats, foxes, martins, and eagles, but for Wordsworth, “no part of the country is more distinguished by sublimity”.

As the Victorians flocked to Lakeland so their relationship with the fells became more physical. Climbing Skiddaw became a must, and the more adventurous embraced rock-climbing. Owen Glynne Jones published a hugely popular book, Rock Climbing in the English Lake District, which remains a vibrant distillation of the dashing spirit of the age.

For Nicholson, these cults of nature are “symptoms of a diseased society, a consumptive gasp for fresh air”. They have arisen “because modern man has locked himself off from the natural life of the land, because he has tried to break away from the life-bringing, life-supporting rhythms of nature, to remove himself from the element that sustains him, in fact, he has become a fish out of nature.” But this is not only a sign of disease, “it is also a sign of health—a sign, at least, that man guesses where the remedy might be found.”

Krampus

It’s nearly 50 years since Nicholson published The Lakers, his insightful history of those early Lakeland writers, yet hordes still flock to these hills. Scafell Pike has become a bucket list must for YouTubers, Instagram photo op’ers, and charity-eventers, all faithfully following the crowd, checking social media as they go, some streaming Spotify, some carrying beers and disposable BBQ’s for summit parties… and amid this hubbub, I can’t help wondering whether we’ve forgotten what it is we came here for.

My misgivings run deeper than the litter and the wildfire risk, although these are increasingly alarming. In On Sacred Ground, the second of two beautifully written books documenting a genuinely awe-inspiring walk of 7000 miles through from the southern tip of Italy to Norway’s northern cape, Andrew Terrill describes how, in Salzburg, he stumbles on Krampusnacht, a gruesome Halloween-like parade of horned monsters roaming the streets, striking delighted terror into the crowds of wide-eyed children.

“Krampus has inhabited Austrian folklore for centuries. The creature originated thousands of years ago in pagan rituals as a horned wilderness god. In medieval times, Christianity appropriated them, inserting them into religious plays as servants of the Devil. By the seventeenth century, Krampusse found themselves paired inextricably with Saint Nicholas, and celebrations on Saint Nicholas Day soon featured saint and monster side by side, the evil Krampus a useful tool for convincing doubters to follow a righteous path.”

“I found myself wondering what effect Krampus would have had on my own childhood. I hadn’t thought much about wild nature while growing up in suburban London. I’d barely known it existed…

“The culture I’d been raised within insisted that I was separate from nature and above it; that it existed for my use. But the threat of Krampus might have helped me question that, might have hinted at my true place in the natural order of things. It might have reminded me that nature could never be controlled. That it deserved great respect. Perhaps it was something the human race needed too, and desperately; a critical reminder that wild nature would run rampage and devour us all if we stepped too far out of line.”

The Roaring Silence

The sublime is all about escaping the trappings of civilisation and facing the savage grandeur of the wilderness, reminding ourselves we are a tiny grain of sand on a vast shore with towering cliffs and pounding waves; it means feeling humbled and insignificant in the face of something so ancient and immense. And yet, here we are venturing into it brandishing all the trappings of the modern world like shields to keep Krampus at bay.

As John Pepper writes in Cockley Beck, one of the keys to fully engaging with the exhilarating wonders of nature is to shut off the noise of everyday living, and yet (even in 1984) we’d come to think of such a roaring silence as an existential threat.

‘”Anything for a quiet life,’ we sighed, and filled it with noise. The racket we engineered to escape from ourselves was more too than the relentless product of transistors, hi-fis, TVs, videos, one-arm bandits, space invaders, pubs, parties, theatres, musical events, football matches and all the other forms of popular entertainment. It was the shrieking of newspaper headlines and advertisement hoardings, high fashion, low fashion, modern architecture, paperback jackets and political panaceas.

“It was the ‘buzz’ we got from alcohol, drugs, coffee, tea and flattery; from gurus and meditation. The excitement of screaming at one’s wife, of gossip, and watching our cities in flames. The sound of our wheels and wings speeding us from nowhere to nowhere but sparing us the exigencies of having to be somewhere. It was the garbled silences administered by Valium. The graffiti over our walls, the two fingers everywhere thrust in the air… A man on the top of Scafell, plugged into ‘The Archers’”.

Wainwright: an Apostle of the Sublime

Yet awe is all around on the path to the Roof of England. We just need to put our phones in airplane mode, leave our earbuds at home, step away from the crowd, fall silent, and drink it all in. And if you really want spiritual transcendence, take a detour off the beaten path where it veers left for Lingmell Col…

“By going forward, a profound hollow is entered amongst a litter of boulders and scree fallen from the enclosing crags. The surroundings are awesome. Pikes Crag soars into the sky on the left, ahead is the gap of Mickledore, topping long fans of scree and rocky debris, and towering on the right the tilted cliffs of Scafell Crag dominate the scene and seem to threaten collapse. This grim fastness is Hollow Stones, and its deep confinement between high and near-vertical walls of rock will make sufferers from claustrophobia and others of timid disposition decidedly uncomfortable.”

Scafell Crag and Shamrock from across the scree of Hollow Stones

The words are those of Alfred Wainwright, whose Pictorial Guides continue to inspire legions of fellwalkers. Of Hollow Stones, Wainwright penned perhaps the perfect expression of the Sublime…

“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.”

Scafell Crag: The Pinnacle and Pisgah Buttress from the top of Deep Gill

At the conclusion to his final Pictorial Guides, AW lists his six best Lakeland mountains. Number one is Scafell Pike; curiously, its sibling, Scafell doesn’t make the list. And yet for all the magnificence of Pikes Crag and Pulpit Rock, Wainwright wasn’t looking at the Pike when he wrote than beatific paragraph, he was facing Scafell.

“The most formidable of these natural bastions is Scafell Crag which towers in supreme majesty above a stony hollow in the fellside: a vertical wall of clean rock some 500 ft high, divided by gullies into five buttresses, the whole appearing to be totally unassailable…

“The aspect of the Crag from below is intimidating, even frightening, and it is so palpably impossible for common or garden mortals to scale that none dares venture up the rocks from the safe ground at the foot, readily acknowledging that those who do so are a superior breed. But Nature has provided a breach in the defences of the Crag by which active walkers may gain access to its innermost secrets, make intimate acquaintance with magnificent and spectacular rock scenery, and emerge unscathed at the top: an achievement earned only by arduous effort and much expenditure of energy. This is the only route on Scafell Crag where walkers can tread safely without encountering serious climbing and without danger to life and limb. Lord’s Rake and the West Wall Traverse are special privileges of the fellwalker and make him feel that perhaps he is not too inferior after all.” (Fellwalking with Wainwright).

Whatever his head counselled, Wainwright’s heart belonged to Scafell Crag. I’m here with Chris Butterfield, a Wainwright archivist who has amassed a vast collection of the author’s books, letters, sketches, and printing materials, and our friend Richard Jennings, who runs the brilliant Lakeland Routes website. Chris has climbed Scafell before, but never by Lord’s Rake and the West Wall Traverse, and he has come here today in search of awe.

A Pagan Place: Lord’s Rake and the West Wall Traverse

Chris looks puzzled as Richard leaves the rough path to Mickledore and starts up a stiff fan of scree, heading for what looks like an impenetrable wall of crag. Wainwright’s breach in the defences is concealed from view, making the act of striking out for Shamrock a fitting leap of faith. The gradient is steeper than it first appears, and the scree is loose and shifts easily underfoot. Ahead the soaring wall appears to grow taller with every step. At its centre is the Scafell Pinnacle. In 1898, O. G. Jones and G. T. Walker broke climbing convention by shunning cracks and gullies and heading straight up its rock face. Five years later, an attempt to do something similar lead to the deaths of R. W. Broadrick, A. E. W. Garrett, H. L. Jupp, and S. Ridsdale. As we climb beside the foot of Shamrock, an unobtrusive cross carved into the rock comes into focus. It is a humble memorial to these four men, a cenotaph, standing not in a mossy graveyard but on the mountain where they fell—the ground they considered hallowed.

The cross at the foot of Lord's Rake — The cross at the foot of Lord’s Rake

As we near the cross at the base of the Pinnacle, the sham dissolves. Proximity reveals what the angle of approach had kept concealed— like the parting of the Red Sea, a navigable channel appears between these tidal waves of rock—a steep scree and boulder strewn gully separating Scafell Crag from its illusory shoulder, Shamrock. Here is Wainwright’s breach in the defences—this is Lord’s Rake.

Chris and Richard ascending Lord's Rake — Chris and Richard ascending Lord’s Rake

We start up this wild craggy corridor, clinging to its jagged walls in forlorn hope of solid footing. Halfway up, a striking feature appears on the left—a chockstone blocks the entrance to Deep Gill creating a cave, vivid green with moss, flanked with scales of slate, like a gaping reptilian mouth. Deep Gill is the inner sanctum of Wainwright’s great cathedral, and this is its gatehouse, but the way in is a rock climb above the chockstone, mere mortals like us must settle for a side entrance, albeit one of immense grandeur.

The cave in Deep Gill above the chockstone of the first — A second cave lies above the first in Deep Gill. Its first two pitches are rock climbs

The top of the first section of the Rake is littered with large boulders, the remains of a larger chockstone that fell and shattered in 2016. If you scramble the boulders, you can follow the Rake through four more distinct sections, two descents and two more ascents (all striking though none as dramatic as this first). However, to do so would be to enter the nave of the great cathedral and walk straight out into the cloisters. To approach the altar, means climbing out of the nave into the chancel. A faint trod forms a natural staircase up the left wall. Richard leads the way up on to the West Wall Traverse—a footpath along a slender shelf above Deep Gill, which rises to meet the Traverse.

Chris and Richard pause for breath by the boulders at the top of the 1st section of Lord's Rake — Chris and Richard pause for breath by the boulders at the top of the 1st section of Lord’s Rake

Richard leads the way onto the West Wall Traverse below the towering Pinnacle – photo by Chris Butterfield

Here, eyes are compelled upward to the imperious tower of the Pinnacle. Wainwright’s simile of a great cathedral captures the sudden soaring rush of awe and wonder it instils; but to me this is a pagan place—a colossal savage temple. The Pinnacle looks like a vast hooded hawk—an immense stone idol, humbling the beholder. As you steal along the Traverse in hushed reverence, it only appears to grow in stature, until eventually you see how the cleft of Jordon Gap separates it from the muscular mass of Pisgah Buttress.

The last pitch of Deep Gill is an easy scramble. In trying to maintain three points of contact, I’m given a stinging reminder of why this volcanic rock was highly prized for Stone-Age axe heads. I slice my finger on a razor-sharp stone. It’s a paper cut but enough for Chris to spot my trail of blood on the scree. I hope Krampus will be placated with this offering and not demand a greater sacrifice.

The wall at the end of gill is not high but looks green and slippery, only when you’re right in front of it does a hidden exit appear on your left—an easy haul over a rock step and out through a dry channel. We track round the head of the Gill to feast our eyes on the magnificent spectacle of Deep Gill Buttress, the west wall of the gill, rising imperiously from the ravine to the majestic summit of Symonds Knott.

The Pinnacle and Pisgah Buttress from the ground above Deep Gill — The Pinnacle and Pisgah Buttress separated by the Jordan Gap

Deep Gill Buttress rising from the depths of Deep Gill

A slender grassy shoulder leads to Pisgah Buttress, and we pull ourselves up the rocks to its top. Across the plunging ravine, the West Wall looks even more monumental, and to our right across the cleft of Jordan Gap is the summit of the Pinnacle. I lack the climbing skills to make the sheer descent and re-ascent, but it is thrilling to stand so close. I spy the modest cairn on its summit and recall O. G. Jones’s mention of a tobacco tin stashed discretely below it, in which Victorian climbers left their calling cards. I wonder if it still there. Chris is gazing around enrapt. The view of Great Gable is astounding.

The summit of the Pinnacle from Pisgah Buttress

The author on Pisgah Buttress – photo by Richard Jennings

The Savage Temple and the Roof of England

Wainwright declared, “The face of Scafell Crag is the grandest sight in the district, and if only the highest point of the fell were situated on the top of Deep Gill Buttress, perched above the tremendous precipices of stone, it would be the best summit of all”. The fact that Symonds Knott is not the summit, and the real summit is offset, somewhat removed from this sublime drama, was a disappointment to him, and the fact that much of the rest of Scafell lacks the awe-inspiring majesty at its heart, is perhaps why Wainwright, the accountant, the objective quantifier, marked it down in relation to its marginally higher sibling. But for Wainwright the poet, the romantic, the eloquent apostle of the sublime, this “towering rampart of shadowed crags” is “the greatest display of natural grandeur in the district, a spectacle of massive strength and savage wildness… an awesome and humbling scene.”

Chris has an early draft of AW’s Fellwalking with a Camera. It contains a page on the West Walk Traverse which was dropped from the final publication (much against Wainwright’s wishes) as the photograph was slightly out of focus. In the text he describes Deep Gill as “the most enthralling place in Lakeland”.

We wander back to the head of the gill from where Wainwright sketched the Pinnacle and Pisgah Buttress, including himself bottom right as “the Oracle”. Last year Chris published a book called Wainwright Memories in which he takes Andrew Nicol, Wainwright’s publisher back to the scenes of several photoshoots and retraces a holiday the pair took with their wives in Scotland. Andrew had the unenviable task of persuading AW to cooperate with publicity initiatives, but he soon learned to broach such matters the right way, and a deep respect and friendship grew between the two men. The book is a warm, touching, and nostalgic insight into that friendship. One of its themes involves recreating old photographs from the Scottish trip and Lakeland locations, with Andrew looking remarkably unchanged and Chris or his wife Priscilla, or her sister, Angela, or Angela’s husband, Glenn standing in for AW or Betty or Andrew’s wife, Bernice. We are certainly not going to let Chris get away without recreating Wainwright’s iconic Deep Gill sketch now. Richard takes charge, fishing out a copy of The Southern Fells and painstakingly arranging Chris’s position.

Chris recreates Wainwright’s iconic sketch – photo by Richard Jennings

Once done, and after a brief visit to the true summit, we pick our way down the eroded scree of a natural amphitheatre to the puddle that is Foxes Tarn, then scramble down its gully to ascend Mickledore from the Eskdale side. After gazing in hushed reverence at the “the sublime architecture of buttresses and pinnacles soaring into the sky”, we venture back through Hollow Stones, to join the hordes descending the “tourist route” from Scafell Pike.

I understand why AW cited Scafell Pike as number one on his list of six best Lakeland mountains. There is something special about the feeling that you are standing on the Roof of England—the nation’s highest ground. I remember being there in the golden light of a winter afternoon, with snow on the ground and the low sun bathing Yeastyrigg Crags and Bowfell in an ethereal amber glow. Despite the biting cold, everywhere emanated a magical warmth. It felt like hallowed ground.

And yet, it was only when I turned my head that my pulse truly quickened. Scafell had fallen into shadow, and across Mickledore, Scafell Crag reared like a mighty black tower, fierce and intimidating, the realm of Krampus—a savage temple at the sublime heart of Lakeland.

Whiskey Man: Lanty Slee – a Legend of Langdale

March 19, 2023 George Kitching 16 Comments

Wainwright described the square mile between Tilberthwaite and Langdale as “one of the loveliest in Lakeland”. In the 1800’s it was home to a notorious bootlegger, famed for his ingenuity, audacity, and ability to outwit the authorities. I walk from Rhunestone Quarry, over Holme Fell, to Tarn Hows on the trail of Lanty Slee.

Mountain Dew

Over Little Langdale Tarn, Lingmoor extends a long flank, dressed in the earthy tones of winter scrub—ochre, umber, and maroon. Where its slopes fall to Blea Tarn, the shadowy Langdale Pikes rise like rough-hewn turrets, carved from the bedrock by elemental forces. To the northeast, low-lying cloud conspires to paint the curve of the Fairfield Horseshoe as the rim of a mighty volcano, plumes of white mist belching from its crater like ash and steam.

The illusion is fitting as these ancient hills were indeed spewed from the vent of a submarine volcano somewhere in the vicinity of the Scafells, then transported, submerged, compacted, pressured, exposed, and sculpted by the relentless effects of tectonic shifts, ice, and water over hundreds of millennia. As Ian Jackson explains so well in his book, Cumbria Rocks, it was this very journey that formed the rippling patterns which make Coniston green slate so alluring. They are the swirling imprint of tides and waves, the watermarks of the deep Ordovician ocean that once covered these hills.

Two centuries ago, quarrying here in Tilberthwaite was rife, excavating fellsides already peppered with copper mine levels, and creating the landscape that Wainwright described as “pierced and pitted with holes—caves, tunnels, shafts and excavations”. But these scars are not a blot. To quote Wainwright again: “Wetherlam is too vast and sturdy to be disfigured and weakened by man’s feeble scratchings… The square mile of territory between Tilberthwaite Gill and the Brathay is scenically one of the loveliest in Lakeland (in spite of the quarries) and surely one of the most interesting (because of the quarries)”.

Behind me, Rhunestone quarry on Betsy Crag has gouged a long gully in the fellside. After decades of disuse, nature is slowly reclaiming this cross-section, softening its splintered sides with speckles of lichen and sprouting foliage from its fissures. A grass walkway divides the gully into two distinct pits. The crumbled remains of buildings nestle beneath walls of stacked spoil, and a long flat slab provides the roof of an arch, the gateway to the higher reaches of the upper pit. But it’s this pit’s lower reaches that have drawn me here, for during a short spell in the mid 1800’s, they produced more than slate. I scramble down a grassy bank, and climb with care down a loose and shifting bed of slippery spoil, damp with morning dew. And I smile at the thought, because Morning Dew (or Mountain Dew) had another meaning here.

In the very bottom, lies a small opening, a cave entrance, crowned with mossy grass and overhung with the spindly branches of a rowan. It’s pitch dark inside, but torchlight reveals a sunken floor submerged in emerald water. In times gone-by, any water collected here would have been distilled into something altogether more potent, for in the tight confines of this cave, Lanty Slee made Mountain Dew.

Lanty Slee was a notorious bootlegger, and Mountain Dew or Morning Dew was slang for his whiskey—although to place an order you supposedly had to enquire whether he’d had a good crop of “tatties” (potatoes). He started operating in a small way in the early 1820’s, and by 1840, he was producing 400 to 500 gallons a year and supplying a good many residents of the Langdale, Tilberthwaite, Yewdale, and Colwith area—much to the consternation of the excise men whose duty it was to shut him down. To evade their clutches, his whiskey-still was constantly on the move, and several quarries and cottages in the area claim to have hosted it for a while.

Little Langdale and Fairfield Horseshoe over Lanty Slee's Cave — Little Langdale and Fairfield Horseshoe over Lanty Slee’s Cave

Tee-total in Tilberthwaite

Indeed, last year as I was returning from a fell walk and approaching one such cottage, a scene reminiscent of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner unfolded—a gentleman with a “long grey beard and glittering eye” stopped me with a quizzical expression and engaged me in conversation. His was not a dark story of superstition and ancient curses, however, he was extremely convivial and excited to know which peaks I had visited. As a former fellwalker and quarryman, he was full of warm nostalgia for the higher ground, and when I admired his cottage, the conversation got really intriguing.

“Oh, I’ve had those history types round,” he said. “They reckon it’s where Lanty Slee had one of his stills. See those steps over there. There were pipes and all sorts under there, and the floor’s been concreted, but you can tell it’s moved. I’d love to know what used to be down there.”

In 1841, a similar cottage gave up its secret. On the 2^nd October, the Kendal Mercury reported:

“On Tuesday last the Exciseman, having received information of a still being at work, proceeded with the Hawkshead police to a lonely cottage at Tilberthwaite, five miles from Hawkshead, the residence of Lancelot Slee to search for a hidden store, and after a careful examination they discovered the place of the works in a vault excavated under the stable, the entrance to which was by a trap-door at the head of the stall, under the horse’s fore feet.

The stall was kept well filled with straw, and if Lanty had occasion to go in or come out, he had nothing to do but to call the horse by name, and repeat the necessary word, and the docile animal would instantly stand off, or rise up, for the free ingress or egress of his master. The flue of the boiler was ingeniously carried underground into the chimney of the cottage.”

According to the Westmorland Gazette:

“All the traps were hoisted off to Ambleside, whiskey and all; and it is supposed that there were some of the strongest spirits that ever were made, for those that only smelled were sent half sensover. It is said that a Tee-total Society is going to be commenced by the mountaineers, for they say that they can be as good temperance chaps as any when Lanty’s whiskey is done, and he must make no more.”

Whatever they told the reporter, the dalesmen had other ideas. When the seizure of another Lanty’s stills made the papers, twelve years later, The Gazette’s Sawrey correspondent recalled what had happened previously: “A few years ago, when the worm and the still had been taken, and were lodged at Ambleside, a party of dalesmen went by night, broke into the warehouse that contained the apparatus, and, on the proprietor returning from a six month’s sojourn at the tread-mill, he was presented with his much-loved and valuable engines.” Another report suggests this pattern of events had happened at least three times before.

Hodge Close and Holme Fell

From Rhunestone quarry, I double back to the Tilberthwaite/Langdale track and take the footpath that skirts Moss Rigg Wood, detouring into the trees to take a look at Moss Rigg quarry. This is the rumoured location of another of Lanty’s stills. Great walls of chiselled slate rise like cubist sculptures from a deep pit lined with spoil. A screen of garnet and ginger twig—larch and silver birch—softens the angular stone, as nature, here too, reclaims what’s hers.

Beyond the wood, the path brings me to Slater bridge over the Brathay, which Wainwright describes as “the most picturesque footbridge in Lakeland, a slender arch constructed of slate from the quarries and built to give the quarrymen a shorter access from their homes”.

Two thirds of a mile from Stang End, I come to Hodge Close, where old quarry buildings have been repurposed as holiday lets, the Old Riving Shed still named for its former function. Here quarried boulders, known as clog, would be split along lines of weakness, called bate, by rivers working with hammer and chisel.

A few yards further on, the ground drops away dramatically to Tilberthwaite’s most celebrated and visited quarry pit. Sheer walls of slate, iron-red with haematite, plunge to a deep pool of copper green. A charcoal grey tunnel opening sits just above the water line like a huge skeletal eye socket. This feature has given rise to the name, Skull Cave, for when photographed along with its reflection in the water and the image turned on its side, the scene resembles a skull. The resemblance doesn’t stop there. From inside the cave, another opening, less prominent from above, resembles a second eye socket, and the narrow pillar of rock dividing them becomes a nose, giving the impression of standing inside a giant stone skull. No doubt these macabre illusions helped in the cave’s selection for location filming in Netflix serial, The Witcher.

Beyond the pit, a path leads up through the trees, past disused reservoirs, to the flanks of Holme Fell, its lower contours feathered with auburn-branched larches and tinted ginger with rusted bracken; its craggier tops are dressed in chocolate waistcoats of winter heather, like the fleeces of Herdwick yearlings. Norman Nicholson once described the Yewdale Fells as “vicious crags, not very high, but fanged like a tiger”. The image extends to their next-door-neighbour. Holme Fell’s southern face plunges to Yewdale in a series of steep rocky drops: Raven Crag, Calf Crag, Long Crag, and Ivy Crag; but if these are the bared teeth of an alpha predator, the gentle approach from the north is a stroll up the soft nape of its neck. The top of its head is the finest of viewpoints for a landscape washed in the earthen tones of winter: clay red, ochre, russet and charcoal, and hatched grey with spoil. Coniston Water snakes southwestward like a sliver of molten silver; the Langdale Pikes are a slate-grey castle, conjured from Middle Earth; and the old reservoir sparkles like a sapphire amongst the scrub.

Herdwicks and Mrs Heelis

A scramble down the summit rocks leads to the subsidiary peak of Ivy Crag, and a descent to Yew Dale Tarn, nestled below the trees of Harry Guards Wood. I pass Yewdale Farmhouse, with its seventeenth century spinning gallery, used for drying Herdwick wool. The farm was bequeathed to the National Trust by Herdwick Breed Association President-Elect, Mrs Heelis, better-known beyond these parts as Beatrix Potter.

Across the road, a path climbs through the trees beside the crystal cascades of Tom Heights—a hypnotic dance of wood and waterfall. At the top is Tarn Hows, landscaped by the Marshall family in the 1800’s. Along with Yew Tree Farm, it was part of the Monk Coniston estate, which Beatrix Potter bought from the Marshalls on behalf of the National Trust. Once the Trust had raised sufficient funds, it purchased part of the estate from her, but kept her on as estate manager, which led to some colourful clashes with their land agent. Beatrix bequeathed them the remainder in her will. Today, Tarn Hows is one of Lakeland’s top attractions, but for all its serene waters and arboreal splendour, it’s not my primary destination this afternoon. I’m still on Lanty’s trail and a little further up the Cumbria Way lies High Arnside Tarn. Its waters are a draw for anglers, but around 1853, they may have had another use too.

Contraband in Colwith

That year, the seizure of another of Lanty’s stills again made the papers. On Saturday 26^th of March, the Westmorland Gazette reported:

“A remarkable discovery of a cave containing an illicit still and all the appurtenances for the illegal manufacture of whiskey was made on the 12th inst. by Mr. Bowden, officer of inland revenue of this town. The locale of this discovery was on the farm of Mr. Lancelot Slee, High Arnside, Colwith, Little Langdale, about five miles from Ambleside and six from Coniston. The secluded character of the place, and the crafty concealment of the cave, renders it a matter of some wonder how Mr. Bowden contrived to discover and find access to it.

The cave has been evidently hollowed out entirely by labour. It is situated near the edge of a somewhat precipitous bank, the abrupt natural fall of one field of the farm into another. The access to it is not at the side, but perpendicularly through a hole at the surface, covered with a flat stone or flag. This aperture, which no doubt did the double duty of a chimney as well as a door, was covered carefully over with brackens. On descending it was found that the sides and floor and roof of the cave were all flagged, the flags of the roof overlapping each other quite in a clever workmanlike style, so as to throw off the water towards the bank above-mentioned. Strong posts and rafters made this subterranean retreat secure from any danger of falling in. The size of this underground apartment is about three or four yards long by two or three yards broad, and at the end where the contraband work was transacted a man could stand up-right. The mode by which that indispensable requisite, water, was supplied for the distilling process formed part of the ingenious adaptation of the place. A little mountain rivulet was contrived, by a small dam about twenty or thirty yards from the cave, to aid in the illicit production of ‘mountain dew’. When it was wanted the little stream found its way to the cave under a covering of turf and brackens, and having done its office this Alpheus of the whiskey-still sank underground and re-appeared about four or five yards from the cave like any ordinary drain. When not wanted for distilling a stone just shifted at the dam turned it off to another field, as though for the simple purpose of irrigation.”

Local historian, Phil Burrows has made it his quest to seek out the locations of Lanty’s stills, and with the help of the current residents of High Arnside Farm, he thinks he has found the spot where Mr. Bowden triumphantly uncovered this cave. Without a full archeological dig, he cannot prove it, but if he’s right, the stream that Lanty so cunningly diverted would have been an outflow from High Arnside Tarn.

In 1897, The Lakes Herald reported the passing of exciseman, Mr. D. Flattely, and reminisced about the cunning of the bootleggers he’d made a career of chasing. Chief among them was Lanty, who it was claimed could produce a bottle of his whiskey within 5 minutes, anywhere within a 20 mile radius of his home. Indeed, one magistrate was foolish enough to believe he’d got the better of Slee on this score:

“It is related that upon one occasion when Lanty had been in durance over night, and appeared in the justice room next morning, one of the magistrates—I think it was Dr. Davy—said to him, ‘I am told that you are able to furnish your friends with a glass of spirit at any time when desired, but I think we have broken the spell this time.’ Considerable was the merriment as Lanty produced a full bottle from his capacious coat pocket, and holding it up replies, ‘Mappen’ ye’r rang. Will ye hev a touch’.”

While the excisemen occasionally uncovered his stills, they never found where Lanty stashed his bottles. And despite his best efforts, neither has Phil Burrows. In a landscape so potted with holes, perhaps it’s not surprising, but maybe, just maybe, everyone has been looking in the wrong place.

Matters of the Spirit

In 1916, Jonathan Denwood and John Denwood published a book called Idylls of a North Countrie Fair, in which they documented, in dialect, a series of recollections, stories and conversations with colourful local characters at Cumbrian fairs. The 8^th August edition of the Penrith Observer carried a review. The reviewer is a little sniffy at the coarseness of some of the language used, concluding, “The introduction of these words and phrases—there are many of them—mars the pleasure of the reader, and will not let him leave the book lying about for his women folk to read.” However, some of the sketches are so entertaining that he overcomes his prudish distaste:

“the best of them is the account of Lakeland smugglers… This purports to be the reproduction of a ‘crack’ Mr. J. M. Denwood had more than twenty years ago with an old resident of Little Langdale, who professed to know Lanty Slee, a noted smuggler of his time; at any rate he told some capital stories about him which are chronicled in most readable style.

Then there was Whisky Walker, a Borrowdale quarryman, who was an adept both at distilling whisky, in illicit fashion, and in disposing it. He is described as a man who was ‘weel behaved, weel larned, an’ far travelled.’

Then there was this little dialogue about one of the characters of Lakeland whose supposed merits have often been written about, and quite as frequently discounted:

“Was he [Whisky Walker] any relation to Wondeful Walker, the famous Wasdale priest, John!

Ah couldn’t tell ye that.

Did you know Wondeful Walker, John!

No, but Ah knew his dowter at was weddit on t’lanlword at Cunniston, an Ah’ve hard it said he was wonnerfal oald scrat, ‘at nivver did a turn for any of his neighbors widoot he was weel paid. He hed a laal kurk, a laal salary, an’ a big lot o’ barnes, but he mannished to seave a fortun ‘at when he deid com to mair nor his wages he’d iver eddled.

(I knew his daughter who was married to the landlord at Coniston, and I’ve heard it said that he was a wonderful old penny-pincher, that never did a turn for any of his neighbours without being well-paid for it. He had a little church, a little salary, and a big lot of children, but he managed to save such a fortune that when he died it came to more than all the wages he’d ever earned).

Did he aid and abet the smugglers, John!

Ah’ll nut say that, but t’ meast of t’ kurks in them days war used as hidin’ pleaces by t’ smugglers an’ whisky makkers. Ah know a family vault in a country kurkyard ‘at Lanty Slee an’ me hev sleeped in an’ hidden stuff in mair nor yance or twice, fra daybrek till t’ neet fell again.

(…most of the churches in those days were used as hiding places by the smugglers and whisky makers. I know a family vault in a churchyard that Lanty Slee and me have slept in and hidden stuff in more than once or twice, from daybreak to nightfall.)

What, beside coffins, John!

Aye, it t’ wick fwok we war flate on, nut t’ deid uns.

(Aye, it was the living folk we were wary of, not the dead ones.)

Did the priests connive at your doings!

Weel, they war niver agean takkin owt they could git for nowt, nor agean buyin’ a sup spirits on t’ cheap.”

Never let it be said that the 19^th century clergymen of Borrowdale and Langdale were anything less than dedicated to all matters of the spirit!

Sources/Further Reading

All these newspaper reports are available through the British Newspaper Archive, but for those without a subscription, local history writer, Raymond Greenhow has done a fine job of collating all the detail and more into a chronological portrait of Lanty, rooted in fact.

https://scafellhike.blogspot.com/2020/06/lanty-slee-and-his-mountain-dew.html

Phil Burrows has made an intriguing and highly entertaining video about his quest to uncover all of Lanty Slee’s hideouts and his theories about High Arnside Tarn. Well worth a watch:

Ian Jackson’s book, Cumbria Rocks is a fascinating guide to the geology of Cumbria, written by an expert but aimed at walkers. Accessible and readable, it is packed full of brilliant photographs and profits go to the Cumbria Wildlife Trust. It is published by Northern Heritage and available from their website:

https://www.northern-heritage.co.uk/product/search/cumbria-rocks-60-extraordinary-rocky-places-that-tell-the-story-of-the-cumbrian-landscape

The following modern day interview on sirgordonbennett.com gives fascinating details insights into to the process of riving slate:

Coniston Stonecraft Interview

General, Natural History, Nature

A Bustle in the Hedgerow

June 19, 2022 George Kitching 20 Comments

Hedgerow Diary—Cartmel Valley, 2021/22

When lockdown kept me from the mountains, I woke up to what was right on my doorstep. During those first few weeks of tight restrictions, I would make a daily circuit of four country lanes. As the restrictions eased, I ranged a little further, exploring in earnest the low hills that ring the Cartmel Valley.

But that short walk around the lanes remained, and still remains, my lunchtime ramble. It’s a landscape very like the one where I grew up: small rotational farms; hay meadows rich in wildflowers; compact fields with hedges and wide margins where micro wildernesses thrive.

The more I focused on the minutiae, the more I saw: a perpetually changing cycle of life, growth, decay, and regeneration. As the hedgerows became more familiar, they became less familiar, and I came to appreciate how they constantly evolve.

I started to learn the names of the wildflowers, the types of lichen even, and from May 2021, I began to keep a diary of photographs and descriptive writing—a paragraph or two, roughly every two weeks, documenting those changes.

The following pages are that diary. They chart twelve months in the life of the hedgerows and hillsides of the Cartmel Valley.

Navigation: each month has its own page. Use the green buttons to move through sequentially or the picture links below to jump straight to a particular month.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Cairngorms, Fell Walk, General, Highlands, History, Mountains, Natural History, Nature, Scotland, Winter skills

Walk Out To Winter: New Skills

April 17, 2022 George Kitching 14 Comments

Winter Skills in the Cairngorms

I head for the snow-capped majesty of the Cairngorms to learn winter skills and meet some remarkable people with inspiring tales of courage, devotion, and survival. (Although, the less said about the pink unicorns, the better.)

The High Road

Beyond Perth, the landscape changes. The sprawl of human conurbation melts into the rear view mirror as the road handrails the River Tay and enters the Craigvinean Forest. Slender trunks of silver birch, white as winter ghosts, fan into filigrees of garnet twig, and dark towers of Scots pine wear tam o’ shanters of Caledonian green.

The road climbs out of the woods and into the hills, lightly flecked at first, but slowly, steadily, the snow line creeps lower, until up ahead, rises a pure white winter peak. A tremble of excitement. This is what I’m here for.

Winter’s touch turns our green hills into Alpine mountains and amplifies our wonderstruck response. But it introduces new levels of treachery. An understanding of winter terrain and its inherent hazards, together with the tools and techniques required to navigate it successfully are vital. Microspikes can only get you so far, so I’m heading for the Highlands to learn some winter skills.

Hayley Webb

It’s taken longer than the miles on the map suggest. I’d booked on to a day-long course on Helvellyn in February 2020, but Storm Dennis put paid to that. It was rearranged for March 16th, but due to an administrative cockup, no instructor turned up. I climbed Helvellyn anyway with another would-be pupil, Matt Napier. Matt turned out to be a sound-engineer who had just returned from Paris. The events he was due to work had been cancelled because of coronavirus. “Anyone I might have heard of?” I asked. “Madonna, “ he relied. “I’m Madonna’s monitor engineer”. I learned lots about life on the road with Madonna, and Roger Waters, and Kylie, but we learned no winter skills. We wouldn’t have anyway—there was no snow.

I arrived home to the announcement that we would be going into lockdown and a very apologetic email from the course organiser offering a refund or a rebooking, although it was uncertain when. I had a little rant on Facebook, and Hayley Webb got in touch.

“I’ll teach you”, she said, and she sent me details of a course she was planning in the Cairngorms for 12 months’ time. It was three full days on the mountain, which sounded far more substantial in terms of what I’d learn. Hayley taught me to navigate so I know what a good instructor she is. What’s more, in a former life, Hayley was a chef, and she would be doing all the catering. Well this would be the icing on the traybake. I would have to wait a year, but 2020 would be a year when all our lives were put on hold. This would be something to look forward to when it was all over.

COVID

Only it wasn’t all over. By February 2021, we were back in lockdown, and the rules in Scotland were even stricter. Hayley was forced to postpone all her bookings, and this being weather dependent, it would mean waiting another year. I signed up straight away.

It was a terrible time for mountain leaders, as it was for anyone trying to keep their own business afloat. Hayley took a job at Sainsburys, packing orders for home delivery. There, she met Gemma Grewar, another mountain leader, who had taken a job as a delivery driver.

On Radio 6, I heard Tom Robinson recount a conversation with an Amazon driver. She told him his gig at the Barbican, two years earlier, had been one of the best she’d seen. She was young. Not typical of his normal audience demographic, so out of curiosity, he asked her why she had attended. “I was your sound engineer,” she replied. I thought of Matt Napier and hoped he was keeping his head above water.

Lagganlia Outdoor Education Centre

COVID still isn’t over, but the latest Omicron variant is proving generally less severe, and life is taking tentative steps back to normal. This morning, the Facebook Messenger group, which Hayley set up to keep us all looped in, was a flurry of negative test photos and excitable examples of overpacking—we were bonding in our desperate bids not to leave anything behind. Now, we are all about to meet for the first time.

As I turn off the Aviemore road at Kincraig and cross the bridge over the River Spey on the edge of Loch Insh, a frisson of anxiety creeps in. I’m minutes from Feshiebridge, the Lagganlia Outdoor Education Centre, and Caeketton lodge, which will be our home for the next four nights, and I realise just how insular I’ve become as a result of all the restrictions. I have a gregarious, outgoing side, but also an introverted side, which has grown to dominate of late. Now, the thought of spending four nights and three whole days with a group of total strangers (Hayley excepted—although we’d only met once) feels intimidating.

That feeling evaporates the second I walk through the door to the warmest of welcomes. The room is already buzzing with convivial conversation and filled with enticing cooking aromas. Hayley shows me to the four-bed bunk room, I’ll be sharing with Rob, a police community support officer and fellow guitarist with a gentle sense of humour and a passion for wild-camping. We are two of only three men on the course. The other is Andy, but Claire has already bagged him. Which is fair enough considering they are partners, although she made that deliberately unclear in her mischievous message to the group earlier, where she raised one or two eyebrows by insinuating she that was getting first dibs. This soon proves typical of Claire’s wicked sense of humour, perfectly matched by Andy’s dry wit. In the course of conversation, I learn they are seasoned long-distance walkers, veterans of several national trails, but Claire has an aversion to steep descents, a fact she discovered recently on Striding Edge, which she ended up crossing on all fours. She has booked a one-to-one course with Hayley in April to try and overcome it, but in the meantime, the next three days hold obvious concerns. That she is here, ready to confront her fears, shows genuine courage.

Kit

After supper, it’s kit inspection—to check we all have suitable ice axes, and crampons, and compatible boots. I award myself Brownie points for having purchased the same ice axe as Hayley, but she tells me my crampons are really designed for boots with a slightly stiffer sole. They’ll be OK, but I should be vigilant in case they pop off.

My boots are three-and-a-half season boots, that will take a flexible crampon. Winter boots are better as they have a stiffer sole, but the added stiffness makes them less comfortable to walk in all year round. If you want boots you can use in all seasons, you are looking at a comprise. Three-and-a-half season boots make the compromise in favour of comfort, while B1 winter boots make it in favour of rigidity. If I am to get serious about walking in full winter conditions, I would be best investing in a pair of B2 boots, which are optimised for crampon use and insulation.

Hayley introduces Gemma, her fellow Winter Mountain Leader and Sainsburys veteran. Gemma is here to assist in case they need to split the group or work on specifics with individuals. This comes as a relief to many of us who are worried about our fitness levels.

Finally comes an appraisal of the weather. Researching conditions and adjusting plans accordingly is key. Wind speeds upwards of 60 m.p.h. are forecast for tomorrow, so we’ll not be going anywhere near the summit of Cairn Gorm..

As we all turn in, Hayley and Gemma study maps to determine where we are likely to find snow at safe altitudes, while keeping as far as possible in the rain and sleet shadow.

Loch an Eilein

In the morning, we stuff sandwiches and delicious homemade tray bakes into our rucksacks, stow ice axes and skiing goggles, don gaiters and waterproofs, and set off for Loch an Eilein.

Ahead of the storms, the air is crisp and dry, the sun extending fingers of white gold around the hems of soft grey cloud pillows, turning tranquil waters to liquid silver. Loch an Eilein means Loch of the Island, and the island in question hides a castle in a copse of trees. The castle started life as a fortified tower built by a notoriously ruthless grandson of Robert the Bruce, known as the Wolf of Badenoch. A curtain wall was added in the 1600, ninety years before the castle was besieged by defeated Jacobites fleeing the Battle of Cromdale. In 1745, it hid fugitives from the Battle of Culloden. A snapshot of Scottish history in a setting unfathomably older. The castle is now home to ospreys.

As the path snakes between the tall pines of Forest of Rothiemurchus, mossy woodland aromas fill our nostrils; and twigs sprout white beards of reindeer lichen. Hayley tells us the woods are home to capercaillie. From the Gaelic, capall coille, meaning “horse of the wood”, the capercaillie is a black, turkey-sized member of the grouse family. They can be aggressive if cornered, and have been known to harass dog-walkers. All the same, I’d love to see one.

Avalanche Awareness

We’re ascending, so when we emerge from the woods we hit the snow line, and the learning starts. We’re surrounded by high hills, and Hayley has us observe how the eastern faces are snow-laden, while western faces are sparse and potentially icy: the prevailing wind was from the west last night, blowing the snow over the ridges to create loaded eastern slopes. We look for cornices, overhangs of compacted snow that could break away causing avalanches. The risk is heightened when fresh powdery drift settles on top of hard, compacted snow, but the top can freeze creating a crust and giving the illusion that all is firm. Hayley demonstrates on the bank by the side of the path. The snow is crunchy, but she excavates a section with her axe and reveals soft powdery stuff beneath, ice below that. She jumps on top and stamps down with her boot. The snow cracks into a tile and slides off.

Winter Skills in the Cairngorms — The party en route to ice-axe training. Photo by Hayley Webb.

Self Arrest

We find a knoll with a reasonable gradient and walk to the top, using our boots to kick steps in the yielding snow, sinking deeper with each step. It’s tiring, and Hayley bids us remember this when planning winter walks—add extra time, don’t be over-ambitious with distance. From the top she has us slide down on our bums, following each other’s line until we create four compacted slippery runs with soft, gentle, rock-free run offs at the bottom. It’s time to don helmets and learn how to self-arrest with an ice-axe.

The Ministry of Funny Walks. Photo by Hayley Webb

We’ve already learned how to hold the axe—hand over the top and the pick end facing backwards—to use the shaft and spike like a short trekking pole, but that grip also allows a rapid lift to the chest if you feel yourself slipping. The idea is to nestle the blunt adze into the hollow beneath your clavicle, then turn as you fall, driving the sharp pick into the snow, with your full weight on top of it. You grab the other end with your free hand and look down the shaft to optimise your position. Oh, and remember to lift your feet into the air, so that if you’re wearing crampons, they don’t dig in and catapult you head over heels down the slope. It’s a lot to remember in the split-second panic of a slip, and if you’re ever to use it in anger, it would have to be second nature. We practice over and over, safe in the knowledge that failure here meets a soft landing. Hayley marches round like a Strictly Come Dancing instructor, barking orders on body-line and position. It’s exhilarating and exhausting.

Rob daggering with an ice axe & kicking steps

Gemma notices Claire hanging back and quietly, unobtrusively, takes her aside for a one-to-one counsel.

Meanwhile, black clouds have been moving up the valley. When the wind whips up and horizontal sleet stings our faces, we don ski goggles and begin the long tramp back down.

I chat to Nikki, a solicitor who’s been a Facebook friend for a while, but this is the first time we’ve met. She’s every bit as warm, loud, chatty, and full-of-fun as I imagined. And every bit as passionate about mountains—although after a year dogged with bereavement, injury, and a recent bout of COVID, her fitness has waned and she’s found today a struggle. Not that anyone else would notice.

And Andrea, who works freelance, teaching kids about nutrition and cooking and a host of other stuff that sounds richly rewarding. She was in the army and was stationed for a while in Herford, Germany, where my Dad was posted in my mid-teens. We reminisce about Herforder Pils, Gluhwein, and Christmas markets.

In the evening, after a hearty meal, we learn to read avalanche forecasts and determine which faces will be safe and which hazardous for us to tread in the morning.

Cairn Gorm

The next day we decamp to the ski centre car park, and with the Met Office predictions of kinder weather holding true, we start up the slopes of Cairn Gorm. We learn to kick snow steps with our boots, and to cut them with our axes. When our feet no longer sink in, we don crampons. “Walk like John Wayne,” says Hayley, “because you have sharp spikes sticking out the sides of your boots, and you don’t want to rip the bottom of your waterproofs. Rob forgets and nicks a small slit in his over-trousers. A little further on, I do the same.

Winter Skills on Cairn Gorm — Daggering with ice axe and kicking in with front points of the crampons. Photo by Hayley Webb

Once we have the hang of things, Hayley and Gemma have us running down a slope to appreciate the grip the crampons afford.

“How are you feeling, Claire?” shouts, Hayley.

“Great!” replies Claire, raising her ice axe in triumph before joining the downward race, her demons conquered.

Point 1141

A steep ridge leads up to Point 1141 (higher than Scafell Pike, yet unnamed). On this slope we find névé, snow that has partially melted and refrozen to form a hard, compacted surface. With the crampons’ teeth biting hard, and no more sinking, the going becomes easier despite the gradient.

As the ridge narrows, Gemma counsels us to keep 10m or more from the north eastern edge, where the slopes are loaded. If a cornice breaks, it takes a significant amount of snow from the ridge top with it, and it will take you too, if you’re too close.

A rocky path is mostly free of snow, and Hayley insists we walk some of the way on it to get use to the feel of crampons on rock, uncomfortable, but sometimes necessary in mixed terrain.

As we approach the top of the ridge, the cloud is beginning to break. Loch Morlich appears in the distance, a sliver of duck egg blue in a nest of forest green. Rob looks down the long line of the ridge and observes that you really couldn’t afford to make a mistake if you were practising ice-axe arrests here.

“Oh I dunno,” quips Andy, “you’d stop moving by the time you reached Inverness”.

Loch Morlich from Cairn Gorm — Looking over Loch Morlich

Point 1141 sits 104 metres below the summit of Cairn Gorm and is marked by a large cairn. It is enveloped in clag, but as we rest, the mist dissipates and unveils an astonishing view. Across a corrie, the buttressed mass of Fiacaill Ridge tapers to a jagged arête above plunging precipices, rendered in monochrome by streaks of snow, exposed black rock, soft sun and heavy shadow. It’s as if we have stepped into a finely hatched pencil sketch, an ink drawing, a sublime larger-than-life etching. Hayley is seldom lost for words, but here, she falls silent in wonder.

Fiacaill Ridge, Cairn Gorm — Fiacaill Ridge, Cairm Gorm

Hayley lost in wonder. Photo by Lesley Varnham.

Loch Morlich

It’s not the only transcendental moment of the day. On the drive back to the lodge, we pass the shore of Loch Morlich, just as the sun is about to set. Through the trees, we spy an onyx sheen illuminated with mirror images of the mountains. Hayley pulls over, and we run to water’s edge to lose ourselves in a tranquil tableau of snow-capped summits, reflected in perfect symmetry.

Shelter on Windy Ridge

The following morning we head up Cairn Gorm’s Windy Ridge. In fresh snow, we follow recent tracks of mountain hare. We cross a ski-slope, its wooden fence bejewelled with glittering formations of wind-ridged ice. We enter a disorienting world of near whiteout, but not quite: the tops of boulders are still visible through the snow. In total whiteout, there is no distinction between ground and sky.

Hayley relays a hair-raising story of being caught in a blizzard here. It came in twelve hours earlier than expected, and with no phone signal, she and her friends were unaware of the revised forecast. They dug deep snow shelters, in which to ride it out, but when it refused to abate, they navigated off the mountain using a compass and pacing techniques, through trenches they carved with their axes. The experience convinced Hayley that she had what it takes to train as a winter mountain leader.

Digging snow shelters is what we do next, using the adze end of our axes. Ours are not deep enough to see out a blizzard (that would take hours) but sufficient to afford temporary respite from the bitter, biting wind.

Rob and I wear gaudy badges of shame for failing to walk like John Wayne. Last night Hayley offered to patch our torn waterproofs with duct tape, without telling us her duct tape is bright pink and sports unicorns. “It’s all I’ve got,” she said with a wicked smirk as she handed them back.

Back in the warmth of the lodge, I chat to Lesley. In September 2019, her young daughter was diagnosed with cancer and underwent several harrowing cycles of chemotherapy. She’s in remission, but until now, Lesley has not left her side. Lesley’s life was put on hold so she could devote everything to caring for her child. This is the first time that she has done something for herself. She is humble and unassuming, and her story has touched all our hearts.

In the morning, I drive Lesley and Charlotte to the station in Aviemore; and as I turn the car around to begin the journey home, I reflect on three inspiring and transformative days of crucial skills, challenging weather, and impossibly majestic landscapes, all spent in the company of some truly remarkable people.

You can find Hayley Webb’s Mountain Adventures page on Facebook:

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

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

Haweswater and the Lost Kingdom of Mardale

February 27, 2022 George Kitching 25 Comments

When the Manchester Corporation built Haweswater Dam in 1936, they consigned two centuries-old villages to the bottom of a reservoir. Before the flood, the valley had boasted a celebrated inn, a tiny church, and a hall strong enough to resist the explosives of the Royal Engineers. It even had its own monarch. I pull on my boots and go in search of the lost kingdom of Mardale.

The Drowned Valley

Sun gleams off the bonnet of an open top car, a Lanchester perhaps, as a smiling woman steers between the stone parapets of Chapel Bridge. In the distance, where Selside and Branstree meet, the twin ravines of Rowantreethwaite and Hopegill beck form deep folds in the fellside, and the Old Corpse Road climbs steeply out of the valley.

Chapel Bridge - the lost kingdom of Mardale — Chapel Bridge, Mardale Green

A bell is ringing from the tiny church, encircled by old yews taller than its tower, and the jubilant shouts of children travel up the dale from Measand school. A peal of raucous laughter erupts from the courtyard of the Dun Bull Inn, and the sounds of whistles and dog-barks waft down from Riggindale where shepherds drive a flock toward the washfold.

The Dun Bull Inn - the lost kingdom of Mardale — The Dunn Bull Inn, Mardale Green

I open my eyes, and the vision dissolves. Now, all is water. I’m standing at the end of the Rigg, the wooded promontory that juts out into Haweswater, a reservoir constructed by the Manchester Corporation between 1936 and 1941. At its far end stands the dam that raised the level of the natural lake. Pewter waters now cover the valley—the centuries old villages of Measand and Mardale Green have been submerged, a rural civilisation lost less than a hundred years ago.

The Manchester Corporation & Haweswater

My vision was a flight of the fancy, a montage of the imagination, conjured from old photographs and contemporary accounts of life before the flood. One photograph persists in my mind’s eye—that of the woman in the car. On first glance, it appears idyllic, but look closer, and the seeds of doom have already sprouted. A series of small white marker posts line a long pale scar, recognisable to anyone today as the road. But the old road ran on the opposite side of the valley. This is the new one, still under construction. The old road carried villagers to and from their homes, but five or six years on, those homes and the road alike would be lost below the rising waters. The new road would carry walkers, bird-watchers, sightseers, and reservoir workers to the head of an extended lake, in a waterlogged valley, unpopulated but for the new Haweswater hotel. The road opened in 1937, the same year the church tower was pulled down and the Dun Bull demolished. The main body of the church had gone a year earlier, its stones and windows repurposed to build a water take-off tower, which stands roughly in line with the natural head of the lake.

Holy Trinity Church - the lost kingdom of Mardale — Holy Trinity Church, Mardale Green

The Water Take-Off Tower, built with the stones and windows from the church,

“No-one else protested, we were the only ones,” Helena Bailey told journalist and writer, Karen Barden, in 1995. Helena was the daughter of the Vicar of Burneside. Her family had holidayed in Mardale year upon year from 1914 to 1929; she felt like a local. Helena would have been four on her first visit, nineteen on her last. She recounted how she and brothers and sister stealthily followed the surveyors and pulled out every one of those marker posts. But the teenagers were no match for the Manchester Corporation, and few others could muster the fight.

“There had been a world war,” she explained. “The country was exhausted. People just wanted to get on quietly with their lives.”

“And this proposal also meant jobs, for hundreds of men.”

I look north to Wood Howe, once a wooded knott, now a tree-crowned island. Today, a stretch of silver water maroons it from the Rigg. Beneath the surface, lie the remains of Holy Trinity church. The church was built in the late 1600’s, on the site of a much older oratory, supposedly constructed by the monks of Shap Abbey. In 1729, its churchyard was consecrated for burials: until then, the dead had to be wrapped in cloth and carried on pack ponies over the Corpse Road to Shap.

Wood Howe from the Rigg. Holy Trinity Church is below the water.

In October 1935, the bodies of those interred here were exhumed. With ironic precedent, they were nearly all reburied at Shap. That August, the last service was held at Holy Trinity. It drew a congregation many times too large for the nave and chancel, which could accommodate just 75. Everyone else stood outside and listened to the sermon over loudspeakers. It was preached by the Bishop of Carlisle. All joined in a rousing chorus of I Shall Lift Up Mine Eyes to the Hills. Among those present was former Vicar of Mardale, Revd. H. F. J. Barham. This had been his parish for twenty five years. He couldn’t bring himself to enter the church. Helena couldn’t bring herself to attend.

Before the flood, the natural lake had been divided almost in two by a natural promontory formed by Measand Beck. The larger southern lake was known as High Water, and the smaller northern one as Low Water. The narrow funnel connecting them was called The Straits. On Measand Promontory stood Measand Hall, and Measand Beck Farm.

The Last Days of Measand

On Monday 12th October 1936, the Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail reported:

“The Haweswater valley, one of the most secluded and peaceful places in the Lake District, echoed yesterday with the sound of explosions when Territorial offices of the Royal Engineers (East Lancashire Division) blew up three buildings on land which will be inundated. These buildings have been homesteads for five or six hundred years. Measand Hall, tenanted by the squires of Mardale for generations, stoutly resisted a new plastic explosive which was being tested for the War Office. At first only ounce charges were used. These made a great noise and raised clouds of smoke and dust, but the walls withstood them. The charges were increased, and these showed the quality of the new explosive, the walls crumbling to pieces instead of flying into the air. Mr. Leonard Kitchen and his family, who lived 40 yards from the hall at Measand Beck Farm, had retreated to safety so many times when the charges proved ineffective that he decided to go on with dinner. When the hall did collapse Mr. Kitchen’s windows were shattered and plaster fell on his Sunday joint.”

My friend, Richard Jennings, has been researching the valley, and he assures me Leonard’s last name is a misprint. He was a Kitching. I have no credible claim to kinship, but it makes me smile to know that my namesakes farmed in Mardale before the flood.

Measand Hall - the lost kingdom of Mardale — Measand Hall

Richard is here now, with his handsome Border collie, Frankie. We’re going in search of a much older story concerning another venerable Mardale family.

The Lost Kingdom of Mardale

The reign of King John was turbulent. The King fell out with the Church and then the barons. He was excommunicated by the Pope and forced by the rebel barons to sign Magna Carta, the closest thing we have ever had to a constitution. Seven years earlier in 1208, John had a foiled a smaller plot, known as the Canterbury Conspiracy. One of the perpetrators was Hugh Holme, whose ancestor came over with William the Conqueror. Hugh became a fugitive from royal retribution. He fled for Scotland but never reached the border, choosing to hide out instead in a cave in the remotest part of Riggindale, the small valley that forks off Mardale between Riggindale Edge and Kidsty Pike. When King John died, Hugh didn’t return to reclaim his lands. He settled in the valley. The residents prized him for his wisdom and worldly knowledge, and they gave him an honorary title. From then on, the head of the Holme family would always be known as the King of Mardale.

The Holme family were pillars of the community. They built the vicarage and did much to support the church. Some sources have also credited the Holme family with the building of a tower on Wood Howe, but in his 1904 book, Shappe in Bygone Days, Joseph Whiteside claims the tower was the work of an eccentric proprietor of the Dun Bull, named Thomas Lamley. Lamley’s aim was to build a structure tall enough to see over into neighbouring Swindale and Patterdale. Such an ambition would have required a tower nearly 2000 ft in height. Lamley gave up when it reached 20 ft, conceding that perhaps it wasn’t going to work. The tower doesn’t seem to have stood for long, but it does appear in a Thomas Allom print.

In 1885, Hugh Parker Holme, the last King of Mardale, was laid to rest. His death ended a family line much loved and revered in the dale. But what of their arrival here? Is the story of Hugh’s flight from King John true? Even today, the OS map names a spot on the lower slopes of Rough Crag as Hugh’s Cave but is this really where the fugitive baron hid from the King? Richard, Frankie, and I are going to investigate.

Mardale Green and Wood Howe by Thomas Allom -the lost kingdom of Mardale — Mardale Green and Wood Howe (showing the tower) by Thomas Allom

Remote Riggindale

We step around the toppled trunks of larches, victims of the violence wrought by Storm Arwen in November. Deciduous conifers, sparse with winter. Those still standing are feathered with delicate fans of twig, black against the steely grey of the lake, as if sketched in ink. A twilight world in monochrome. Yet as we emerge from the dense canopy of the Rigg, the early morning sky is lightening, turning Haweswater China blue. The silhouettes of broad leaf trees twist into spindly traceries, like woodcuts. Ahead, Swine Crag is a drab olive pyramid, rising from a bed of ginger bracken. Across Riggindale, the graphite slopes of Kidsty Pike dissolve into wispy mist. Overhead, the clouds are duck-egg blue, but above the snow-flecked Straits of Riggindale, the early sun ignites an amber glow—a warm band of ethereal light bathing the valley in primordial mystery.

We pass an old stone barn and handrail a dry stone wall, black as granite in the creeping shadow; we meet Riggindale Beck and fall in step; its hissing waters whisper intangible truths. Rough Crag rears above on our left, untouched by the celestial glow. It is dark and severe, a forbidding wall of tumbling scree and precipitous outcrops, peppered with wiry, twiggy tangles of mountain ash. A place of shadows and secrets, and perhaps a legendary cave.

Hugh’s Cave – Hideout of the First King

Ahead the stream curves into a tiny oxbow. The ground is becoming increasingly soggy, but I resist Richard’s suggestion that we head for the slopes as I have taken a compass bearing from the bend in the beck to where the OS map places the H of Hugh’s Cave. Richard is sceptical of its value, names on maps are often put where they obscure the fewest features and should only be read as approximations. Besides, he is convinced he has spied the cave from Kidsty Pike, a few years back, and thinks we should spot it easily from this distance. As we reach the oxbow, he does. I follow the line of his outstretched finger and pick out the chiselled boulder perched as a lintel above a black hollow. A skeletal rowan stands like a sentinel. I fish out my compass. It lies right on the bearing.

Richard and Frankie set off for Rough Crag

We start to climb, calves twinging in protest at the steepness of the scree. Soon we are scrambling over boulders. Rocky outcrops well up in waves, obscuring our target. I become disoriented, but Richard spots the rowan, and we lock back on course. The cave entrance is hidden but the rowan and lintel remain in view, yet despite our exertions, they seem forever the same distance away.

Eventually we reach a small grassy rake which leads up over a boulder to the rowan and the cave entrance. Only now we’re here, we uncover the deception: there is no cave. The lintel sits atop another boulder that slopes inward, creating a small alcove, which contrives in shadow to resemble an entrance.

Flummoxed but undeterred, we soldier on towards the jutting wall of Riggindale Crag, below Caspel Gate and Long Stile, that rugged stairway to the summit of High Street. Our efforts are unfocused, casting searching glances at rocks in the hope of finding an opening. Eventually, we spot one. Straight ahead, where the crags form into an almost vertical wall, a leaning boulder forms a crude arch over a dark recess, which might—just might—run deeper into the cliff. But alas, we are foiled again. As we draw near, the deceptive shadow dissipates, and reveals nothing but solid rock.

Back at the valley bottom, both boulders resume their illusory forms, and as we track back along the far shore of the beck, past the old wash fold, another deception is unmasked. Richard spots the cave he spied from Kidsty Pike. It is nothing more than a square slab of black rock.

Rewilding

Over the shoulder of Kidsty Pike, we settle on a grassy outcrop overlooking the lake, above the submerged course of the old road. In 1921, Councillor Isaac Hinchliffe of Manchester wrote an article for the Journal of the Fell and Rock Climbing Club in which he painted a fragrant picture:

Hawewater from the Coast to Coast path, above where the old road used to run.

“I hope the new road will be innocent of stone walls and iron railings, with wide margins some three or four yards where possible, with unobtrusive fences hidden by kindly growths which now for the most part fringe the road from Burn Banks to Mardale. Heather and gorse and ivy, blackthorn, holly and mountain ash, wild raspberries and blackberries, honeysuckle, wild roses, the Guelder rose, convolvulous and the meadow-sweet, which now scents the air even to one passing in a motor-car, the primrose, foxglove, and that beautiful and prolific plant, the wild geranium or meadow crane’s bill, to say nothing of the humble daisy and buttercup, or the tiny ranunculus which brightens the mossy wayside pools, the March violet, wild thyme, and a hundred other beautiful plants which now grow wild alongside or near to the present road. Patches of lady’s bed-straw and parsley fern will always relieve the grey monotony of the screes.”

Sadly, the Manchester Corporation did build a wall, and they replaced much of the indigenous flora with commercial forestry. Happily, much of the incongruous conifer has now been cleared—the dense larches on the Rigg are one of few the remaining outposts. The slopes of Selside and Branstree have been sensitively replanted with native broad leaves. In the years to come, the valley may once again resemble the councillor’s idyll.

Rowantreethwaite Beck and the Old Corpse Road (to the left of the ravine)

Richard is disappointed we didn’t find the cave, but part of me is secretly pleased. The romantic in me wants to imagine it is still there somewhere, its mouth hidden under tumbled boulders and filled with scree—a secret guarded by the mountain. I stare south-east across the water to where Holy Trinity lies submerged, then north to where Measand once stood. Perhaps it is better that Mardale keeps its mysteries hidden.

Wood Howe and the Rigg, and the waters covering Mardale Green

Mardale Uncovered

In the summer of 1976, after months of drought, the level of the reservoir dropped so low that the ruins of Mardale Green emerged. It happened again in 1984, and the Westmorland Gazette published a book, Mardale Revisited, by journalist and photographer, Geoffrey Berry. Berry contrasted photographs of the muddy remains with old pictures and accounts of Mardale as it once had been.

The village emerged for the third time in 1995, and the paper published a second edition of Berry’s book with an addendum by Karen Barden, who interviewed Helena Bailey and Joyce Bell. Joyce was four-and-a-half when she attended the final service at Holy Trinity Church with her mother, Lucy. Her parents, like theirs before them, had run the Dun Bull Inn. She remembered her mother’s reaction to visiting the ruins in 1976:

“She was very upset, but not bitter and could pick everything out. It was in a better state then.

“She played war with a couple at Chapel Hill going through the ash heap with a riddle. She said it was sacrilege and they had done more damage than the water.”

“The village had lain forgotten until then. A beautiful valley which had been totally ruined. It would never be allowed now and shouldn’t have happened then.”

Karen’s addendum is short but poignant, sympathetic to such emotional ties, and indignant, angry even, at the unfolding circus:

“They have arrived in their thousands along with ice cream sellers and others keen to make a fast buck from Mardale’s misery.

“An empty packet of 20 Regal lies where once there would have been a tomb. Wrappings from cheese and onion crisps and a Wall’s Cornetto carelessly tossed to a ground, normally over 50 feet under water.”

Mardale appeared again last summer (2021). I didn’t visit. I had done so three years earlier, in 2018, when the village was partially revealed. I chose a weekday evening. There were few people around, and it felt tranquil. Chapel Bridge was still submerged, but I could walk along the old walled track to the remains of the Dun Bull Inn and the farms of Grove Brae and Goosemire. It was fascinating if disquieting to enter the lost village, yet part of me felt I was intruding.

A Sting in the Tail

Looking out over the waters now, I try to imagine how Lucy must have felt; how she must have longed for people to leave this sunken chest of treasured memories to rest in peace. The residents sacrificed their homes and their heritage for the sake of progress. Yet there was a sting in the tail. On 8^th May 1933, Mr. Alan Chorlton, MP for Bolton, addressed Parliament with the following words:

“Looking at the existing condition of supplies in industrial areas, we have the extraordinary position that Manchester years ago before the decline in trade, went in for a scheme of supply of additional water to cost £10,000,000. Since that scheme was started there has been a change in the condition of world affairs which has so reduced the trade demand, that, with the movement of new industries elsewhere, this great scheme is not now called for. In fact there is more than sufficient water from existing supplies in that area.”

The reservoir went ahead regardless. I hope that Chorlton was wrong. I hope the water really was needed. But more than anything, I hope his words never reached Lucy’s ears. It would have been devastating to think that it was all for nothing.

Credits/Further Reading

A big thank you to Richard Jennings for sharing much of his research and furnishing me with some of the stories retold here. Richard’s own website is rich source of local history (as well as a host of great walking routes). It is well worth checking out:

https://www.lakelandroutes.uk/local-history/

Councillor Hinchliffe’s account of Mardale before the flood appeared in the Volume 5, No. 3 of the Journal of the Fell and Rock Climbing Club. It makes fascinating reading. You can find it on-line here:

https://www.frcc.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Vol5-3.pdf

Geoffrey Berry’s book, Mardale Revisited was published by the Westmorland Gazette in 1984, but it is worth seeking out the second edition from 1996 with the addendum by Karen Barden. ISBN: 1 901081 00 1

For more from me on Mardale, Riggindale and ascending High Street by Rough Crag, see:

Manchester, So Much to Answer For

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

Four Great Books About Lakeland or Walking

December 12, 2021 George Kitching 10 Comments

As 2021 draws to an end, I review four great books about Lakeland or walking: James Rebanks portrays three generations on a Cumbrian fell farm and finds the key to a sustainable future in the teachings of his grandfather. Chris Townsend walks Scotland’s spine. John Bainbridge takes us on furtive forays into Forbidden Britain; and Beth Pipe teams up with Karen Guttridge to blaze a new Lakeland trail, connecting the district’s distilleries..

English Pastoral by James Rebanks
Along the Divide by Chris Townsend
The Compleat Trespasser by John Bainbridge
Gin, Cake and Rucksacks by Beth Pipe and Karen Guttridge

English Pastoral

An Inheritance

James Rebanks

2020, Allen Lane

Change doesn’t always come from those in power. Sometimes it happens quietly from the ground up as ordinary men and women find the courage of their convictions.

English Pastoral is a remarkable book: a work of rare lyrical beauty and an argument of astonishing power. Moreover, it is acutely in tune with the zeitgeist: as the world grows impatient with the hollow greenwash slogans of politicians, here is a simple honest testament, a voice of integrity, and an insight of major environmental significance.

It is a book written by a Cumbrian fell farmer, renouncing the ecologically damaging efficiencies of industrial agriculture (efficiencies he once embraced), in favour of a sustainable model rooted in the past. But it is not a declamatory manifesto or dry scientific treatise. Instead, it is an engaging human-interest story spanning three generations of a family on a small farm in Matterdale.

Woven from threads of reminiscence, it begins as the author recollects how his grandfather taught him to farm. His grandfather had a strong connection with the earth, born perhaps of walking behind a horse-drawn plough, feeling every trough and stone as the blade cut into the soil. He never lost that understanding, even when he reluctantly replaced the horse with a tractor. Rebanks remembers a day his grandfather jumped down from the tractor to rescue four curlew’s eggs from the path of the plough, diligently restoring them once the furrow had been cut, and watching from the gate to check that the bird returned.

It was a relationship with the natural world that many of his generation possessed. Yet, two decades later, the face of farming had changed drastically. Tractors were three-times the size, combine harvesters were ivory towers of technology, driven by contractors in air-conditioned cabs with music blaring. Cows were no longer grazed on pasture but packed into barns to be fed silage and commercially produced foodstuffs. That connection with nature had been severed, and the curlews (like many other species) were in decline.

The centuries-old practice of small mixed rotational farming was jettisoned in the name of science. You could farm industrially, stripping out hedges, ploughing right up to the edges, and sowing the same crop in the same field year after year, replenishing nutrients through the magical application of chemical fertilisers. It seemed like progress, and yet, there were worrying signs that it might be the wrong road.

When Henry died, a unexpected discovery sent a mini shockwave through the valley. Henry had been the last of the old guard, stubbornly refusing to modernise, eschewing chemicals in favour of manure, making hay instead of silage, mowing late. He was well liked, but perceived as a relic, marooned in the past. When his land was put up for sale, an analyst reported that the soil was the best he’d ever tested.

To glimpse where this industrial highway might lead, Rebanks visits the Midwest. Here the tone turns chilling bleak. It is worth pausing to pay tribute to the transportive quality of the writing. Rebanks has a poetic way with words. The way he describes the landscape is painterly. We can almost smell the grass of the Matterdale meadows and, equally, taste the dust of the American near-desert, where much of the top soil has blown away and the vast acres of crop are choked with weeds, grown resistant to the pesticides. Much of the work is automated, administered by drones, while farming communities languish, their incomes gone, their buildings dilapidated, their windows dressed with confederate flags and Trump stickers—testimony to a collective refusal to face facts, placing faith instead in charlatans with ready-made scapegoats.

Back home in Matterdale, Rebanks changes course. He brings in ecologists and begins restoring biodiversity: planting trees, laying hedges, re-wiggling rivers, fencing off boggy areas to create wetland habitats, cultivating hay meadows and resowing indigenous wildflowers. And the rewards come quickly. Curlews return. Barn owls appear.

He is not alone. Many of his neighbours are following suit. The benefits are not financial, but the work is vital. Unhelpfully, the government pursues destructive trade deals with nations still wedded to the industrial model. Some activists demonise stock farming, advocating a vegan future, where swathes of land are designated as wilderness while the rest is given over to intensive crop production. But those intensive methods are the very ones that have been destroying the soil. They are unsustainable.

Rebanks doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but he is busy doing what his grandfather did—making sure that what happens within the boundaries of his own farm is done right. He humbly suggests that in a world of noise, living quietly might actually be a virtue. By farming in harmony with nature, he shows that agriculture and wilderness can co-exist. Change doesn’t always come from those in power. Sometimes it happens quietly from the ground up as ordinary men and women find the courage of their convictions.

I grew up in a village of small mixed rotational farms; several surround the place where I live today. Thanks to English Pastoral, I no longer view them as a link with the past, but a signpost to the future.

Follow James on Twitter @herdyshepherd1

Next: Along the Divide by Chris Townsend

Pages: 1 2 3 4

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

Strange Tales From The Kentmere Riverbank

November 21, 2021 George Kitching 18 Comments

The Good, The Sad, and the Crafty

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

Crag Quarter

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

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

The Poet of Kentmere

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

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

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

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

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

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

…but the escape was ever fleeting:

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

His brooding moods would birth the blackest notions:

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

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

Reservoir Dogs

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

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

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

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

Hall Cove—Source of the Kent

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

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

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

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

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

The Mock Tithe Commissioner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources/Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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

Wonderwall – The hidden world of Crinkle Gill

July 30, 2021 George Kitching 18 Comments

Crinkle Crags via Crinkle Gill

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

The Mists of Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Answering the Call

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

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

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

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

Oxendale Beck and Browney Gill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crinkle Gill – The Pool and the Dam

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

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

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

Crinkle Gill – The Chute and the Overhang

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

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

Crinkle Gill – The Canyon of Carrion

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

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

Crinkle Gill – The Wall

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

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

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

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

The Fallen Man, Crinkle Gill — The Fallen Man

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

The Amphitheatre, Crinkle Gill — The Amphitheatre

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

Crinkle Crags

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

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

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

Faeries Wear Boots

May 23, 2021 George Kitching 23 Comments

Green Crag, Harter Fell & Hard Knott

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Green Crag and Crook Crag from the quagmire

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

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

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

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

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

The Skiddaw Hermit

March 14, 2021 George Kitching 26 Comments

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

The Westmorland Gazette and Kendal Advertiser—9th June 1866

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

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

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

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

The Banffshire Journal—7th Dec 1869

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

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

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

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

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

Westmorland Gazette – 8th February 1890:

W. J Browne of Troutbeck writes:

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

Banffshire Reporter—18th July 1873:

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

The Edinburgh Evening News—10th June 1876:

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

Westmorland Gazette – 8th February 1890:

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

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

Song From The Wood

November 15, 2020 George Kitching 16 Comments

Rusland Horizons Greenwood Trail 3

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

High Dam, Rusland Heights, Fearing Brow, Finsthwaite

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

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

Geronimo! Definitely not Rhiannon, then.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stott Park Bobbin Mill — Start Park Bobbin Mill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Green Mind

October 25, 2020 George Kitching 24 Comments

Dow Crag and Coniston Old Man from Torver

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources/Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thorn Of Crowns

August 23, 2020 George Kitching 29 Comments

The Rites of Spring & the Secret of Crummock Water

May 12th, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crag Fell from Bowness Knott — Crag Fell and hawthorn trees

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Walk on the Wild Side

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