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

Rhiannon

July 26, 2020 George Kitching 15 Comments

A Midsummer Night’s Dream on Dixon Heights

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dixon Heights from Bishops Tithe Allotment

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

Bracken, foxgloves, and rocky outcrop, Dixon Heights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sheep & Wolf’s Clothing

May 17, 2020 George Kitching 22 Comments

Eagle Crag

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eagle Crag from Stonethwaite — Eagle Crag

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Wolfman of Eagle Crag

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

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

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

Before the flood

February 23, 2020 George Kitching 21 Comments

Raven Crag & the Flooding of Thirlmere

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harriet Martineau, in 1855, adds to the picture:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources/Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wikipedia is also good on the history of the reservoir:

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

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

This Is My Church

November 24, 2019 George Kitching 29 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jones describes the Pinnacle as;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lord’s Rake from The Rake’s Progress

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

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

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

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

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

The Pinnacle and Pisgah from the West Wall Traverse

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

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

Wastwater from the top of the Lord’s Rake

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

Great Gable from the top of the Lord’s Rake

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

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

The Pinnacle and Pisgah from the plateau above Deep Ghyll

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

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

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

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

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

Pedestrian Verse

October 20, 2019 George Kitching 21 Comments

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

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

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

Grisedale Tarn and Seat Sandal from Fairfield

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grisedale Tarn between Fairfield, Seat Sandal and Dollywagon Pike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And beer”, replies the other.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grisedale Tarn and Dollywagon Pike from Seat Sandal

To the Shores of Lake Placid

September 15, 2019 George Kitching 20 Comments

Landscape of Liberty: from Auschwitz to Ambleside

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

Lingmoor Fell

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

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

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

Windermere from Brown Haw — Windermere from Brown How

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Merz Barn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Auschwitz to Ambleside

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jewish Prisoners Arrive at Theresienstadt

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

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

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

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

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

Exhibitions and Further Reading

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

Lake District Holocaust Project
Windermere Library
Ellerthwaite
Windermere
LA23 2AJ

Tel: 015394 88395

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

Visit the Merz Barn at:

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

Telephone: 015394 37309

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

Fell Walk, General, History, Nature, Scramble

Hit the Rake Jack

August 18, 2019 George Kitching 23 Comments

Jack’s Rake and Dungeon Ghyll Force

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking down the first section of Jack’s Rake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Big Day in the North

April 28, 2019 George Kitching 11 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sharp Edge”, he nods.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sympathy For The Devil

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

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

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

Riddle of the sands

March 24, 2019 George Kitching 18 Comments

Humphrey Head

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fire and Water

February 23, 2019 George Kitching 15 Comments

Sunset Over Morecambe Bay, In Snow

Snow covered Coniston Fells beckon, but a computer glitch and an ill-fated Christmas shopping trip, worthy of Father Ted, rob me of a day on their slopes. As a consolation, I climb Hampsfell to watch the sun set over Morecambe Bay. It turns into one of the most magical fell walks I’ve ever experienced.

December 9th, 2017 and the snow was falling, clothing the peaks in an alluring blanket of white. From my kitchen window, I can see Dow Crag, and in winter, when the trees are stripped of leaves, I can also make out a little of the Old Man of Coniston’s shoulder. By mid-afternoon they were looking positively Alpine, promising all kinds of winter adventure. It was too late to get out today, but Tuesday would be my birthday, and with uncharacteristic foresight, I’d booked the day off work. I checked the Met Office mountain forecast: sunshine and excellent visibility; and with only two days to go, there was just a chance it might be right.

Sheep at the foot of Hampsfell — Across the fields

I was buoyant. Borderline ecstatic. And then it happened. Or at least it didn’t. Sandy switched on her laptop, and nothing responded. Zilch, nada, not a flicker. I’m unusual in being a software developer who hates computers. It’s nothing personal, I just spend so much of my day immersed in them, I try to avoid them in my spare time. I fumbled for an excuse, but it wasn’t forthcoming, and Sandy was panicking, so I felt compelled to help.

My wife is a freelance journalist and animal photographer. She had two important photoshoots to process in the coming week, and her laptop is a vital tool. Luckily it was still under guarantee, so I got out my phone and looked up the nearest Apple Dealer (I know nothing about hardware).

“There’s one in Lancaster”, I announced triumphantly. “They can book you in on Tuesday.”

“But I’m at the Westmorland Gazette on Tuesday”, she said, far from consoled. “We’re on a deadline. I’m busy all this week”. Then she added, “Don’t you have the day off on Tuesday?”

My heart sank faster than a Sunderland supporter’s on the first day of the season; or Sue Lawley’s when Wainwright told her he didn’t much like music, at the start of half an hour of air time she was supposed to fill with his choice of Desert Island Discs.

“There are some nice shops in Lancaster”, Sandy offered brightly. “You could do some Christmas shopping”.

It was supposed to be a positive suggestion, but the very thought filled me with dread. I have form, you see. Once in Newcastle, with a few hours to kill, I tried a spot of seasonal gift hunting, unsupervised, but it turns out I’m terrible at it. I just wondered around John Lewis like an automaton, unable to find the way out. When I finally did, it led straight into Fenwicks and the nightmare started again. It was like an episode of Father Ted, except there wasn’t a party of priests in the lingerie department that I could follow. (I know this because I looked). When eventually I escaped into fresh air outside the Grainger Market, I seriously considered buying everyone sausages.

Tuesday arrives, and The Apple Dealer can’t see me until 11:30, so with that and the drive, and the fruitless Christmas shopping, and wandering around Sainsbury’s like an automaton, I don’t get home until 2:30pm. The sky is an unbroken expanse of blue, and the snow-capped Coniston Fells in the distance look magnificent. But they’re half an hour away—by the time I get there, there’ll only be about an hour of daylight left.

Determined to salvage something from the remains of the day, I wonder about Hampsfell. Hampsfell is a small hill that separates Cartmel and Grange. A tiddler compared to the Coniston Fells, but it punches above its weight with its rare limestone pavements and panoramic views of both the Lakeland fells and Morecambe Bay. Wainwright suggests it might appeal to the semi-retired fellwalker: “It is a hill small and unpretentious yet endowed with an air of freedom and space that will recall happy days on greater heights. It is a place for looking northwest, indulging memories, and dreaming.”

I’d be on the summit in time to watch the sun set. Sunset over the bay, on a beautiful snowy day, from a summit made for dreaming—that has to be something special.

I layer up, pull on my boots, grab gloves, hat, headtorch and microspikes and set off. The magic starts almost immediately I step outside the front door. The snow is little more than a dusting of icing sugar on the surrounding fields, but it’s enough to turn the landscape into a Christmas card. A robin hops about the hedgerow and the spire of Field Broughton church rises from a hollow across the meadows to complete the scene.

I wander up narrow country lanes and on to a bridleway, then a follow a path across a field to a stand of trees above. Sheep graze on scattered patches of exposed grass, their shaggy fleeces like mounds of driven snow. As I climb higher through Hampsfield allotment, the low orange sun blazes like a fireball through a lattice of branch and twig, a giant bonfire amid the deepening white blanket. Galloways roam the open fell side, their coats a swatch of seasonal colour: black, red, yellow, and cream, matching the silhouettes of the naked trees, the autumn bracken and the winter grass. As I approach the summit, something is happening across the valley…

On top of Hampsfell stands the Hospice, a squat stone tower with an open door and an open fireplace; a gift to travellers from the pastor of Cartmel in 1846, and a testament of thanks to beauty here experienced here daily. As Wainwright astutely observes, “Outside, over the doorway, is an inscription that will be Greek to most visitors.” Translated from the Greek (for Greek it is), the inscription, “rhododactylos eos”, means “the rosy fingered dawn”. Her cousin, the rosy fingered dusk, is at play now.

North-west over Cartmel valley, beyond a brown swathe of winter woodland, the Coniston Fells rise like a frozen tundra, artic blue in the dimming light; but they are transforming before my eyes—awaking, warming as if softly stage-lit in anticipation of an imminent first act—their chiselled contours now reflect a warm pink glow. Behind them, the sky is a wan, ethereal yellow, sparsely streaked with wisps of mauve.

As I turn south and climb between snow softened escarpments to the limestone-paved plateau, black skeletal branches of stunted, windblown hawthorn trees bow in unison toward the Hospice, a dark tower before a horizon of deepening orange.

In the short distance to the tower, the colours shift and blend again as the sky overhead darkens. To the east, over the Kent Estuary, Arnside Knott is little more than a soft Prussian blue suggestion below a strip of sky, pink as oyster shells. The reflective snow bestows a strange ambience. The stone fence posts that guard the Hospice are black shadowy sentinels, chained together to repel the shaggy cows that roam like ancient bison.

This is a landscape so familiar yet altogether new. It’s as if I’ve crossed into a parallel universe—somewhere I may have glimpsed on the cover of a 1970’s prog rock album. Folk tales of a faery kingdom that the unwary traveler may pass into and return a haunted, altered man seem suddenly less fantastical.

Yet, the real drama is happening to the west, where the orange sky intensifies over Bardsea and Barrow. In the sea beyond the dark peninsula, I can just make out tall thin poles, little more than fine grey pencil lines. Using the zoom on my camera, I discern the blades of the wind turbines. This is the offshore wind farm, Britain’s largest. Or at least it is in the parallel world I’m used to. Here, with imagination uninhibited, they are an encroaching army of Martian fighting machines from H G Wells’ War of the Worlds. And they must have opened fire, because all of a sudden the sky and water alike burst into flame.

In between, a low bank of cloud, the thick smoke of the conflagration, engulfs the peninsula, forming a soft grey barrier between the incandescent sky and its mirror image in the waters. All that’s left of the land beyond the Leven estuary is a thin black strip of shoreline. And before my eyes, a new civilisation emerges. The formless cloud bank resolves into an acropolis of colossal towers, slate grey but licked with yellow, still fresh from the furnace that rages above and below.

Beyond the Hospice, the snow covered limestone gives way to snow covered scrub. I climb a stile over a dry stone wall and follow a white path lined with a Mexican wave of wind-bowed hawthorns. The south eastern horizon is salmon pink, below quilted cloud the colour of Herdwick shearlings. Copper rivulets snake across dark sands to reach the silver sea beyond.

Slowly, the blaze in the west softens to amber afterglow and becomes a slender strip of pale gold beneath a charcoal sky. The cloud city levitates and starts to disperse, and beneath are pin pricks of light, like tiny candles, from the miniature human conurbations of Barrow, Bardsea, Dalton and Ulverston.

I’ve been reading the memoirs of Flookburgh fisherman, Jack Manning. He knew these patterns of lights like the back of his hand. They were crucial landmarks when out on the sands, on horse or tractor, scooping shrimp or cockle in the dead of night before the tide’s return.

As I watch the ever changing light show from the subsidiary summit of Fell End, I’m aware of little puffs of steam rising in the dark. I hear a soft footfall and a snort, and I realise I’m not alone. As my eyes adjust, I discern the shapes of sheep grazing quietly on the slope below.

The snow is so reflective I leave my head torch in my rucksack. I return to the wall and find the stile has vanished. I’m momentarily perplexed, but when I retrieve the torch and switch it on, the stile materialises right in front of me. It must be darker than I thought.

And it’s growing darker by the minute; the torch beam accentuates the gloom, but I can no longer see without it. I pass the Hospice and begin the descent back to Hampsfield Allotment.

Suddenly, I notice something strange in the darkness up ahead. Two little points of light hover above the path. I can’t think what they could be. I’m not given to superstition but with my imagination so stoked it would be easy to start believing in the supernatural. They look like disembodied eyes and they hold their position at around head height. Try as I might to find a terrestrial explanation, none presents itself.

When I’m no more than a few yards away, I hear the breathing and see the vapour from the invisible nostrils. Slowly her outline materialises. A big Galloway cow, black as the night. She’s staring intently at me, probably wondering what the approaching ball of light might be. When she realises it’s only me, she loses interest, but doesn’t relinquish the path. I give her wide berth, more from respect than fear. Somehow, I sense no tension here. Nothing threatens the peace of this enchanted landscape on this frozen winter evening.

Just over half an hour later, I turn they key in my front door. I’m back where I started three hours earlier, yet in some intangible sense, I’m still half a world away.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream on Dixon Heights

Further Reading/Sources

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Eagle Crag

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Raven Crag & the Flooding of Thirlmere

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

Further Reading & Listening

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

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Landscape of Liberty: from Auschwitz to Ambleside

Lingmoor Fell

Merz Barn

From Auschwitz to Ambleside

Exhibitions and Further Reading

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Jack’s Rake and Dungeon Ghyll Force

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

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Humphrey Head

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Sunset Over Morecambe Bay, In Snow

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Walks, stories and musings from the Lake District Fells