Tag Archives: Borrowdale

Fell Walk, General, History, Natural History

Whisky in the Jar

June 21, 2020 George Kitching 27 Comments

Great Gable via Grey Knotts, Brandreth & Green Gable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kirk Fell over Beckhead from Great Gable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources/Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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

Fell Walk, General, History, Nature

Sheep & Wolf’s Clothing

May 17, 2020 George Kitching 22 Comments

Eagle Crag

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eagle Crag from Stonethwaite — Eagle Crag

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Wolfman of Eagle Crag

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

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

Art, Fell Walk, General, History

Mountains and Margarine

January 20, 2019 George Kitching 20 Comments

Bonington, Beatrix, Kurt & the Borrowdale Caveman

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

Man vs Mountain

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

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

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

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

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

The Professor of Adventure

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

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

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

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

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

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

Millican Dalton's Cave — Millican Dalton’s Cave

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

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

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

Mier Bitte

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mrs Heelis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fell Walk, General, History

Born To Be Wild

December 26, 2017 George Kitching 8 Comments

Millican Dalton and Castle Crag

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

The Other

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

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

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

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

The Professor of Adventure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Into the Jaws of Borrowdale

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

The River Derwent, in the Jaws of Borrowdale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Incription in Millican Dalton's cave — Jump to conclusions

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

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

Castle Crag war memorial — Borrowdale from Castle Crag quarry

No Man’s Land

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For detailed direction for this walk, visit Walk Lakes

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

Lakeland Walking Tales

Tag Archives: Borrowdale

Whisky in the Jar