Rusland Horizons Greenwood Trail 3
With the arboreal serenity of High Dam Tarn, the heather-clad open fell, the mountain panoramas, and the spooky story surrounding the woods at Fearing Brow, Rusland Horizons’ Greenwood Trail 3 is a rich and varied walk. As I learn about the Trust’s conservation work in this beautiful valley between Windermere & Coniston, I discover a link to a man I once knew: a charcoal burner who lived in the forest and made yurts; as it transpires, that was only one chapter in a truly remarkable life.
High Dam, Rusland Heights, Fearing Brow, Finsthwaite
In my recent post about Dixon Heights, the sight of semi-feral fell pony in the soft light of a summer evening provoked a flight of fancy about Rhiannon, the Celtic horse goddess, sometimes depicted as an ethereal white mare. About a week after posting that article, my friend, Sarah, showed me a video she’d taken on Dixon Heights of a young foal. Rhiannon was standing over him protectively. Was Rhiannon the mother, I wondered? Yet, when the foal trotted off to greet a black mare, I realised how big and muscular Rhiannon looked in comparison. Then Rhiannon lowered his undercarriage and there could be absolutely no doubt about his masculinity.
Several days later, I discovered the Fell Pony Adventures’ Facebook page. This Equestrian Centre runs the Hades Hill herd of indigenous fell ponies that graze Dixon Heights (Hades rhymes with shades). I posted a picture of Rhiannon, which they loved and helpfully informed me, “George, this is Hades Hill Geronimo – 8 year old Registered Fell pony stallion who’s running with the mares”.
Geronimo! Definitely not Rhiannon, then.
The page made interesting reading. The Equestrian Centre is committed to the preservation of the breed, now classed as vulnerable by the Rare Breeds Survival Trust, but also to the ponies’ heritage as working animals (a tradition stretching back to Roman times). The centre offers wild camping pack pony treks to hidden corners of the Lake District. Indeed, I had just read Joanna Eede’s excellent account of one in the May/June 2020 edition of Lakeland Walker. Intrigued, I clicked through to their web site to read more about the organisation. The herd is now managed by Tom Lloyd, but it was established in 1957 by Tom’s father, Walter. Walter had been inspired by a letter in Horse and Hound Magazine, contradicting a claim that there were no pure bred ponies running wild in the country any longer. The correspondent, Miss Peggy Crosland, had stated that there were indeed still herds of fell ponies on the Lake District Fells. Walter got in touch and ended up buying two Heltondale mares in foal. Hades Hill lies on Shawforth Common in Lancashire, but in the early nineties, Walter moved to Cumbria with his ponies; Tom took over the herd in 1994, which is how Geronimo came to have the run of Dixon Heights.
Lockdown taught me the joy of waking up to what is right on your doorstep. The Dixon Heights post prompted Mandy Lane to get in touch and ask whether I had done much walking in the Rusland valley. To my shame, I admitted I’d done very little. Mandy explained she was a volunteer with Rusland Horizons, a charitable trust dedicated to conservation of the natural environment in the valley that lies between Windermere and Coniston. The trust also promotes education in the landscape and the revival of traditional rural skills. Mandy told me about the Greenwood Trails, which Rusland Horizons has created with the help of local school children, and she gave me the address of their website. In the About section, I learned that the newly renamed Rusland Horizons Trust is a successor organisation to the Lottery-funded Rusland Horizons Landscape Partnership Scheme. However, Rusland Horizons Trust began life in 1987 as an independent charity called Woodmanship Limited, formed to continue the work of Walter Lloyd, “a well-known coppicer and woodsman in the South Lakes area”.
Might this be the same Walter Lloyd? I Googled Walter and found his obituary in The Guardian. Walter died in 2018, aged 93, after what, by any standards, had been a remarkable life. What hit me first, however, was the picture staring back at me from the page: a kindly face, eyes sparkling with vitality and mischief, framed by a shock of wild white hair and matching moustache; for it was a face I’d known. Not well, and only briefly, over twenty years ago, but someone I’d known, all the same…
When I first moved to Cumbria in 1998, I signed up for Tai Chi lessons in Kendal. Walter was in the same class, an unmissable character, full of warmth, charm, and humour, turning up in battered jeans and a check shirt, smelling of woodsmoke. Despite being in his early seventies, he told me he was a woodsman and a charcoal burner, who made yurts and lived in a horse-drawn wagon in the woods near Newby Bridge.
…I read on and discovered he’d been very much more than that.
Walter grew up in Cornwall, where he showed a greater inclination for roaming the countryside with his donkey than he did for school. In the end, his parents packed him off to boarding school, but when war broke out, the school was evacuated to Wales where Walter met a company of charcoal burners who would prove a seminal influence. With the nation at war, Walter joined the Royal Navy and served off the Normandy beaches on D Day, and on the Artic convoys, for which he was recently awarded a medal by Vladimir Putin. After the war, he gained a degree in agriculture from Cambridge University and turned his hand to farming. After founding the Hades Hill herd, his annual trips to the Appleby Horse Fair and his prowess as a folk fiddle player ingratiated him with the gypsy horsemen society. Walter helped scupper official attempts to shut down the festival.
To supplement his meagre farm income, Walter pursued a parallel career as an Emergency Planning Officer for Greater Manchester, a role which saw him appear on television advising people what to do in the event of a nuclear attack: he pulled a bottle of whisky from his pocket and said “Drink all of it. You’ve got four minutes. Die happy!”. Walter also founded Civil Aid, which trained people to help out in emergencies, and offered a life-saving service at the explosion of free music festivals in the 1970’s: from a second-hand “Green Goddess” military fire engine, he dispensed drinking water, blankets, and vegetable curry to hungry and borderline-hypothermic hippies.
When he retired, Walter moved to the South Lakes where he was instrumental in reviving a number of derelict woodlands and re-establishing traditional crafts, still capable of producing local income from coppiced wood: charcoal-burning, coracle making, swill basket-weaving and rope-making (using Herdwick wool gathered from fences). In doing so, he inspired a generation of would-be artisans to abandon the rat-race and pursue their dreams of living closer to nature, forging a living from the land using almost forgotten skills.
Before Walter’s time, the woods around Stott Park were coppiced to produce birch, ash, and sycamore wood for the Bobbin mill. During the nineteenth century, hundreds of Cumbrian mills supplied the bobbins essential to the cotton industries of Lancashire and Yorkshire. Stott Park is the only working example left. The British textile industry flourished at the start of the twentieth century, but the outbreak of WWI destroyed the export market and the cotton mills closed. With demand for bobbins plummeting, Stott Park adapted its machines to make wooden tool handles and managed to survive as commercial enterprise until 1971. It is now a working museum run by English Heritage. The mill recently won silver in the Small Visitor Attraction category at the Enjoy England awards, (although medium and larger-sized visitors are also welcome, I believe).
The Bobbin Mill is the starting point for Rusland Horizons’ Greenwood Trail 3. As I step out of the car into dazzling August sunshine, I feel I couldn’t have picked a better day to explore Walter’s old stomping ground. I follow the small country lanes towards Finsthwaite and turn right on to a track that passes the National Trust High Dam car park and information boards. The track becomes a rough path, entering Bell Intake woods and climbing beside a stream. Before long, I reach the leaf-green pool of Low Dam. In 1835, Finsthwaite Tarn was dammed to provide a water supply to drive the Stott Park waterwheel. Low Dam is a small catchment pond on the outflow from High Dam, the much larger tarn restrained by the dam wall.
High Dam appears a little further up the slope, a shimmering oasis of arboreal serenity, its languid surface an ephemeral dance of reflected leaves, twigs, trunks, and branches. Sunbeams dispersed through tall trees light the waters in an impressionist palette of greens and golds, sun-kissed yellows, and earthy browns, stippled here and there with blue polka dots of sky. I cross the bridge over the outlet and follow the footpath that encircles the tarn, walking slowly, lazily, bathing in the reflective calm of this little sea of tranquillity. About half-way up the western shore, the Greenwood Trail turns left to follow an old enclosure wall out on to open fell. Too enchanted with the tarn to take the trail on my first lap, I stick with the shore path up around the head of the water and down its eastern bank. A wooden boardwalk provides sure footing over a mire awash with sweet-scented bog myrtle. Electric blue dragonflies flit over foliage, and dead foxgloves stand like rusted fence posts against drystone walls mottled with lichen and softened with moss.
When I reach the trail junction for the second time, I follow the enclosure wall out of the wood to much wilder terrain beneath the slopes of Great Green Hows. The ground turns marshy, but a boardwalk crosses the worst sections. I’ve left all human company behind, but a newt darts over my foot. On reaching a stone stile, I’m met with a sudden sweeping prospect over the Rusland Valley and Grisedale Forest to the Coniston Fells. The Old Man stands proudly centre, flanked by Dow Crag on the left, and Brim Fell, Swirl How, and Wetherlam on the right, all soft grey silhouettes except where the southern tip of the Lad Stones ridge has found the morning sun.
A wooden signpost, replete with a Greenwood Trail arrow, points south to Rusland Heights. The OS map shows no path, but the trod is mostly clear and helpfully marked in indistinct stretches by white-topped posts. The open fell is awash with seasonal colour: green summer bracken interleaved with autumnal copper, outcrops of heather in vibrant purple, soft mauve, and chocolate brown—a last parade of high summer on the cusp of autumn. I pass rocky outcrops and deep green holly bushes, cross another stone stile, and handrail an old drystone wall to the highest point. Here, a grand panorama of Lakeland peaks awaits. The entire Coniston range from Caw to Wetherlam occupies the western aspect, while tracking north, I can see Seat Sandal, the Fairfield Horseshoe, Red Screes, Stoney Cove Pike, Thornthwaite Crag, High Street, and Ill Bell. Froswick is all but hidden in shadow, but Yoke, Harter Fell, and Kentmere Pike are discernible. Dark shadowy forms all, like the ghosts of fells below the celestial snowy peaks of cloud above.
Beyond a wall junction, the path starts to descend then climbs again on slopes of yellow gorse and purple heather. A little detour up a rocky knoll affords a glimpse of Boretree Tarn, its iridescent waters, dragonfly-blue below the wooded rise of Yew Barrow. The path initially skirts the wood, descending through a small rock-walled gorge to a reed-lined pond at its edge, then it dives into the trees and descends steeply to a minor road; a shady stretch, which bears the sinister name of Fearing Brow.
Fearing is local dialect for a ghost or evil spirit, and the ghost in question is that of Margaret Taylor, known since her untimely demise as the Ealinghearth Dobby. In 1825, driven to despair by the cruelty and callous neglect of her father, Margaret resolved to end her misery by drowning herself. She was buried at Finsthwaite, but sadly, her suffering didn’t end with the grave. Her heartless father left her funeral before she was even interred, yet Margaret’s spirit was racked with guilt, and she remained earthbound, locked in an eternal quest to find him, and to profess her devotion despite his disdain. She was said to hitch rides on travellers’ carts or fall in with those that trod the lane, always announcing her presence with strange waffling sound. The story led one eighteen-year-old lad, named Christopher Cloudsdale, to make a fatal choice. One winter afternoon he visited Rusland Smithy on an errand from the Bobbin Mill. It was after dark by the time he set off back, and despite the snow, he wouldn’t follow the road for fear of the Dobby, attempting instead to make his way over Great Green Hows. Disoriented in the dark and with his clogs balled up with snow, he wandered in circles for hours before falling and freezing to death.
From Fearing Brow, the trail doubles back into the wood and follows a shady avenue to Townend, where it crosses the Finsthwaite road and tracks round to the farm buildings at Tom Crag. From here, it climbs through an ancient meadow known as the Dales. The Dales were thin strips of land allocated to villagers, on which they would grow oats, barley, and vegetables. Their livestock would graze the fellside and overwinter in the wood, known as Wintering Park, which the trail now enters. There are sheep here still. I can hear a lamb before I see it. It sounds distressed, and when I catch sight, I realise it has got its head stuck in a wire fence while attempting to eat the perennially-greener grass on the other side. I walk over to try and free it, but the sight of me approaching gives it all the impetus it needs to free itself.
From Wintering Park, the trail crosses fields, named by Norse settlers, to Finsthwaite with its Alpine looking church. The Greenwood Trail leaflet (downloadable from the website) includes a picture of the Hunter family of Finsthwaite weaving swill baskets in Plum Green Yard in 1891. By the 1980’s, many of these traditional skills were in danger of dying out, and much of the surrounding woodland had become derelict. It seems counter-intuitive to think that cutting wood is a form of conservation, but properly managed coppicing can extend the life of trees and create habitats much richer in biodiversity. Thanks to Walter Lloyd and Rusland Horizons, these woodlands and their traditional crafts are flourishing again. A Greenwood sign reminds me this wonderful trail was devised by school children, and I acknowledge the sterling work the charity is doing in education as well as conservation.
Then I think of fell ponies on Dixon Heights, and I remember clumsily stumbling through a Tai Chi kata with a remarkable man I only wish I’d known better.
Further Reading
The Rusland Horizons Greenwood Trails:
https://www.ruslandhorizons.org/project/the-greenwood-trail.aspx
Rusland Horizons Home Page:
https://www.ruslandhorizons.org/
Fell Pony Experience web site – all about the Hades Hill herd:
https://fellpony.co.uk/about-the-herd
Walter’s second wife Gill Barron remembers a remarkable man:
https://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/many-hatted-man –
More stories about Walter (how he tried to steal a Nazi commandant’s boat, and how he put out a stage fire at Jimi Hendrix’s last UK concert):
Walter’s obituary in the Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/12/walter-lloyd-obituary
CountryStride interview Walter’s son, Bill Lloyd, who has worked as a woodsman using a heavy horse:
https://www.countrystride.co.uk/single-post/countrystride-40-bill-lloyd-into-the-woods
Coppicing and woodland conservation:
https://www.conservationhandbooks.com/coppicing-cut-trees-conservation/
My Piece on Dixon Heights and Rhiannon (aka Geronimo)