Tag Archives: Hiking

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

The Savage Temple at the Heart of Scafell

July 23, 2023 George Kitching 26 Comments

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

Cults of Nature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Krampus

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

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

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

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

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

The Roaring Silence

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

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

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

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

Wainwright: an Apostle of the Sublime

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

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

Scafell Crag and Shamrock from across the scree of Hollow Stones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deep Gill Buttress rising from the depths of Deep Gill

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

The summit of the Pinnacle from Pisgah Buttress

The author on Pisgah Buttress – photo by Richard Jennings

The Savage Temple and the Roof of England

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whiskey Man: Lanty Slee – a Legend of Langdale

March 19, 2023 George Kitching 16 Comments

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

Mountain Dew

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tee-total in Tilberthwaite

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

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

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

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

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

According to the Westmorland Gazette:

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

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

Hodge Close and Holme Fell

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

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

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

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

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

Herdwicks and Mrs Heelis

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

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

Contraband in Colwith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matters of the Spirit

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

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

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

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

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

Ah couldn’t tell ye that.

Did you know Wondeful Walker, John!

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

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

Did he aid and abet the smugglers, John!

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

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

What, beside coffins, John!

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

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

Did the priests connive at your doings!

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

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

Sources/Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coniston Stonecraft Interview

Fell Walk, General, Natural History

The Deer Hunter

September 16, 2018 George Kitching 14 Comments

The Nab & the Rut

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beda Fell from Rest Dodd — Satura Crag from Rest Dodd

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

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

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

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

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

Red Deer, Martindale — Wainwright in Martindale

Sources/Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

Practical note:

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

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

Fell Walk, General, Ghost Story, History, Legend

Reconstruction of a Fable

July 22, 2018 George Kitching 7 Comments

The Fairfield Horseshoe and the Skulls of Calgarth

In which I walk the fine mountain ridges of Fairfield Horseshoe, tell the spooky story of the Calgarth skulls, bag a free beer in Rydal, become a social pariah in Ambleside, and learn a life lesson from Laurence Fishburne.

The Skulls of Calgarth

As I drive through Troutbeck Bridge, I pass a sign for Calgarth Park, offering two-bedroom supported retirement apartments. Viewings are available. I’m sure both my age and my bank balance disqualify me (although one is depressingly nearer than the other). All the same, I’d be tempted to have a peek—the building has an interesting history, and a sinister backstory.

The house is an elegant lakeside villa—all Georgian pillars and neatly manicured lawns—overlooking Windermere. It was built by Bishop Richard Watson in 1790. In its early years, it played host to such eminent neighbours as Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge. During the First World War, it was transformed into a hospital, and later became a children’s orthopaedic unit, specialising in TB and polio.

When Bishop Watson bought the estate, it already had a hall, but he didn’t much like the look of it. Perhaps it was the cold and austere demeanour. Perhaps he was a forerunner of Kevin McCloud’s Grand Designers and fancied something modern, handsome and hospitable. Or perhaps, he knew about the skulls.

In the sixteenth century, a humble cottage stood on the spot. It was the home of Kraster and Dorothy Cook. They weren’t rich, but they worked hard, and they ran a productive and profitable farm.

Living and working in such an idyllic location should have brought endless happiness, but there was a fly in the ointment. Their land was coveted by a rich and influential justice of the peace, named Myles Philipson. He was a greedy man. His estate was substantial, but it wasn’t enough. The Cooks had something he wanted, and it consumed him. He swore he’d acquire the land by any means.

It proved harder than he thought. Money didn’t work: the Cooks were simple, honest folk, who appreciated what they had and wanted nothing more. Philipson tried bullying, but the Cooks were strong and stood firm.

In the end, their steadfastness paid off. Philipson backed down. Indeed, it seemed he’d had a complete change of heart and deeply regretted his behaviour. To make amends, he invited them round for dinner on Christmas Eve.

Dorothy and Kraster must have felt their troubles were over, but they were rudely awakened the next morning by soldiers demanding to search their cottage—Philipson had accused them of stealing a silver goblet. It was soon found in Dorothy’s bag—precisely where the maleficent magistrate had snuck it.

The Cooks were arrested and imprisoned, awaiting trial. They must have been scared stiff, but they had faith in their own innocence and in the British justice system. Imagine their dismay when they entered the courtroom to find Philipson presiding.

Philipson declared them guilty and sentenced them to death, decreeing that all their land be signed over to him as compensation. He quickly set about demolishing their cottage and building a hall on the same spot.

From the gallows, Dorothy uttered a terrible curse: for as long as the Philipson family remained in residence, Kraster and she would haunt them night and day, and their business affairs would never prosper.

One year later, the hall was complete and the Philipsons moved in, but any celebrations were derailed when they found two skulls on the bottom stair. They had their servants throw them out and retired to bed, but they were kept awake by a terrible screaming and wailing. When they rose in the morning, the skulls were back.

Over the coming months, Myles had the skulls crushed, burned, buried and thrown in the lake. Whatever he tried failed: the infernal screams persisted, and every morning the skulls returned.

Living under such a curse quickly put paid to visitors; the family became reclusive and their business affairs suffered. In the end, Myles had to sell everything but the hall to cover his debts. He bequeathed the hall to his son, but the curse remained. Only once the Philipson family quit the hall for good, did Kraster and Dorothy lie quietly in their graves.

The Fairfield Horseshoe

Each lake has its own character: Wastwater is feral and fiercely beautiful; Coniston, tranquil; Ullswater dark and mysterious (especially when cloud envelopes the fell tops); but Windermere has grandeur. It’s a grandeur that has little to do with her flotillas of yachts or the moneyed mansions that line her eastern shore. A daunting profile dominates her northern skyline, her head cradled by a ring of high fells, a vision of strength and drama. Dressed in snow and reflected in the long mirror of the lake, the Fairfield Horseshoe is a sight to stir the blood and quicken the heart; in the spring sunshine of this May Day Bank Holiday, its slopes are gold and green, softer than in winter but every bit as inspiring.

I park in Ambleside and head up Nook Lane to Low Sweden Bridge, following a wide track that then winds its way up the lower reaches of Low Pike. A dry-stone wall meanders in from the left. The track swings right in search of a gentler ascent, but a narrow path handrails the wall, heading up over steeper ground to Low Brock Crag. This way signals greater adventure.

A short and easy scramble brings me to the crest of Low Brock Crag. Windermere commands the backward view, nestling languidly in a glacial groove—long cool and periwinkle blue.

The summit of Low Pike is further half-scramble, rising in a rocky outcrop like a bouldered earthwork, wedded to the wall, which curves away below like a castle’s outer curtain. Dropping down from this little tower, I land in its shallow moat. The ground between here and High Pike is a soggy morass. In the weeks to come, an extended heatwave will dry Lakelands’ most pervasive bogs, but for now, I have to pick my path with care.

By the time I reach the top of High Pike, the wall is broken down in places, blending ever more closely with the crag, as if born of the mountain, it aspires to revert.

After a long grassy rise, I reach Dove Crag’s summit cairn, and gaze out again over Windermere—its further reaches now visible beyond the headland, stretching out toward a white sheen of Irish Sea, blurring the distinction between earth and sky. In February, I stood on this very spot, when snow, cloud and soft light conspired to blend lake, sky and fellside in an ambient glow of pink and white. Now the soft blue haze of imminent summer inflects the lowland, and the slopes are olive green with young bracken; shafts of sun stage shadow plays across the crags ahead.

This ancient landscape of immutable rock is in a constant state of flux. Pinnacles, crevices, crags and gullies are thrown into sharp relief, then retreat into shadow; hues of red and yellow, mauve and purple streak fleetingly across the slopes, then blur and are swallowed again by dark recesses of green. It’s an animated impressionist painting of ever-shifting ephemera.

Mountains are restless chameleons. As John Berger expresses it so beautifully, in Hold Everything Dear: “There are moments of looking at a familiar mountain which are unrepeatable. A question of a particular light, an exact temperature, the wind, the season. You could live seven lives and never see the mountain quite like that again; its face is as specific as a momentary glance across the table at breakfast. A mountain stays in the same place, and can almost be considered immortal, but to those who are familiar with the mountain, it never repeats itself. It has another timescale.”

From Hart Crag and over Link Hawse to Fairfield’s rocky shoulder, the terrain grows more rugged and dramatic; precipitous crags plunge to Dovedale and Deepdale and I’m compelled to make small diversions to gain a better view.

On reaching one of Fairfield’s summit shelters, I sip coffee from a thermos and stare over at St Sunday Crag, rising like a dinosaur across Deepdale Hause. In sun, its livery is flecked with gold and purple, and streaked with stripes of exposed stone like strips of armour plate. Captured on canvas and hung in a gallery, critics would think it a stylised exaggeration, and yet the reality is more intense.

I head south, following the cairns down the western spine of the Horseshoe to the summit of Great Rigg.

Between 1955 and 1966, Alfred Wainwright published his Pictorial Guides to the Lake District, a series of seven books that document 214 peaks with hand-drawn maps, pen and ink drawings, practical direction and poetic description. The series has been continuously in print, and to climb all 214 has become known as “bagging the Wainwrights”.

The desire to bag Wainwrights now infects my judgement. Where once, I’d have been content to continue directly down the main ridge, the prospect of ticking off Stone Arthur waylays me, and I make a detour to the right, descending rapidly over ground that will all have to be regained.

It’s not obvious where the summit is as it isn’t really summit at all, just an outcrop on the ridge—and there are several. I meet a couple who are asking themselves the same question. We alight hopefully on the first contender (hopefully, because it’s not too far down the slope—but somehow, we know this would be too easy). They check their GPS and confirm the elevation is too high. We carry on together down the incline.

They tell me they’re attempting all the Wainwrights in a year, so the Horseshoe, with the addition of Stone Arthur, is like concocting several syllables from all the high-ranking Scrabble letters and landing on a triple word score—a grand total of nine ticked off for about eleven miles of effort.

When we reach the proper “summit”, the vivid blue of Grasmere beguiles below.

It’s a slog back up the slope to Great Rigg and a great relief to finally descend toward Heron Pike, with the forget-me-not fingers of Windermere and Coniston Water outstretched below. The final stretch down the pitched zigzags of Nab Scar overlooks Rydal Water, glittering like a teardrop in the green of the valley.

When I reach the bottom, fatigue kicks in, and I sit on a wall above Rydal Mount, looking at a sign for the Coffin route to Grasmere (and trying not to read it as a suggestion).

I walk on through the grounds of Rydal Hall where a girl is emptying paper plates into a bin. She looks up and smiles and says, “Do help yourself to a beer if you’d like one.”

I pinch myself to make sure I’m not dreaming, but she’s still here, and she’s gesturing behind me, where three kegs are perched on the wall.

“We’ve had a wedding reception but there’s some beer left over, so we thought we’d offer it to walkers. We’ve no glasses so you’ll have to make do with a jam jar—they’ve all been washed”, she explains brightly.

I thank her and pour myself a sparkling jam jar of Jennings Cocker Hoop. We chit chat for a minute or two, then she heads back inside. As she reaches the door, she turns and says, “take it with you if you want—we don’t need the jam jar back.”

A good cool hoppy ale never tastes better than after a long walk. Sipping this unexpected trophy, I head on down the wide Rydal-to-Ambleside path, where I pass several groups of strollers: not sweaty fell walkers now, but smartly dressed, respectable types, out for a gentle Bank Holiday peramble.

And they’re giving me decidedly funny looks. The third time it happens, I check my flies. Then it dawns on me—I’m carrying a jam jar that’s now about a quarter full of frothy amber liquid. They think it’s a urine sample. And I’m swigging it.

To Have or to Be

As I drive back past Calgarth Park, I notice that the next lane is called Old Hall Road. Out of curiosity, I turn down it. After a few hundred yards the road narrows and a large sign warns, “Private Road—Keep out”. I wonder about continuing and try to think of a cover story, but better judgement prevails.

Later, I’ll wonder if it actually said “no access”, but “keep out” is the message I get, loud and clear, and right now this feels hostile. Perhaps it’s the apparent terseness of the wording or just the abrupt end to the freedom of the fells; or perhaps it’s the recollection of a newspaper article about the scandal of London councils selling social housing to luxury property developers. Perhaps it’s because She Drew the Gun’s Poem has been playing on the car stereo, “How long before they put up a wall and call it a private city?” But all of a sudden, the story of the Calgarth skulls seems very real.

This is when I realise it’s not a ghost story at all but a morality tale about a man haunted to the edge of insanity by his conscience.

In the 1970’s Erich Fromm wrote a book called To Have or to Be. He suggested people are governed by a having orientation—the desire to possess things—or a being orientation—the desire to experience things. Those of us who tread the fells have our walking boots firmly in the being camp. (That said, perhaps our desire to bag summits and tick off Wainwrights betrays an underlying having orientation. Here, I should probably confess I got all this from an episode of CSI. I did buy the book, but I haven’t read it yet, so for now, this is coming via Laurence Fishburne.)

While the being orientation is the likelier path to happiness, Fromm predicts that our western obsession with consumerism means the having orientation will predominate. Forty years on, we’ve already travelled a long way down that road.

Beware the skulls.

Find a route map and directions for this walk at https://www.walklakes.co.uk/walk_42.html

Fell Walk, General, History

Away from the Numbers

June 24, 2018 George Kitching 12 Comments

Grey Friar, Great Carrs, & Dow Crag from Seathwaite

It was to be my 100th Wainwright. Not quite halfway, but a minor milestone nevertheless. The day begins inauspiciously with a series of farcical calamities worthy of Basil Fawlty, but en route to the Seathwaite reservoir, the disarming beauty of the Duddon valley works its magic. After a splendid ridge walk, I celebrate in the rural charm of the Newfield Inn—the scene of a violent riot, 114 years ago, which ended in the fatal shooting of a navvy. Hard to believe these days, but I’m on my best behaviour just in case.

It’s not as if I was expecting fanfares, a red carpet and a Champagne breakfast on the terrace. That would be ridiculous—we haven’t got a terrace. But on a morning that marked a minor milestone in my fell walking career, I did, at least, want things to go smoothly.

It wasn’t to be. I awoke to find the cat had thrown up over the sofa cushions. He’d even managed to hit a car rug perched over the arm. The scatter pattern suggested he’d been projectile vomiting while spinning like a whirling dervish. Was he violently ill or possessed by a legion of demons? It didn’t look like it.

I’ve seen enough episodes of CSI to know how to work a crime scene, and here I found grass and a sizeable clump of matted fur (quite possibly not his own). Cat lovers will know that grass is an emetic which cats imbibe deliberately to shift fur balls. The ensuing upchuck is relatively controlled, so this extravagant distribution was clearly a matter of choice. The proud perpetrator was now standing by his bowl, demanding his breakfast.

After half an hour of intensive fabric cleaning, I stuffed Wainwright’s Pictorial Guide to the Southern Fells into my rucksack and set off for Seathwaite.

I’ve lived in Cumbria for twenty years and I’d never been into the heart of the Duddon valley. I’ve gazed down on it many times from the tops of the Coniston fells, ever struck by its lonely beauty. In autumn, the Seathwaite reservoir had shone like a sapphire on a baize of burnished gold. Today, the fields and trees are a swatch of fresh June green, licked into life by the early morning sun. I could easily lose myself in carefree reverie, but I need to concentrate because I’m not entirely sure where I’m going.

After Seathwaite, the map shows a fork in the road, with the right-hand prong giving way to the old quarry track that leads up to the Walna Scar Pass and on to Coniston. The reservoir track starts from the same point. Sure enough, the road forks where expected and there is even a sign saying “Coniston, unfit for cars”. But as the winding single-track road narrows to no more than my car width, I start to question why it is I think there is off-road parking at the end of it.

The road ends abruptly in a gate—with no parking space anywhere to be seen. A farmer on a quad bike is approaching from the other side. He clearly wants to come this way. I recall a distinct lack of passing places and the road is too narrow for a three-point turn. There’s nothing for it but to reverse back to the farm I passed quarter of a mile back.

Parking sensors are wonderful things, but they don’t know the difference between dry stone walls and cow parsley. Given the abundance of foliage overhanging the verges, my dashboard is lit up like a Christmas tree and my ears are ringing from the continuous high-pitched beep. I reach the farm, but I’m too close to the opposite wall to back in. I effect a painfully faffing five-point manoeuvre, while trying to avoid the eye of the farmer, who I sense is laughing heartily. Eventually, I manage to let him past. He gives a cheery wave and speeds off down the lane, no doubt dying to get home and tell his wife all about his encounter with Mr Bean.

I follow him back to the Seathwaite road. On the edge of the village, there are four parking spaces. One is still free. Perhaps my luck is changing.

It’s a rash hope. I open the hatchback to find the top isn’t properly on one of my water bottles and it’s emptied itself entirely into one of my boots—the one I’d put my socks in. I pour 500ml of water out of the boot and wring out the socks as best I can, then I squelch one and a half miles back up the road to the gate. I go through and just on the other side, I find the parking spaces.

Then, I step in a cowpat.

As I tramp up the reservoir track, I feel every bit like Basil Fawlty scouting around for a branch with which to give the day a damn good thrashing… But subconsciously, I start to change gear. There’s a song going around in my head. It’s The Waterboys’ Don’t Bang the Drum—it was playing on the radio on the way here:

“Here we are in a fabulous place
What are you gonna dream here?
We are standing in this fabulous place
What are you gonna play here?
I know you love the high life, you love to leap around
You love to beat your chest and make your sound
But not here man – this is sacred ground
With a Power flowing through
And if know you you’ll bang the drum
Like monkeys do”

The song warns of being so pumped up with our own self-importance, or perhaps with peeved indignance at the banana skins life leaves littered in our path, that we can stand in the most astounding of places and fail to realise.

I stop to apply sun cream, and I wake up to where I am. The epiphany strikes like an earthquake. A minute ago, the Duddon valley was a place of cowpats, frustratingly hidden car parks and wet feet. Now it’s a place of astonishing power and disarming beauty.

Across the valley, a conspiracy of sun and shadow renders the Scafells as an Art Deco railway poster—broad, flat, angular and stylised.

To the east, the sheer green slopes of Brim Fell, Dow Crag and Walna Scar form a colossal rampart to rend the valleys of the Duddon and Coniston. And straight ahead, rising over rippling foot hills, is the grassy dome of Grey Friar—the only Coniston fell I’ve yet to set foot on. Except, it isn’t really a Coniston fell at all. As Wainwright points put, Grey Friar belongs entirely to the Duddon.

Grey Friar from the Seathwaite reservoir track

Ticking off all the Wainwrights hadn’t been a goal. I was more interested in getting to know my favourites well—experiencing all their ascents and ridge walks. However, some gentle hectoring from my neighbours, Paul and Jeanette, convinced me that tackling the full 214 is a great incentive to explore new ground. They’re right, and since committing to the challenge, my knowledge of the peaks has grown exponentially.

I’ve climbed all the other mountains in this range at least twice and some (like The Old Man) as many as eight times. But Grey Friar, I’ve been saving. It will be my 100th Wainwright.

The OS map shows no path, but Wainwright sketches two that wend in parallel up the south western ridge. The first, a grass rake, is clearly visible from the track, but the intervening ground is marshy. AW suggests continuing to the reservoir and starting from just beyond the outtake channel. His second path is more direct and starts from the same place.

After a mile or so, I crest the hill and the long buttressed curve of the dam wall appears at the foot of dark shadowy slopes. As I reach the walkway that traverses the top, the sun slips behind a cloud, so now over the parapet, the dark waters stretch out—a long black placid pool, cool and inscrutable.

The reservoir’s tranquillity belies the violence in its construction. The ancient tarn was dammed in 1904, to extend its capacity as a water supply. The summer was a scorcher; the work was hard, and tempers were frayed. In such a small and remote community as Seathwaite, tensions were strained between locals and the labourers drafted in to sweat and toil. It would only take a spark to ignite the tinder.

In the event, alcohol proved the accelerant. According to Dick Sullivan’s book, Navvyman (Coracle Press, 1983), Owen Cavanagh had been drinking heavily since 9am. By noon, the landlord of the Newfield Hotel (now the Newfield Inn) judged he’d had enough. As Cavanagh’s rowdiness threatened to get out of hand, the landlord demanded he and his mates leave the premises. The men refused. They smashed up the pub and stole bottles of whisky, then they spilled into the street where they pelted the church and the vicarage with rocks. The publican, a barman and an engineer confronted the rioters with firearms. Shots were fired wounding three—fatally in Cavanagh’s case. The gunmen were arrested but later acquitted on the grounds their actions were legally justified in protecting property.

A primeval peace pervades now. The ghosts of rampaging navvies don’t haunt the fruits of their labours. I follow the walkway along the top of the dam and cross the footbridge over the main and auxiliary tarn outlets.

Between the crags of Great and Little Blake Rigg, Grey Friar’s slopes are more forgiving—grassy terraces peppered with rocky outcrops. Where Wainwright shows the start of his direct route, the tiniest of cairns hints at a faint path. I augment the cairn with a couple more stones—now you’ll have to blink a fraction longer to miss it.

In places, you have to rely on instinct and common sense to determine the line of the path. In others, it’s more pronounced, but nowhere is there any difficulty. A moderate pull up grassy slopes attains the ridge, and I make for the summit. Two cairns, a little way apart, stake equally convincing claims. Wainwright judges the north-eastern contender to be the true summit but concedes the south-western has the better views. He’s right, I pull myself up a rocky step and hunker down beside it to gaze across at Harter Fell and the Scafells.

A blue haze, like a sea mist, transforms the peaks into a mythical realm, where black spires, full of menace and foreboding, rise above dappled flanks, pretty and beguiling, and dark hollows harbour mysteries, old as the hills themselves.

One hundred Wainwrights under my belt is still seven short of halfway. Even so, it’s a ton, a nicely rounded sum, and it feels like an accomplishment. Grey Friars was a fine choice. It’s an underrated mountain, but away from the numbers, these are the kind that can reward the most. It’ll be a different story across on Scafell Pike. At this time of year, walkers will be arriving by the coach load. The Let’s Walk the Lakes Facebook group are tackling that today. Three weeks ago, I climbed Skiddaw with them. It was my first outing with the group, and a nicer bunch of like-minded people you couldn’t hope to meet. I wave in their direction and look forward to our next hike together. Then I set off for Great Carrs.

Just shy of the summit is a memorial cairn to the wreck of a Halifax bomber that crashed here in 1944. I’ve written about that at length in Ghost of Canadian Airmen, so I won’t repeat myself here, but the cairn with its cross and its plaque, together with the little wooden crosses people plant among the stones to commemorate their own departed loved ones, never fail to move me.

I don’t know how this looked in Wainwright’s day. It’s been rebuilt, so perhaps its appearance is more poignant now, but I find AW’s casual dismissal of it as a pile of aeroplane wreckage a tad perplexing. I’ve always suspected his curmudgeonly character was a slightly tongue-in-cheek persona: the bonhomie and humour in his writing suggests someone a little better disposed to people than is commonly supposed. But this throwaway line in the Grey Friar chapter does seem to reveal a more damaged individual, either lacking empathy, or perhaps, so used to burying his feelings he found them awkward to deal with when they surfaced.

I cross the shoulder of Swirl How and head over Brim Fell. The sky darkens, and it spots with rain. The hills are now a solemn grey, the Seathwaite reservoir a sombre sheen. But the dark clouds above Dow Crag are clearing and the ones overhead are insubstantial. They lack the ammunition for a proper downpour. Halfway to Dow Crag’s summit, the sun breaks through in triumph. By the time I reach the top, it’s glorious.

I read a number of walking blogs, and I enjoy Tessa Park’s, not only because it’s called Mountains and Malbec (which scores double points in my book), but because she champions the use of the ARSE CRAMPON. The concept is not entirely new, Wainwright remarks on the usefulness of the posterior, particularly in descent, but Tessa coined the phrase and she deserves a shout-out as I make liberal use of this piece of equipment in scrambling off the summit rocks.

Dow Crag’s buttresses and gullies are some of most dramatic features to be found anywhere in Lakeland. Its top is peppered with plunging vistas of heart-stopping beauty. Intrepid climbers perch on precarious outcrops high above the blue glimmer of Goat Water.

On the way down over Buck Pike and Brown Pike, Coniston Water is a hazy aquamarine wash to the east, while to the west, a band of barley forms a golden heart in the Lincoln green of the Duddon Valley. On reaching the Walna Scar Road, I turn right and descend past the old quarry into the pastoral perfection of Dunnerdale. Harter Fell looms ahead and Tarn Beck burbles over rocks as I meander lazily back to Seathwaite.

The Duddon valley from the Walna Scar track

The Newfield Inn is the epitome of a charming rural pub. I sit in its pretty beer garden, enjoying the warm sunshine and a cool hoppy pint of Mosaic from the nearby Foxfield brewery. It’s impossible to imagine this was the scene of a violent riot and fatal shootings one hundred and fourteen years ago.

I’m quite sure the landlord doesn’t keep a loaded firearm behind the bar anymore, but just in case, I return the glass, thank him kindly and take extra care not to break anything on the way out.

Fell Walk, General, History

Jimmy Hewitson and The Howitzer

April 8, 2018 George Kitching 10 Comments

Coniston, Tarn Hows, Black Fell & Holme Fell

“Some men become national heroes for superlative acts of bravery in service to their country. Others become heroes locally, because they stand up for the underdog when the establishment runs roughshod over them.” Jimmy Hewitson was both. I hear his remarkable story from his grandson, John. It’s a story of courage, compassion and the redemptive power of the Cumbrian landscape.

Courage

On the radio, a mother bravely describes losing her son in the Manchester Arena bombing. She says, “as soon as I heard about the explosion, I knew he was dead”. Some unfathomable maternal instinct tapped into something deeper than radio silence and sensed a severed emotional connection. By morning, she knew for certain that he hadn’t been admitted to any of the city’s hospitals, but it took a full twenty-four hours for the police to confirm her worst fears.

I can’t begin to imagine how those twenty-four hours felt. What that poor woman went through. What she is still going through. Every hour must have seemed an eternity, hoping against hope she was wrong, powerless do anything but wait for that dreadful knock on the door.

Benjamin Kirkby’s mother waited almost a year.

Ben was a Coniston lad and a quarryman. When World War One broke out, Ben, like many of his mates, answered Lord Kitchener’s call for volunteers. He enlisted in the King’s Own Lancaster Regiment (now the Duke of Lancaster’s) and was assigned to 1/4 brigade. Ben didn’t see action until the Somme, on 8th August 1916; after that, he would take no further part in the war. He was killed that day, as were two of his friends, Richard Usher and Sol Robinson. Richard and Sol’s deaths were confirmed within days, but Ben was reported as wounded, then wounded and missing. It was a full eleven months before his parents heard their son was dead.

Benjamin Atkinson Kirkby (courtesy of the Ruskin Museum)

I’ve just come from The Ruskin Museum in Coniston where curator, Vicky Slowe, has been showing me a file of remembrance; it has a page for each of the soldiers. A display case holds some personal artefacts: Ben Kirkby’s commemorative scroll; Richard Usher’s death penny and the official army communique to his parents, informing them of their son’s death. It also holds a painting by Richard of a boat on a lake, presumably Coniston Water. It looks peaceful and serene, evoking a long, lazy, carefree afternoon. A happy memory he held with him, perhaps, in the bitter, bloody turmoil of the trenches.

Ben Kirkby Commemorative Scroll (courtesy of the Ruskin Museum)

Beside the display case is a Matchless motorcycle that belonged to James Hewitson, another local lad who fought beside Ben, Sol and Richard in The Somme. Vicky and I were joined by John Dodd, James’s grandson, who recounted his grandfather’s remarkable story.

Some men become national heroes for superlative acts of bravery in service to their country. Others become heroes locally, because they stand up for the underdog when the establishment runs roughshod over them. Jimmy Hewitson was both. His grave lies in the Coniston churchyard, beside the fine Celtic cross of the war memorial, designed by W. G. Collingwood, who founded the Ruskin museum and designed Ruskin’s gravestone, as well as a series of war memorials including those at Hawkshead, Ulverston and St Bees, and the plaque on top of Great Gable.

Coniston war memorial — Coniston War Memorial (courtesy of the Ruskin Museum)

In 2018, on April 26^th, a new plaque was laid beside the Coniston memorial to mark the 100^th anniversary of the action that earned James Hewitson the Victoria Cross.

Hewitson survived the Somme; by 1918, he had been promoted to Lance Corporal, and his brigade had moved to Givenchy. A photograph in the museum shows a boy, seemingly too young for the military uniform he is wearing, but his courage and daring on April 26th were outstanding. He was recommended for the Victoria Cross in May 1918, and on 28^th June, this report appeared in The London Gazette:

“For most conspicuous bravery, initiative and daring action. In a daylight attack on a series of crater posts L/Cpl Hewitson led his party to their objective with dash and vigour, clearing the enemy from both trench and dugouts, killing in one dugout six of the enemy who would not surrender. After capturing the final objective, he observed a hostile machine-gun team coming into action against his men. Working his way round the edge of the crater he attacked the team, killing four and capturing one. Shortly afterwards he engaged a hostile bombing party which was attacking a Lewis gun post; he routed the party, killing six of them. The extraordinary feats of daring performed by this gallant non-commissioned officer crushed the hostile opposition at this point.”

King George V presented James with his Victoria Cross in France, on 8^th August 1918. It must have been a day of bittersweet emotions for him, as it was the second anniversary of the Somme action that killed his friends.

James Hewitson's Grave — James Hewitson’s Grave

Defiance

When the troops returned home in 1918, the mood was very different from the surge of patriotism that had seen so many enlist, four years earlier. The men bore deep scars, emotionally as well as physically. Today, we recognise post traumatic shock disorder. Back then, it was little understood and was known crudely as shell shock. Soldiers showing symptoms in the trenches had been shot for cowardice or desertion; demobbed squaddies kept shtum and suffered in silence. Many others were conspicuous by their absence.

The survivors were less reticent when it came to demanding change. Across Britain, there was a feeling among veterans that if they were going to risk their lives fighting for their country, they wanted a say in how it was governed. The Representation of the People Act of 1918 gave the vote, not only to women, but to all working-class men.

In a politically opportunist attempt to recapture some patriotic fervour and whip up a sense of triumphalism, The War Office presented many British towns and villages with war trophies. Ulverston received a German tank which stood at the bottom of Market Street until the 1960’s (the roundabout on the A590 is still known as “tank square”).

Coniston was presented with a German howitzer. It’s hard to imagine a more clumsy and insensitive gesture to a community licking its wounds and mourning its dead than to foist upon it the very instrument of its grief. It would be an understatement to say it didn’t go down well with the residents, especially those who had served. One evening, some young veterans were enjoying a pint when the conversation turned to the hated gun. Opinion was unanimous: they’d all spent enough time staring at the front of one of those things; there was no way they wanted to stare at the back of one now. After a few more pints, they decided to do something about it.

Jimmy Hewitson was at home, but such was his standing, they decided to run their plan past him, first. Jimmy’s wife answered the door; her husband had already gone to bed. When they told her what they were planning, she ran straight up the stairs to rouse him. It took no time at all for Jimmy to shout his response from the landing, “Give me a minute to get some pants on, and I’ll give you a hand”.

The howitzer had been placed outside the Ruskin museum. Being a field gun, it was on wheels. The men got behind it and, with a lot of heaving and shoving, managed to push it down the back street, past the Black Bull, over the bridge, and down to the lake. It must have been a struggle to keep something that heavy under control on the downhill stretch. They were aiming for the steep drop into the deeper water, but in the dark, they steered to the left of it, near the stone-built jetty, and pushed it into the shallows. It didn’t sink very far.

A half-submerged howitzer wasn’t quite the act of good riddance they’d been hoping for, so one of them suggested they have a word with Prissy. Priss was the captain of the Steam Yacht Gondola that ran daily excursions up and down the lake, acting as a water bus for locals and a sightseeing experience for tourists. He was only too happy to help and told them to be ready in the morning when he’d sail the Gondola past the spot on the way to her first pick up. The next day, they tied a rope around the gun and threw the end to Priss; he towed the howitzer out into the middle of the lake, where he left it to rust on the bottom.

John was only little when his grandad died, but his older brother recalls hearing the story first hand. John does remember seeing the howitzer exhumed sometime in the very late 1960’s or early 1970’s. It was pulled from the lake, loaded on to a trailer without fuss or ceremony, and swiftly driven away to sit in some private collection.

Purification and Renewal

In his post-war years, James Hewitson dug ditches, cut hedges and repaired roads, but he was hospitalised several times for shell shock and for surgery to remove shrapnel. Like many of his peers, Jimmy’s heroism came at a high personal cost. As a nation, we were ill equipped to help. Shell shock was seen as form of a neurasthenia: a supposed mechanical exhaustion of the nerves (it’s no longer a recognised condition in western medicine). Treatments were experimental and sometimes barbaric. We can only hope Hewitson escaped our worst medical follies. Certainly, he seems to have seen some improvement in later years: he was able to attend two regimental reunions and the museum has a wonderful photograph of him as an old man astride his beloved Matchless motorbike.

On leaving the museum, I walk down through a field of charcoal-fleeced Herdwicks to Coniston Hall, on the lake shore. In the soft grey light of an overcast afternoon, the rugged grandeur of this Elizabethan building appears sculpted from the earth, rough-hewn from Silurian stone, abandoned to ivy, repurposed as farm-house, a wide grassy ramp rising to its once opulent hall stripped of its oak panelling in its rebirth as a barn. Its conical chimneys stand tall and turret-like against a pale wash of sky.

Beyond is the lake, the water gently ridged with ripples, a soft bluish pewter, silver where it escapes the shadows. I walk the shore path to Torver, and most of the way to Brown How. Underfoot, the beach is mud, stone, moss and shale, overhung with a twiggy latticed canopy of naked branches, as if lightly sketched in soft graphite where they spring from heavily shaded trunks. I pass stone boat houses and little wooden jetties where an orange dinghy and an orange buoy are isolated splashes of colour amid the soft, earthy monochrome. To the north, is the high mountain drama of the Fairfield Horseshoe, stark in snow, a skyline rigidly defined, mighty and intimidating. But here, beside the water, is tranquillity.

I think of Richard Usher’s painting. Is this where he came in his head to escape the harsh reality of French battlefields? I think of the lake’s benevolence in swallowing the gun, and I think of James Hewitson’s battle with shell shock; I wonder if he found solace here. Across the beach lies the uprooted trunk of a silver birch, its branches outstretched like limbs reaching out to touch the water. The Coniston war memorial is a Celtic cross. In Celtic mythology, the birch was a symbol of purification and renewal.

Two days later, I’m at Tarn Hows. After some harsh weeks of winter, spring is here, pregnant with the promise of light and warmth. In a few hours, the circular shore path will be thick with sightseers, but at half past eight, I have it almost to myself. The water is a perfect mirror, rendering the dark curtain of trees in ink wash. The shore is a Ruskin watercolour of russet and brown. I pass a bench that bears an inscription: “In memory of Jane Aldworth (1959 – 1995) who loved this place”. Thirty-six is a tender age to die. War is not the only thief of youth. I wonder what happened to her; what comfort she found here. And again, I’m struck by the redemptive power of the landscape. Purification and renewal.

I leave the shore and climb a path that joins the Cumbria Way, which I follow east for a few hundred yards, then turn left to climb to the wilder summit of Black Fell. As a landscape yawns awake from hibernation, it’s possible to experience all seasons at once. Black Fell is a perfect podium for the humble punter. The Fairfield Horseshoe is draped in thin grey clouds, like wisps of Herdwick wool; on Red Screes and the Kentmere Fells, flecks of snow cover mellow tints of autumn. Windermere is a long stretch of sombre silver, Esthwaite Water, a white shimmer, disrupted by the hatched reflections of branches. Tarn Hows is a prelude to Coniston, pale blue beyond; Wetherlam is mighty, dark and wintery, and largely lost in cloud. As I watch, Bowfell and Crinkle Crags are swallowed entirely. And yet above, a summer-like sky is blue and streaked with the slenderest wisps of cirrus. A church bell rings below in Hawkshead, and I shed an outer skin, warm in spring sunshine.

I walk on through a landscape of seasonal transition, of spring skies and winter trees, of distant snow and imminent growth. I pass a farmhouse where a woman skilfully executes a Tai Chi kata. I cross the Coniston to Ambleside road and climb the track past a paddock of belted Galloways to Hodge Close quarry. Sheer faces of rock, tunnelled with caverns and streaked with rich veins of red mineral, fall to a deep pool of copper blue. Many of the King’s Own Lancaster volunteers were quarrymen. Some may have worked here. Now it’s a playground for climbers and divers.

Beyond the quarry, I follow a path up to the old reservoir, an azure jewel in a cloak of russet and straw grass. A boggy expanse leads to the craggier outcrops of Holme Fell. I scramble up a rock step to reach the summit. Coniston Water stretches out below, a languid sheen of white sparkle. I drink coffee from a thermos and think about Jimmy Hewitson and the howitzer.

In January 2014, the then Education Minister, Michael Gove, wrote a piece for the Daily Mail in which he attacked dramas such as Oh What a Lovely War, The Monocled Mutineer and Blackadder for perpetuating “left-wing myths” that depict World War One “as a misbegotten shambles – a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite”. His point seemed to be that criticism of the war and the military tactics somehow “denigrate(s) virtues such as patriotism, honour and courage”. As Philip Hedley pointed out in The Guardian, Gove was so keen imagine a left-wing conspiracy, he conveniently ignored a significant fact: “important source material (for Oh What a Lovely War) came from the Tory MP Alan Clark’s book, The Donkeys, the title of which came from the phrase describing the soldiers as ‘lions led by donkeys’.” Gove was being disingenuous: historians may argue over the donkeys, but the courage of the lions has never been in question.

Mr Gove may not agree with the wide-held view that The Somme was the “epitome of military futility”, but Vicky told me there is some evidence that Sol, Ben and Richard came under friendly fire. I’m not really sure it would have made much difference to their mothers whether it was German, French or English hands that fired the fatal rounds. They’d have been devastated it was anyone.

If you re-read Michael Gove’s piece now, you’ll find he’s keen to draw parallels with modern challenges: “migrant populations on the move, rapid social upheaval, growing global economic interdependence, massive technological change and fragile confidence in political elites” – themes he’s revisited several times since, in the context of the European Union. In retrospect, it reads very like a politician hoping to use the WW1 commemorations to lay the groundwork for a referendum campaign. Whatever your view on Brexit or contemporary politics, manipulating the memory of ordinary men who made an extraordinary sacrifice, is cheap. It’s political opportunism, not a million miles away from placing a German howitzer in front of a grieving population. If you’d pulled a stunt like that on men like Jimmy Hewitson, Michael, I have a sneaking suspicion they’d have told you to jump in a lake.

For a map and directions for the Tarn Hows, Black Fell, Holme Fell walk, visit WalkLakes:

https://www.walklakes.co.uk/walk_111.html

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.

Millican Dalton's Cave — Millican Dalton’s Cave

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

Fell Walk, General, History, Literature

In My Time Of Dying

October 15, 2017 George Kitching 31 Comments

Haystacks and Wainwright.

As a teenager, my overriding aspiration was to move to the city and form a band. It was the start of a journey that would take me from the clubs of Newcastle to the pages of the NME and the very cusp of success, only to change direction and drop me in the wilds of Cumbria. En route, Jimi Hendrix would make room for a Borough Treasurer from Blackburn who disliked music, didn’t much like people, but loved the hills and whose writing opened my eyes to a whole new world. I pay tribute to this unlikeliest of heroes on top of Haystacks, the heather-clad hill where his ashes are scattered.

From Hendrix to the Hills

My heroes were all musicians: Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townshend, Gram Parsons, Paul Weller, Black Francis… I could go on. I grew up in the country among the gentle hills of Wiltshire, but when I was 18, it wasn’t higher fells I craved, it was the city. Somewhere with nightlife and a thriving alternative music scene; somewhere I could join a band and play loud electric guitar in dark, sweaty, smoky clubs.

I secured a place at Newcastle University but my studies came second to my musical aspirations. After some false starts and a few years learning how to make noises other people might deign to listen to, I found friends with the right collective chemistry and we formed a band that was half decent. We were called Hug, and together we achieved most of our teenage ambitions. We toured the country in a transit van; played support to some of our heroes; we secured a record contract and released three e.p.’s and an album. We recorded sessions for Radio 1; and, at the start of 1991, the New Musical Express named us, alongside the Manic Street Preachers and Ocean Colour Scene, as one of their top tips for the coming year.

Unfortunately, we were the exception that proved the rule. While others on the list shot into the arena of international stardom, our journey stalled at the perimeter, performed a three-point turn and deposited us back at the Gateshead DHSS, where our hopes of evading more traditional employment were unceremoniously quashed.

I signed up for a course at Newcastle Poly or Northumbria University, as it had just become (supposedly an eleventh-hour name change, after some bright spark on the committee realised that rebranding it, “The City University of Newcastle upon Tyne” wouldn’t abbreviate well). I was to learn about IT, a far cry from my original vision of a career, but one that might, at least, earn me a living.

I hadn’t long qualified when my wife, Sandy was offered a dream job in Cumbria. I urged her to take it and set about seeking opportunities for myself, eventually securing a role with a small company developing medical software for managing people on dangerous drugs (the prescribed, not the proscribed kind). It seemed an interesting and worthwhile use of my new skills and we settled in the South Lakes.

Our first house was on the edge of a wood, right out in the sticks. It took a few weeks to adjust. I’d never really understood the term, “the roaring silence” until then. When you live in a city for any length of time you stop hearing the constant hum of traffic, but it becomes a vaguely hypnotic backdrop; a subliminal reassurance that the buzz of human activity continues as normal. To have it suddenly removed was disconcerting. I remember lying awake, acutely aware that I could hear absolutely nothing. Then a barn owl screeched outside the open window and I nearly shot through the ceiling. A few months later, I heard the bark of a stag for the first time and thought the Hound of the Baskervilles was coming through the wood.

But the countryside had started to work its magic and, before long, I felt the draw of the mountains. I invested in a set of OS maps and some walking guides, including a set of laminated cards, which I still use, although their age is now apparent from the supporting notes, which advise the intrepid explorer to “invest in a pair of walking stockings and a spare pullover”.

An Unlikely Hero

As my interest grew, I become acquainted with a name that seemed almost synonymous with the Lakeland fells. In the Carnforth Bookshop, I chanced upon a second-hand copy of one of his books, “The Southern Fells” and snapped it up to see what the fuss was about. The pocket-sized tome was a little dog-eared and it had obviously witnessed, first-hand, the summits it described; but it was all the more special for it. Its content, however, was a revelation: a series of pen and ink drawings, part map, part sketch that ingeniously captured the essence of a mountain and rendered it on a 2D page in such a way that the reader instantly understood its character and topography. I had always admired the way artist, David Hockney could convey so much with such an economy of line. Here too, the author accomplished a similar feat; and the accompanying text was pure, heartfelt poetry. It spoke volumes in a few simple paragraphs shot-through with warmth, humour, passion and practical advice.

Suddenly, Jimi Hendrix and Pete Townshend had to shuffle along to make room for a pipe-smoking, whiskered, staunchly conservative old curmudgeon, who went by the name of Alfred Wainwright. An unlikely coalition to say the least – Wainwright once assured a bemused Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs that, “music has never played an important part in my life. It’s never been an inspiration to me. Rather an irritation, very often.”

Born in Blackburn, Alfred Wainwright grew up in relative poverty. His father was an alcoholic, who drank much of what little he earned as a stonemason. The young Alfred was bright and a model pupil at school, where he consistently scored top marks, but he was forced to leave at thirteen in order to support his mother.

He got a job as an office boy with the Blackburn Borough Engineer’s department, but continued his studies at night school and eventually qualified as an accountant, which enabled him to climb the career ladder and become Borough Treasurer.

If the young Wainwright’s diligent attempts to better his lot were an attempt to escape the hardships of his upbringing, poverty was not the only thing he wanted to flee. From an early age, he had shown a keen interest in walking and cartography. He produced his own maps and frequently eschewed the industrial urban environment for long days in the tranquility of the countryside.

At the age of twenty three, Alfred, or AW as he preferred to be known, came to the Lakes for a walking holiday with his cousin, Eric. They climbed Orrest Head, above Windermere, where they witnessed the Lakeland fells for the first time. He described the experience as “magic; a revelation so unexpected that I stood transfixed, unable to believe my eyes”.

A year later, AW entered into a disastrous marriage with Ruth Holden. Throughout their courtship, Wainwright kept his cap on. When he finally removed it on their wedding night, the sight of his red hair revolted her and both parties rapidly came to regret their decision. Despite the birth of their son, Peter in 1933, domestic relations did not improve and the lure of the Lakes as an escape grew ever stronger.

Wainwright’s biographer, Hunter Davies is convinced that had AW found happiness in his first marriage, he would have “walked far less and written nothing”. As it was, his trips to the fells became a weekly pilgrimage and he eventually took a pay cut to move to Kendal in 1941. Eleven years later, he started writing his Pictorial Guides as a “love letter” to the landscape that held him in such rapture.

That AW sought solace among the summits is abundantly obvious throughout his books. He describes finding “a balm for jangled nerves in the silence and solitude of the peaks” and of “man’s search for beauty, growing keener as so much in the world grows uglier”.

An intensely private man, he disliked crowds and disapproved of group excursions as evidenced in his mournful description of the popular route up the Old Man of Coniston: “This is the way the crowds go: the day trippers, the courting couples, babies and grandmothers, the lot. On this stony parade, fancy handbags and painted toenails are as likely to be seen as rucksacks and boots.” This is accompanied by a sketch of a lone walker looking to the fells while a crowd stares in the opposite direction, trying to spot Blackpool Tower.

By his own admission, Wainwright was a shy child who grew up to be anti-social, but the popular perception of an old curmudgeon is a little unfair. Bonhomie toward like-minded explorers runs right through his writing and his dry humour is everywhere.

In a personal note at the conclusion of his final Pictorial Guide, “The Western Fells”, AW lists his six best Lakeland mountains as “Scafell Pike, Bowfell, Pillar, Great Gable, Blencathra and Crinkle Crags”, then quickly qualifies the list, explaining, “These are not necessarily the six fells I like the best. It grieves me to have to omit Haystacks (most of all)”.

Haystacks is not technically a mountain, being just short of the requisite 2000 ft, and AW is being objective in omitting it on these grounds; but this relatively diminutive hill captured his heart more than any other. He describes it as standing “unabashed and unashamed amid a circle of higher fells, like a shaggy terrier in the company of foxhounds”… “For a man trying to get a persistent worry out of his mind, the top of Haystacks is a wonderful cure.”

The “persistent worry” of his home life continued until, in his own words, “my wife left me, took the dog and I never saw her again”. AW eventually found matrimonial happiness when he married an old friend, Betty McNally. She became not only his spouse but his walking companion. After his death in 1991, Betty carried out AW’s long-held wish and scattered his ashes by Innominate Tarn on top of his beloved Haystacks.

Haystacks and Fleetwith Pike

It’s been years since I climbed Haystacks and when I did, the top was shrouded in mist. It’s high time I return. I leave the house at 6:00 am for a glorious drive that runs the full lengths of Windermere, Rydal Water, Grasmere, Thirlmere and Derwent Water. From the high level drama of the Honister Pass, I descend to Gatesgarth with Buttermere stretched out before me, sparkling in the September sun.

I park the car and follow the stream through the farmyard and out toward High Crag, towering ahead. To my left, Fleetwith Edge soars up over Low and High Raven Crags to the top of Fleetwith Pike. This is my intended descent. It looks a little daunting from below, but the views will be outstanding. Between these two loftier neighbours lies Haystacks, a dwarf in comparison but no grassy hillock, its craggy rock-face hints at the interest on top.

I must have slept at an odd angle as I have a stiff neck which the drive has turned into a dull headache. Wainwright famously declared, “one can forget even a raging toothache on Haystacks”, so I’m sure it won’t bother me for long, but as I round a little coppice of trees, I find a sealed tray of paracetamol in the path. I don’t really believe in fate but can’t deny the serendipity and it feeds a strange feeling that I’m somehow supposed to be here today.

I start the climb up to Scarth Gap between Haystacks and High Crag, pausing occasionally to cast an eye back over Buttermere and Crummock Water. On reaching Scarth Gap, I’m greeted with fine views over Ennerdale to two of Lakeland’s heavyweights, Pillar and Great Gable. Pillar’s precipitous northern slopes are bathed in green shadow, sheer and formidable. I try to trace the High Level Traverse between the crags to the magnificent column of Pillar Rock, from which the mountain takes its name. I lose the line of the path (apparently it’s not much easier to follow when you’re on it).

A cloud floats across the face of Gable, a huge dark turret rising from the valley head. Over Buttermere, the bulky mass of Grassmoor dominates, while here, across the saddle, the path climbs steeply to the rocky heights of High Crag. These are the “foxhounds” in whose company the “shaggy terrier” behind me stands “unabashed and unashamed”. I turn around and continue the climb to discover why.

The question is quickly answered as the ascent turns into a scramble; nothing technically difficult, but challenging enough to establish this as mountain terrain, good and proper, and the rival of any of its neighbours. On reaching the parapet, Haystacks’ treasures are revealed in full – a heather-clad castle of rocky towers and tiny tarns, leading eyes and feet in a merry dance of intrigue. Two excrescences of stone vie for the distinction of summit, although the honour is usually bestowed on the farther one, which boasts a cairn as its crown.

Cloud shadows dapple the flanks of High Crag as I look back across a small blue pond that glistens like an overture to the watery expanse of Buttermere beyond. I’m almost entirely alone, but for two distant figures perched precariously atop the turret of Big Stack, framed against the plunging crags of Fleetwith Pike. Everywhere I turn is magical and somehow otherworldly. Haystacks has all the rugged drama of its neighbours but here, in place of a desolate wilderness of boulder, is a wild beauty and a pervading sense of tranquillity.

Walker perched on Big Stack with Fleetwith Pike behind — Walkers perched on Big Stack with Fleetwith Pike behind

High Stile over summit cairn, Haystacks — High Stile over a summit tarn on Haystacks

I cross a depression and clamber to the true summit for another breathtaking panorama; then meander down through the heather, where herdwicks graze happily, to the peaceful shore of Innominate Tarn. AW’s wish to be scattered here is expressed more than once in his writings, but never as fully and eloquently as in Memoirs of a Fellwanderer, where he says this:

“All I ask for, at the end, is a last long resting place by the side of Innominate Tarn, on Haystacks, where the water gently laps the gravelly shore and the heather blooms and Pillar and Gable keep unfailing watch. A quiet place, a lonely place.

“I shall go to it, for the last time, and be carried – someone who knew me in life will take me and empty me out of a little box and leave me there alone. And if you, dear reader, should get a bit of grit in your boot as you are crossing Haystacks in the years to come, please treat it with respect. It might be me”.

I’m transfixed by the gently rippling waters and could easily linger all day. AW was not a religious man. He knew heaven was right here and to mingle with this soil and feed the heather was his hope for an afterlife. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…

To Wainwright, true music was here – in birdsong, or the tinkling of a mountain stream, or the sound of the wind among the peaks. I can’t argue with that. It’s perfect.

Eventually, I wrestle myself away and follow the path as it wends down through some remarkable rock scenery to Dubs Bottom, from where I start the ascent of Fleetwith Pike.

The contrast could not be more striking. The intoxicating spell of a natural Shangri-La is broken by the harsh scars of industry in the spoil heaps and engineered gullies of Dubs quarry. From here, the path follows the line of an old works tramway to the head of Honister Crag, known as Black Star. Wainwright describes Black Star as “a place without beauty. A place to daunt they eye and creep the flesh”. The crag itself is not in view, but on the horizon a spoil heap rises, battleship grey, like a dark and sinister tower. If Haystacks was a fairy tale fortress, the vision ahead is the Castle of the Dolorous Guard, straight from the page of Arthurian legend. “Dub” is a Celtic word for black and right on cue, the sky darkens. It’s enough to send a slight shiver down the spine.

It would be remiss to imply the old quarry workings are a lamentable eyesore, however. Industrial heritage holds its own fascination, especially as it is slowly reclaimed by nature. AW understood that Lakeland isn’t a true wilderness. The hand of man is everywhere, from the intricate pattern of dry stone walls enclosing lush green grazing pastures in the valley bottoms to the shafts and tunnels of old mines that pierce the fell sides. As he put it (in describing Honister), “there is no beauty in despoliation and devastation but there can be dramatic effect and interest and so it is here”.

But the desolate outcrop of Black Star is not my destination and I turn left after Dubs Hut (maintained as a bothy by the Mountain Bothies Association) and climb beside a slate-filled gully to two spoil heaps where I pick up a path left, which meanders over open moorland to the summit of Fleetwith Pike. Here, one of the finest views in Lakeland awaits, looking straight down the valley over Buttermere and Crummock Water with distant Loweswater curving off to the left.

I sit and stare at this majestic scene as I eat my lunch, then begin the plunging descent of Fleetwith Edge. It’s not nearly as daunting as it appeared from below. There are some steep rock steps to negotiate and some minor scrambling, but nothing too difficult if due care is taken. The path follows well chosen zigzags and is impossible to rush, not only because you need to watch your footing, but also because it’s absolutely necessary to pause frequently and marvel at the improving vista.

At the bottom, I join the road and I’m suddenly struck by the hope that my gaitors have done their job. What if I find a bit of grit in my boot? I can’t leave AW in the car park, he hated cars.

I look back and notice the white wooden cross low on the fell side. This marks the spot where Fanny Mercer, a servant girl from Rugby, fell from Fleetwith Edge in September 1887 (130 years ago, this month). Her simple memorial is a sobering reminder that the fells can be treacherous as well as beautiful. It’s heartbreaking to think one so young was robbed of her life on what should have been a joyful excursion.

Fanny Mercer's cross — Fanny Mercer’s cross

Tragic accidents occur daily, some of much greater magnitude than the sad story of a servant girl from over a hundred years ago. And yet this simple cross remains affecting because there’s no objective yardstick for pain. That whole communities are devastated by fire, flood, disease or famine doesn’t negate the suffering of someone bruised by a failed relationship or grieving the loss of a loved one. We all have our crosses to bear, however big or small, but ironically, it’s often hardship that sharpens our senses to the beauty in the world. The most affecting songs are rooted in heartbreak and it was perhaps the pain of a loveless marriage that led Wainwright to find hope, inspiration and validation among these hills. I hope Fanny experienced a little of that wonder too, before her life was cut so abruptly short.

“The fleeting hour of life of those who love the hills is quickly spent, but the hills are eternal. Always there will be the lonely ridge, the dancing beck, the silent forest; always there will be the exhilaration of the summits. These are for the seeking, and those who seek and find while there is still time will be blessed both in mind and body” – A Wainwright.

Crime, Fell Walk, General, History

A Walk on the Wild Side

September 10, 2017 George Kitching 17 Comments

The Mosedale Horseshoe and a Night at Black Sail

A tough but beautiful walk around the Mosedale Horseshoe takes in some of England’s finest mountain scenery and ends with a night at the country’s remotest youth hostel, deep in the wilds of Ennerdale. It begins by the shore of Wastwater, where the sight of divers kitting up in the car park, stirs memories of a notorious 80’s murder enquiry.

The Lady in the Lake

There’s something utterly wild about Wastwater. Forget the pastoral prettiness of Windermere or Coniston, England’s deepest lake is a feral beast; savagely beautiful but ever poised to bare its teeth. On this July morning, the sky is overcast and there’s a distinct chill in the breeze. The choppy waters are gun-barrel grey, rippled with white-crested waves; dark and inscrutable, daring you to guess at the secrets beneath.

In the wooded parking area beside Overbeck Bridge, two men are preparing to find out. As they don dry suits and all manner of sophisticated diving gear, Tim remarks they must reckon it’ll be seriously cold. One of the divers looks up and smiles, “yeah, at 40 metres down, the temperature stays pretty much the same all year round”.

40 metres is the limit for diving with compressed air. Below that, special suits and gas mixtures are needed to survive. For all the lake’s imagined mystery, what most divers find is an endless expanse of mud; or perhaps, if they’re lucky, the gnome garden, introduced by an enterprising soul to add a bit of novelty to the view.

On occasion, though, Wastwater has yielded darker secrets. In 1984, Neil Pritt was diving at a depth of 34 metres when he spied a rolled-up carpet tied to a concrete block. At first, he dismissed it as the efforts of an ambitious fly-tipper, but aware that police had recently searched the lake, looking for missing French fell-walker, Veronique Mireille Marre, Neil took a closer look. His suspicions were confirmed – the carpet concealed the body of a woman.
But it wasn’t Veronique. Whoever she was, she’d been down there some time. The cold had preserved her so well, it was only a matter of days before police made a positive ID. In the meantime, the press dubbed her “The Lady of the Lake”.

When investigators removed her wedding ring, it bore the inscription, “Margaret 15-11-63 Peter”. Detectives made the connection with the case of Margaret Hogg from Guildford, reported missing by her husband, Peter in 1976. Peter was arrested. Under interrogation, he capitulated and confessed to killing his wife but claimed extreme provocation. He told the Old Bailey how Margaret had been having an affair, which she made little effort to conceal. According to his testimony, on the night in question, Margaret tired of merely taunting her husband and physically attacked him. Peter retaliated by grabbing her by the throat and squeezing hard. When the life went out of her eyes, he stopped. When she slumped to the floor, he realised she was dead and coolly hatched a plan that very nearly proved the perfect crime.

After wrapping Margaret’s body in an old carpet, Peter put her in the boot of the car with a rubber dingy, a roll of carpet, and a concrete block. Then he drove through the night to Wastwater. Had Peter rowed out a few metres further, Margaret’s body would have fallen into the “abyss” and sunk all the way to the bottom, at nearly twice the depth a diver could reach. As it was, she came to rest on a shelf just under half way down, where she would remain for the next eight years.

I’m not sure what a modern jury would have made of Peter’s defence, but in 1984, a woman’s infidelity was enough to hand the moral high ground to the man. Peter was acquitted of murder and given three years for manslaughter, plus an extra year for obstructing the coroner and committing perjury in divorce proceedings.

Veronique’s body was later found at the bottom of Broken Rib Crag. The coroner returned an open verdict, but there was nothing to suggest that this was anything other than a tragic accident.

The Mosedale Horseshoe

For all its brooding solitude, Wastwater is magnificently beautiful. The vista over lake, to the fells at its head, has been voted Britain’s favourite view. Great Gable takes centre stage, while in the foreground, resembling the hull of an upturned boat, stands Yewbarrow. Yewbarrow is the start of the Mosedale Horseshoe, an airy circuit that boasts some of the finest mountain scenery in Lakeland. Tim and I are going to walk the ridge to its highest point on Pillar. From there, we’ll descend into the wilds of neighbouring Ennerdale for a night at England’s remotest youth hostel – the Black Sail hut.

We leave the car park following the stream, cross a stile, and turn right on to a steep and unrelenting grass slope. Ahead is the formidable face of Bell Rib. There doesn’t appear to be a way up for mere mortals. Indeed, Wainwright declares it “unclimbable except by experts”, adding, “maps showing paths going straight over it are telling fibs”. Fortunately, the Ordnance Survey is less aspirational. Their route skirts left and climbs between Bell Rib and Dropping Crag. Such is the gradient, we’re looking for the fork long before we reach it.

The path ends abruptly at a steep, stone-filled gully. We put hand to rock and start to climb. At just over 2000 ft., Yewbarrow is the baby of the group, but it’s no mean mountain and won’t surrender its summit without a struggle.

At the top, a grass slope leads to a narrow ridge beyond Bell Rib. Behind us, Wastwater is a shimmer of silver beneath the whitening cloud. When we reach the crest, a dramatic cleft in the crags, known as The Great Door, frames a canvas of rich but sombre tones: the shadowed lake a dark sash of royal satin, deep and vivid blue; hemmed by the solemn Screes, their slopes mottled with daubs of gold and green, and deftly flecked with feathered brushstrokes, like copper flames that flicker up to kiss a scarf of purple heather.

Poised above the water’s edge, a dark vestigial verge of coppice, a lone patch of fur on an else clean-shaven pelt.

Cupped high among bottle-green spires, Burnmoor Tarn is a glint, a duck-egg glimmer, a hint of hidden brightness, cajoling the bashful sun to break cover.

A few easy rock steps remain between here and the summit. When we arrive, the panorama is remarkable; Pillar rises like barnacled leviathan from the mossy sea of Mosedale; sunlight gilds the green skirts of Kirk Fell and, to the east, the Roof of England is cloaked in cloud, Mickledore just visible through the mist like a gateway to Middle Earth.

Across a depression, we stride up Stirrup Crag and glimpse our onward path. Thin wisps of cloud float like wood smoke around the top of Red Pike. A faint path snakes through charcoal crags to a carpet of olive green above.

The way lies across Dore Head, some 300 feet below. If we’d studied the contours we’d have known the path that swung left, a little way back, was the easier proposition. As it is, we stick with the one we’re on and climb down the crag itself; descending abruptly through a maze of chimneys; easing down bulwarks on jagged ledges; stepping back from dead-ends that stop in sudden drops. It’s slow and a touch unnerving, but there’s only one sticky moment: a parapet I think I can shimmy down in two small stretches. But I misjudge. Now, over-committed, I’m obliged to jump – a little too far for comfort. Thankfully, I land well, with all extremities intact, and manage not to career over the next edge.

Once down, we’re slightly shocked at how severe Stirrup Crag looks from below and wonder if we’d have attempted it had we known. I later read that Wainwright left a trail of blood over these rocks and feel relieved they weren’t craving a fresh sacrifice. For some reason, Tim chooses now to mention that the Black Sail Youth Hostel cancellation policy includes a plea to the effect – “let us know if you are not coming. If we’re expecting you and you don’t show, we’ll send out Mountain Rescue.” I’m not sure whether it’s a comfort or a concern.

A party of around 15 fresh faced teenagers has arrived at Dore Head ahead of us. They took the sensible path. In fact, they may have bypassed Yewbarrow altogether. They’re now comfortably ensconced in a rest and refreshment break that looks set to extend indefinitely. If they’re going to tackle the full round at this rate, it could prove a very long day. I hope they’re not descending from here, though. The traditional way down to Mosedale is a notorious scree slope. Once the delight of scree runners, it’s now so dangerously eroded it looks concave from below. A grass rake offers an alternative but even that looks severe. I think of Veronique Marre and conclude some risks just aren’t worth taking; then try not to think about that as I look back over Stirrup Crag on the way up Red Pike.

Once on top, isolated shafts of sunlight steal through cracks in the cloud. Scoat Tarn sparkles to the south, the adamantine lustre of lost treasure, scattered in the bracken. Haycock is now in sight, while, northward, Great Gable rises over Kirk Fell, a pyramid no more, but a mighty dome, surged from the earth in an ancient eruption of volcanic violence. Beyond the summit, we perch on crags above Black Combe and eat pies, looking across to Pillar and the stiff stream of scree tapering to the col of Wind Gap.

Out of the breeze, it’s warm. Certainly, warm enough for midges to swarm around Tim. Apparently, he only had space in his rucksack for one bottle, so it was a toss-up between sun cream and midge repellent. He went with sun cream, which is probably why the sun has, so far, been so coy. Tim swears by a midge repellent that’s marketed by Avon as a moisturiser. It’s called Skin So Soft and whenever he produces a bottle, he feels compelled to assure me “it’s what the SAS use”. He retreats into the breeze and the midges turn on me, so I’m compelled to join him.

We climb the saddle to Scoat Fell and catch our first sight of Ennerdale Water, a pale sheen against the dense green of the pine plantations on its banks. The summit lies a little to our left and a fine ridge runs out to Steeple, which looks as inspiring as its name. It’s all too tempting for anyone with fire in their blood. But we’ll have fire in our bellies too and we still have some way to go before we reach Black Sail. Supper is served at seven, so to arrive ravenous and find we’d missed it would be miserable. There’s also that thing in the cancellation clause that convinces us to press on to Black Crags without detour. From there, we descend to Wind Gap and begin the tough pull up to Pillar. With the exertion, any residual disappointment at skipping Steeple turns to quiet relief.

Few labours reward so richly, however. As we reach the summit, the sun breaks through, illuminating the landscape in way that is nothing short of magical. Pillar Rock rises majestically above a sward of conifer; Great Gable is a tower of rugged glory; Broad Stand, finally free of cloud, a brutal bastion on the ramparts of Sca Fell. But as shafts of sunlight dance across the slopes, this terrain of intransigent rock manages to evoke nothing so much as a swirling Turner seascape: the white splashes of exposed rock are surf and spray; dark crags, the welling eddies; the wave upon wave of rolling peaks, a surging ocean, every shade of green.

High Crag, Robinson and Hindscarth from Pillar

All the way down to Looking Stead, I linger, attempting to capture this on camera. It’s beyond my skills and if I lavish words, it’s only to try and convey what pictures fail to tell.

At the top of Black Sail Pass, we meet a man who asks us if we’ve seen a party of 15 teenagers. They’re not late, he’s just bored of waiting. Something tells me he’s in for a long day.

Black Sail Hut

We descend into Ennerdale, where, in the remotest corner of this wildest of valleys, lies an old shepherd’s bothy: The Black Sail Hut, now a Youth Hostel and our home for the night. A warm welcome and cold beers await. We sit outside on wooden benches in the golden light of evening and watch the Galloway cattle, that roam free like big black bison, old as the hills.

Tim disappears for a shower and I watch a small figure wend her way down the long path from Windy Gap, between Great and Green Gable. When she arrives, she unshoulders her pack, grabs a beer and joins me outside. We compare notes on our routes. As we chat, I suddenly realise why she looks familiar. It’s Yvonne, a friend of my wife’s from about ten years ago. Yvonne is a high-powered consultant to head gardeners. I’ve only met her once, when she led a tour of the grounds in a Lakeland stately home, dispensing invaluable tricks and tips, some of which I wrote down and perpetually promise to put into practice. She asks about Sandy and we laugh out loud at the odds of meeting like this. Tim reappears around the corner, and the midges make a bee-line for him. Yvonne proffers a bottle of repellent. “Skin So Soft” he beams delightedly, then drops his voice an octave and adds “the SAS use it, you know”.

Great Gable from Black Sails Hut — Great Gable from Black Sail Hut

Relaxing at Black Sails Hut — Relaxing at Black Sail Hut

After supper, we sip beers and swap stories with two guys sharing our dorm. They’re old friends from London, who have moved out of the capital in different directions but meet up once or twice a year for walking holidays. They’ve been in the Lakes all week, tramping the hills and staying in hostels. There are three of them but the third has turned in for an early night. Unsurprisingly, he’s the first up in the morning. I join him for a coffee while we wait for breakfast. He tells me how they got a light soaking on top of Haystacks late yesterday afternoon.

“That’s odd” I say, “we were on Pillar around that time, looking down on Haystacks. It looked as if it was in sunshine.”

He looks puzzled, then shrugs, “perhaps it was earlier – three-ish possibly”. Very localised showers are possible in the hills, but it still doesn’t quite add up.

“We stayed at Honister Youth Hostel, last night”, he continues.

“No, you didn’t”, I shout (silently), “you stayed here. I’ve just seen you get out of bed”.

“We’ve been lucky today though”, he goes on, “it’s been dry all day”.

Incredulous, I want to scream, “It’s quarter to eight in the morning. You’ve not been anywhere yet and besides, it’s bucketing it down”… but then I realise, he’s just a day out. By “today”, he means “yesterday”, “yesterday” means the day before. Suddenly, everything makes sense. It’s pretty much the same account we got from his mates – you just have to subtract a day.

It’s an odd idiosyncrasy, but I can think of two possible explanations: he’s either a timelord or, after several consecutive days on the fells, the days begin to blur. I’ve been out for one night and I can already understand that.

Everything that seems so integral to our existence – the bustle of the working week, its routines, schedules, deadlines – simply dwindles in importance out here; it’s all fluster, all folly, all “sound and fury, signifying nothing”. Our own inflated sense of self-importance, seems equally ridiculous. Set against the timeless scale of this primal landscape, our hive and industry seem no more significant than the swarming of midges.

I scratch the bites and the simile suddenly seems poignant – we too do disproportionate damage. Wainwright called Ennerdale’s pine plantations an act of vandalism – a defacing of the indigenous landscape – but we do much worse than this. And with a climate change denier in the White House, efforts to curb our excesses are under threat.

In the 60’s, a NASA scientist called James Lovelock wrote a book called GAIA, in which he argues the Earth acts like a single living organism. Its ecosystems adapt and evolve to marginalise or eliminate threats. If he’s right, even now, the planet could be developing a natural strain of Skin So Soft to send us blighters packing.

My mind wanders back to the here and now where my new acquaintance is finishing his account. I conclude he’s a timelord and we refer to him thereafter as the Doctor.

With the cloud down and heavy rain set in, we abandon plans to climb Great Gable and head back over the Black Sail Pass. It’s an opportunity postponed, not lost, as one thing is certain. We’re coming back here.

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

Ghosts of Canadian Airmen

July 16, 2017 George Kitching 21 Comments

Wetherlam, Swirl How & Great Carrs via Steel Edge

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

Sheep Folds

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andy Goldsworthy Touchstone Fold, Tilberthwaite

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andy Goldsworthy Sheepfold, Tilberthwaite

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

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

Steel Edge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LL505 S for Sugar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mountain Top Memorial, Great Carrs — Mountain Top Memorial

Haunted

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

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

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

Monuments

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

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

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

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

Fell Walk, History, Natural History

Redemption Song

February 19, 2017 George Kitching 7 Comments

The Herdwicks of Harter Fell

From Eskdale, a walk up the heather-clad flanks of Harter Fell sets in motion a train of thought about the herdwick sheep and how they were nearly wiped out by foot and mouth disease. Recollections of those dark days in 2001 turn into a tribute to the remarkable men and women who brought this iconic breed back from the brink.

Epidemic

I’d lived in Cumbria for three years when foot and mouth disease struck. In early 2001, it was easy to tap into the collective anxiety as the news reports rolled in, but at first it felt like something that was happening somewhere else.

Then one day, I drove home from work to find the sky thick with black smoke. I didn’t put two and two together until I stepped out of the car and the smell hit my nostrils. I knew it at once and it evoked classrooms – familiar, faintly nostalgic, sickening it its current context – it smelt of glue.

Several animals on one of the nearby farms had tested positive for the disease. The panicked government policy at the time wouldn’t allow for isolating the infected and protecting the healthy; instead, slaughter-men were summoned to dispatch the whole herd. Now, they were burning the carcasses and the air was thick with the smell of collagen from the rendered hides and hooves.

Several other neighbouring farms followed suit. These were just over the county border in Lancashire, where things were bad, but the toll in Cumbria itself would become the worst in Britain. In a desperate effort to contain the disease, the government introduced a policy of “contiguous cull”, which meant all animals within 3km of an infected site were slaughtered. Farmers would sit with OS maps sprawled out on their kitchen tables, anxiously awaiting the news bulletins and plotting the distance from the latest outbreaks to their own fields, breathing sighs of reprieve or collapsing into despair depending on the report.

Children in infected areas were not allowed to go to school as the virus can survive for up to two weeks on contaminated clothing. Teenagers studying for A levels were sent to stay with friends and not permitted to return for the duration of the epidemic. Yet, in the distant halls of Westminster, Margaret Beckett announced that “farmers aren’t in quarantine”.

Large areas of the Lake District National Park were closed to prevent visitors spreading the disease. Businesses built on tourism were hit hard and farmers who’d diversified by building holiday lets on their land suffered a double-whammy.

Every day heart-breaking stories were recounted, not only of the slaughter itself, but of its bungled government-directed execution: calves discovered alive under the carcasses of their mothers; ill-briefed slaughtermen killing the sheep dogs along with the flock; dead animals left to bloat and rot for days before their burial or cremation could be arranged; and, almost inevitably, given the depth of despair among those who had lost everything, there were suicides.

The exact number of animals culled has never been admitted, but the Visit Cumbria website, that worked hard to make information available during crisis, estimates the national toll to be in the region of 20 million. Visit Cumbria’s Foot and Mouth pages are now closed, but they have left in place four poignant reports from those dark times, which you can find at: Visit Cumbria – Foot and Mouth Disease

They all warrant reading, but perhaps the most harrowingly evocative is Annie Mawson’s Open Letter to the People of Cumbria:

An open letter to the people of Cumbria

As an “offcomer” with no root in the local farming community, Foot and Mouth was something I glimpsed from over the wall, but Annie was right in the heart of it. At one point in the letter she says this, “I have always compared the herdwick sheep to men like my dear Dad, who once farmed the Wasdale fells: just like them he was wise and hardy, strong and sensitive, gruff and gentle, and for the first time in 10 years, I am glad he is not alive to witness this hell on earth.”

Herdies

Nothing is perhaps more iconic of the Lake District than the herdwick. These hardy mountain sheep are remarkable. I recently watched one on a rocky outcrop on Dow Crag caught between two sheer gullies and apparently in some distress. I feared the worst and could hardly bear to watch, convinced she was about to fall. Ten minutes later, the reason for her agitation became clear – she wasn’t distraught about how to get down, she was trying to find a way up to sparse patch of grass on a little plateau above. When she figured it out, she stood grazing triumphantly on the most precarious pasture imaginable. Half an hour later, she had found her way back down to the bottom of the crags with no bother at all.

Herdies, as they are affectionately known, are born black but turn a chocolate brown within a year. After their first shearing, their fleece lightens to a grey which whitens with age. They are hardy enough to withstand the harsh conditions on the high Cumbrian fells. Each flock knows its own territory or “heaf” and stays within these invisible boundaries. This knowledge is passed down from ewe to lamb. Cumbrian farms traditionally have small amounts of privately owned “in bye” land in the valleys, but hold common grazing rights to the fell sides. As the turf knowledge of each heaf rests with the sheep, the animals change hands with the land, meaning some flocks have been in residence for centuries longer than their current owners’ families.

For those of us who love to walk the Lakeland hills, these ovine custodians are an inextricable part of the landscape, but that nearly changed forever with Foot and Mouth. The majority of herdwicks are farmed within 14 miles of Coniston, a concentration that made them very vulnerable to such an outbreak. As the virus spread and the culling escalated there were real fears that this rare breed, so emblematic of the Lakes, might be wiped out completely.

But Cumbrians of both the two-legged and four-legged varieties are made of sterner stuff. In 2015, after Storm Desmond wreaked havoc in the county, artist Andy Watson produced a variation on the standard flood road sign. It’s image, snapped in situ on the approach to a Carlisle bridge, went viral. It said simply:

Welcome to Carlisle
Weak Bridge
Strong People

It’s an epithet that’s been earned time and again, but never more so than in the wake of Foot and Mouth when farmers and shepherds began the painful and painstaking process of rebuilding their flocks, herds and lives. With herdies, there were added complications as the territorial knowledge that resided with the animals had been largely lost and shepherds had to re-“heaf” newcomers, spending long hours out on the hills teaching the sheep to recognise their invisible boundaries.

It wasn’t the first time herdies had been threatened. In the early twentieth century, farmers were largely turning to other more commercial breeds. Children’s author, Beatrix Potter bought a farm with the profits from her first book and together with her shepherd, Tom Storey, began breeding herdwicks. During the 1930’s, she won several awards at county shows and even became president of the breed association for a period. By the time of her death, Potter owned 15 farms spanning some 4,000 acres, which she bequeathed to the National Trust on the understanding they continue to breed herdwicks. As such, herdies owe their persistence, in part, to a carrot-pinching, blue-jacket-wearing rabbit called Peter.

This wasn’t a train of thought I was expecting to follow when I bagged the last roadside parking place at the foot of the Hardknott pass, just beyond Boot and Jubilee Bridge. As I crossed the stream and turned right up a path to the grassy slopes of Harter Fell, nothing but the joys of a Saturday morning hill walk in the south western Lake District were drifting through my mind.

Harter Fell

I veered left at Spothow Gill to follow the cairned path that winds up to the summit through the swathes of purple heather. Half way up, I paused and gazed west over the wild expanse of Birker Fell toward the Irish Sea, shimmering in the distance. As I turned my eyes back to the slopes before me, I recalled Wainwright’s perfect description, “not many fells can be described as beautiful, but the word fits Harter Fell, especially when viewed from Eskdale. The lower slopes on this flank climb steeply from the tree-lined curves of the river Esk in a luxurious covering of bracken, higher is a wider belt of heather, and finally spring grey turrets and ramparts of rock to a neat and shapely pyramid”.

But, as I sit here on the highest of the three rocky outcrops that comprise the peak, looking out over this timeless terrain, and I watch two herdwick ewes with their young lambs, jet black apart from the white rings around their eyes and mouths that make you think they’re wearing balaclavas; and two more, playfully vying for the pre-eminent position atop a lofty boulder; I appreciate how easily this might not have been. It’s daunting to think how bereft these slopes would be without the herdwicks that define them. And I acknowledge, not for the first time, that this county I have made my home, and which I have come to love so deeply, is not just about spectacular landscapes, it’s also about some pretty remarkable people and some very resilient animals.

It also has the most bloody fickle weather imaginable. The Met Office promised sunny spells and excellent visibility and on the way up that looked a likely prospect. My planned descent to the crest of Hardknott Pass is famed for its spectacular views of Scafell Pike, but just as I’m leaving the summit, a bank of low lying cloud rolls in and obscures the Scafell Massif completely. I have one of those disconcerting moments where the path forks and my instinct is to keep right, but, with the key landmarks hidden, I check the compass. It is unequivocal in directing me left. This feels completely wrong, but experience has taught me to distrust instinct and, in the event, the compass doesn’t let me down. The descent is boggy and the path sketchy. In the end, I lose it completely and decide to follow the line of a fence, knowing I must cross it at some point lower down. Progress is painstakingly slow as the grass is long and covers a quagmire, so I have to test every step to ensure I don’t sink.

Hard Knott Roman Fort

It’s with some relief that I attain the road that runs over the pass. This is surely England’s most scenic white-knuckle drive. The gradient is 1 in 4, even 1 in 3 in places and the hairpin bends are ridiculously tight. You might question the wisdom of stepping out on foot on to such a treacherous-sounding thoroughfare, but, at walking pace, you’re not going much slower than the traffic.

I walk down to the first hairpin where a girl is cycling up the impossible gradient with all the steely determination of a herdwick. When she reaches me, she stops for a breather. I express my admiration and she tells me she fell off lower down and shows me the grazes to prove it. I leave her to tackle the next section and turn right away from the road on to a footpath, then promptly sink, almost knee-deep, in black bog water. Cursing myself for taking my eye off the ball, I extricate myself and tread more carefully over the intervening ground to the Hardknott Roman fort.

Encountering the well-preserved remains of a Roman fort, high on a Cumbrian fell, is an impressive experience, but you’re left in no doubt as to why they built it here. It commands panoramic views over Eskdale, breathtaking for the leisure walker, but no doubt of more strategic significance to its original inhabitants. It would have been harsh in winter, mind, and there must have been many a young auxiliary, used to gentler Mediterranean climes, who stood shivering on guard duty, cursing that flirtatious dalliance with the captain’s daughter, or whatever indiscretion earned him this remote posting.

I read an information board that tells me I’m standing in front of the Commandant’s house. It would have been quite a residence in its time, befitting of status and rank, with a central courtyard and easy access to the communal bath house. Today a herdwick ewe grazes within its walls. It’s on her heaf. She’s the commandant now; and who am I to argue?

Post Script

In 2012, Lakeland Herdwick meat was awarded Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) status, putting it on a par with Stilton cheese and Melton Mowbray pork pies. This means that only animals that were born, reared and slaughtered in Cumbria can be sold as “Lakeland Herdwick”. It’s a vital step to safeguarding the authenticity and quality of the breed and provides a justly deserved protection for the farmers. With Herdwick lamb and mutton finding its way on to the menus of top London restaurants, Cumbrian farmers can now enjoy a measure of financial security in reward for their commitment.

Fell Walk, History, Legend

The Stuff of Legend

October 30, 2016 George Kitching 5 Comments

Helvellyn via Grisedale Tarn from Thirlmere

On a stunning hill walk over the Helvellyn range, I discover a teddy bear with a tragic tale to tell and delve into history and folklore to encounter a lost Celtic crown, a ghost army, a reckless romantic artist eulogised for the manner of his death and a dog’s devotion that endured beyond the grave.

Nestled between the mighty flanks of Fairfield and the hefty Helvellyn massif, Grisedale Tarn has an eerie, other-worldly majesty. As the cloud hangs low over its silent waters, you can almost imagine a hand emerging from its depths and holding aloft Excalibur. But it’s another Celtic chieftain whose legend pervades here.

Dunmail was the last of the Cumbrian kings, slain in a bloody battle with massed Scottish and Saxon forces. His men were routed, mutilated and forced to build a large cairn, Dunmail Raise, on the spot where their chieftain fell. To save Dunmail’s crown from Saxon mitts, they cast it into Grisedale Tarn, where it is rumoured to remain. Legend has it that, every year, a ghostly army returns, retrieves the crown and carries it back to Dunmail Raise, convinced their king will, one day, rise again and reclaim his kingdom.

Today, the cairn sits on the central reservation of a short stretch of dual carriageway between Grasmere and Keswick, just before the A591 skirts the shore of Thirlmere. Turn away from the tarmac however, and climb the path alongside the cascading waters of Raise Beck, and the modern world quickly fades. By the time you reach the tarn, the stuff of legend is tangible.

Some fine ridge walks converge here. Walkers from Patterdale, with lofty ambitions and matching energy levels, can conquer St Sunday Crag and climb Fairfield by the rocky pinnacle of Cofa Pike. I’m heading for Helvellyn, which means the zigzag path up the southern slope of Dollywagon Pike.

As if still in mourning for Dunmail’s demise, the sky darkens and the cloud comes down. By the time I reach the top it’s enveloped in a thick mist. The way to Helvellyn is wide and easily followed, but Dollywagon’s summit requires a brief detour. I follow the sketchy path along the line of the crags. Distant silhouettes of walkers and some jubilant whoops reassure me I’m heading in the right direction. Soon, the summit cairn comes into view and the reason for their felicity is revealed. A party of charity fundraisers is preparing for a group photo, unfurling their “24 peak challenge” banner in triumph. The celebrations are cut abruptly short, when a navigationally diligent member realises this isn’t Helvellyn after all, and the banner is duly packed away.

As they dissolve into the murk in search of the right mountain, I’m left alone on a slender promontory descending all around into cloud.

Then I notice something out of place. A small teddy bear, tucked carefully behind a rock. It clearly hasn’t been dropped by accident, but what is it doing here? It has a laminated card tagged to its ear bearing the web address, https://www.facebook.com/angelbabycassie.

It’s been placed by a grieving father in memory of his stillborn daughter, Cassie Elizabeth. Nicky Bloor has set himself the challenge of climbing the 100 highest peaks in England and Wales in order to raise awareness and fund help for other parents going through this harrowing experience. On each summit, he leaves a teddy, like the one he’d bought for Cassie. The one she never got to hug.

A sudden flash of blue sky, and I get a tantalising glance of the valley below. The cloud shrouds round again, but the wind has whipped up a pace and is blowing it clear. As I pick my way back to the main path, the vista to the west opens up, revealing a panoramic parade of Lakeland peaks, the sun illuminating their slopes like a Heaton Cooper painting.

I press on for the deliciously named Nethermost Pike. By now the sky has cleared to the east, rewarding those of us who have braved the gloom with heady views over Ullswater and Striding Edge. Striding Edge is a jagged Helvellyn arête. It affords adventurers, with a head for heights, an exhilarating way to scramble to the summit. From Nethermost Pike, its intrepid walkers look like ants or stick men. We appear to have swapped Heaton Cooper for LS Lowry.

I track round the edge of the crags to get a closer look at Striding Edge, and Red Tarn beyond. As I join the route coming up from the ridge, I encounter a monument to Charles Gough. Gough was a romantic artist, who died here in 1805. He attracted little attention during his lifetime, but was later immortalised by William Wordsworth and Sir Walter Scott, who saw the free-spirited (or just plain reckless) nature of his death as the ultimate expression of the romantic ideal. A tourist in the Lake District, Gough set out to climb Helvellyn with no experience and only his faithful dog, Foxie, for company. Three months later, a shepherd found his corpse beside Red Tarn and supposed he must have fallen from Striding Edge. Foxie was still guarding his body.

This image of canine fidelity was irresistible to the Romantics, who pictured a devoted spaniel lovingly defending her master’s body from the ravens that picked at his bones. A Carlisle newspaper had a more prosaic interpretation, “The bitch had pupped in a furze near the body of her master, and, shocking to relate, had torn the cloaths from his body and eaten him to a perfect skeleton.”

With the clouds parted, the views from the top of Helvellyn are every bit as spectacular as you would expect from the third highest mountain in England. They continue to reward all the way down to Thirlmere. On the way, I pass a man who can climb no further due to his crippling fear of heights, but whose overriding ambition is to make it to the top one day. And a lovely couple, who ask me earnestly if they are nearly at the summit – a hundred yards above the car park!

All human experience is here then – the history, the comedy and the tragedy; the poetic and prosaic; the noble and foolhardy; and all somehow diminished in significance by these wild, beautiful, remote peaks with their rocky outcrops and sweeping vistas, formed from catastrophic eruptions 450 million years ago.

As the country argues angrily over Brexit – union or independence – the legend of Dunmail is a timeless reminder that it was always thus. But, these magnificent hills were here long before there were human feet to tread them and they will remain long after the last walking boot has crumbled into the dust. It’s a realisation as liberating as it is humbling. Perhaps, this is why one man is so desperate to conquer his fear while another seeks solace here from the pain of losing his child. To borrow a line from Bono, “kingdoms rise and kingdoms fall, but you go on and on”.

Click here for detailed directions at WalkLakes.co.uk

Cults of Nature

Krampus

The Roaring Silence

Wainwright: an Apostle of the Sublime

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

The Savage Temple and the Roof of England

Further Reading:

Enjoyed this post?

Share this:

Like this:

Mountain Dew

Tee-total in Tilberthwaite

Hodge Close and Holme Fell

Herdwicks and Mrs Heelis

Contraband in Colwith

Matters of the Spirit

Sources/Further Reading

Enjoyed this post?

Share this:

Like this:

The Nab & the Rut

Sources/Further reading

Enjoyed this post?

Share this:

Like this:

The Fairfield Horseshoe and the Skulls of Calgarth

The Skulls of Calgarth

The Fairfield Horseshoe

To Have or to Be

Enjoyed this post?

Share this:

Like this:

Grey Friar, Great Carrs, & Dow Crag from Seathwaite

Enjoyed this post?

Share this:

Like this:

Coniston, Tarn Hows, Black Fell & Holme Fell

Courage

Defiance

Purification and Renewal

Enjoyed this post?

Share this:

Like this:

Millican Dalton and Castle Crag

The Other

The Professor of Adventure

Into the Jaws of Borrowdale

No Man’s Land

Enjoyed this post?

Share this:

Like this:

Haystacks and Wainwright.

From Hendrix to the Hills

An Unlikely Hero

Haystacks and Fleetwith Pike

Enjoyed this post?

Share this:

Like this:

The Mosedale Horseshoe and a Night at Black Sail

The Lady in the Lake

The Mosedale Horseshoe

Black Sail Hut

Enjoyed this post?

Share this:

Like this:

Wetherlam, Swirl How & Great Carrs via Steel Edge

Sheep Folds

Steel Edge

LL505 S for Sugar

Haunted

Monuments

Enjoyed this post?

Share this:

Like this:

The Herdwicks of Harter Fell

Epidemic

Herdies

Harter Fell

Hard Knott Roman Fort

Post Script