A Midsummer Night’s Dream on Dixon Heights
One of the positives of lockdown has been waking up to what is right on your doorstep. With its ruined tower, Bay views, and fell ponies, Dixon Heights (Newton Fell South) is a Wainwright outlier, rich in enchantment. Its mention in the Annals of Cartmel reads like a nineteenth century episode of Father Ted. As I discover, on the eve of midsummer, it can prove veritably dreamlike.
“Things seen, things remembered, and things imagined are blended together into a delicate landscape which is half reality and half dream, but in which the dream helps to clarify rather than to obscure that which is really there.”
– Norman Nicholson
In its heady days as a watering hole for coach and horses, High Newton boasted three inns. Now there’s only The Crown, a fine pub, but closed this evening, due to lockdown. Newton was once a stop on the horse-drawn omnibus route from Lancaster to Ulverston. As 19th century interest in the Lakes awakened, a steady stream of curious sightseers made the journey, inspired in part by the hyperbole of early apostles of the picturesque, like William Gilpin. In 1820, a new turnpike opened through Levens, Lindale, and Newton that offered an alternative to the perilous race over Morecambe Bay. In his guidebook of 1842, J Hudson commends the route to “those Tourists who dislike to cross the sands”, adding, “the road is excellent, and passes through a pleasant and agreeable country”.
For the best part of two centuries, High and Low Newton suffered their share of pass-through traffic. Fifteen years ago, you needed your wits about you to cross this road. It was a single carriageway bottleneck on the A590, and an accident black spot. In 2006, however, work began on a bypass that would transform village life here. The new stretch of dual carriageway opened in 2008 and reduced traffic through the villages from 17,900 vehicles per day to 550. This midsummer evening, with the road journeys restricted further by COVID, I see none. The prevailing sounds are the distant bleat of lambs and a sudden downbeat of big wings as a buzzard takes off from an overhanging branch.
Our house looks out on Newton Fell, the long low heather-clad ridge that runs north through the woods of Chapel House and Simpson Ground to the rocky summit of Gummer’s How, perched above Windermere. Wainwright features Newton Fell in his book of outliers, dividing it into two separate walks which he calls Newton Fell North and Newton Fell South. No right of way exists between them, and although much of the ground is now open access, there is still a portion that is not, an untempered legacy of an 1806 land-grab—the enclosure of the Cartmel Commons.
With lockdown keeping me from the mountains, I’ve been taking a deeper interest in what is right on my doorstep. The trek along the ridge from the Newton reservoirs over the tops of Saskills (Newton Fell’s summit) and the weathered crag of White Stone has become a fast favourite, but until last week, I’d never climbed the southern tip, Dixon Heights. It is the shortest of fell walks but rich in enchantment, and on this balmy midsummer’s eve, I’m eager for some solstice magic.
Wainwright climbed Dixon Heights from Lindale, but his route is bisected now by the dual carriageway. Happily, there is an alternative that starts closer to home for me. Opposite Yew Tree Barn Antiques in Low Newton, a track skirts a farm and narrows to a public footpath, little more than a furrow through the bracken. As I leave the road, I disturb a grazing roe deer. It darts away through dense foliage, a ripple in the fern. Beyond a gate, the path forks. The lower prong hugs the wall, but the higher one climbs through a sea of leafy green, dotted purple with the cascading bells of foxgloves. Red admirals flit over canary coloured tormentil, and as the trod meanders toward the ridge line, craggy outcrops spring from the undergrowth like eroded ruins of ancient temples. To the right of Buck Crag, over the lush flatland of Cartmel valley, I catch my first glimpse of the Bay.
The first summit is Bishop’s Tithe Allotment, a name echoed in a portion of neighbouring Hampsfell, which suggests the church may have been an early beneficiary of the enclosures. The elevation is a humble 620 feet, but it boasts fine views. The Bay stretches out to the south, and Arnside Knott rises across the Kent Estuary. The eastern skyline is dominated by the dark distant shapes of the Pennines, the Howgills and Ingleborough. Closer at hand, across the Winster valley, is another Wainwright outlier, one of his favourites, Whitbarrow Scar. Its western flank is long and wooded, but it presents a 200 foot escarpment to the A590, and to the turnpike that preceded it. To J Hudson, writing with all the poetic overstatement of his age, it was, “a huge arched and bended cliff, of an immense height”.
Down in the valley, the River Winster forms a natural parish boundary. A country lane runs from High Newton to Witherslack, borne over its waters by the twin arches of an old stone bridge. According to James Stockdale’s Annals of Cartmel (1872), here in April 1576, stood the gibbet from which Richard Taylor swung, deliberately conspicuous from the road, a macabre moral lesson to all would-be ne’er do wells. Stockdale writes,
“The highway road from Newton-in-Cartmel to Witherslack, after the steep zigzag descent of Towtop, crosses the river Winster at Bleacragg Bridge (so spelled in the Ordnance map, 1850). On the Lancashire side of the river, and adjoining the south-western end of the bridge, is a small rocky knoll, on which some Scotch fir and larch trees now grow; this knoll has always had the name of “Gallows Hill,” which may be accounted for by the above register, though all other tradition of the crime and its punishment has been lost.”
The church register, from which Stockdale quotes, states, “April 10. Richard Taylor was buryed whoe suffered the same daye at Blakragge bridge end for murthering wilfullye Richard Kilner of Witherslack.”
If Bleacrag bridge supplies Stockdale with a dark tale, Buck Crag, on the western slope of Bishop’s Tithe Allotment, furnishes a lighter one. At the start of the 18th century, the farmhouse at its foot was home to Edmund Law, the curate and schoolmaster at Staveley. Stockdale praises Law for his “pedestrian achievements” and calculates that by walking the eight miles there and back to the church and school every day, over his forty-nine years in post, Law must have clocked up 122,696 miles—“a distance more than equal to five times the circumference of our globe”. Edmund remained a humble footsore curate, but his educational prowess propelled his progeny into high office: his son became the Lord Bishop of Carlisle, and his grandsons went on to become variously, the Bishop of Elphin, Baron Ellenborough, and the Bishop of Bath and Wells.
Stockdale describes the house at Buck Crag as “one of the most homely and lonely places in these realms”, but evidently, it held such a fascination for Law’s grandsons that, in 1818, one of the bishops arrived on the doorstep, replete with an entourage of clerics and a secretary, and much to the astonishment of the farmer who now lived there, requested a thorough tour of the premises. Apparently, “t’Bishop inquir’t t’dog tail aut a-joint”. Meanwhile, a scene straight from Father Ted was playing out on the fell: “Whilst all this was going on, some of the younger clergymen took the opportunity, under the guidance of the farmer’s two daughters, to scale and scramble over the precipices of Buck Crag and the mountains adjoining; but whether it was the delightful scenery or the presence of the ladies that rendered them oblivious, they certainly quite forgot ‘that time hath wings,’ and having kept the bishop a long time waiting, they did not escape some mild reproof for tarrying so unnecessarily long on the top of Buck Crag”. The Bishop himself, it seems, left with his grandfather’s old armchair from “i’ t’ingle neak” as a keepsake, despite some mild reluctance from the farmer who had grown rather fond of it.
From the summit, the ridge continues south, dropping 130 ft to the saddle with Dixon Heights. At the bottom of the depression, Tom Tarn nestles beside a copse. In wetter times, a stone wall divides its waters, but after weeks of little rain, it’s dry, distinguished only by a small expanse of cracked mud. Whitbarrow Scar to the east and Hampsfell to the west are renowned for their limestone pavements, but Newton Fell is an outcrop of older Silurian mudstone, muddy siltstone, and muddy sandstone of the Bannisdale formation. In times past, the slopes down to the tarn were quarried for slate and flag. I lose the path amid prolific undergrowth. To regain it, I affect an easy scramble over a grey face of cut slate, now prettily laced with white and pink petals of English stonecrop. I disturb a skylark. It shoots skyward, its flight a succession of deft tacks on the arc of white-tipped wings.
A gate by the tarn leads through to Dixon Heights. The wall disappears into the deep tree cover, but ahead, there is a grassy clearing, mown close by the carefree grazing of the wild ponies that dwell here. Beyond, a hawthorn covered bank rises to the grassy top. Here stands a ruined tower.
In 1827, architect George Webster, acquired Dixon Heights and built an elegant country mansion, Eller How, at its foot. Webster made his name extending and remodelling stately homes like Hutton in the Forest, Dallam Tower and Holker Hall. He also built Kendal Town Hall and several local churches. Eller How became his home. It is often supposed that Webster erected the summit tower as a romantic folly, but in his book of 1849, succinctly named, A History, Topography, and Directory, of Westmorland: And Londsdale North of the Sands, in Lancashire Together with a Descriptive and Geological View of the Whole of the Lake District, P. J. Mannix calls it an observatory. Wainwright says it was used by the Home Guard during the war but suggests its origins are obscure. According to Wainwright, a local legend claims it was “a lookout for the observation of smugglers in the estuary”, but he admits it’s equally likely that it was “merely a decoration of the Eller How estate”.
Whatever its original purpose, it is a romantic ruin now and a fine viewpoint over the estuary and the Bay. As I settle on its old stones and surrender to the charm of midsummer solitude, the soft light of evening weaves a gentle magic.
I’m not quite alone. A feral white horse is grazing at the edge of the summit plateau, its taught muscular frame, flowing tail and unkempt mane, the epitome of wild majesty. Backdropped by the shimmering mudflats of the estuary, shores braided with dark woodland, and lit by an opal sky feathered silver with cirrocumulus, the whole scene is beguilingly beautiful. The horse looks ethereal, not quite of this world: a vision of something simpler, something older, something finer. I’m entranced, and I watch for a long while, lost in the rarefied poetry of the moment. It’s a wrench to tear myself away.
Below the summit, on a wooded bank above the track that leads to Eller How, there is a weathered arch. This was certainly a folly, likely built by Webster as a mock ruin; the vogue for the picturesque prized ruins in the landscape, and it became fashionable to build your own. William Gilpin, a devout apostle of the movement, frowned on such contrivance, but after two and half centuries, nature has conspired to turn this arch into the very thing it was meant to mimic, a gothic relic. Wainwright sketched it with more battlements than it boasts now, so perhaps Gilpin would relent, and admire the effect of time and weather on these chiselled stones. After the dreamlike wonder of the white horse, the arch assumes an air of Arthurian romance.
One version of the Arthurian legend can be found in the Mabinogion, a collection of Welsh stories composed in the 13th century from older Celtic tales. When waves of pagan invaders pushed into Cumbria, its Celtic priests and poets fled to Wales, taking their traditions with them, so it is entirely possible that some of the stories of the Mabinogion are Cumbrian in origin.
Also featured in the Mabinogion, is Rhiannon, a woman of the Otherworld, who appears to Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed, astride a horse. Smitten with her beauty, Pwyll follows her, but despite her gentle pace, he can never catch her until he implores her to stop, which she does willingly and rebukes him for not asking earlier. Rhiannon then reveals she has chosen Pwyll to be her husband. Pwyll and Rhiannon marry, but their son is abducted on the night of his birth. Fearing execution for their negligence, his nursemaids kill a puppy and smear the sleeping Rhiannon with its blood. Just as they plan, she is accused of murder and cannibalism. Pwyll refuses to abandon her and retains her as queen, but she is obliged to undergo a penance. Every day, she must sit outside the castle by the stable block and profess her crime to visitors. She must then offer to carry them into the castle on her back, like a beast of burden. Eventually, a vision of a foal being stolen from a mare by a dark presence leads to the baby’s rescue and to Rhiannon’s exoneration.
Rhiannon is associated with the Gaulish horse goddess, Epona, and often portrayed as a maiden. But in some depictions, Rhiannon, herself, is an ethereal white mare.
“Things seen, things remembered, and things imagined are blended together into a delicate landscape which is half reality and half dream, but in which the dream helps to clarify rather than to obscure that which is really there.”
Further Reading/Sources
Stockdale, James. 1872: Annals of Cartmel. Ulverston: William Kitchen; London: Simpkin, Marshall, & Co
Guest, Lady Charlotte E. (Translator). 1838: The Mabinogion. Dover Publications, 2000
Wainwright, A. 1974: The Outlying Fells of Lakeland. Kendal: The Westmorland Gazette
Nicholson, Norman. 1955: The Lakers. Milnthorpe: Cicerone Press, 1995.
Hudson, J. 1842: A Complete Guide To Wordsworth’s Scenery of the Lakes of England.
Mannex, P. J. 1849: History, Topography, and Directory, of Westmorland.
London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co.
Thomas, P.R.. 2006 Geology of the area between Lindale and Witherslack. Nottingham, UK, British Geological Survey, 39pp. (IR/06/079) (Unpublished), Available at: http://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/7302/