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Fell Walk, General, History, Lake District, Literature, Mountains

Sailor, Spy: The Revolutionary Roots of Swallows and Amazons

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Inspired by idyllic childhood holidays on Coniston Water, Swallows and Amazons turned Arthur Ransome into a national treasure, but a decade earlier, he’d been branded a political pariah for his radical bulletins from Bolshevik Russia. A friend of Lenin and Trotsky, and a secret agent for British Intelligence, could Ransome’s revolutionary experiences underpin his classic story? I head for Coniston to find out…

In the early hush of this Torver Sunday, a song thrush grubs in the grass of the verge. I escape the road through a kissing gate where a fingerpost points the one-and-a-half miles to Coniston Water.

Buttercup and red clover line the path. Dog roses entwine hazel, and white lace doilies of elder blossom grace the leafy canopy. Silver light promises brightening skies, and as I look northwest to the fells, The Old Man of Coniston is a drab olive shadow, emerging from soft grey cloud like teased wool. 

Red clover by the Torver path
Dog rose by the Torver path

Foxgloves stand like sentries before the whitewashed walls of Hoathwaite farmhouse. From here on, the way runs through campsites, abuzz with the sound of excited awakenings. Sausages sizzle on camping stoves, cooking smells entwine with coffee and canvas. Adults perch contentedly on camping stools, quietly absorbing the ambience, while children run around vigorously role-playing pirates or explorers or whatever scenarios their lakeside holiday has fired in their imaginations, their iPads and phones for now abandoned.

Tree roots beside the Cumbria Way
Tree roots beside the Cumbria Way

Through the trees is a crystal shimmer. I cross the lattice of gnarly roots that line this stretch of the Cumbria Way like the veins of a limb, and stand on Torver jetty, gazing out on the dark, inscrutable waters, gilded with sunlight and ridged with ripples like intricate engravings on a tray of antique silver.

Torver jetty, Coniston Water
Torver jetty, Coniston Water

Coniston Water is a dividing line between two very different landscapes, defined by the bedrock on which they rest. Writing in 1949, Cumbrian writer and poet, Norman Nicholson describes this contrast vividly:

“As you get out of the train, you find yourself on a vaulted platform, with a large round arch at the terminus end. Through the arch, looking so near that you feel you must be staring through binoculars, are the Yewdale Crags, along the flanks of Wetherlam. These are vicious crags, not very high, but fanged like a tiger, with slaverings of scree and bright green whiskers of larch and rowan. You walk forward and the arch widens and you see farther up Yewdale, with Raven Crag at its throat, and the road winding beneath Tom Heights on the way to Ambleside. All this is volcanic. Then you step through the arch, and Coniston village is below you, a row of villas and a neat wire fence leading to the lake. And beyond the lake, the wavy, unemphatic moors of Silurian rock behind Brantwood. The lake itself is of a dull, drab green, like the paint on the railings of Sunday-schools, and it looks uncomfortably damp—the lakes of the Silurian country always look damp. Down the lake you see a quiet pastoral country, greener and more hospitable than the Brantwood fells, full of dimples and hollows, and little misty trees and farms. Wooden railings step out into the water like children hand-in-hand, paddling. Nevertheless, the Brantwood shore, which looks so dull from this side of the lake, is full of woods and ferns and birds and little sykes with golden saxifrage among the stones.” .

(Cumberland and Westmorland, 1949)
Yewdale Fells
Yewdale Fells

That the two sides of the lake should differ so dramatically feels almost portentous; they echo the two sides in the public perception of another writer, one for whom the lake would become a muse.

“It had its beginning long, long ago when, as children, my brother, my sisters and I spent most of our holidays on a farm at the south end of Coniston. We played in or on the lake or on the hills above it, finding friends in the farmers and shepherds and charcoal-burners whose smoke rose from the coppice woods along the shore. We adored the place. Coming to it we used to run down to the lake, dip our hands in and wish, as if we had just seen the new moon.

Going away from it we were half drowned in tears. While away from it, as children and as grown-ups, we dreamt about it. No matter where I was, wandering about the world, I used at night to look for the North Star and, in my mind’s eye, could see the beloved skyline of great hills beneath it. Swallows and Amazons grew out of those old memories. I could not help writing it. It almost wrote itself.” 

So wrote Arthur Ransome in 1958 of the novel that would turn him into a national treasure.

Wetherlam Lad Howes ridge from the Brantwood shore
Wetherlam Lad Howes ridge from the Brantwood shore

Published in 1930, Swallows and Amazons’ reception marked a remarkable turnaround in Ransome’s public standing; just a decade earlier, the Establishment had been keen to paint him as a political pariah.

“Mr. Ransome is a partisan. He backed the Bolsheviks from the very first and is concerned, under the guise of impartiality which he does not possess, to defend them through thick and thin.”

Thus argued a reviewer in Justice, appraising Ransome’s 1919 work, “Six Weeks in Russia”. Justice was the journal of the Social Democratic Federation, which would become the British Socialist Party. Right-wingers were less generous. Colonel Alfred Knox, The British Military attaché, declared that Ransome should be “shot like a dog” for his Bolshevik praising articles. 

Ransome was living in St Petersburg (then Petrograd) at the time of the Russian Revolution, and he wrote a series of articles for the Daily News praising Lenin and Trotsky and condemning the British government for backing the White Russian counter-revolutionaries. For a British Establishment who, in 1918, were forced to concede the vote to women and to working class men, and who were threatened by the rise of left wing politics, Ransome’s articles were a thorn in the side. But how Ransome came to be in Russia in the first place, and perhaps even his romantic fervour for revolution, may have owed much to his relationship with his father, and, as Paul Eastham argues in Huge and Mighty Forms, perhaps even to a particular incident here on Coniston Water.

Eastham writes,

“As a young boy, Arthur Ransome learned a harsh lesson about bourgeois English life. While on a family holiday at High Nibthwaite on Coniston Water his father Cyril threw him into the lake to find out if he would naturally sink or swim. Arthur sank like a stone and refused all further aquatic instruction from his well-meaning but acerbic father who accused him of being an unteachable, effeminate ‘muff’. Appalled by a dreadful threat that he would not be allowed out in boats in future, the boy saved up his pocket money and taught himself the backstroke at Leeds Public Baths near the family home in three visits. When Arthur announced this achievement over breakfast, Cyril told Arthur not to tell lies and dragged him grimly to the baths to prove the truth. Arthur never truly forgave the aspersion cast on his honesty. His father’s despotism instilled in him a lifelong suspicion of authority and an even greater horror of rejection.”

Coniston Water, inspiration for Swallows and Amazons
Coniston Water

His distrust of authority almost certainly deepened at school. Teachers at Old College Prep School in Windermere failed to recognise that Ransome was myopic and needed glasses. Instead, they thought him academically slow and labelled him a coward for failing to defend himself at boxing. While he gained a scholarship to Rugby School, he distinguished himself by gaining the lowest ever pass mark. Shortly afterwards, his father died of complications following a night-fishing accident. Young Arthur would be denied the opportunity to ever live up to his father’s expectations.

Ransome became a writer, moving to London where he embraced the fashionably anti-establishment attitudes of the Bohemian movement and married Ivy Walker. The union was ill-judged. Walker was a genuine rebel who loved to shock. Ransome was a sentimentalist, who deep-down craved acceptance. Ivy’s lewdness and tantrums appalled him, and despite the birth of their daughter, Tabitha, their relationship soon became strained.

As an aspiring author, Ransome’s break came when he was commissioned to write a biography of Oscar Wilde. Despite his publisher’s plea for discretion, Ransome included a salacious and questionable assertion that Lord Alfred Douglas had tempted Wilde away from the straight and narrow following his prosecution for homosexuality. Published in 1912, the book was a success, but Lord Douglas, who had since adopted Catholicism and renounced Wilde as “the greatest force for evil that has appeared in Europe during the last three hundred and fifty years”, was incensed and sued Ransome for libel. Wilde’s first lover, Robbie Ross came to Arthur’s aid, providing a crack team of lawyers who won the case on a technicality, bankrupting Douglas in the process. Ivy turned up every day in court to revel in the notoriety, but victory sat uneasily with Arthur, who ordered the offending passages to be expunged from future editions of the book, and soon afterwards, fled to St Petersburg to study Russian folklore, abandoning his wife and daughter.

In 1915, Ransome published Old Peter’s Russian Tales, an anthology of 21 Russian fairy stories. With the onset of WWI a year earlier, however, Ransome found himself ideally placed to become a Russian correspondent to British newspapers, particularly the radical Daily News.

St Petersburg
St Petersburg
St Petersburg

The war took a huge toll on the Russian army, and by 1917, soldiers had begun to mutiny. Following the widespread unrest known as the February Revolution, Tsar Nicholas II was persuaded to abdicate. The monarchy was abolished and replaced with a Provisional Government, which represented the capitalists, but a rival institution known as the Petrograd Soviet, or workers’ council was formed to represent soldiers and workers. Ransome correctly anticipated that this was not the end of the story. In Sept 1917, he reported:

“Extremism has been spreading fast and it had seemed as if the whole broad base of the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates were slipping to the Left; while its Executive Committee clings to its moderate position and risks loss of support from below… Agreement between the Government and the Petrograd Council is impossible.”

What Ransome didn’t anticipate was how quickly events would unfold, and he found himself marooned in England on a short visit when the Bolsheviks seized power in October. He needed to get back to Russia swiftly, but now Russia was a country difficult to enter. Fortunately, Ransome’s passage was smoothed by a senior diplomat whose children were big fans of Old Peter’s Russian Tales. On arrival, a further bit of serendipity fell in Ransome’s favour. The new Head of Security had chosen that moment to personally supervise the checking of bags, and it was he who opened Ransome’s. He was amused and intrigued to find it contained a book on fly-fishing, a book of Russian folklore, and the complete works of Shakespeare. He demanded to meet the bag’s owner and the two became friends, providing Ransome with introductions to the Bolshevik inner circle.

Arthur moved into an apartment with Karl Radek, became Lenin’s chess partner, and obliged Trotsky in his new role as a military commander by scouring bookshops for works on military tactics. He also embarked on an affair with Trotsky’s 23-year-old secretary, Evgenia Shelepina.

As a sentimentalist, Ransome was inspired by the idealism of revolution and enthusiastically embraced the notion that the people were shaking off centuries of tyranny. On hearing an inspiring speech by Trotsky in 1918, he wrote:

“I would willingly give the rest of my life if it could be divided into minutes and given to men in England and France so that those of little faith who say the Russian revolution is discredited, should share for one minute that wonderful experience”.

While many in the British establishment bristled at Ransome’s apparent Bolshevism, others saw the utility in having a man on the inside, especially when official diplomatic ties had been severed. Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour asked MI6 to recruit Ransome as an agent to act as a conduit to the Bolshevik leaders. Ransome obliged and was given the code name, S76, although his involvement remained an official secret until 1991. British Intelligence Found Ransome something of an anathema. His whimsical and emotional response to events led to some head-scratching and the worry that he might be acting as a double agent, although this suspicion was later discounted.

Indeed, Bruce Lockhart, the British agent accused by Russia of plotting to assassinate Lenin, would later write in his memoirs: “Ransome was a Don Quixote with a walrus moustache, a sentimentalist who could always be relied upon to champion the underdog, and a visionary whose imagination had been fired by the revolution. He was on excellent terms with the Bolsheviks and frequently brought us information of the greatest value.”

Ransome’s romantic take on the Revolution blindsided him to its brutal realities. In his attempt to paint the Bolsheviks as visionaries rather than butchers, he initially defended the formation of Cheka, the secret police, the suppression of free speech, and even execution without trial as political necessities in the face of western-backed aggression. However, as the body count began to grow, disbelief must have morphed into disillusion and distrust, and in 1919 Ransome was persuaded to leave, taking Evgenia with him.

Ransome’s great nephew, Hugh Lupton told the Daily Mirror,

“Their escape was like one of the Russian folk tales Uncle Arthur loved, fleeing from the city, sleeping in burnt-out barns, dodging death. He rescued the woman he loved.”

Hugh also revealed that Evgenia did not leave empty handed:

“Possibly unbeknown to Ransome, she smuggled out one million roubles’ worth of diamonds in her undergarments to sell to Bolshevik sympathisers in the West! They had probably been confiscated from the aristocracy.”

Arthur and Evgenia settled first in Estonia, where they married after Arthur secured a divorce from Ivy in 1924. In 1925, spurred perhaps by homesickness for those beloved Lakeland landscapes, Ransome brought his new bride to England, and the couple settled at Low Ludderburn, on Cartmel Fell above Windermere.

Coniston Water from the Brantwood shore
Coniston Water from the Brantwood shore

Ransome was concerned that his reputation might see him blackballed from the yachting club. By now he would fiercely deny that he had ever been a Bolshevik, claiming that you may as well call a botanist a beetle, because he writes about them. When British Special Branch chief, Basil Thompson demanded Ransome explain what his politics were. He replied, “fishing”.

Moored boats at Uni of Birmingham boat house jetty, Coniston Water
Moored boats at Uni of Birmingham boat house jetty, Coniston Water

During this time, Arthur struck up an enduring friendship with the Altounyans, an Anglo-Armenian family who lived in Syria but often visited the Lakes. Their mother, Dora, was the daughter of his old friend and mentor, W. G. Collingwood, and their children, Taqui, Susan, Mavis (nicknamed Titty) and Roger would provide the inspiration for key characters in Swallows and Amazons.

To many, Swallows and Amazons is a delightful tale of imaginative children on a Lakeland adventure, free from shackles of parental supervision. It enshrines typically British values of fairness, decency, and self-reliance. The children’s playground is a small island, a stone’s throw from the shore and in sight of the farmhouse where their mother is staying, but in their imaginations, they are by turns explorers and pirates, inhabiting a desert island in the middle of a mighty shark-infested sea.

Some now see the novel as dated, a story of privileged children with a colonial mindset. They see themselves as great white adventurers and imagine the locals to be “natives”, but this reading misses the point. The children are merely repeating the language of Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island. The “natives” include their own mother, and in truth, are code for grown-ups. Jim Turner, the Amazons’ uncle, we learn can be the best of pirates (when he is disposed to indulge his nieces by joining in their adventures), but this year he has gone native, that is to say, he is acting like an adult, too preoccupied with writing a book to give them any time.

The Old Man and Wetherlam from across the water
The Old Man and Wetherlam from across the water on the Brantwood shore

It was the pursuit of a writing career that took Ransome away from his own daughter, Tabitha. In 1928 Arthur attempted to reestablish contact but Tabitha shunned him. The character of Turner is often assumed to be Ransome himself, and it is hard not to read this as a veiled apology. Of course, in the novel Turner sees the error of his ways, resumes his persona of Captain Flint, and walks the plank as punishment for his neglect.

According to Paul Eastham’s reading, the symbolism runs deeper. Flint does not only walk the plank for neglecting his nieces, but for the slurs he makes against their friends the Walker children (the Swallows), who he wrongly accuses of planting a firework on the roof of his houseboat and of stealing his manuscript. Ironically John, the eldest of the Walkers and captain of The Swallow, tries to pass on a message from some kindly local charcoal burners, warning Turner that he risks being targeted by thieves. But Turner refuses to listen, and when the burglary occurs, he blames John. In light of Turner’s accusations, suspicion of the children spreads among the locals. Eastham sees John as representing Ransome’s self-image, unfairly accused of something he is didn’t do.

Swimming in Coniston Water
Swimming in Coniston Water

Whether Arthur actually advocated Bolshevism is a matter for debate. In his own mind, he was writing honest accounts of events and providing some degree of balance to an English press largely predisposed to spin against Lenin. Just as in boyhood, his integrity was besmirched and he was spurned by the Establishment.

By the end of Swallows and Amazons, John’s innocence is proven, Turner is profusely apologetic, and the Swallows help recover the stolen manuscript. To my mind, Eastham is right on the nail. The book is more than just an adventure story, it is a personal catharsis, a symbolic attempt to set the record straight. The plot ends with an injustice righted and the rehabilitation of the Walker children as heroes rather than villains. This may have been wish-fulfilment on Ransome’s part, but thanks to the story, it became a reality. The huge popularity the book brought Arthur the acceptance he had always craved.

A swallow, breast of wheatfield yellow and wings of royal blue, soars skyward against the chimneys of Coniston Old Hall. A small flotilla of moored yachts bob lazily on the rippling waters by the Sailing Club. The Yewdale fells rear above the Methodist chapel, with all the feral savagery of Nicholson’s description. Foxglove, bracken, and flowering bramble line the steep bank of Church Beck, which crashes and hisses down the rocky cascades of the ravine. I head up to Crowberry How and take the steep path up the Old Man, past a wall of quarried slate and the wild tranquility of Low Water. When I reach the summit, the lake stretches languidly below.

Coniston Water shore
Coniston Water shore
Coniston Old Hall
Coniston Old Hall
Moored yachts Coniston Sailing Club
Moored yachts Coniston Sailing Club
Yewdale Fells above the Methodist Chapel
Yewdale Fells above the Methodist Chapel
Low Water and Levers Water from the Old Man summit
Low Water and Levers Water from the Old Man summit
Coniston Water from Old Man summit
Coniston Water from Old Man summit

Throughout his time in Russia, Ransome kept this landscape close. Lupton told The Mirror:

“All the time he carried a pebble in his pocket from Peel Island, in Coniston Water in the Lake District, the inspiration for Wild Cat Island in Swallows and Amazons, like a talisman, a lucky charm.”

Arthur once described walking the streets of Moscow as the same “wonderful experience” as “walking on Wetherlam or Dow Crag, with the future of mankind spreading before one like the foothills of the Lake Country, and the blue sea out to the west.” His romantic fervour for revolution may have palled, but his passion for Lakeland never would.  

Sources / Further Reading

Paul Eastham’s Huge and Mighty Forms is a fascinating book exploring why Cumbria has produced so many influential characters. Arthur Ransome rubs shoulders with everyone from William Wordsworth to Fletcher Christian, Lady Anne Clifford and Queen Cartimandua.

Available from Fletcher Christian Books:

https://www.fletcherchristianbooks.com/

Roland Chambers’ article, “Whose Side Was He On?” in the 10th March, 2005 edition of The Guardian is an interesting read:

https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2005/mar/10/russia.books

Likewise, Jon Henley’s “I Spy Arthur Ransome” article in the 13th August, 2009 edition:

https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2009/aug/13/arthur-ransome-double-agent

You can find Hugh Lupton’s interview with the Daily Mirror, about his Uncle Arthur, here:

https://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/swallows-amazons-writer-double-agent-8730764.amp

Additional information in my article came from an excellent exhibition, called From Coniston to the Kremlin: Arthur Ransome‘s Russian Adventures. It was curated by The Arthur Ransome Trust (ART) and hosted at the Ruskin museum in Coniston in 2016. ART has republished several of Ransome’s books, including his autobiography and Old Peter’s Russian Tales, which are available from their online shop.

https://arthur-ransome-trust.org.uk/

As part of its permanent exhibition, the Ruskin museum has the sailing dinghy, Mavis—the inspiration for the fictional Amazon—and a Ransome cabinet of curiosities:

https://ruskinmuseum.com/who-was-arthur-ransome/

Paul Flint and Geraint Lewis from the Arthur Ransome Trust featured in a recent podcast from the always excellent Countrystride team, which you can find here:

https://www.countrystride.co.uk/single-post/countrystride-79-arthur-ransome-life-loves-literature

Norman Nicholson’s Cumberland and Westmorland, 1949 is a beautifully written study of the two counties. It is out of print, but second hand copies are relatively easy to find on line.

The British Newspaper Archive has many of Ransome’s articles from his time in Russia. The 1918 book review in Justice also came from there.

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    Fell Walk, General, History, Literature, Nature

    Green Mind

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    Dow Crag and Coniston Old Man from Torver

    All through lockdown, distant Dow Crag reminded me of where I longed to be. No surprise that’s where I would head when restrictions lifted, ascending from Torver, past a magnificent waterfall born of childhood mischief. During the months away, I read Norman Nicholson’s The Lakers. At its core is the environmental message Wordsworth & Ruskin learned from Lakeland. In the time of COVID, it is more relevant than ever.

    John Ruskin spoke of a “plague wind”: a “strange bitter biting wind” that would cast the sky in a “dry black veil”, impenetrable to sunshine; it could carry terrible thunderstorms, “rolling incessantly, like railway luggage trains, quite ghastly in its mockery of them—the air one loathsome mass of sultry and foul fog, like smoke”. It would blanche the sun and blight the air before “settling down again into Manchester’s devil’s darkness”.

    To Ruskin the wind was a physical phenomenon, as if a meteorological distortion, provoked by the sulphurous smog belched forth by the Victorian cities of England’s Industrial Revolution. But in his book, The Lakers, Norman Nicholson counsels against taking this too literally; at home on the eastern shore of Coniston Water, Ruskin must have breathed some of the cleanest air in England. To Nicholson, Ruskin’s plague wind was a metaphor, a symbol of the spiritual corrosion which mass industrialisation had wrought.

    The Lakers is a beautifully written account of Lakeland’s early tourists, its guide-book writers and apostles. It examines how industrialisation and our mass migration to urban living provoked a love affair with Cumbria’s fells and dales. “The Middle Ages had seen the village as a small clearing of order among the illimitable wilderness of nature; the seventeenth century saw the mountains as the last defiance of disorder among the colonies of civilisation”. In the centuries to come, however, a collective desire to escape into England’s last great wilderness would germinate and grow strong. By Ruskin’s time, the urban pride of the seventeenth century was ringing hollow. As Nicholson puts it:

    “The first great thrust of the Industrial Revolution had overstretched itself; the muscles were beginning to sag, the energy to fail. In the parlours, the drawing-rooms, the pews, all was still comfortable and secure; but in the back-alleys, the rotting cottages, the slave factories, there was the strain and anger of a society at one and the same time vigorous and stunted, opulent and starved. In spite of all the clangour of the railways, the grasp and grab of trade, the grandiloquence of empire, the flags, the dividends, the Harvest Festivals, the brass bands, the gold watches and Prince Albert himself, there was hidden somewhere in every Victorian a tired, rather frightened, rather lost little dog that wanted to crawl under the table and sleep.”

    We had become divorced from nature, shut off from its rhythms and cycles. It had become something to pave over, to hide, to tame; and as we lost sight of our own place within it, it simply became a resource to plunder and exploit. Yet, when the sterility and artifice of urban living began to pall, it was nature we craved as a diversion, as an escape, as therapy, as spiritual replenishment: “The gentry, the manufacturers, the professional people, blowing their noses on the stench and stew of the money-grubbing cities, rushed to the Lakes to forget it all, at least for a fortnight.”

    Were Ruskin or Nicholson alive today, 2020 might have brought an uncanny sense of déjà vu: not just Britain, but the whole world is in the grip of literal plague wind, a pandemic, which has forced us through months of domestic confinement in a desperate bid to contain its spread. The meteorological effect of lockdown has been the polar opposite of Ruskin’s apocalyptic vision, however. China’s industrial cities, the twenty-first century’s inheritors of Victorian England’s smog, have seen blue sky for the first time in decades. And here in the post-industrial UK, where air pollution now comes from the incessant combustion of petrol, diesel, and jet fuel, we’ve witnessed a canopy free of vapour trails, and air filled, not with the unbroken hum of traffic, but with birdsong. It might have been a romantic stretch of the imagination, but in those first months of lockdown, it really did seem as if the planet was breathing a huge sigh of relief. Now, our desire to escape to our green spaces is stronger than ever.

    From his home at Brantwood, John Ruskin looked over Coniston Water to the Coniston mountains.  My house doesn’t share his panorama; trees and foothills obscure most of the range; but I can see Dow Crag. In line with government guidelines and the wishes of Mountain Rescue, I kept away from the high fells until late July. But the sight of Dow Crag, its buttresses and gullies rendered in sharp relief by startling spring sunlight, was a daily reminder of where I longed to be. No surprise then, that I should head for Torver when restrictions relax.

    Dow Crag
    Dow Crag

    In the days before magazines, songs, poems, stories, and political and religious tracts were distributed in the form of chapbooks—short, cheaply produced publications that were sold by itinerant pedlars and hawkers, known as chapmen. Disparaged in literary circles as “penny dreadfuls” and feared by the establishment as channels for subversive ideas, chapbooks were, for many, their window on the wider world. One such chapbook put Torver on the map. It included a report entitled, “a New Prophesy”—the lurid account of the vision experienced by an 8 year old Torver girl, who had lain in a trance for three days. It was billed as a “an alarm from heaven to the inhabitants of the earth, giving an account how crying sins of the day and time do provoke the Almighty; with strange and wonderful things, as a warning to this last and worst age, agreeable to the Holy Scriptures and divine revelation: the like never published”. In the girl’s revelation, “The envious and discontented were howling like mad dogs: the oppressors of the poor were trodden under foot by the devils in the burning flames; in the midst of which lake were the swearers, lyars, and covetous persons, bearing the wrath of God to all eternity!”

    I make a mental note to mind my language as I pull up in Torver and pop the suggested number of coins into the car park’s honesty box.

    Wainwright described this way up Dow Crag as “the natural line of approach”, and, “the most attractive, for when the woods of Torver are left behind the view forwards to the great buttresses of Dow Crag grows more dramatic with every step”. He’s spot on. At this early hour, Wetherlam is indistinct in shadow and the Old Man, dark-tinged, but Dow Crag is already vividly illuminated by the morning sun, its wrinkled face a huge elephantine hide, riven by deep gullies into shapes that resemble a petrified parade of prehistoric creatures.

    Before long, the path splits. The right hand fork crosses Torver Beck and climbs between spoil heaps to the deep pit of Banishead Quarry. Wainwright’s map notes simply, “there is much of interest to see here”. The Southern Fells was published in 1960, so Wainwright would have researched it in the late 1950’s. Whether the waterfall was yet to exist, or whether it was simply too new and contentious to be guaranteed a future, I couldn’t say, but AW’s circumspection hints at, but never actually mentions, the quarry’s crowning glory.

    Banishead Waterfall
    Banishead Waterfall

    The waterfall is not a natural feature, it was born of mischief in the 1950’s, and we have three local boys to thank. Their playground was the quarry pit and the beck that ran past its top. One day, in a daring flash of inspiration, they hit on the idea of moving rocks to divert part of the flow into the pit. Their endeavours that afternoon yielded a small trickle, but after tea, one of the boys returned with his brother and a mattock; their renewed efforts produced the cascading majesty of the cataract that now plunges into the pool. An anonymous narrator recounts the story beautifully on the Torver website. So familiar with the finer details is the narrator, he even knows what they ate for tea.

    Today, the waterfall is magnificent surprise, concealed until the last minute when it springs a vista as arresting as it is unexpected. A vast chute of white spray hurtles headlong down a vertical wall of cut stone, striped orange and black with lichen. It falls into a dark pool, its surface as glassy and reflective as polished granite, except where it escapes the shadow to turn sapphire, fringed green with a leafy canopy of tree cover.

    Banishead Waterfall
    Banishead Waterfall

    For most of the Victorian era, the definitive guide to the Lakes was one written by Harriet Martineau and published in 1855.  Martineau was a prolific author and social reformer who did much to improve the lot of rural communities in the Lakes.  Her early life was dogged with illness, and she was rendered largely immobile when diagnosed with a uterine tumour at the age of 37. Remarkably, five years later, she underwent a course of mesmerism and declared herself cured. She relocated to Ambleside and embraced the outdoors with a physical vigour that matched her formidable mental strength.  When I first read some of her suggested excursions, I wondered if she had ever actually walked them.  Scafell Pike via Rosset Pike and Esk Hause, returning by Tarn Crag and Easedale Tarn, leaving time to explore Grasmere, before travelling to Ambleside to tackle Nab Scar in the afternoon, anyone? Such reservations are dispelled when you discover that this was a woman who took daily walks of six to eight miles before breakfast at 7:30.

    Ahead of me, above an expanse of moorland, lies the Walna Scar road. There can be no doubt that Harriet knew this area, her account is replete with such intimate detail:

    “Amidst the grassy undulations of the moor, he (the walker) sees, here or there, a party of peat-cutters, with their white horse; if the sun be out, he looks absolutely glittering, in contrast with the brownness of the ground. It is truly a wild moor; but there is something wilder to come…The precipice called Dow (or Dhu) Crag appears in front ere long; and then the traveller must turn to the right, and get up the steep mountain-side to the top as he best may. Where Dow Crag and the Old Man join, a dark and solemn tarn lies beneath the precipice… Round three sides of this Gait’s Tarn, the rock is precipitous; and on the other, the crags are piled in grotesque fashion, and so as to afford, —as does much of this side of the mountain,—a great harbourage for foxes, against which the neighbouring population are for ever waging war.”

    Dow Crag from Old Man
    Dow Crag from Old Man
    Great Gully
    Great Gully

    When I reach the old quarry road, the precipice towers ahead, an awe-inspiring wall of cliff and cleft. Wainwright rates it second only to Scafell Crag in its sublime grandeur. Gait’s Tarn, or Goat’s Water, is hidden from view; it is a further climb through the Cove to reach it. That will be my way down.  The ridge running left from the summit, over Buck Pike and Brown Pike, will be my way up; so I turn left and follow the Walna Scar road up to the Walna Scar pass, detouring right to visit the tranquil oasis of Blind Tarn, an ephemeral ripple of mossy reflection under the green skirts of the crags.

    Blind Tarn
    Blind Tarn

    From the pass, I follow the steep path up Brown Pike, where a stone shelter offers respite long enough to sip coffee and look back at the long silver sliver of Coniston Water, glimmering in the distance. Along the onward path, the hunched shoulders of the Old Man form an imposing bulk of blue and green beyond the slender pyramid of Buck Pike. From the top of Buck Pike, a grassy ridge leads to Dow Crag’s summit. Along its precipitous edge, slender crevices plunge into the deeper chasms of Great and Easy Gully. A simple scramble gains the highest point. To the west, across a sea of green foliage and white rock, the darker summits of the Scafells are constantly retouched by the fleeting flicker of sun and shadow: a scene of wild vitality; a Van Gogh painting animated into life.

    Old Man over Buck Pike
    Old Man over Buck Pike
    Gully top
    Gully top

    I follow the ridge path down to Goat’s Hause, and with my lockdown legs bearing up, continue up on to the Old Man, where a small party of young women are in jubilant spirits; the euphoria of the peaks after the shackles of lockdown, perhaps, but it seems like something more.  One of them is draped in an Olympic cape.  I ask her if they’re raising funds for charity.

    “No,” she says. “The cape is from the Olympics. I was part of the women’s hammer-throwing team. But since then, I sustained a serious back injury that put me in hospital for ages. I was told I might never walk again. I was determined to prove them wrong, and I made a bucket list of all the things I wanted to do when I got better.  Climbing the Old Man was one.”

    “I’m a bit sweaty,” she grins when I congratulate her. “It’s hard work. Give me an Olympic final, any day!”

    Low Water from Old Man
    Low Water from Old Man
    Old Man Trig Point
    Old Man Trig Point

    As I descend the zig zag path to the shore of Goat’s Water, I’m elated to be here again; but at the same time, I’m as reflective as its copper-green surface.  Last time I took this path, three shepherds and their tireless dogs were bringing a Herdwick flock down off the fells, a practice that goes back centuries. My thoughts return to Nicholson. At its heart, his book is study of folly. The folly of the Picturesque. The folly of “landscape”.  Most of those early apostles of the Lake District were as guilty as the industrialists in misunderstanding the land and our relationship with it. They saw it as something distinct from us; something to be marvelled at; something to be captured on a canvas and hung on the wall of a civilised townhouse. William Wordsworth was different. He understood how disconnected we had become from the ecosystems we are part of. In the traditional farming communities of the Lakes, he saw a unity between man and the land, which he exalted as a blueprint for how things ought to be. By Nicholson’s time, Wordsworth was massively popular, but his message had been largely lost. He’d become the Sunday School impression of a poet, a purveyor of pretty words about lakes, and daffodils, and quaint rustic traditions.

    Dow Crag over Goat's Water
    Dow Crag over Goat’s Water

    Yet these days, Wordsworth is enjoying something of a re-evaluation as an early environmentalist. The need to heed his message has never been more urgent: COVID-19 is the latest in wave of viruses that have made the transition from animals to humans, a phenomena scientists are linking directly to our relentless destruction of habitats and wild places.  Today’s extinction rate is hundreds, maybe even thousands, of times higher than the natural base rate. The first species to go are usually larger mammals. Their disappearance, in turn, triggers an explosion in the populations of smaller mammals like rodents—those species most likely to spread disease to us. Declining insect populations affect pollination and result in crop failures.  The devastating wildfires in Australia and California are directly linked to global warming.  And yet we describe environmental initiatives as “saving the planet”, as if the planet is some nice-to-have pleasure park that we enjoy at weekends. By destroying ecosystems that we are part of, we are, quite simply, sowing the seeds of our own destruction.  It’s not just about saving the Black Rhino or the Amur Leopard, ultimately, it’s about saving ourselves. To think otherwise is to be a man relentlessly sawing away at the branch that he’s sitting on while his  companion begs him to stop for the sake of the bird’s nest further along.

    We urgently need to change: to find more sustainable ways of sustaining ourselves. Yet, it seems a problem so insurmountable, we are inclined to bury our heads in the sand: slam activists as scaremongers, deny climate change; deny COVID, even.  And yet, if lockdown has taught us anything, it’s that we are actually very good at adapting.  When the offices closed, huge numbers of employees switched to homeworking in days; complex systems that companies had procrastinated on for years were deployed in weeks. All of a sudden, vast numbers of us discovered we can do our jobs from anywhere, without burning daily excesses of petrol, diesel, or jet fuel. Innovation abounds. When we up against it, we are capable of the most remarkable things. I think of Harriet Martineau’s miraculous recovery, and of a jubilant girl in an Olympic cape, conquering the Old Man of Coniston. 

    Nicholson dreamed of a time when we would achieve a “new synthesis of the scientific and imaginative vision”:

    “Then perhaps, we may be able to look at the fells of Cumberland with a new understanding. For they rear themselves in the middle of our civilisation like an ancient boulder lying in a garden. An archaism, belonging to the world of nature as it was long before man came to look at it; belonging, also, to the world which will survive man. They are a sign both of what man comes from and what he is up against. They may be mapped, footpathed, sign-posted, planted with conifers, gouged with quarries, titivated with tea-shops. They may even, in some gigantic explosion, be blown out of shape. Yet they will remain the same, for they are a fact, a fact we cannot alter and perhaps cannot even understand. They are the past which shaped us and the future in which we shall have no shape. To talk of preserving them is both irrelevant and irreverent. All that matters is how long they will allow us to preserve ourselves”.

    – Norman Nicholson
    Dow Crag over Goat's Water
    Dow Crag over Goat’s Water

    Sources/Further Reading

    Read the story of how the Banishead Waterfall came into being as told by one who was there:

    http://www.torver.org/torver-history/banishead-quarry

    David Attenborough’s Extinction sets out the science that links destruction of habitats and our current biodiversity crisis with the rise in pandemics (still available to view on iPlayer at the time of writing).

    http://bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000mn4n

    Norman Nicholson’s The Lakers is well worth a read, if only for the beauty of his writing. It is out of print, but second-hand copies can be found. Here are the details of the Cicerone paperback edition:

    Nicholson, Norman. 1955: The Lakers. Milnthorpe: Cicerone, 1995

    The Lakers
    The Lakers

    In this excellent edition of the CountryStride podcast, farmer and author, James Rebanks, explains how he, and many of his neighbours, are moving to a more sustainable and wild-life friendly form of farming: Lakeland farmers returning to the traditions that inspired Wordsworth:

    https://www.countrystride.co.uk/post/countrystride-38-james-rebanks-english-pastoral

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      Fell Walk, General

      White Winter Hymnal

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      The Old Man and the Raven

      After days wrapped in a Christmas cocoon of lethargy and overeating, the sun returns and I head up the Old Man to savour the snow-capped splendour of the Coniston fells. On Raven Tor, I find my inner pagan.

      Long before a star shone over a stable in Bethlehem, December 25th was the pagan festival of Midwinter – the winter solstice or the shortest day. It celebrated the rebirth of the sun god and an end to his lingering death, manifest in the ever-declining daylight. From here on, the days would lengthen, and warmth and fertility would return.

      A deity who dies and rises again. That sounds somewhat familiar.

      In our secular world, Christmas still bears the trappings of a Christian festival, albeit one at sea in a mass consumer bonanza. But we’re a nation of many faiths, and most of us are agnostic. That’s not to say that Christmas doesn’t mean anything. Even us unbelievers can get behind a season of peace and goodwill, and of course, we enjoy the bank holidays. But it resonates in a profounder way, which has everything to do with its pagan roots. However much our high-tech global reach divorces us from natural cycles, we can’t escape the seasons. We are of the planet and respond to its rhythms in a primal way that daylight bulbs, and strawberries in December, and 24-hour TV can do little to dissipate. Indeed, the December telly guides are full of retrospectives, celebrating the dying year: top 50 news stories, films, records, books, celebrity gaffes, you name it. We look back, take stock, make resolutions for the year to come; let go the stresses of the preceding months; make merry and recharge. Death and rebirth: a spiritual impulse as old as man.

      In our Gregorian calendar, the winter solstice falls on December 21st, but let’s not split hairs. Christmas Day, 2017, is so overcast, it feels like the shortest day. Wrapped in a warm cocoon of family, lethargy and overeating, it’s full of good cheer and comfort and a welcome retreat from the dank, dark drizzle outside.

      The sun god sleeps on through Boxing Day but makes an appearance the day after, when the temperature plummets and the snow falls, causing widespread traffic chaos. Unfortunately, we’re driving home to Cumbria. The roads on our route are clear, but it seems everyone in the country has picked this day to travel. With diversions and roadworks, we spend nine hours in a nationwide traffic jam.

      We arrive back on Wednesday night, unpack, light the fire and put our feet up. I’m due in work on Friday but have tomorrow free. The forecast is clear, cold and sunny. It’s time to break out of the cocoon.

      I wake later than intended, stuff warm layers into a rucksack and head for Coniston. I park in the village and head up the track beside the Sun Inn, a fitting temple to the god who’s very much in evidence today. I make a mental note to pop in later and offer my devotions.

      The path climbs beside the waterfalls of Church Beck, passes Miners’ Bridge, and emerges from the trees into dazzling light at the foot of the Coppermines valley. Straight ahead, beyond the spoil heaps of the slate quarry, stands Raven Tor, the spur that juts out from Brim Fell and separates the two mountain corrie tarns of Low Water and Levers Water. Low Water lies to its left, enclosed by Brim Fell and the Old Man; Levers Water to its right, enclosed by Swirl How and Wetherlam. The mountains are cloaked in snow. It’s enough to make your spirit soar.

      Levers Water over Low Water
      Levers Water over Low Water

      I follow the path to Crowberry Haws and join the quarry track up the Old Man. This is the tourist route. The “back way”, by Goats Water, under the imperial cliffs of Dow Crag, boasts the greater natural splendour. By contrast, this route reveals the scars of industry. Even so, it holds interest. Only the fallen tower of the aerial tramway and its rusting cables, slumped across the path like slain iron snakes, are foreign bodies. Everywhere else, human intervention has simply shaped and rearranged what is naturally here. A neat wall of slate encloses the track on the approach to the old quarry, where stone buildings lie in tumbledown ruin. Slowly the Old Man reclaims what is his, erasing our imprint, and reasserting his natural form. His scars are healing. In a thousand years, there will be little trace of us. For now, there is heritage, softened by the elements and slowly integrating back. This was once a thriving industry that supported the village below; testimony, if you like, to the Old Man’s benevolence to those at his feet.

      Slate quarry ruins - The Old Man Of Coniston
      Slate quarry ruins – The Old Man Of Coniston

      Slate Quarry - Old Man of Coniston
      Slate Quarry – Old Man of Coniston

      Beyond the quarry, a stream has turned the steps to ice. A few of the ill-equipped soldier on, seeking out the snowy edges. Others turn back. The rest of us sit down and pull Microspikes over our boots. Once attached, the going is easy. There is a satisfying crunch as the little teeth bite into the ice and hold firm.

      By the time I reach Low Water, the hand of man has withdrawn and the landscape is altogether wilder. Today, it is a realm of shadows, where dark waters ripple in vivid contrast to the snowy slopes that surround. Here and there, the sun god penetrates and turns the water bronze. I walk along the shore and stare up at Raven Tor, a bright and regal perch, swathed in a thick cloak of virgin snow.

      Low Water
      Low Water

      I return to the main path and climb the steep zig zags that lead to the Old Man’s summit. In places, the path is a uniform sheet of ice and I watch a spike-less man opt instead for the snowy slopes. We meet where he re-joins the stone pitching. He bemoans the fact the mountain is steeper now than five years ago. I smile, and he recounts his last walk in here in snow. He didn’t have spikes then either, so to avoid coming back down this icy section, he made a round of Brim Fell to Raven Tor, then found a way down its flanks to Low Water. I trace his route with my eyes and a vague notion hatches into a plan.

      With height, the lower reaches of Levers Water appear beyond the Tor; a second dark pool to balance Low Water; two black eyes to the Raven’s nose. Beyond, the snow-kissed summit of Wetherlam rises from an umber midriff.

      Low Water and Levers Water
      Low Water and Levers Water

      The sun god reigns supreme on top. Out from under the Old Man’s shoulder, the light is magical; the god himself, a white star in an expanse of azure. Below the blue, a fluffy blanket of cloud is trimmed in soft yellow. Golden rays sparkle in the crystalline snow. The summit’s beehive cairn is an altar where hooded figures bow to Sol Invictus, the unconquered sun, a deity reborn in youthful vigour.

      Old Man Summit in snow and sun
      Old Man Summit in snow and sun

      Old Man Summit Cairn
      Old Man Summit Cairn

      Beyond the trig point, the snow-capped ridge sweeps on over Brim Fell.  A few well-wrapped wanderers are hastening this way.  I’m the only one striding outward. Its soon becomes apparent why.  A different elemental force takes charge on Brim Fell.  A bitter wind sweeps over the Duddon valley from the Irish Sea, blowing stinging snowflakes in horizontal sheets.  Despite a hood, a hat and a tightly wound woollen scarf, my face takes a lashing and I’m buffeted by gusts. It’s brutal but exhilarating.  Past the summit cairn, I hurry toward the edge. Once over the parapet and on to the Raven’s outstretched wing, I’m protected, and I pause to drink in the scene.

      Old Man of Coniston Trig Point
      Old Man of Coniston Trig Point

      Ridge to Brim Fell from the Old Man
      Ridge to Brim Fell from the Old Man

      Coniston Fells ridge - Scafells behind
      Coniston Fells ridge – Scafells behind

      I’m entirely alone.  A few small silhouettes of people are visible on the Old Man’s summit, but here is virgin territory.  Well almost. I find one set of footprints and follow them for a short way.  For a brief minute, I glimpse a hooded figure on the slopes below, just above the shore of Low Water.  But in a blink, he’s gone, and soon after, so are his tracks.  The sun dances over the untouched snow, knee-deep now.  I imagine I’m exploring uncharted ground as I descend the Raven’s wing to her shoulder, following the line of rocks and grassy tufts that just protrude, in the hope of avoiding unseen fissures. I climb the Raven’s neck to the cairn perched on her head. Across Levers Water, Black Sails ridge stands proud, a muscular right arm to the head of Wetherlam. The amber rocks of the Raven’s cairn crown her white mantel. There’s about two hours of daylight left but the light is already softening, assuming the warm glow of afternoon. I’m toasty from the exertion, but after five minutes of taking photos, I’m blowing into my gloves to warm my frozen hands.

      Black Sails from Raven Tor
      Black Sails from Raven Tor

      Raven Tor Summit
      Raven Tor Summit

      The snow has drifted into soft deep blankets on the slopes that fall away to Low Water.  I follow a tinkling stream for most of the way down, then veer left for a gentler descent.  At the bottom, I leap a beck at its narrowest point and climb to the shore path, where I stood earlier. Cold, dark and tranquil, Low Water is a pool of primeval mystery, snugly enclosed in the arms of the Old Man and the Raven.

      The Old Man from Raven Tor
      The Old Man from Raven Tor

      Low Water - Old Man
      Low Water – Old Man

      I cast a last reverential glance at these snow-clad Titans then return, past the quarry, to the world of mortals.  In the Sun Inn, a fire crackles in an old, black, cast-iron range; a tiny Sol Invictus bestowing light and warmth as the sky outside darkens.  I sup a welcome pint of Loweswater Gold and watch the flames dance around the logs.  I’ve never thought of myself as religious, but today I’m in touch with my inner pagan.

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