Great Gable via Grey Knotts, Brandreth & Green Gable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources/Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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