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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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!”

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.

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

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

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