Category Archives: Legend

Troubled Waters – The Unquiet Graves of Coniston

The ghosts of two ill-fated lovers haunt Yewdale Beck, the victims in a centuries-old tale of abduction, murder, and revenge. The spirit of a Victorian smuggler disturbs a young family in 1960’s Skelwith; and Dow Crag is home to an ancient raven, condemned by a Druid to live for millennia.

Under Yewdale Bridge the beck burbles over a bed of smooth stone, its waters glossed with the warm patina of antique pewter, like the dull sheen of old tankards in a tavern, and with just as many stories to tell.

Yewdale Beck from Yewdale Bridge
Yewdale Beck from Yewdale Bridge

A little way up the lane, The Cumbria Way leaves Shepherd’s Bridge to shyly handrail Yewdale Beck through Blackguards Wood to Low Yewdale, where it forks right to the dappled shade of Tarn Hows Wood, and beyond to the tarns themselves.

Broadleaf Tree on Cumbria Way
Broadleaf Tree on Cumbria Way

On the way, the outstretched limbs of broadleaf trees escape their leafy boas to point bony fingers earthward as if betraying unseen secrets. And over the lush green canopy and carpet of summer bracken, something more imposing looms. The vicious crags of the Yewdale fells rise like chiselled fangs of volcanic fury. Holme Fell is a mauve castle of rugged towers and ramparts, a primeval stronghold keeping eternal watch over the leafy pastures below.

Yewdale Fells
Yewdale Fells
Holme Fell from the Cumbria Way
Holme Fell from the Cumbria Way
Yewdale Fells
Yewdale Fells
Holme Fell
Holme Fell

A shower of summer rain softens the light, and as beams of sun slowly re-emerge to spotlight the higher crags of Wetherlam Edge, a rainbow forms over the  Tilberthwaite Fells, imparting an air of eerie mystery. And such a feeling is fitting, as the banks of Yewdale Beck are supposedly haunted by the victims of an old and murderous misdeed.

Rainbow over Tilberthwaite
Rainbow over Tilberthwaite

The Giant and the Bower Maiden

Writing in 1849, Dr Alexander Gibson recounts a tale told to him by a racy, terse and poetic “rustic informant”. By Gibson’s time, after a century of neglect, Coniston Hall with its “ivy clad turret-like chimneys” had been repurposed as a barn. Until around 1650, it was the family seat of the Le Fleming family, the Knights of Coniston. When occasion demanded, it was the knight’s duty to raise a small army of men-at-arms to repel marauding bands of Scots or Irish. According to the tale, one of the knights had his efforts galvanised by the arrival of incomer from Troutbeck. The new recruit was a giant of a man, who had recently built himself a hut and taken up residence in “the lonely dell of the tarns” (now Tarn Hows). Standing 9’6” in his stockinged feet, this robust fellow was known as Girt Will O’ The Tarns. When not employed as foot soldier, Will was prized locally as an agricultural labourer.

Tarn Hows
The Lonely Dell of the Tarns (Tarn Hows)

Now, Le Fleming had a daughter named, Eva who was greatly admired for “her beauty and gentleness, her high-bred dignity and her humble virtues”. Lady Eva, as she was known, had a romantic inclination and loved to row for hours on the lake or stroll through the woods surrounding it. On such excursions, she was invariably accompanied by her favourite bower maiden, Barbara. Eva loved Barbara like a sister, and Barbara herself was so fair, she was capable of turning as many heads as her mistress, but despite a string of local suitors, Barbara only had eyes for Le Fleming’s falconer, a man named (fittingly), Dick Hawksley.

One fine evening, following days of heavy rain, Eva summoned Barbara for a moonlit stroll along the lake shore. As they made their way through the coppiced woods at the head of the lake, Barbara recounted how, on several recent occasions, she had been accosted by Girt Will as she rode to Skelwith to visit her family. Indeed, the last time, he had gone so far as to try and snatch her horse’s rein and might have pulled her from her mount had she not reacted quickly and spurred her steed into a canter. Just as Lady Eva was expressing her shock and indignation at such impertinence, a rustle in bushes cut her short, and in an instant Girt Will appeared. He straightaway snatched up Barbara with the ease that any ordinary man might lift a child, then set off at full tilt into the trees. Barbara’s screams quickly roused Eva from her momentary stupefaction, and she rushed back to the hall to summon help. Dick Hawksley and a few others gave chase on foot, while Eva’s brothers fetched their swords and called for their horses to be saddled.

The pursuers cornered their quarry where Yewdale Beck forms a small pool, known as Cauldron Dub, near Far End cottages on the outskirts of Coniston. With Barbara now a burden and an impediment to fight or flight, Girt Will perpetrated an act of barbaric callousness and hurled his helpless victim into the beck. The beck was in spate after days of heavy rain, and the raging torrent swiftly swallowed Barbara. Dick Hawksley wasted no time in diving in after her. Fleetingly, he reappeared pulling Barbara towards the shore, but the current was too strong, and the entwined lovers were swept headlong downstream. The stunned onlookers quickly divided into two parties, some running along the bank in the hope of affecting a rescue, while the others set off in pursuit of a Girt Will, who had taken advantage of their distraction to hot foot it toward Yewdale.

Any hopes of dragging the lovers from the swollen beck were dashed when they reached Yewdale bridge. The constriction of the channel under the stone arch forced the turbulent waters into a much faster surge, and Dick and Barbara were quickly swept from view.

Meanwhile, their avengers caught up with Girt Will between Low and High Yewdale. Wielding their swords, they succeeded in dodging his swinging club long enough to inflict a myriad of mortal cuts upon his person. Indeed, it was said there was not sufficient skin left on his body to fashion a tobacco pouch. A twelve-foot mound near the path from High Yewdale to Tarn Hows Wood has ever since been known as the Giant’s Grave.

Barbara and Dick remained lost for several days until their drowned bodies washed up on the shore of the lake, still entwined in a lovers’ clinch. The tragic violence of their deaths did not afford a quiet passage to the grave, however, and their spirits are said to haunt the stretch of Yewdale Beck between Cauldron Dub and the bridge.

The Spirit of a Smuggler

Today, below a shifting procession of pregnant cloud and shafts of sun, the waters of Tarn Hows glisten with the steely polish of armour plate, feathered with pinnate patterns of over-hanging rowan leaves and dotted with bunches of blood-red berries.

Rowan Tree Tarn Hows
Rowan Tree Tarn Hows
Tarn Hows
Tarn Hows

Beyond the tarns, I leave the Cumbria Way to climb to one of the finest viewpoints in the region, the low summit of Black Crag. Windermere and Coniston Water stretch out towards the Irish Sea like languid slivers of fallen sky, but as clouds gather in the west, Wetherlam and Langdale Pikes fade to grey, the spectral impressions of fells. They mark the bounds of bootlegger country, and it is the ghost of a bootlegger that hijacks my thoughts now.

In 1853, local papers excitedly reported the arrest of local smuggler and illicit whiskey distiller, Lanty Slee. Lanty remains something of a Robin Hood figure in the popular imagination, famous for robbing the excise men of their liquor duties by selling cheap moonshine (known as Mountain Dew) to the poor. In 1853, the excise men uncovered one of Slee’s stills in a purpose-dug cave in a field border to the west of Black Crag.

While the newspapers reported Lanty as resident at High Arnside Farm at the time of this arrest, contemporary historians like H S Cowper placed him at neighbouring Low Arnside. It is possible, he rented both properties at different times, or even together. One person with a special reason for believing Lanty lived at Low Arnside is Gordon Fox. Gordon and his wife, Barbara moved into the Low Arnside Farm in the early sixties, and they would soon come to associate Lanty with a different kind of spirit.

Ladder Stile, Black Crag Summit
Ladder Stile, Black Crag Summit
Windermere from Black Crag
Windermere from Black Crag
Black Crag Trig Point and Coniston Water
Black Crag Trig Point and Coniston Water

When I posted an article about Lanty, earlier this year, Gordon got in touch to share his story. Here it is in his own words.

Low Arnside Farm
Low Arnside Farm

“As you know Low Arnside is a most beautiful but remote lakeland farmhouse on the high fells above the Coniston road and was featured in the film, “Miss Potter”.

“In November 1961, my eldest son was almost born in the house due to his early arrival, but we did just make it to Kendal in time.

In order to ‘modernise’ the house ‘slightly’ electricity had been installed and whilst channelling the walls for the wiring the workmen discovered a dagger and a couple of lead bullets which had been buried under the plaster.

“Because of odd happenings in the house, we decided to have a Ouija board session one night and raised a spirit which gave us some very interesting information. The séance comprised my wife Barbara, myself, our friends, Stephen Darbishire, the painter and his wife the poet, Kerry Darbishire. During the course of this session, we raised the spirit of someone called Lanty Slee who told us the house was his and ‘always would be’.

“After a few more answers, he suddenly said that he could say no more. We asked why and his final remark spelt out that it was because of the presence of a ‘pure being’! Naturally we all wondered if he meant one of us. But we named all four of us and each time our question was met with, ‘no’. Then Barbara asked if it was the two months old Matthew peacefully sleeping upstairs and he answered at once, ‘yes’!..at which point all contact ceased.

“All activity in the house also ceased after that, which had recently comprised of him being so delighted with the arrival of electricity that “he” would switch the lights on and off in the middle of the night, to our already tired annoyance as new parents. So, when that all stopped it was a blessing.

“I would add that up until that time none of us had ever heard the name Lanty Slee.”

The Druid and the Immortal Raven of Dow Crag

From Black Crag and Low Arnside, I return by the eastern shores of Tarn  Hows, and the high Coniston Fells command my attention once more. Wetherlam and the Old Man each dominate their own portion of the skyline but contrive to hide the majestic rock face of Dow Crag that lies beyond. Writing in 1908, W T Palmer recounts an old legend which claims Dow Crag is home to an immortal raven. Its immortality is a curse rather than a blessing, however, condemned as it is to grow ever older, frailer, and more and more world-weary, while perpetually denied the release of death.

Dow Crag
Dow Crag

The curse was a punishment, metered out by a Druid, for the raven’s catastrophic dereliction of duty. The bird was the Druid’s familiar. He was charged with watching over Torver as a sentinel. His job was to croak a warning when he saw the Roman army advancing. But the Druid awoke to find the Britons’ camp in flames and legionaries marching forward victorious, the raven perched atop their standard. On returning to his master, the bird faced and angry rebuke for his treachery. But he pleaded that it was not treachery but a terrible mistake. He had swooped down to attack and kill the yellow bird the Romans held proudly before them, but as his talons locked in on their target, he realised it was not a bird at all but an effigy of burnished bronze. Only then did he realise to his horror, he was too late to return and sound the alarm.

“Venerable bird,” said the Druid. “Venerable as myself and as old, I had it in mind to condemn these to die, but instead that shalt live, live on the topmost crag of Dow, till another army sweep away the Roman, and the yellow bird is carried southward over sands”.

The Romans did eventually leave southward over the sands, but to the raven’s eternal woe, the last legion became mired in a swamp on Torver Moor, where the standard bearer and his yellow bird were swallowed up. It is said they lie there still. And unless they are ever exhumed and the bird carried south over Morecambe Bay, Dow Crag will ever echo with the hoarse croaks of its ancient raven.

Dow Crag
Dow Crag


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    Thorstein – A Viking’s Adventure In Lakeland

    Thorstein of the Mere is a fictional tale of how Coniston Water got its old name. It blends bloody history and ghostly legend in a compelling picture of life in Dark Age Lakeland. Inspired by Collingwood’s novel, I walk from Beacon Tarn to the Giant’s Grave in the footsteps of Celts and Vikings.

    Legends of The Northmen

    The son of a giant, and a shapeshifter with the ability to change sex, Loki was a companion to Odin and Thor, but his penchant for playing tricks would prove his downfall. When he tricked the blind god, Höd into killing Balder, the most loved of all the gods, his punishment was severe.

    Giant's Grave. Woodland
    Giant’s Grave. Woodland

    Loki was bound to a rock with the entrails of his son. Above, hung a great serpent that would drip venom on him. To spare his torment, Loki’s wife would catch the venom in a bowl, but when the bowl was full, she would have to leave his side to empty it. While she was gone, the venom would splash onto Loki’s face. His spasms of pain were the cause of the earthquakes.

    The story is a central tenet of Norse mythology, but intriguingly, it is depicted alongside Christian scenes of the crucifixion on a tall sandstone cross in the churchyard at Gosforth, near Wastwater. The Gosforth cross is intriguing testimony to the blending of Celtic Christian and pagan Viking cultures in 10th century Cumbria.

    The reasons for the Viking invasion are themselves misted in legend. They concern the mythical Danish king, Ragnar Lodbrok, who distinguished himself through many raids on the east coast. Ragnar’s sons, Bjorn Ironside, Ubba, Sigmund Snake-in-the-Eye, Halfdan, and Ivar the Boneless gained such fame as warriors that their father felt compelled to outdo them. Ragnar bragged he would conquer Britain with just two boats, but his efforts were thwarted by Ella, King of Northumbria, who executed Ragnar by throwing him into a snake pit. To avenge their father’s death, Ivar, Halfdan, and Ubba raised a large army and set sail. 

    On arrival in Britain, Ivar declined to fight and headed for Northumbria to make peace with Ella. In return, he asked for as much land as he could cover with a bull hide. The king agreed, but Ivar was cunning. He stretched the hide as thinly as it would go then cut it into fine strips. Sewn together, they created a cord large enough to encircle York, which duly became his Viking capital, Jorvik. Ivar then sent for his brothers and their armies. They defeated Ella and executed him by carving the blood eagle into his back (a gruesome torture, which we can only hope existed solely in the imaginations of the saga writers).

    But Ivar the Boneless and Halfdan step out of the pages of mythology and on to the pages of history when they arrive in Britain. In 865 AD, they really did lead the Great Pagan Army that proceeded to conquer the kingdoms of East Anglia, Mercia, and Northumbria. Viking ambitions to conquer Wessex were finally thwarted by Alfred The Great in 878 at the battle of Edington. A settlement was reached in which the east of England—East Anglia, East Mercia (East Midlands) and Northumbria (which included Yorkshire)—would be under Danish rule, while Wessex, and West Mercia would remain Anglo-Saxon.

    But Cumbria was not part of England. It was part of Strathclyde, an independent Celtic kingdom which stretched up above the Solway to where Glasgow now stands. It had largely resisted incursions by the Saxons, the Scoti, and the Danes. The Vikings that settled along its coastal plain were not Danes but Norwegians, arriving by way of the Orkneys, Dublin, and the Isle of Man. While undoubtedly fearsome warriors, they do not seem to have shared the desire to subjugate and rule. They were farmers and frontiersmen seeking new lands, or perhaps, their independence from a recently unified Norway. They helped shape the Cumbrian landscape by clearing forests for pasture; they may even have introduced the Herdwick sheep. In such turbulent times, their desire to self-govern was similar to that of the indigenous Celts, and they learned to live alongside each other, if not in perfect harmony, at least in a loose tactical coalition of common interest.

    Coniston Water from The Beacon
    Coniston Water from The Beacon

    A Saga of the Northmen in Lakeland

    Such is the world that provides the setting for W. G. Collingwood’s 1895 novel, Thorstein of the Mere. The eponymous mere is Coniston Water, and the novel is Collingwood’s imagined tale of how the lake got its original name, Thurston Water. Its subtitle, A Saga Of The Northmen In Lakeland, is a mission statement. Collingwood was a scholar of the Norse sagas, and an archaeologist who excavated several Lakeland sites. His novel is an attempt to credibly portray what life must have been like in Cumbria in the 10th Century, both for the Vikings and the Celts. The principal characters are imagined, but the story is woven around four historical events—the treaty in Bakewell (920), the Treaty of Dacre (927), the battle of Brunanburh (937), and the battle for Cumbria (945)—that helped shape Anglo-Saxon England and Brittonic Cumbria.

    When Alfred the Great died, he was succeeded by his son, Edward the Elder, who succeeded in driving the Danes out of East Anglia and Mercia until only Northumbria remained under the Danelaw. In 920, Edward summoned the other British kings and chieftains, including Ragnald—the Viking king—and Owain—the Celtic king of Strathclyde—to a meeting in Bakewell, where he persuaded them to accept his overlordship in return for peace and the retention of their kingdoms.

    Thorstein is a young boy at this time, growing up at Greenodd, by the mouth of the River Crake. The South Lakes is home to several Norwegian settlements, centred on Ulfar’s Town (Ulverston). Ulfar is a friend and neighbour of Thorstein’s father, Swein, and his town acts as a meeting place for the Thing—an assembly where the local Northmen agree common laws and discuss trade and harvests. Further north is another Norwegian settlement under the control of their kinsman, Ketel. Ulfar, Swein, and Ketel, are summoned to Bakewell alongside Owain. Swein has no argument with the Saxon king but becomes enraged by the presence of Ragnald the Dane, an old enemy. Edward’s diplomacy prevails, however, and he persuades Swein to agree, if not to Edward’s overlordship, then at least to peace.

    Thorstein’s early years are relatively idyllic, growing up in a fine Viking timber house, learning to till the land and look after sheep and cattle, playing in the river and dreaming of setting sail and claiming new lands. Then in 927, one of the Celtic fell-folk, a red-headed giant of a man, appears from the forest to deliver a burnt arrow. It is a summons. Swein had heard from chapmen (itinerant tinkers) that Edward and Ragnald had both died and been succeeded by their sons, Athelstan and Sigtrygg. Sigtrygg had tried to extend the boundaries of the Danelaw, but Athelstan had been quick to push him back. But now it seems that Sigtrygg too has died and Athelstan has conquered York to proclaim himself King of all England. For fear the Saxon king’s ambitions will not stop there, King Constantine of Scotland and Owain are mobilising against him. The Lakeland Northmen are urged to join them. The giant will return in several days to lead them over the mountains to join the host.

    Wool Knott, Blawith Common
    Wool Knott, Blawith Common

    ~

    W. G. Collingwood

    At the Ruskin Museum in Coniston three of Collingwood’s watercolours hang alongside Ruskin’s own. Collingwood was Ruskin’s assistant—his aide du camp as Ruskin called him—and founder of the museum. Some think that Collingwood would have achieved more had he stepped from Ruskin’s shadow, but these paintings are not overshadowed. One of the Coniston Coppermines Valley, brooding clouds swirling around the Bell, holds my attention longer than anything else in the room. Collingwood was highly attuned to the Lakeland landscape, and his vivid descriptions in the novel are as evocative as his paintings.

    Coniston Mountains across Blawith Common
    Coniston Mountains across Blawith Common

    ~

    The Giant’s Demand

    The Celtic giant leads the Northmen over the wild moorland of Blawith Common, to Hawkshead and the banks of Windermere, where they find the ruins of Galava, the Roman city of Ambleside—its former magnificence is evident even though its buildings are crumbling. From there, they follow the old Roman road past Rydal and Grasmere to Thirlmere, then east from Blencathra to Dacre near Eamont where their massed forces gather. But they are no match for Athelstan’s Saxon army, which is already encamped, and to avoid a bloodbath, they accept Athelstan’s overlordship and pledge that none shall attack their neighbours.

    Beacon Tarn from Wool Knott
    Beacon Tarn, Blawith Common

    On their return to Greenodd, Swein asks his Irish wife, Unna to converse with the Celt and ask what gift they can give him as a reward for guiding them through the mountains. His reply shocks them. As political insurance, he wants to foster one of their children. Swein refuses, but over the coming months, children of thralls (servants) and shepherds go missing and are found dead in the woods, and the Northmen remain on high alert.

    The worry of the fell-folk slowly subsides, but the peace with Athelstan is fragile, not least because the Danish King Guthferth Ivarson of Dublin (who was not part of the treaty) uses Cumbria as a through route to mount raids on York. Aware of how cut-off they from their kinsmen further north, the various Norwegian communities agree to congregate at an annual Althing. As a venue, they choose Legburthwaite at the head of St John’s in the Vale—the spot where they parted after the Treaty of Dacre.

    Thorstein Finds the Mere

    Meanwhile, Thorstein has grown into a strong and curious thirteen-year-old, thirsty for adventure. He and his brothers know “by hearsay of wide lakes among the fells, lying all alone for the first adventurer to take and hold”, and Thorstein imagines that if he could only track the Crake, he might discover “the great water”. Swein has warned his children to always keep in sight of home, “but he might as well have warned the smoke not to go out of the chimney”. Thorstein persuades his elder brother, Hundi, to go with him, and the two boys set off up the valley of the Crake. There are none of gentle pastures that grace its banks today. The shores are thick with forest, and their journey becomes a demanding ghyll scramble. By the time they reach the spot where Lowick bridge now stands, Hundi has had enough and turns back, but Thorstein battles on alone, climbing Lowick force and navigating the swamp beyond until, “when the wood thinned, and the waterway broadened, and the world grew brighter, and lo, beyond, a great gleam of blue, and a blaze of golden sky”.

    Coniston Water from The Beacon
    Coniston Water from The Beacon

    Thorstein has discovered his mere and sleeps like a squirrel in the boughs of a great oak. In the morning, he sets off for Greenodd to fetch witnesses so he can claim the lake as his territory, but before he has gone far, he is hit on the head with a cudgel. When he comes round, he is being dragged through the wood by the red-headed giant, and his henchmen. The giant has his fosterling, and Thorstein is about to enter the world of the fell-folk.

    Juniper, Blawith Common
    Juniper, Blawith Common

    Blawith Common – Home of the Celtic Fell-Folk

    “BEYOND the heather was the giant’s home, on the fell between Blawith and Broughton. On one hand were the waste wet mosses of the moor, and on the other hand, far below, the great flats of Woodlands, surrounded by the tossing rocky range of Dunnerdale fells, from Brimfell on the right hand away down to Black Comb and the glittering sea.”

    In describing this terrain, Collingwood the storyteller morphs briefly into Collingwood the archaeologist:

    “Upon these moors, here and there you can find the walls of their buildings, and even in little corners what may be chambers, or store-houses, or fire-spots, or what not, curiously built of great stones: but all quite different from the farm buildings of our own people, and plainly the relics of an earlier race. Within these homesteads there are heaps that are round and hollow in the midst, with a gap for a doorway, and edged with stone within and without. Though the top of it is fallen in, one can see that such a ruin might have been a hut shaped like a beehive, and roofed over like those Pict-houses they tell of in other parts: high enough inside for a man to stand up in, and big enough for him to lie at length. When we dig into them, we find potsherds, and bones of their feasts, the charred stones and ashes of their fires, and now and then a scrap of iron or bronze, on the paving or along the skirting of the dry-stone wall. Also, hard by, one may light upon plenty of graves where the fell folk doubtless lie buried. Indeed, upon Blawith moor, under the Knott, there is a great barrow in which folk digging found burnt bones, and you can see the tall stone that stood at the head still standing there. They call this place the Giant’s Grave: and old neighbours tell that it is the burial place of the last of the giants who dwelt in that moorland village, and that he was shot with an arrow on that very fell side, and so was killed, and his race ended.”

    Giant's Grave. Woodland
    Giant’s Grave. Woodland
    Ancient Settlement
    Ancient Settlement

    ~

    Cudgel-wielding giants no longer stalk Blawith Common. Nor are you likely to meet armed Northmen coming from Ulfar’s Town, although you may encounter walkers making a similar trek along the Cumbria Way.

    In the early half-light of an October morning, Beacon Tarn is all mine, its pewter waters, a tranquil pool of timeless memory, hemmed with soft banks of bracken, muted colour gradually returning with the daylight, twilight tones turning to autumnal tints of mulberry, russet, and mustard. Collingwood once taught his protégé, Arthur Ransome, that the unique spirit of a place has as much to do with layers of memory as with the rocks and trees, and this ancient landscape is steeped in the ambience of his novel.

    Beacon Tarn
    Beacon Tarn
    Beacon Tarn

    I follow the Cumbria Way beneath Wool Knott as far as Tottlebank Heights then track right. When I reach the far end of Blawith Knott, the red sea of bracken parts to reveal an expanse of scrubby grass and scattered boulders, some natural erratics, but one, at least, is a solitary standing stone, marking the ancient grave of a giant. A little further on are the remains of a settlement, just as Collingwood describes.

    Giant's Grave. Woodland
    Giant’s Grave. Woodland
    Ancient Settlement
    Ancient Settlement
    Ancient Settlement
    Ancient Settlement

    As a Northman, Thorstein is appalled by the primitive crudity of their huts, their semi-wild cattle, and the meekness of their Christian religion, worshipped with simple wooden crosses. But the giant’s daughter takes a shine to him, and with time, a bond between them grows.

    “The child who had nursed him gave him to understand that her name was Raineach, that is Fern: and indeed she was not unlike the bracken when it is red in autumn, and she was slender and strong and wild as its tall fronds that smother up the hollows among the boulders on the moors.”

    Boulders near Giant's Grave
    Boulders and bracken near Giant’s Grave

    From the summit of Blawith Knott, I look out across the wild expanse to the Coniston mountains, which emerge like shadows from chiffon veils of cloud—the charcoal forms of spectral fells.  Beneath White Borran, two large ancient cairns lie shrouded in shoulder-high bracken, and sparse junipers stand like stunted sentinels.  I climb to the rocky summit of Wool Knott, and gaze over Beacon Tarn, slate blue in breaking sun, to the fiery flanks of Beacon fell beyond. From the shore, I climb to the top of the Beacon, and suddenly below, there is the long slender body of Thorstein’s mere, cool and languid, under wooded slopes.

    Coniston Water from The Beacon
    Coniston Water from The Beacon

    ~

    The Battle for Cumbria

    Thorstein spends three winters with the fell-folk. With time, they appear less uncouth, and he learns their prowess as hunters and fishermen. His bond with Raineach strengthens until the two are inseparable, and although he still dreams of absconding, he now imagines taking her with him. In the end, it is Raineach who instigates their escape.

    It is 937, and the peace has broken, Constantine and Owain are again rising against Athelstan, and this time the Irish Danes have joined their alliance. The Lakeland Northmen will fight alongside them. Promising Thorstein the opportunity to see his father, the giant and a few of his men take the boy over the fells to Thirlmere, where they encamp with their kin in the Iron Age fort at Castle Crag on The Benn. Raineach follows against her father’s wishes.

    Castle Crag fort, The Benn
    Castle Crag fort, The Benn

    The Battle of Brunanburh is an overwhelming victory for Athelstan. Owain is killed and his throne passes to his son, Domhnall. Swein dies too. The giant had meant to keep Thorstein as a ransom in case of trouble with the Northmen. Now with the boar dead, the piglet is a liability, and the giant means to kill him, but Raineach overhears and alerts Thorstein. The two make their break for freedom over the fells, arriving back at Greenodd in time for Swein’s wake.

    What ensues is an engrossing tale of adventure, love, and betrayal. A twist sees Thorstein declared an outlaw and forced to take refuge on Peel Island in the middle of his mere. The real truth behind his transgression disseminates, however, and Hundi and his friends prevail on Thorstein to attend the Althing to clear his name.

    Outside the sanctity of the Althing, Thorstein’s outlaw status means he is vulnerable to attack. As such, he takes a circuitous route by way of St Patrick’s Dale (Patterdale). Here, he meets two battle-bruised Celtic warriors. They inform him that Edmund has joined forces with Constantine’s successor, Malcolm, to invade Strathclyde. He has Domhnall’s army in retreat. Domhnall now plans to lure the Scots and Saxons into a narrow mountain pass, where his men can hide in the wooded slopes and ambush the advancing Saxons by rolling great boulders on them. Domhnall is heading for the Thirlmere, right where the Northmen are innocently gathering for their Althing. Thorstein must get to Legburthwaite early to warn them.

    The battle for Cumbria in 945 is as shrouded in legend as the story of Ragnar Lodbrok. According to the myth, Domhnall (corrupted to Dunmail by the Anglo-Saxon tongue) is slain by the Saxons and buried at Dunmail Raise. To keep his crown from Saxon hands, a few of his elite bodyguards, seize the crown, climb the slope of Raise Beck, and fling it into Grisedale Tarn. Every year, Dunmail’s ghost army returns to retrieve the crown and bid Dunmail rise again.

    Historians concede that a battle probably did take place. It is likely Edmund won and gifted the rule of Strathclyde to Malcolm, but it is also likely that Domhnall survived. Later, he may even have regained control of his kingdom.

    In Collingwood’s version, Thorstein crosses Striding Edge and experiences a premonition of the coming bloodshed—a vision as ghostly as the legend that would grow up around it. Ultimately, however, events unfold in line with the historical narrative, albeit with a little poetic flourish—Domhnall casts his own crown into Grisedale Tarn as he melts into the mountain mist with Aluin, the woman who has been his undoing.

    Grisedale Tarn
    Grisedale Tarn

    To learn Aluin’s story, and the fate of Thorstein and the Northmen, you will have to read the novel. Not only is it a fine, swashbuckling adventure, but as a credible imagining of life in Dark Age Cumbria, it is hard to beat.

    I am not alone in that opinion. Arthur Ransome said this:

    “For myself, the Lake Country and my own childhood would not have been what they were if I had not known Mr. W.J. Collingwood’s ‘Thorstein of the Mere’”.

    Sources/Further Reading

    A translation of The Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok and his Sons:

    http://www.germanicmythology.com/FORNALDARSAGAS/ThattrRagnarsSonar.html

    In this fascinating edition of Countrystride, archeologist, Steve Dickinson talks about the Gosforth cross, the Vikings in Lakeland, and a possible lost kingdom:

    https://www.countrystride.co.uk/single-post/countrystride-90-the-vikings-in-cumbria

    A little more on the Battle of Brunanburh from Diane McIlmoyle. (Please note the Giant’s grave Diane mentions is not the same as the one in my article). Diane’s article also includes links at the end to further posts of hers on the Treaty of Eamont Bridge (Dacre) and Dunmail’s battle with Edmund and Malcolm:


    The following books were also very helpful and well worth reading:

    Schama, Simon. 2000: A History of Britain, at the edge of the world? London: BBC Worldwide.

    Eastham, Paul. 2019: Huge and Mighty Forms, Why Cumbria Makes Remarkable People. Cockermouth: Fletcher Christian Books.

    Carruthers, F. J. 1979: People called CUMBRI. London: Robert Hale. 


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      Loweswater Gold: the Remarkable Mysteries of Mellbreak

      Beguiling lakes, stiff scree slopes, a champion ale, a superlative waterfall eulogised by a Lake Poet, and a tragedy with a supernatural twist, I go in search of mystery and majesty in Loweswater.

      Loweswater Gold

      I’m heading for Loweswater. I have heard tell it is a magical realm where the lake is filled with a golden ale, as fine as any ale to have passed the lips of mortals. Ancient enchantments ensure the lake looks (and tastes) like water, but as it is magically syphoned into cellars of the Kirkstile Inn, it is transformed into the aptly named Loweswater Gold, crowned Champion Golden Ale of Britain in 2011. If I fail to return, do not mourn me. Be assured I died happy…

      Mellbreak


      The Kirkstile Inn sits beside the church (or kirk) in the village of Loweswater, and nestles in the shadow of Mellbreak, which rises like a rough-hewn pyramid beyond. Graphite grey in early morning shadow, Mellbreak’s tapering profile and plunging declivities suggest a mountain of Alpine proportions, but this is an illusion. The fell is a meagre 1676 feet high, and neither is it a pyramid. Behind its northern façade of Raven Crag and White Crag, Mellbreak stretches into a ridge with a wide summit plateau; it is shaped like the hull of an upturned boat and sports two summits.

      Mellbreak over the Kirkstile Inn
      Mellbreak over the Kirkstile Inn

      Such knowledge does little to diminish the daunting profile which its north face presents. It looks unassailable. I’m hoping this too is an illusion; for to experience the true magic of Loweswater Gold, it is necessary first to complete a quest in the form of a fell-walk, and today, that quest is Mellbreak.

      The Direct Ascent


      Wainwright advocates the direct route of ascent, straight up the stiff scree to the right of Raven Crag.  As I approach along the track from Kirkgate farm, the prospect loses none of its intimidating countenance. The slope looks severe, but this is the way Wainwright deems the grandest, so with blood already pumping in anticipation, I climb over grass to where the rivers of cinnamon scree snake steeply upward through chocolate heather to the steel-grey crags above.

      The scree slopes of the direct ascent Mellbreak
      The scree slopes of the direct ascent Mellbreak

      Calves soon convulse in sharp pangs of protest, and the loose shale punishes hard-won progress by forcing feet to slide back one step for every two gained. A little way up, the path forks, the left-hand route makes a few wise zig zags before disappearing below the face of White Crag.  I’m not entirely sure where it emerges.  Keeping on ahead looks the tougher proposition, but at least the outcome is clear: it enters a steep sided gully, which Wainwright calls the “rock gateway”. Footing becomes firmer within the gateway and before long, I am climbing out on to Wainwright’s “first promontory”, a rocky shelf which provides an edifying view back over the blue iridescence of Loweswater, shaped into an elongated heart by distortions of perspective and the green incursion of Holme Wood on its western shore.

      Blake Fell and Loweswater from Mellbreak
      Blake Fell and Loweswater from Mellbreak

      Loweswater is remarkable for being the only lake in Lakeland that does not drain outward towards the sea.  Instead, its outflow, Dub Beck, empties inwards into Crummock Water, whose blue expanse comes into view a little further up the slope. Whiteless Pike, another charcoal pyramid, casts a perfect dark reflection on Crummock’s ripple-free sheen, cobalt blue under clear April skies. 

      Rannerdale Knotts over Crummock Water and Butterm
      Rannerdale Knotts over Crummock Water and Buttermere

      Twin Peaks


      Above the crags, the going is easier, and the north summit is quickly gained. This is the more satisfying of Mellbreak’s twin tops, capped with a triangular cairn and ringed with heather. From here, the aspect over Loweswater comes into its own, hemmed by the steep flanks of Blake fell and Burbank fell to the south-west, and the twin summits of Darling Fell and Low Fell to the north-east. Straight ahead, beyond the water, stretches a flat expanse of coastal plain, eventually merging into a hazy wash of blue, the merest hint of the Irish sea.

      Loweswater from Mellbreak's north summit
      Loweswater from Mellbreak’s north summit

      The south summit is marginally higher. It lies two-thirds of a mile away across a scrubby depression, straw yellow with winter grass still awaiting spring’s rejuvenating touch. Yet, across this featureless plateau, the skyline is a feast of mountain drama: to the north-east, Whiteside, Grasmoor and Whiteless Pike rise like a holy trinity of primordial might, angular and dark, cocoa-dusted with winter ling. Red Pike and High Stile rear in response, and over Hen Comb, Great Borne is a mossy dome above plunging northern crags.

      Whiteless Pike and Rannerdale Knott
      Whiteless Pike and Rannerdale Knotts
      Great Borne from Mellbreak
      Great Borne from Mellbreak

      Buttermere and Crummock Water

      In 1802, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote to Sarah Hutchinson, “Conceive an enormous round Bason mountain-high of solid Stone / cracked in half & one half gone / exactly in the remaining half of this enormous Bason, does Buttermere lie, in this beautiful & stern Embracement of Rock”. Mellbreak’s south top rewards with a view that does full justice to such a description: Buttermere occupies the bottom of a rocky corridor, flanked by High Snockrigg and the Newlands fells on one side and the High Stile range on the other. At the far end, Fleetwith Pike supplies the south-eastern wall. Yet from here, it looks as though the basin is complete, with Mellbreak itself forming the northern flank.  With descent, the illusion is punctured, as the end of Crummock Water comes back into view, and you realise how the valley sweeps round to hug the eastern flank of Mellbreak rather than terminating at its foot. A small strip of farmland separates Buttermere and Crummock Water; similar meadows divide Crummock Water from Loweswater; and you sense how these remote communities are connected by their lakes.

      Buttermere from Mellbreak's South Summit
      Buttermere from Mellbreak’s South Summit

      A Supernatural Tale


      In her book, Life in Old Loweswater, Roz Southey recounts the closest thing Loweswater has to a ghost story. On the 22nd of December 1774, the Cumberland Pacquet reported a story of a mysterious death with supernatural associations. The victim was an apprentice to a shoemaker who lived in Buttermere. The paper withheld names, so Roz calls the boy, Will, and the shoemaker, Pearson. Mrs Pearson had sent Will on an errand to deliver shoes to farmsteads around the three sibling lakes. The rain was relentless, and as Will covered the long miles home in the fading light, he started to worry that he had lost his way. Eventually, he glimpsed a familiar humpbacked bridge and hurried to cross, elated to find he was not far from home. 

      In his haste, he stubbed his toe and fell to the ground. As he nursed his foot, he was nearly blown over the edge by a horrendous gust of wind that seemed to come from nowhere.  The river was in spate, and white water gushed ferociously over the rocks below. Will clung to the parapet for dear life. Eventually the freak gale abated enough for him to crawl back off the bridge and on to the track, where suddenly, there was no wind at all, nor the slightest hint that there had been one. Afraid that some malign force was at play, Will added three miles to his journey home to avoid crossing the bridge. 

      When he arrived at the shoemaker’s, Mrs Pearson berated him for his lateness, and laughed in disbelief at his preposterous tale. She sent him upstairs to change and fetch his fellow apprentices for supper. When Will failed to join them, she sent one of the other boys to look for him.

      The stricken lad swore to the coroner that he found Will sitting on the stairs, strangled by the crupper of a saddle that hung above. The coroner was baffled as to how anyone could have got himself into such a position, especially by accident (and all who knew him testified to Will’s joyful love of life).  The inquest returned a verdict of accidental death, but Mrs Pearson’s had her doubts. Her suspicions were dark and intangible.

      Grasmoor from Scale Beck
      Grasmoor from Scale Beck

      Scale Force and Hen Comb


      I descend south to where Black Beck flows east to Crummock Water, through a narrow funnel of land between Mellbreak and the opposing slopes of Gale Fell. I follow the beck to a footbridge below Scale Knott. Ahead, Crummock Water is a dark pool transformed into gleaming azure where it escapes the shadow of Rannerdale Knotts. I turn off the path and cross the footbridge, walking in the footsteps of Coleridge, following Scale Beck up to a ravine on the flank of Red Pike, which the Lake Poet described as “a dolphin-shaped peak of deep red”. Here, the beck comes thundering off the mountain in the mighty cataract of Scale force, “the white downfall of which glimmered through the trees, that hang before it like the bushy hair over a madman’s eyes” (Coleridge). At 170ft, Scale Force is Lakeland’s highest waterfall, and it is utterly beguiling.

      Scale Force
      Scale Force

      The Lake Poet continued his journey west past the foot of Mellbreak and the head of Mosedale. This is the way I go too, as far as Hen Comb, whose steep grassy southern slopes I start up. The summit is another fine viewpoint for Buttermere and Fleetwith Pike.

      Buttermere and Fleetwith Pike from Hen Comb
      Buttermere and Fleetwith Pike from Hen Comb

      At the top, I sit in the sunshine and watch a man rambling up the long northern ridge from Loweswater. When he reaches the top, he beams at me and exclaims, “What a perfect day for doing this. Cap it all with a pint of Loweswater Gold at the Kirkstile Inn”. He must have read my mind.

      Mellbreak over Loweswater Gold
      Mellbreak over Loweswater Gold

      Further Reading

      You can find a PDF version of Roz Southey’s book, Life in Old Loweswater, here:

      http://www.derwentfells.com/pdfs/LifeInOldLoweswater2019.pdf


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        Haweswater and the Lost Kingdom of Mardale

        When the Manchester Corporation built Haweswater Dam in 1936, they consigned two centuries-old villages to the bottom of a reservoir. Before the flood, the valley had boasted a celebrated inn, a tiny church, and a hall strong enough to resist the explosives of the Royal Engineers. It even had its own monarch.  I pull on my boots and go in search of the lost kingdom of Mardale.

        The Drowned Valley

        Sun gleams off the bonnet of an open top car, a Lanchester perhaps, as a smiling woman steers between the stone parapets of Chapel Bridge. In the distance, where Selside and Branstree meet, the twin ravines of Rowantreethwaite and Hopegill beck form deep folds in the fellside, and the Old Corpse Road climbs steeply out of the valley.

        Chapel Bridge - the lost kingdom of Mardale
        Chapel Bridge, Mardale Green

        A bell is ringing from the tiny church, encircled by old yews taller than its tower, and the jubilant shouts of children travel up the dale from Measand school. A peal of raucous laughter erupts from the courtyard of the Dun Bull Inn, and the sounds of whistles and dog-barks waft down from Riggindale where shepherds drive a flock toward the washfold.

        The Dun Bull Inn - the lost kingdom of Mardale
        The Dunn Bull Inn, Mardale Green

        I open my eyes, and the vision dissolves. Now, all is water. I’m standing at the end of the Rigg, the wooded promontory that juts out into Haweswater, a reservoir constructed by the Manchester Corporation between 1936 and 1941. At its far end stands the dam that raised the level of the natural lake. Pewter waters now cover the valley—the centuries old villages of Measand and Mardale Green have been submerged, a rural civilisation lost less than a hundred years ago.

        Haweswater

        The Manchester Corporation & Haweswater

        My vision was a flight of the fancy, a montage of the imagination, conjured from old photographs and contemporary accounts of life before the flood. One photograph persists in my mind’s eye—that of the woman in the car.  On first glance, it appears idyllic, but look closer, and the seeds of doom have already sprouted. A series of small white marker posts line a long pale scar, recognisable to anyone today as the road. But the old road ran on the opposite side of the valley. This is the new one, still under construction. The old road carried villagers to and from their homes, but five or six years on, those homes and the road alike would be lost below the rising waters. The new road would carry walkers, bird-watchers, sightseers, and reservoir workers to the head of an extended lake, in a waterlogged valley, unpopulated but for the new Haweswater hotel. The road opened in 1937, the same year the church tower was pulled down and the Dun Bull demolished. The main body of the church had gone a year earlier, its stones and windows repurposed to build a water take-off tower, which stands roughly in line with the natural head of the lake.

        Holy Trinity Church - the lost kingdom of Mardale
        Holy Trinity Church, Mardale Green
        The Water Take-Off Tower, built with the stones and windows from the church,
        The Dun Bull Inn half-demolished

        “No-one else protested, we were the only ones,” Helena Bailey told journalist and writer, Karen Barden, in 1995. Helena was the daughter of the Vicar of Burneside. Her family had holidayed in Mardale year upon year from 1914 to 1929; she felt like a local. Helena would have been four on her first visit, nineteen on her last. She recounted how she and brothers and sister stealthily followed the surveyors and pulled out every one of those marker posts. But the teenagers were no match for the Manchester Corporation, and few others could muster the fight.

        “There had been a world war,” she explained. “The country was exhausted. People just wanted to get on quietly with their lives.”

        “And this proposal also meant jobs, for hundreds of men.”

        I look north to Wood Howe, once a wooded knott, now a tree-crowned island. Today, a stretch of silver water maroons it from the Rigg. Beneath the surface, lie the remains of Holy Trinity church. The church was built in the late 1600’s, on the site of a much older oratory, supposedly constructed by the monks of Shap Abbey. In 1729, its churchyard was consecrated for burials: until then, the dead had to be wrapped in cloth and carried on pack ponies over the Corpse Road to Shap.

        Wood Howe from The Rigg
        Wood Howe from the Rigg. Holy Trinity Church is below the water.

        In October 1935, the bodies of those interred here were exhumed. With ironic precedent, they were nearly all reburied at Shap. That August, the last service was held at Holy Trinity. It drew a congregation many times too large for the nave and chancel, which could accommodate just 75. Everyone else stood outside and listened to the sermon over loudspeakers. It was preached by the Bishop of Carlisle. All joined in a rousing chorus of I Shall Lift Up Mine Eyes to the Hills. Among those present was former Vicar of Mardale, Revd. H. F. J. Barham. This had been his parish for twenty five years. He couldn’t bring himself to enter the church. Helena couldn’t bring herself to attend.

        Holy Trinity Church - the lost kingdom of Mardale
        Holy Trinity Church, Mardale Green, showing the children’s gallery

        Before the flood, the natural lake had been divided almost in two by a natural promontory formed by Measand Beck. The larger southern lake was known as High Water, and the smaller northern one as Low Water. The narrow funnel connecting them was called The Straits. On Measand Promontory stood Measand Hall, and Measand Beck Farm.

        The Last Days of Measand

        On Monday 12th October 1936, the Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail reported:

        “The Haweswater valley, one of the most secluded and peaceful places in the Lake District, echoed yesterday with the sound of explosions when Territorial offices of the Royal Engineers (East Lancashire Division) blew up three buildings on land which will be inundated. These buildings have been homesteads for five or six hundred years. Measand Hall, tenanted by the squires of Mardale for generations, stoutly resisted a new plastic explosive which was being tested for the War Office. At first only ounce charges were used. These made a great noise and raised clouds of smoke and dust, but the walls withstood them. The charges were increased, and these showed the quality of the new explosive, the walls crumbling to pieces instead of flying into the air. Mr. Leonard Kitchen and his family, who lived 40 yards from the hall at Measand Beck Farm, had retreated to safety so many times when the charges proved ineffective that he decided to go on with dinner. When the hall did collapse Mr. Kitchen’s windows were shattered and plaster fell on his Sunday joint.”

        My friend, Richard Jennings, has been researching the valley, and he assures me Leonard’s last name is a misprint. He was a Kitching. I have no credible claim to kinship, but it makes me smile to know that my namesakes farmed in Mardale before the flood.

        Measand Hall - the lost kingdom of Mardale
        Measand Hall
        Measand Beck Hall - the lost kingdom of Mardale
        The Kitching brothers outside Measand Beck Farm

        Richard is here now, with his handsome Border collie, Frankie. We’re going in search of a much older story concerning another venerable Mardale family.

        The Lost Kingdom of Mardale

        The reign of King John was turbulent. The King fell out with the Church and then the barons. He was excommunicated by the Pope and forced by the rebel barons to sign Magna Carta, the closest thing we have ever had to a constitution. Seven years earlier in 1208, John had a foiled a smaller plot, known as the Canterbury Conspiracy. One of the perpetrators was Hugh Holme, whose ancestor came over with William the Conqueror. Hugh became a fugitive from royal retribution. He fled for Scotland but never reached the border, choosing to hide out instead in a cave in the remotest part of Riggindale, the small valley that forks off Mardale between Riggindale Edge and Kidsty Pike. When King John died, Hugh didn’t return to reclaim his lands. He settled in the valley. The residents prized him for his wisdom and worldly knowledge, and they gave him an honorary title. From then on, the head of the Holme family would always be known as the King of Mardale.

        The Holme family were pillars of the community. They built the vicarage and did much to support the church. Some sources have also credited the Holme family with the building of a tower on Wood Howe, but in his 1904 book, Shappe in Bygone Days, Joseph Whiteside claims the tower was the work of an eccentric proprietor of the Dun Bull, named Thomas Lamley. Lamley’s aim was to build a structure tall enough to see over into neighbouring Swindale and Patterdale. Such an ambition would have required a tower nearly 2000 ft in height. Lamley gave up when it reached 20 ft, conceding that perhaps it wasn’t going to work. The tower doesn’t seem to have stood for long, but it does appear in a Thomas Allom print.

        In 1885, Hugh Parker Holme, the last King of Mardale, was laid to rest. His death ended a family line much loved and revered in the dale. But what of their arrival here? Is the story of Hugh’s flight from King John true? Even today, the OS map names a spot on the lower slopes of Rough Crag as Hugh’s Cave but is this really where the fugitive baron hid from the King? Richard, Frankie, and I are going to investigate.

        Mardale Green and Wood Howe by Thomas Allom -the lost kingdom of Mardale
        Mardale Green and Wood Howe (showing the tower) by Thomas Allom

        Remote Riggindale

        We step around the toppled trunks of larches, victims of the violence wrought by Storm Arwen in November. Deciduous conifers, sparse with winter. Those still standing are feathered with delicate fans of twig, black against the steely grey of the lake, as if sketched in ink. A twilight world in monochrome. Yet as we emerge from the dense canopy of the Rigg, the early morning sky is lightening, turning Haweswater China blue. The silhouettes of broad leaf trees twist into spindly traceries, like woodcuts. Ahead, Swine Crag is a drab olive pyramid, rising from a bed of ginger bracken. Across Riggindale, the graphite slopes of Kidsty Pike dissolve into wispy mist. Overhead, the clouds are duck-egg blue, but above the snow-flecked Straits of Riggindale, the early sun ignites an amber glow—a warm band of ethereal light bathing the valley in primordial mystery.

        Haweswater from the start of the Rigg
        Entering Riggindale
        Frankie in Riggindale

        We pass an old stone barn and handrail a dry stone wall, black as granite in the creeping shadow; we meet Riggindale Beck and fall in step; its hissing waters whisper intangible truths. Rough Crag rears above on our left, untouched by the celestial glow. It is dark and severe, a forbidding wall of tumbling scree and precipitous outcrops, peppered with wiry, twiggy tangles of mountain ash. A place of shadows and secrets, and perhaps a legendary cave.

        Rough Crag
        Riggindale in early morning light

        Hugh’s Cave – Hideout of the First King

        Ahead the stream curves into a tiny oxbow. The ground is becoming increasingly soggy, but I resist Richard’s suggestion that we head for the slopes as I have taken a compass bearing from the bend in the beck to where the OS map places the H of Hugh’s Cave. Richard is sceptical of its value, names on maps are often put where they obscure the fewest features and should only be read as approximations. Besides, he is convinced he has spied the cave from Kidsty Pike, a few years back, and thinks we should spot it easily from this distance. As we reach the oxbow, he does. I follow the line of his outstretched finger and pick out the chiselled boulder perched as a lintel above a black hollow. A skeletal rowan stands like a sentinel. I fish out my compass. It lies right on the bearing.

        Richard and Frankie set off for Rough Crag

        We start to climb, calves twinging in protest at the steepness of the scree. Soon we are scrambling over boulders. Rocky outcrops well up in waves, obscuring our target. I become disoriented, but Richard spots the rowan, and we lock back on course. The cave entrance is hidden but the rowan and lintel remain in view, yet despite our exertions, they seem forever the same distance away.

        Traversing Rough Crag
        Frankie and the imagined cave

        Eventually we reach a small grassy rake which leads up over a boulder to the rowan and the cave entrance. Only now we’re here, we uncover the deception: there is no cave. The lintel sits atop another boulder that slopes inward, creating a small alcove, which contrives in shadow to resemble an entrance.

        Flummoxed but undeterred, we soldier on towards the jutting wall of Riggindale Crag, below Caspel Gate and Long Stile, that rugged stairway to the summit of High Street. Our efforts are unfocused, casting searching glances at rocks in the hope of finding an opening. Eventually, we spot one. Straight ahead, where the crags form into an almost vertical wall, a leaning boulder forms a crude arch over a dark recess, which might—just might—run deeper into the cliff. But alas, we are foiled again. As we draw near, the deceptive shadow dissipates, and reveals nothing but solid rock.

        Is this Hugh’s Cave?

        Back at the valley bottom, both boulders resume their illusory forms, and as we track back along the far shore of the beck, past the old wash fold, another deception is unmasked. Richard spots the cave he spied from Kidsty Pike. It is nothing more than a square slab of black rock.

        Rewilding

        Over the shoulder of Kidsty Pike, we settle on a grassy outcrop overlooking the lake, above the submerged course of the old road. In 1921, Councillor Isaac Hinchliffe of Manchester wrote an article for the Journal of the Fell and Rock Climbing Club in which he painted a fragrant picture:

        Hawewater from the Coast to Coast path, above where the old road used to run.

        “I hope the new road will be innocent of stone walls and iron railings, with wide margins some three or four yards where possible, with unobtrusive fences hidden by kindly growths which now for the most part fringe the road from Burn Banks to Mardale. Heather and gorse and ivy, blackthorn, holly and mountain ash, wild raspberries and blackberries, honeysuckle, wild roses, the Guelder rose, convolvulous and the meadow-sweet, which now scents the air even to one passing in a motor-car, the primrose, foxglove, and that beautiful and prolific plant, the wild geranium or meadow crane’s bill, to say nothing of the humble daisy and buttercup, or the tiny ranunculus which brightens the mossy wayside pools, the March violet, wild thyme, and a hundred other beautiful plants which now grow wild alongside or near to the present road. Patches of lady’s bed-straw and parsley fern will always relieve the grey monotony of the screes.”

        Sadly, the Manchester Corporation did build a wall, and they replaced much of the indigenous flora with commercial forestry. Happily, much of the incongruous conifer has now been cleared—the dense larches on the Rigg are one of few the remaining outposts. The slopes of Selside and Branstree have been sensitively replanted with native broad leaves. In the years to come, the valley may once again resemble the councillor’s idyll.

        Rowantreethwaite Beck and the Old Corpse Road (to the left of the ravine)

        Richard is disappointed we didn’t find the cave, but part of me is secretly pleased. The romantic in me wants to imagine it is still there somewhere, its mouth hidden under tumbled boulders and filled with scree—a secret guarded by the mountain. I stare south-east across the water to where Holy Trinity lies submerged, then north to where Measand once stood. Perhaps it is better that Mardale keeps its mysteries hidden.

        Wood Howe and the Rigg, and the waters covering Mardale Green

        Mardale Uncovered

        In the summer of 1976, after months of drought, the level of the reservoir dropped so low that the ruins of Mardale Green emerged. It happened again in 1984, and the Westmorland Gazette published a book, Mardale Revisited, by journalist and photographer, Geoffrey Berry. Berry contrasted photographs of the muddy remains with old pictures and accounts of Mardale as it once had been.

        The village emerged for the third time in 1995, and the paper published a second edition of Berry’s book with an addendum by Karen Barden, who interviewed Helena Bailey and Joyce Bell. Joyce was four-and-a-half when she attended the final service at Holy Trinity Church with her mother, Lucy.  Her parents, like theirs before them, had run the Dun Bull Inn. She remembered her mother’s reaction to visiting the ruins in 1976:

        “She was very upset, but not bitter and could pick everything out. It was in a better state then.

        “She played war with a couple at Chapel Hill going through the ash heap with a riddle. She said it was sacrilege and they had done more damage than the water.”

        “The village had lain forgotten until then. A beautiful valley which had been totally ruined. It would never be allowed now and shouldn’t have happened then.”

        Karen’s addendum is short but poignant, sympathetic to such emotional ties, and indignant, angry even, at the unfolding circus:

        “They have arrived in their thousands along with ice cream sellers and others keen to make a fast buck from Mardale’s misery.

        “An empty packet of 20 Regal lies where once there would have been a tomb. Wrappings from cheese and onion crisps and a Wall’s Cornetto carelessly tossed to a ground, normally over 50 feet under water.”

        Mardale appeared again last summer (2021).  I didn’t visit. I had done so three years earlier, in 2018, when the village was partially revealed. I chose a weekday evening. There were few people around, and it felt tranquil. Chapel Bridge was still submerged, but I could walk along the old walled track to the remains of the Dun Bull Inn and the farms of Grove Brae and Goosemire. It was fascinating if disquieting to enter the lost village, yet part of me felt I was intruding.

        A Sting in the Tail

        Looking out over the waters now, I try to imagine how Lucy must have felt; how she must have longed for people to leave this sunken chest of treasured memories to rest in peace. The residents sacrificed their homes and their heritage for the sake of progress. Yet there was a sting in the tail. On 8th May 1933, Mr. Alan Chorlton, MP for Bolton, addressed Parliament with the following words:

        “Looking at the existing condition of supplies in industrial areas, we have the extraordinary position that Manchester years ago before the decline in trade, went in for a scheme of supply of additional water to cost £10,000,000. Since that scheme was started there has been a change in the condition of world affairs which has so reduced the trade demand, that, with the movement of new industries elsewhere, this great scheme is not now called for. In fact there is more than sufficient water from existing supplies in that area.”

        The reservoir went ahead regardless. I hope that Chorlton was wrong. I hope the water really was needed. But more than anything, I hope his words never reached Lucy’s ears. It would have been devastating to think that it was all for nothing.

        Credits/Further Reading

        A big thank you to Richard Jennings for sharing much of his research and furnishing me with some of the stories retold here. Richard’s own website is rich source of local history (as well as a host of great walking routes). It is well worth checking out:

        https://www.lakelandroutes.uk/local-history/

        Councillor Hinchliffe’s account of Mardale before the flood appeared in the Volume 5, No. 3 of the Journal of the Fell and Rock Climbing Club. It makes fascinating reading. You can find it on-line here:

        https://www.frcc.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Vol5-3.pdf

        Geoffrey Berry’s book, Mardale Revisited was published by the Westmorland Gazette in 1984, but it is worth seeking out the second edition from 1996 with the addendum by Karen Barden. ISBN: 1 901081 00 1

        For more from me on Mardale, Riggindale and ascending High Street by Rough Crag, see:


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          Strange Tales From The Kentmere Riverbank

          The Good, The Sad, and the Crafty

          As I follow the River Kent to its source in the rugged wilderness of Hall Cove, high in the fells that ring Kentmere Head, I discover old tales of tragedy and criminal cunning.

          Hall Cove from Ill Bell
          Hall Cove from Ill Bell

          Crag Quarter

          Primeval boulders slumber like fossilised dinosaurs, uprooted by ice ages to litter irregular pastures. Here and there, they combine in the neat alignment of dry stone walls, scavenging gateposts from green slate, before reverting back into tumbledown disarray. Higgledy piggledy sheep walks are green with succulent grass, plumped with late summer rain, and hemmed with rowan trees, resplendent with berries—vibrant bunches of scarlet against the ordered symmetry of pinnate leaves. As Kentmere’s Green Quarter gives way to its Crag Quarter, Calfhowe Crag stands like an rough-hewn dome, a lumpen tower of ancient stone toward which everything appears to lead. On another day, the crag might be revealed as a mere foot soldier in the massed ranks of rock that rise to the heady heights of Yoke, but today, low cloud conspires to veil its overlord, shrinking the world and crowning Calfhowe Crag king.

          Greenslate fence post Kentmere
          Greenslate fence post Kentmere
          Calfhowe Crag Kentmere
          Calfhowe Crag Kentmere
          Boulders and Walls Kentmere
          Boulders and Walls Kentmere
          The Crag Quarter
          The Crag Quarter
          Rowan Berries Kentmere
          Rowan Berries Kentmere

          Calfhowe Crag, Cowsty Crag, Ewe Crag, Goat House Scar, Rams Slack—a mountain landscape named for the animal husbandry conducted in its shadow. Yet for one Kentmere farmer’s son and promising poet, the relationship ran deeper. The fate of Charles Williams was foretold by a boulder.

          Calfhowe Crag
          Calfhowe Crag
          Boulders Kentmere
          Boulders Kentmere

          The Poet of Kentmere

          At the very hour the boy was born, a large rock dislodged itself from Wallow Crag, in neighbouring Mardale, and rolled down the slope to submerge itself in Haweswater. Those versed in science might explain such happenings as the effects of frost and thaw, but to the old women of Kentmere, it was a portent. An ill omen. The boy was born to drown.

          In proud defiance of such superstition, Charles grew into a fine youth, healthy of body and enquiring of mind, spending much of his free time roaming the valley and engaging in scientific experiment—diverting the course of a stream to make a mini-waterworks, constructing a windmill from scavenged stone and timber. But all such pursuits were rapidly abandoned the day he rescued Maria from an marauding bull. Snatching an umbrella from the girl’s hand, Charles opened it in the animal’s face, stopping the bull in its tracks and giving it cause to change course. 

          Maria had been a childhood friend, but that afternoon, as he walked her home, Charles looked at Maria with fresh eyes—sixteen-year-old eyes—and something within him stirred. The attraction proved mutual and they began spending much time together. The upswell of emotion bubbling inside the lad first found expression through his pen, and he scribbled a succession of promising love poems. Happily, when he eventually plucked up the courage to profess his feelings to her face, Maria bashfully agreed to become his wife, just as soon as she turned twenty-one.

          Sadly, it seems that boulders don’t dislodge from Wallow Crag to presage marital bliss. As Maria entered her twenty first year, she was struck down by a strange illness that confounded her doctors. Perpetually at her bedside, eager to see signs of improvement where there were none, Charles was powerless to stop the life draining from her. When she died, all prospect of his own happiness died with her.

          His poetry became darker and more profound. Only the beauty of the Kentmere landscape afforded any sort of relief: 

          “I seem a moment to have lost
          The sense of former pain;
          As if my peace had ne’er been crost,
          Or joy could spring again.”

          …but the escape was ever fleeting: 

          “But ah! ‘it’s there!—the pang is there;
          Maria breathes no more!
          So fond, so constant, kind, and fair,
          Her reign of love is o’er.

          His brooding moods would birth the blackest notions:

          “I feel the cold night’s gathering gloom
          Infect my throbbing breast
          It tells me that the friendly tomb
          Alone can give me rest.”

          It was Charles’s custom to return from his ramblings before dark, so when he failed to show one evening at dusk, his parents panicked. Friends and neighbours formed search parties. The stricken youth had been spotted on Harter Fell, earlier in the afternoon, so their efforts extended into Mardale, where their worst fears were confirmed. Charles was found drowned in Haweswater, right at the foot of Wallow Crag.

          Reservoir Dogs

          For a short while, I handrail the River Kent. In years past, I have waded its estuary on the mudflats of Morecambe Bay; and I have often meandered along its banks in Kendal, before the opulent Georgian splendour of Abbot Hall; but today, I will follow its course up into the rugged bowl of Hall Cove where it springs into life. First, I must leave its bank and follow a footpath across these stone strewn pastures to the old reservoir road.

          The reservoir was built in 1846 to provide a steady water supply to the woollen mills, paper mills, gunpowder mills, and flour mills further down the valley. With the coming of the railways and the ready availability of coal, it’s usefulness was quickly superseded. Eventually, the James Cropper paper mill became the sole owner. The mill still maintains the reservoir even though it no longer uses the water.

          Kentmere Reservoir outflow
          Kentmere Reservoir outflow

          Beyond the farm at Hartrigg, the metalled  road becomes a footpath, and nearer to the reservoir itself, the landscape bears the scars of old industry, the chiselled entrance to a quarry emerging from the mist that hides the majestic heights of Ill Bell. Heaps of spoil surround the old reservoir cottage and the barracks, built to house quarry workers. By 1900, there were eight working quarries in the valley, with only one hostelry in which the quarrymen could slake their thirst. The scenes of rowdy drunkenness outside the Lowbridge Inn became so notorious that Kendal magistrates refused to renew its license, and the valley has been without a pub ever since. Both cottage and barracks are now bunkhouses under the collective management of the Kentmere Residential Centre. They cater for activity groups, but not for stag or hen parties, apparently. The moral quest for temperance persists, it seems.

          The reservoir itself nestles at the head of the valley, surrounded by a horseshoe of high fells: Ill Bell, Froswick, Thornthwaite Crag, and Mardale Ill Bell. A wispy veil of cotton cloud hides their summits, leaving only their bracken-clad slopes sweeping upward into nothingness, a realm of ephemeral mystery like an Ancient Greek vision of Olympus. Only the spur of Lingmell End reveals its full extent, a stately pyramid of purple crag and yellow scrub, which casts a long shadowy reflection on the dark, lugubrious waters. The reservoir is filled with the waters of the Kent, whose nascent stream comes crashing down from the wilds of Hall Cove, lurking in the ethereal mists above.

          Lingmell End over Kentmere Reservoir
          Lingmell End over Kentmere Reservoir

          Hall Cove—Source of the Kent

          I circle the shore and pick up a sketchy path beside the infall, treading over boggy ground at first, but soon finding firmer footing on scrubby grass, a swathe of yellow-green, brightened occasionally by sparse sprigs of purple heather. As I ascend slowly towards the veil of chiffon cloud, the stream hisses and chatters. Grey boulders frequently break its flow, splitting its course into white cascades, plunging in parallel down rocky steps. Jets of white water collect in limpid pools, green or the iron-red of mineral ores.

          Cascades on the River Kent
          Cascades on the River Kent
          Cascades Hall Cove
          Cascades Hall Cove

          I’ve not seen a soul since leaving Kentmere village, and the mist contrives to hide any sense of a wider world. It’s just me and the stream, climbing gently into a tranquil wilderness, now far removed from the signs of human industry. The fizz and swish of the water becomes a walking meditation, at once soothing and stimulating. Ahead, the thinning and whitening of the mist hints at the cloud lifting; slowly; at walking pace; as if with every contour I enter another chapter in the unraveling of a mystery.

          Red Mineral Ore Steam Bed
          Red Mineral Ore Steam Bed

          Like a harbinger of autumn, a fallen sheaf of dead bracken forms a copper arch over a round boulder, green with moss and flanked with twin cascades—a natural work of art. I sense I’m being watched, and look up to see a cow, the colour of the red bracken, eyeing me with curiosity—unused to seeing humans, aside from the farmer, perhaps.

          Bracken Arch River Kent
          Bracken Arch River Kent
          Sheepfold by River Kent
          Sheepfold by River Kent
          Sheepfold River Kent
          Sheepfold River Kent

          Beyond an old sheepfold, a craggy outcrop pushes me away from the water. The hiss amplifies into a crashing roar, and I sense a hidden waterfall.  I scramble over the top to peer down into a steep-sided bowl, into which the stream pours in a crashing torrent over a sheer wall of granite, rendered vivid green with moss.

          Waterfall River Kent
          Waterfall River Kent

          Beyond the waterfall, I find myself in the rugged amphitheatre of Hall Cove. Here the Kent splits into five slender feeder streams. One descends from Thornthwaite Crag down a ravine which has gouged a dramatic course between the twin ramparts of Gavel Crag and Bleathwaite Crag. Two more fall from the steep wall of Bleathwaite Crag itself (one of these bears the distinction of being the river’s official source). Two more descend the grassy slope of Lingmell End, whose top is now clear of cloud. I opt to follow the second of these, ascending over rough pathless terrain, whose scrubby appearance belies the severity of the gradient. With aching calves, I reach the source of the stream—a subsidiary source of the Kent itself—and haul myself up to the ridge line. I walk along to the cairn at the end, and look down over the reservoir and the verdant pastures of the valley.

          Upper stretch of River Kent
          Upper stretch of River Kent
          Feeder Stream Lingmell End
          Feeder Stream Lingmell End
          Kentmere Reservoir from Lingmell End
          Kentmere Reservoir from Lingmell End

          The Mock Tithe Commissioner

          For centuries, farmers here, as everywhere, would have paid tithes to the church. Tithes were paid in kind as one tenth of all produce from the land: wheat, eggs, milk, timber and such like. With the dissolution of the monasteries and the enclosure acts, large tracts of land fell into private ownership. The landlords inherited the right to receive tithes, but to many, receiving payments in kind was an inconvenience. The Tithe Commutation Act of 1836 replaced tithes with monetary payments, known as corn-rent. Tithe commissioners were appointed to oversee the process, and they employed gangs of surveyors to carry out the unpopular work of determining who owed what to whom. The presence of tithe surveyors in Kentmere created an opportunity for one cunning and unscrupulous individual.

          On the July 9th, 1836, The Kendal Mercury reported that a stranger in a striking moleskin coat had appeared at the inn in Staveley. After drinking his fill of ale and rum, he asked whether payment might be deferred until his return from Kentmere. Witnesses not privy to the exact exchange of words were surprised when the landlord agreed. En route to Kentmere, he made the same request at a Jerry shop. (Jerry shops were informal, and often disreputable, drinking dens, named for Jerry Hawthorn and Corinthian Tom—the original Tom and Jerry—a fictional pair, whose rakish exploits featured in a popular monthly journal). Here however, the reason for the stranger’s easy access to credit was discovered. He announced that he was none other than Mr Watson of Snow Hill, the Tithe Commissioner. He had no change, but would settle his bill after paying his surveyors.

          When he chanced upon said surveyors, in a field further up the valley, he told a different story, however, claiming to be a fellow itinerant labourer, fresh from working on the railways. As he was yet to be paid for his travails, he wondered whether the surveyors could lend him a little money; but the men revealed they too were awaiting payment and were subsisting on the credit of Jonathan, a yeoman who was giving them bed and board.

          Next, the man in the moleskin coat turned up at Jonathan’s house, once more introducing himself as Mr Watson, come to pay his surveyors, but unable to find anyone in the valley who could give him change for a note. Jonathan was said to be as “cunning as a Yankee”, but so frustrated was he at the inability of his lodgers to pay their bills, he fell over himself to lend the Tithe Commissioner half a crown.

          That evening, when the surveyors returned, Jonathan demanded that they settle their account, declaring that he knew full well they had been paid, having met Mr Watson in person.

          “Pooh!” said the Surveyer, “that wasn’t Mr. Watson but a poor broken-down fellow, begging for relief on his road.”

          At this, “fresh light dawned upon Jonathan’s mind—the conviction went through his heart like a pistol bullet—he had been done.”

          Arming himself with “a strong sapling of about two yards in length” and recruiting the assistance of his neighbour, Gilpin. He set off on the trail of the mock commissioner. On hearing that a stranger had been spotted heading over the Nan Bield Pass (that crosses between Lingmell End and Harter Fell, linking Kentmere with Mardale), the pair gave pursuit, arriving at Mardale’s Dun Bull Inn at about midnight.

          When the landlord confirmed that a gentleman matching the description was indeed lodging there that night, Jonathan demanded, “then let us in; we want him; he is a rogue, a housebreaker, and a robber”

          Once inside, it dawned on Jonathan that he had no warrant or power to take the imposter in to custody, but spying his moleskin jacket on a chair in front of the fire, he resolved to take the coat instead.

          After fortifying themselves with gin and ale, the vigilantes arrived home at about 3 o’clock. To Jonathan’s surprise, he was roused the next morning by a constable at his door, accompanied by the mock commissioner. At this, the yeoman flew into a rage and insisted the constable apprehend the imposter, but it was not the imposter who was facing arrest. Indeed, the pretended Mr Watson remained “cool as a cucumber”:

          “I borrowed half a crown of you, I admit—you leant it freely, and I will return it to you in time—then where is the reason, Sir, that you should come in the night and steal my clothes?”

          To avoid custody and charges, Jonathan obeyed the constable’s orders and returned the coat, with the borrowed half crown still in its pocket. Left to brood over its loss, the hard fact that his lodgers’ bills remained outstanding, his own wasted nocturnal journey, and the realisation that he was now the laughing stock of his neighbours, Jonathan calculated the whole affair had cost him exactly six-and-eightpence—at the time, the going rate for an attorney.

          Hall Cove from Ill Bell
          Hall Cove from Ill Bell

          Sources/Further Reading

          For more on the history of the reservoir and the story of the quarrymen, magistrates, and the Lowbridge Inn, see A Brief History of Kentmere by Iain Johnston on the Kentmere.org website

          https://kentmere.org/wp-content/uploads/A-brief-history-of-Kentmere.pdf

          The story of Charles Williams, The Poet of Kentmere, comes from Wilson Armistead’s 1891 book, Tales and Legends of the English Lakes, London: Simpkin, Marshall and Co; Glasgow: Thomas D Morison; (reissued by Forgotten Books).

          The story of the Mock Tithe Commissioner was reported in the Kendal Mercury on July 9th, 1836.


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            Faeries Wear Boots

            Green Crag, Harter Fell & Hard Knott

            A waterfall liberated from Victorian excess; the southern outpost of Wainwright country; two tragic deaths; and a faery Court of Forlorn Hope, lurking in the shadow of the Scafells… Tales of Eskdale from Green Crag, Harter Fell, and Hard Knott.

            Slate-grey faces of fissured rock stare solemnly from beneath a swarming canopy of foliage, a tangled green profusion of liverwort, fern, lichen, and moss. Tall trunks of sparse, spindly trees twist upward to meet a narrow crack of sky, a pale canopy above the steep jungled sides of the ravine. The air is sultry with spray from the pearl-white cascades hissing and crashing down dark walls of crag.

            Stanley Ghyll
            Stanley Ghyll

            When the railway brought Victorian tourists to Ravenglass, Eskdale’s Stanley Ghyll was high on their must-see schedule, but Victorian curiosity was almost its undoing. Back then, Stanley Ghyll was part of the Dalegarth and Ponsonby estate, which served as a nursery to nearby Muncaster Castle.  In thrall to exotica, many country estates were busy planting rhododendron, a novel Asian import that was suddenly all the rage. Muncaster was no exception, and in 1857 various species were planted on the nursery estate, including the common invasive ponticum variety, which soon took hold in Stanley Ghyll. It spreads quickly, outcompeting native flora and forming a dense canopy that shuts out the light and suppresses germination of other plant species.

            A hundred years later, Stanley Ghyll was overrun, its celebrated falls mostly obscured; its biodiversity threatened, as were its visitors. Hidden hazards lurked. Rhododendron “root jacks” rock, rendering it loose and unstable; and forty years ago, a tragedy occurred. On Friday 27th June 1980, the Millom Gazette reported that “the neighbourhood of the waterfall has been made very dangerous by earth breaking away, being especially dangerous in wet, slippery weather”. At the time, newspapers were still in the habitat of describing women in terms of their husband’s accomplishments, so we learn little of Mrs Abraham from the article, not even her first name, only that she was the wife of Mr Alfred Abraham, a retired Chemist from Ormskirk. He and his wife had been staying at Eskdale Green, when they decided to pay a visit to Stanley Ghyll. Despite her 75 years of age, Mrs Abraham was described as a “very active woman”. The couple were walking near the top of the waterfall when, tragically, she slipped and fell 60 to 80 feet on to the rocks below. Her husband attempted to climb down but was unable to reach her, so he went for help at Dalegarth, over a mile away, returning with Gamekeeper Massicks, some foresters, and Police-Constable Martin, who despite the considerable difficulty afforded by the dangerous ground, managed to get Mrs Abraham’s body out of the ravine. Alas, she was already dead.

            Stanley Ghyll
            Stanley Ghyll

            Stanley Ghyll is now a Site of Special Scientific Interest on account of its rare ferns. In 2019, the Lake District National Park (the current owners) began an operation to remove nine hectares of rhododendron to let the indigenous woodland regenerate. In doing so, they discovered several loose and hazardous rock faces and several fallen and unsecured trees lying directly above the path—which is why the upper footbridge is now padlocked. Signs warn of the imminent danger of falling rocks, and of the ongoing work to render the site safe.

            Stanley Ghyll
            Stanley Ghyll

            Even at a safe distance, the liberated cataracts are magnificent. I turn heel at the gate and walk back through woods, the early morning air fresh with the scent of mossy awakenings.

            ~

            Stepping-stones lead across the River Esk to St Catherine’s church, just outside Boot. They too look slippery and challenging, and I’m glad my journey continues on this bank.

            Stepping stones across the River Esk
            Stepping stones across the River Esk

            “On the crest of moorland between the Duddon Valley and Eskdale there rises from the heather a series of serrated peaks, not of any great height but together forming a dark and jagged outline against the sky that, seen from certain directions, arrest the eye as do the Black Cuillin of Skye.” The words are Alfred Wainwright’s, describing the coxcomb ridge that reaches its zenith in Green Crag, which he chooses as the southern boundary of “fellwalking country”. They have arrested my eye many times, usually fleetingly while I’ve been driving across the lonely expanse of moorland that is Birker Fell. But parking up, crossing the boggy scrub, and gaining Green Crag from the high ground would feel like cheating, so I’m making the ascent from the valley (as Wainwright says I should).

            I handrail the River Esk as far as Low Birker Farm, where I join the old peat road up to Tarn Crag. For Wainwright, the acquaintance with these old peat roads is one of the defining joys of this walk, characteristic as they are of old Eskdale. As I approach the farm, a cacophony of bleating and barking, clipped commands and sharp whistles drifts over the trees from the open fell beyond. I am about to witness another practice, centuries old, and unlike the peat roads, still an essential part of Eskdale life. The shepherds are bringing their flocks of Herdwicks down from the hill. As I round the wood and gain the open slopes, the peat road forks left but the first of the Herdies are charging in from the right. The sight of me stops them in their tracks. They turn tail and scamper off in the opposite direction. I feel guilty: the shepherds and their dogs haven’t put in hard hours seeking, rounding, herding, and driving these sheep down the narrow fell tracks only to have me turn them back. Luckily, the sheep stop a few yards hence, wary of the dogs further up. They watch as I take the left fork. With me safely out of sight, they’ll return.

            With height, the whole spectacle unfurls like an oil painting. Beneath the riven slate of naked crags, over outcrops of mossy grass, and through waves of copper bracken, tireless collies coral the dispersed flock into a funnel of white, chocolate, and charcoal fleeces. Herdies are tough in spirit as well as body, and they confound the will of the dogs as far as they can. Over to the left, clear of the main flow, three escapees hide behind a tree. Out of sight but not out of mind, it seems—the sheep dogs know their game; eventually, a border collie bounds from behind a rock, and their cover is blown. A little further up the track, I meet an old shepherd who tells me he’s heading down this way to thwart those intent on using this track as an escape route: it’s a favourite trick apparently. I can tell his knowledge is hard-won.

            Bringing in the Herdwicks Tarn Crag
            Bringing in the Herdwicks Tarn Crag

            Near the top of the track, stands the ruins of an old peat hut. Built to house turf cut from the moor, it is slowly crumbling back into the fellside. In 1960, Wainwright lamented, “Time has marched fast in Eskdale: at the foot of the valley is the world’s first atomic power station, and peat is out of fashion. Alas!”. Three years earlier, a fire at the Windscale reprocessing plant had constituted Britain’s worst nuclear incident.  That must have been at the forefront of his mind. But cutting peat also came with an environmental cost. Peat bogs are carbon sponges. Scotland’s peat moors trap more carbon than all of the UK’s woodland put together. After centuries of draining our wetlands to make farmland or stripping them for turf, we’re now scrambling to protect them.

            Peat Hut Tarn Crag
            Peat Hut Tarn Crag
            Peat Hut, Tarn Crag
            Peat Hut, Tarn Crag

            Watching the Herdies, you’d be forgiven for thinking time stands still in Eskdale, but it continues to march fast. Sellafield’s Calder Hall Atomic Power Station closed in 2003, and its Windscale reprocessing plant is due to cease operations in 2021.  Eventually, they, too, will go the way of the peat huts.

            As I reach Low Birker Tarn, my boots start to squelch, but here is a sight to make the spirit soar. For me, hard wooden pews and the smell of musty hymn books have never managed to elicit a religious response; yet put me before the sheer green force of Stanley Ghyll, or the dark turrets and jagged crags that rise from this windswept moor, and tell me that here be water sprites or faery fiefdoms, and I might just believe you. I cross a moat of sodden peat hags and track beneath the irregular battlements of Crook Crag to the primordial tower of Green Crag. It is well-defended, but a little speculation reveals a breach in the crags, which affords an easy scramble to the top.

            Crook Crag and Green Crag
            Crook Crag and Green Crag
            Perched boulder by Crook Crag
            Perched boulder by Crook Crag
            Green Crag
            Green Crag

            Here is the southern outpost of Wainwright country—a fine grandstand from which to survey a brooding autumnal wilderness of drab olive, fiery copper, and maroon, stippled with mauve crag and sparse patches of coniferous green. The capricious sky is overcast, wrapping the shadowy Scafells in thin veils of mist.  Eastward, the colossal, cupped hand of the Coniston Fells encloses a sliver of silver—the glinting waters of Seathwaite Tarn, its outlet, a thin white trickle spilling over the gnarly knuckled thumb of Grey Friar.

            Coniston Fells and Seathwaite Tarn
            Coniston Fells and Seathwaite Tarn

            While Victorian sightseers flocked to Stanley Ghyll, the more adventurous set their sights on Scafell Crag and the nascent sport of rock climbing. Its buttresses and gullies are named for pioneers, and a cross carved into the rock at the foot of Lord’s Rake commemorates a 1903 climbing accident—the worst in Britain at the time. Twenty-nine years later, humble Harter Fell, rising like a pyramid from the pine-green of Dunnerdale Forest, was to claim a horror of its own. On July 29th, 1932, the papers were preoccupied with the violence erupting on the streets of Germany, where the ascendant Nazis were venting their anger at election results which had (as yet) frustrated their grab for power. An accident on a Cumbrian fell merited only a few words; but the Dundee Evening News found space for several more.

            “PINNED UNDER A ROCK

            Climber’s Ordeal

            A young man, Eddie Flintoff, of Hayworth Avenue, Rawtenstall, was seriously injured whilst climbing Harter Fell, a mountain about 2000 feet high at Eskdale, Cumberland.

            He arrived on holiday at the Stanley Ghyll Guest House, Eskdale, a few days ago. 

            He was one of a party of 35 who set out to climb Harter Fell, three miles from the guest house.

            The party, which included a number of women, was in charge of the host, Mr M’Lean, and they reached the summit of the mountain without mishap.

            In starting the return journey, it is stated, Mr Flintoff decided to descend by the face of the mountain instead of taking the usual gully route.

            Suddenly rocks on which he was standing gave way, and he was carried down a number of feet and partly buried under a rock weighing about 25 cwts (1.25 tons).

            Crowbars Useless

            Mr M’Lean, who has only one arm remained with the party, while Mr H. Eccles, the guest house secretary, hurried to Askdale (sic) to obtain iron crowbars with which to lever the rock and release Flintoff.

            Eight men of the party remained to render assistance, but were unable to release Flintoff owing to the weight of the rock.

            Mr Eccles telephoned to Whitehaven, 25 miles away, for the ambulance and a doctor. On his return, Flintoff was liberated. He had been under the rock for two hours, but he had not lost consciousness.”

            Dr Henderson sedated Flintoff with morphine and chloroform, and stretcher bearers carried him down to Boot, from where he was taken to Whitehaven hospital.

            Eddie Flintoff would never learn where the events in Germany were to lead. He died a few days later of his injuries.

            Harter Fell is less than half a mile from the foot of Crook Crag, but reaching it is an adventure. The liminal ground is a quagmire, a sea of unstable sphagnum that sucks at my boots. I set my sights on a drystone wall which climbs the fellside—the OS map shows a right-of-way beside it—but the journey there is indirect. I cross a stream and follow a roundabout route, leaping from heathery tuft to heathery tuft (heather being good indicator of drier ground).

            Harter Fell from Green Crag
            Harter Fell from Green Crag

            The heather stops a few hundred feet short, and what lies beyond is best described as a lake. Thwarted, I attempt to track right, but the ground near the stream is too soft. After sinking nearly knee deep, I retreat toward Crook Crag, bound the stream at my initial crossing, and try the other side. Thankfully, the islands of heather persist here, and it is with some relief that I gain the slope of Harter Fell.

            Green Crag and Crook Crag from the quagmire
            Green Crag and Crook Crag from the quagmire

            The right-of-way on the map does not translate into a path on the ground, but the wall is a handy guide. There are crags above, but the map shows a way between where the contours are gently spaced. My rudimentary navigation skills do not let me down, which is just as well as a couple who I passed at the bottom have decided to follow me. Near the summit, we pick up the path coming up from Spothow Gill. This should have been Eddie Flintoff’s way down. It was my intended route too, but from the summit, the view of the Scafells is ever more bewitching and I decide to strike on for Hard Knott.

            Scafells from Harter Fell
            Scafells from Harter Fell

            By the time I reach the cairn at the top of Hard Knott Pass, it’s 4pm and I’m a long way from my car. The enchantment here is palpable, though, and on this overcast afternoon, it is dark in flavour, steeped in primeval drama. As I climb beside Hardknott Gill, damselflies flit on gossamer wings, slender flashes of yellow and black, their enormous eyes, dense clusters of photoreceptors scanning for prey. The summit cairn stands like an altar before a synod of stone deities: Slight Side, Scafell, Scafell Pike, Broad Crag, and Ill Crag huddle ahead like a congress of colossi holding court: their sharp-chiselled profiles are black in the brooding light, and their muscular crags extend like crouched limbs. They form the Roof of England; and in their shadow lies the realm of a faery king.

            Damselfly Hard Knott
            Damselfly Hard Knott
            Hard Knott
            Hard Knott

            In 1607, William Camden published Britannia, the first topographical and historical study of Great Britain and Ireland. At Ravenglass, he noted that the locals “talke much of king Eveling, that heere had his Court and roiall palace”. Three centuries later, in an article for The Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, R G Collingwood dug deeper, unearthing mythical connections between Eveling and Arthurian legend, and concluding “Ravenglass is Fairyland”. Stories of King Eveling diverge: was he husband to Morgana La Fay, the sorceress, who was, by turns, Arthur’s ally and his foe? Was Eveling perhaps another name for Affalach, Lord of the Underworld, Lord of The Isle of Apples, otherwise known as Avalon, where even now, Arthur is said to sleep? An anonymous article on the Brighthelm Stane Library website tells a darker tale: Eveling was King of the Court of Forlorn Hope, a capricious tyrant, grown vain and insular by the time King Arthur came knocking. 

            Scafell and Slight Side
            Scafell and Slight Side
            Bow Fell from Hard Knott
            Bow Fell from Hard Knott

            Eveling’s court was at Ravenglass, but his Rath, or stronghold, was a ring of stones within the old Roman fort of Mediobogdum, just below the summit of Hard Knott. Arthur had a Dream of Albion, and he travelled the land beseeching princes and chieftains to unite with him. Most bent their knees in homage, but not Eveling. He saw nothing but a naïve boy and took affront that such a nobody should fail to show due deference to the great faery king. He demanded Arthur return to the Rath after dark, when Eveling and his court would be holding a moonlit ball. Then, Eveling would teach Arthur the proper manner of a monarch.

            Arthur and his army withdrew to the valley bottom where they camped, quite possibly where the village of Boot now lies. But a solitary figure stayed behind on the hill. When darkness fell, and the faery courtiers began their revelry, Merlin conjured a mist that enveloped the mountain. When it cleared, all traces of Eveling and his court were gone. Well, not quite.  According to local superstition, travellers, passing the circle of stones on certain nights of the year, may yet spy the faery throng trapped in their eternal dance. Fall in step with them at your peril, however, as to do so is never to return.

            Scafell massif from Hard Knott
            Scafell massif from Hard Knott

            Further Reading / Sources

            Read the full King Eveline story on the Brighthelm Stane library website:

            http://brighthelmstane.hartsofalbion.co.uk/the-tale-of-king-evelings-rath/

            Find out more about the Stanley Ghyll restoration:

            https://www.lakedistrict.gov.uk/caringfor/projects/stanley-ghyll-closure

            More about the invasive properties of rhododendrum:

            http://www.countrysideinfo.co.uk/rhododen.htm


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              Paint It White

              Barf via the Bishop and Slape Crag

              With their hand-drawn maps & poetic prose, Wainwright’s Pictorial Guides feel less like guidebooks and more like the arcane scripts of a sage, handing down the secrets to another realm. His description of the direct route up Barf reads like an epic quest; its way markers; the Clerk, the Bishop, the Solitary Rowan, the Pinnacle; sound like clues in the unravelling of a mystery. On a glorious day between the lockdowns, I set off for Thornthwaite to answer the call.

              Arcane Secrets

              Twenty three years ago something special caught my eye.  I was upstairs in the Carnforth bookshop, browsing the second-hand section for crime-thrillers, or cookbooks, or music biographies, but what I picked up was none of those. It was a small, dog-eared hardback with a torn dust-jacket and yellowing pages that bore the title, “A Pictorial Guide To The Lake District—being an illustrated account of a study and exploration of the mountains in the English Lake District by A Wainwright. Book Four, The Southern Fells”.

              I bought it. I’d heard of Wainwright, I’d even seen some of his artefacts in Kendal Museum, and I was vaguely aware he was revered among fellwalkers. But I wasn’t yet a fellwalker. I was a musician, whose short if promising career had failed to find that elusive breakthrough. By 1995 that dream was over. I retrained as a software engineer, and when my wife was offered a dream job with the Lakeland Arts Trust, we left our home in Newcastle for the South Lakes.

              It was the beginning of an exciting new chapter. For the first time, we had a little money and modest prospects, but something was missing. Being in a band had never been about courting fame, you see. It was all about the magic that happens when ideas and understanding gel.  Not that they did always, some gigs meant travelling for hours to stumble, without conviction, through a short set to three bored punters and a dog. But on the nights when everything came together, the songs took on a life of their own, and we conjured something that transcended its parts. Audiences were complicit, and everyone’s spirits soared. When it was over, we’d lug our gear back into our transit van and drive off to sleep on somebody’s floor—but we were warm in the afterglow. I missed that transcendence, that soaring sensation of liberty and release. Little did I know, I was about to find it again in the most unexpected of places.

              It hadn’t taken long for me to lift my eyes to the fells. I remember standing on the shore of Haweswater, looking up at High Street and a friend telling me that a Roman road used to run over the top of it.  I knew then that I had to go up there.  I’d invested in a map and a modern guide-book (which would get me to the top of High Street), but this Wainwright guide was entirely different. It didn’t contain any photos, or useful details about parking or facilities. Its maps were not borrowed from Harveys or the OS, but hand-drawn in an idiosyncratic style that morphed into illustration, and the text was rendered in the author’s own hand. It felt like arcane knowledge, the sacred scripts of a sage handing down the secrets to another realm.

              And the fells looked like another realm; wrapped in mist, or capped in snow, they seemed to belong more to the clouds than the olive patchwork of fields and woods below. Wainwright’s words transported you there.  They made each mountain feel like a quest, and my little second-hand copy was replete with handwritten annotations from previous owners who had followed in his footsteps.  It was a call I would answer too, and in doing so I would regain what I had lost. On the summits, I would know again that feeling of exhilaration and humility, the affirmation of being a tiny part of something much grander, and I would learn that music is not the only mode of flight.

              A Quest

              By 2020, many of the mountains in the Southern Fells had become old friends. I now owned all seven Pictorial Guides, but there were still a few fells I hadn’t climbed, (not a box ticker by nature, I had only recently resolved to climb all of the Wainwrights). On the western bank of Bassenthwaite Lake stands a small group of green, mostly wooded, hills which were still virgin territory for me. As Wainwright so enticingly describes, one of these presents a very different face to the others:

              “Insignificant in height and of no greater extent than half a mile square, the rugged pyramid of Barf… yet contrives to arrest and retain the attention of travellers along the road at its base. Its outline is striking, its slopes seemingly impossibly steep, the direct ascent from its foot appears to be barred by an uncompromising cliff. There are few fells, large or small, of such hostile and aggressive character”. Wainwright describes the direct ascent from Thornthwaite as “a very stiff scramble, suitable only for people overflowing with animal strength and vigour”. Yet, perhaps more than any other, his depiction conjures an epic adventure—of the kind that flows from the pen of Tolkien or JK Rowling.  Its landmarks: the Clerk, the Bishop, the Scree Gully, the Solitary Rowan, the Oak and Rowan growing together below the rock traverse (the key to breaching Slape Crag), and the Pinnacle (a signpost to the upper escarpment); all sound like esoteric clues in the unravelling of a mystery. Here, for sure, is a quest.

              End of the Scree Gully
              The Scree Gully

              And like all true quests, it is not without danger. In recent years, several people have become crag-fast in the vicinity of Slape Crag and been forced to call for help. I like to think of myself as a responsible fellwalker, who, even at the best of times, takes all reasonable steps to avoid calling for assistance; but September 2020 is not the best of times:  Britain is in the grip of COVID-19, and while lockdown restrictions have been eased (temporarily), Mountain Rescue are urging people to stay within their capabilities.  There is no way I will attempt this with being certain I can do it, or at least, that I can back out safely. Some further research is needed then. 

              Wainwright suggests that the rock traverse below Slape Crag recalls Jack’s Rake, except that it is short and easy. I’ve climbed Jack’s Rake, and Sharp Edge, and Striding Edge, and Dow Crag’s South Rake; the received wisdom seems to suggest that if I was OK with those, I should be able to cope with Barf.  The excellent Lakeland Routes website gives a step-by-step photographic guide, which instils confidence rather than dread. It also provides an alternative route (now included in Clive Hutchby’s third edition of Wainwright’s guide). This gives slightly easier alternatives to both the rock terrace and the “unpleasant” scree gully. Crucially, it affords a way down, avoiding the scree gully, should I baulk at Slape Crag. I have a Plan B then, should I need it.

              Slape Crag. Barf
              Slape Crag
              The Bishop

              Suitably reassured and with an excellent forecast of clear skies and strong September sunshine, I set off for Thornthwaite. Before I reach the parking area at Powter How, I pull over , for here is a view of Barf just as AW sketches it— it looks just as impossibly steep and hostile. With the sun minutes away from clearing Skiddaw, the pyramid’s face is yet in shadow, its grey crags mottled with mauve, morphing into russet where summer heather has succumbed to autumn’s touch. But among the sombre tones of first light, something shines—an upstanding pillar of brilliant white. This is the famous Bishop of Barf. Few rocks in the Lake District are subject to a ritual with such a bizarre backstory.

              So the tale goes, in 1783, the Bishop of Derry was on his way to Whitehaven to make the crossing to Ireland, when he broke his journey with a night at the Swan hotel in Thornthwaite. During the course of the evening he fell into drinking with the locals and drunkenly bet he could ride his horse all the way to the top of Barf. He made it just under halfway. At about 700ft, the horse fell in the vicinity of the pillar, killing both animal and rider. They were buried together at the foot of the fell near another rock, known as the Clerk. In commemoration, the pillar was whitewashed and named, the Bishop. Whitewashing the Bishop became an annual ritual for the villagers, organised and rewarded by the staff at the hotel. In recent years, since the hotel closed and was converted into flats, the responsibility has been assumed by Mountain Rescue.

              The Bishop of Barf
              The Bishop of Barf

              I park at Powter How, opposite the old Swan Hotel, and take the path that leads into the woods. Before long, I reach the Clerk, “a poor drooping individual who attracts little attention to himself”.  But all good quests begin with an inauspicious sign, and here the Clerk is it. He marks the point where the adventurer must leave the beaten path (which continues up through the verdant woods beside Beckstones Gill), and head out on to the unforgiving slopes of fractured slate. 

              The Clerk
              The Clerk

              The unseasonably bright sun is now fully risen, and as I emerge from the tree cover, the light is dazzling. Ahead is an arid desert of shifting scree and sparse scrub, tilted at an alarming angle, atop of which the Bishop gleams like a beacon. Wainwright counsels that the slope is “arduous to ascend, the feet often slipping down two steps for every one step up—from which it should not be supposed that better progress will be made by going up backwards”. Behind the Bishop, forbidding walls of rock rise in ominous warning. I begin the slog. The semblance of a path is simply a line of erosion, and stripped of the cushion of scree, not always the easiest choice. My quads burn as I follow my instincts, and the Bishop is a welcoming figure when he finally stands before me, resplendent in his gleaming garments. From the front, this seven foot pillar is more redolent of a shapeless glove puppet than an elevated dignitary of the church, but from the rear, he cuts a more refined and human figure: a rounded head on top of a slender neck casts an authoritative gaze over ground that drops abruptly to the patchwork of fields, far below.

              Behind the Bishop of Barf
              Behind the Bishop

              In 1783, the Protestant Bishop of Derry was William Augustus Hervey, the Earl of Bristol, known as “the Edifying Bishop”, on account of his predilection for building churches. He won respect for cross denominational initiatives that benefited Catholics as well as Protestants, but he was famed for his flamboyance. King George III described Hervey as “that wicked prelate”, on account of his womanising (his mistresses included society beauty, Madam Ritz, and Emma Hamilton, who was better known for an affair with Lord Nelson). He was also an eccentric, requiring his clergymen to play leapfrog to determine which parishes they served. It might be entirely believable that such a colourful character died here, in such reckless manner, had he not actually died in Italy, twenty years later (expressing the dying wish that his body be shipped back to England in a sherry cask). How or why Hervey became the subject of such a curious local legend is unknown, but it’s a fabulous story, and it would be a shame to let truth stand in the way of it. In the words of John Ford, “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend”.

              The Scree Gully
              The Scree Gully
              The Scree Gully

              Behind the Bishop, a path curves right through the heather, avoiding the formidable scree gully that rises, seemingly vertically, between the walls of rock above. But the easy route is not Wainwright’s way, and its presence feels like a temptation designed to lure the pilgrim from his calling. A true quest involves a series of trials, and to rise to the challenge, the scree gully must be negotiated.  Wainwright warns “its walls of rotten rock cannot be trusted for handholds and fall apart at the touch. The tiles here pull out like drawers”. Tentatively, I cast around for purchase and pull myself up. In actuality, the gully is not as daunting as the sage suggests, and by the time I reach the rocky outcrop that bars the exit, I’m enjoying myself enough to shun a path that escapes left to a heathery slope and tackle the terminal rocks head on.  The slates here are stacked, as if by ancient hands, to form a defensive wall, replete with buttressed turrets, but in the absence of incumbents armed with spears, and arrows, and barrels of burning tar, they are easily scrambled.       

              Wall of the Scree Gully
              Wall of the Scree Gully
              Terminal rocks of the Scree Gully
              Terminal rocks of the Scree Gully
              The Solitary Rowan

              There is some respite now for aching limbs. A gentler heathery slope stretches onward, and up ahead stands the next of Wainwright’s mystical way markers, the Solitary Rowan. Wainwright indulged the notion he was blazing a trail through this wild terrain and was slightly deflated to find the trunk inscribed with the initials of those who had gone this way before. In my imagination, the carvings are ancient runes, a riddle whose meaning can only be unlocked by the worthy.  I make out the characters G and T, letters with a clear spiritual connotation that I resolve to imbibe as soon as I get home.

              The Solitary Rown, Barf
              The Solitary Rown

              Despite the encroach of autumn, much of the flora here is still in bloom. Bees are abuzz with pollination duties, and the September sun feels more like June. The desert of shifting scree has given way to fertile swathes of yellow gorse, and purple bell heather, while russet hues of dying bracken herald the turning of the season.

              Bee on heather by Slape Crag
              Bee on heather by Slape Crag
              Bee on rocks below Slape Crag
              Bee on rocks below Slape Crag

              Slape Crag

              The respite is fleeting however, the scree returns before the towering fortifications of Slape Crag, which loom above. A lower curtain wall threatens to impede access, but with proximity, a line of shadow on the right resolves into a gully. The passage is narrow and steep, but the rock is firm, a natural stone staircase.

              Gully below Slape Crag
              Gully below Slape Crag
              Gully below Slape Crag
              Gully below Slape Crag

              At the top, the easier path winds in from a bield on the eastern side, beyond which the fell disappears in a rapid tumble to the road and the diminutive Swan below. Ahead is the towering face of Slape Crag. That the unwary should become crag fast here is perhaps no surprise. The cliff rises in a sheer white wall of smooth slate, blocking onward progress. With the prospect of descending back down the severe scree an apparent invitation to a broken neck and a seemingly unassailable cliff looming above, those with a vested interest in continued living might well conclude discretion the better part of valour and dial for help. But those armed with the arcane knowledge of a sage, know that all is not lost.

              Looking down over the bield to the Swan, Barf
              Looking down over the bield to the Swan

              Wainwright declares, “this obstacle can be safely negotiated at one point only”. In this, he is actually wrong. The scree falls sharply away to left where the lower part of the cliff rises, but ahead, the shattered slate continues upward to meet the foot of the upper wall. Here, a heather terrace tracks left, along the top of the lower wall. Apparently, it ends in a simple scramble. This is Lakeland Routes’ and Hutchby’s alternative way, thought by some to be the easier option.

              Slape Crag, Barf
              Slape Crag

              Wainwright’s way is harder to spot. It passes below the lower wall. “Bear left at its base”, he says, “to a rock traverse above an oak and a rowan together”. I can see a cleft rock at the bottom, but the scree stops there too. Beyond, the slope becomes a stiff drop, obscured by foliage. If there is a traverse, it must start here, but the sunlight is blinding and it’s difficult to make sense of the impression.  As I approach, features start to coalesce, and I realise a tree is growing horizontally out of the cliff. Its trunk is robust and gnarly, and its deciduous leaves still deeply green—it’s an oak. Closer still, I make out a smaller, lighter, spindly trunk sprouting from the rock in front of it. Here then is the rowan, but I still can’t see a path. With the blind belief of Harry Potter running at the wall in King’s Cross Station, hoping it will yield access to all platform 9 ¾, I make steadfastly for the spot. When I’m almost upon it, the impenetrable shadow that looked like a dead end resolves into a narrow trod around the base of the cleft boulder. I track above the rowan and the oak, so focused on discovering the way forward that I’m unfazed by how abruptly the ground falls away, at least until I glance back. This must be the section that revived “lurid memories of Jack’s Rake” for Wainwright, but I’m already beyond it, and a path is now obvious. Before I know it, I’m on to the heathery slope beyond.

              The Rock Traverse above the oak and rowan, Barf
              The Rock Traverse above the oak and rowan
              Around the Pinnacle

              All that remains is to breach the upper escarpment. This can be tackled directly with a steep climb through the heather, but Wainwright eschews such a prosaic approach in favour of rounding the pinnacle, a semi-detached needle of rock over to the left. The way is obscure, but again, it is a case of seek and ye shall find. A path slowly reveals itself among sporadic blooms of purple heather, yellow gorse, and fragrant wood sage.

              Heather slope below the Upper Escarpment, Barf
              Heather slope below the Upper Escarpment
              The Pinnacle, Barf
              The Pinnacle

              Beyond the Pinnacle, a sheep trod, no more than a furrow in the foliage, tacks back along the top of the escarpment, affording breathtaking views over the line of ascent, and a growing sense of triumph at having survived it.

              Two false summits, with tantalising views of Bassenthwaite Lake, lead to the cairn that marks the top. Here the unimpeded view over the lake’s tranquil blue waters is a rich delight. Beyond the eastern shore, the muscular mass of Skiddaw rises, a true Lakeland giant, a Goliath to Barf’s humble David. And yet for all its might, it lacks the myth and mystery, the beauty and intrigue, the sense of unravelling adventure that Barf holds in abundance.

              Bassenthwaite from the summit of Barf
              Bassenthwaite from the summit

              A grassy ridge path leads on to Lord’s Seat, and from there, to Broom Fell, Graystones, and Whinlatter. I shall spend the rest of the day exploring those green and wooded slopes, and they will seem a world apart from the route which brought me here. In late afternoon, I’ll reach the bottom of Beckstones Gill and wend through the woods to the Clerk. I shall look out again from the dappled cover of the trees onto the sun-bleached slope of fractured slate; and I shall spy the Bishop presiding over the progress of a solitary walker, starting up the stiff scree—another pilgrim on a quest, armed, no doubt, with a hand-drawn map and the poetic scribblings of a sage.

              Further Reading

              Lakeland Routes guide to the direct route up Barf

              Lakeland Routes Alternative Route

              The National Trust on William Hervey, Bishop of Derry

              https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/downhill-demesne-and-hezlett-house/features/the-flamboyant-earl-bishop-at-downhill


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                Secrets of the Screes

                Illgill Head, Whin Rigg, Miterdale, Burnmoor Tarn

                Two ghost stories, an old corpse road, a hidden valley, a homicide, and a tragic vanishing: I walk over Illgill Head and Whin Rigg to discover the secrets of the Screes.

                Silhouettes of branch and twig entwine in a spindly tracery, a filigree of black wood to frame a lake of aquamarine. This sleepy copse still skulks in Sca Fell’s shadow, while beyond the trees, bright morning rays cast Wastwater as a dazzling blue gem. Even at this early hour, the far bank is lined with cars and campervans. Since the end of our first lockdown, this loneliest of Cumbrian lakes has drawn crowds, intent on swapping the beaches of the Mediterranean for these rugged and altogether wilder shores; but here at Brackenclose, beyond the car park and the campsite, there is solitude.

                Wastwater from Brackenclose
                Wastwater from Brackenclose

                The empty shell of the climbing hut stands like a skeleton beneath a canopy of ancient oaks. Temporary wire fence-barriers block access.  This was the Fell and Rock Climbing Club’s first hut, architect-designed and purpose-built on this small tract of land at the head of England’s deepest lake.  It opened in 1936, a temple of sorts for those whose spiritual nourishment was to be found in scaling the Scafells. Some did not survive their adventures and lie buried close by in the graveyard of St Olaf’s—England’s tiniest church in the lee of its highest mountain. Last year, the hut was badly damaged by fire and now stands in ruins, a sepulchre to past glories. There is something strangely apt in its mournful ambience, however, for this footpath is an old corpse road.

                No-one was buried at St Olaf’s before 1901. The churchyard wasn’t consecrated until then. For centuries before, the people of Wasdale had to carry their dead over the foot of Sca Fell, around the shoulder of Burnmoor Tarn, and across Eskdale Moor to St Catherine’s church in Boot. This ancient right of way was their coffin route.

                An old stone packhorse bridge leads over the twin becks of Hollow Gill and Groove Gill; its paving and its walls of local stone look organic, weathered and irregular, as if the mountain had taken pity on the processions of coffin bearers and rearranged its scree to smooth their passage. Beyond the bridge, a rear-guard of solitary rowans marks the last of the tree line, their bright red berries in primary contrast to the aquatic blue of Wastwater. The lake’s far shore is hemmed by clay-red fells, terminating in the fractured bell of Buckbarrow. On this side, the grassy slopes of Illgill Head rise yonder, hiding the precipitous face it presents lakeward.

                Wastwater from the Corpse Road
                Wastwater from the Corpse Road

                I leave the corpse road at a gate and follow a drystone wall up the fellside, crossing the wall above Straighthead Beck and climbing soggy slopes toward the ridgeline. With height, a heady vista over Wasdale Head unfurls, like some immense primeval Valley of the Kings. Kirk Fell and Lingmell throw down chiselled ridges, like colossal natural pyramids, mossy green and purple in their lower reaches, rising to dark faces of naked slate. They are mere gatekeepers to Great Gable, which towers above, a sharp angular edifice of sculpted granite. Higher still, Sca Fell lurks in shadow, a muscular presence, intimidating, but as yet, ill-defined. Sunlight floods Yewbarrow, illuminating every crack and crevice of its gnarly, fissured forehead above its eastern skirts of scree. Beyond Mosedale’s hollow, Pillar looms like some gargantuan hippo god, stirring from slumber in a devastating show of strength.

                Kirk Fell Great Gable Lingmell
                Kirk Fell Great Gable Lingmell
                Great Gable
                Great Gable
                Pillar over Yewbarrow
                Pillar over Yewbarrow

                At a little shy of 2000 ft, Illgill Head is a modest foot-soldier in the company of such Titans, but between its summit and that of neighbouring Whin Rigg, it drops to Wasdale so abruptly and with such cascading drama that Wainwright declares, “no mountain in Lakeland, not even Great Gable nor Blencathra nor the Langdale Pikes, can show a grander front”. It is as if some ancient elemental god conjured a storm of such force it shattered the bedrock and gouged a ruptured cliff of plunging ravines and jagged arêtes. These are the Wastwater screes, and the path that hugs the cliff edge promises airy exhilaration.

                Wastwater Screes
                Wastwater Screes
                Wastwater Screes

                The summit plateau is smooth and grassy with little hint of the imminent drama. Nearing the edge, scooped hollows reveal sudden glimpses of the lake, then the flank falls rapidly away in a succession of sheer drops, perilous scree gullies and sharp ridges. These arêtes bear names like Bell Crag, Bell Rib, and Broken Rib. The skeletal image is apt—it’s as if the smooth flesh of earth and grass has been torn off to reveal the bones of the mountain.

                Wastwater from Illgill Head
                Wastwater from Illgill Head
                Wastwater Screes
                Wastwater Screes
                Wastwater Screes

                Of the arêtes, Broken Rib on the Whin Rigg side is arguably the finest. Its name evokes the Arizonian desert, but it protrudes like a Transylvanian castle, hewn straight from the rock, a rampart replete with pointed turrets and hefty buttresses, and a long sheer drop to the bracken-clad scree at its foot. A precarious trod picks a way along its slender top, affording a pulse-quickening prospect over Wastwater to the pyramids at his head. The lake is a polished iridescent pane, Egyptian blue like stained glass. It is astoundingly beautiful, but it is a beauty spiced with danger and laced with loss: for nearly forty years ago, Broken Rib harboured a tragic secret.

                Broken Rib
                Broken Rib

                In July 1983, French engineer, Francis Marre, and his wife, Michelle, received a postcard from their daughter, Veronique. It said, “It is very nice here. I am enjoying myself. I am disappointed I cannot speak more English. Will see you in two weeks’ time”. But a fortnight later, Veronique failed to arrive home in Paris as planned. The 21-year-old agricultural student had disappeared on July 31st after setting off from Wasdale Youth Hostel for Grasmere. Her distraught mother would tell reporters, “Veronique would not just disappear of her own free will, I am sure of that. She would have let us know if she could, but I think she has been kidnapped or killed or had some sort of accident”.

                Broken Rib
                Path along the top of Broken Rib

                Det. Chief Inspector Steve Reid organised one of the biggest searches ever seen in Lakeland. Tracker dogs and mountain rescue teams were deployed, but Veronique was nowhere to be found. Then several months later, divers in Wastwater made a gruesome discovery. What at first appeared to be an old roll of carpet, turned out to be a hessian sack containing the body of a woman. She had been strangled, and her body tied, weighted down, and dropped from a dinghy into the deepest part of the lake. The perpetrator had made a glaring oversight, however. He’d forgotten to remove her wedding ring, which was inscribed with her initials, those of her husband, and the date of their wedding, 15-11-63. This was clearly not Veronique. The body was quickly identified as that of Margaret Hogg, reported missing by her husband in 1976.

                Wastwater from Broken Rib
                Wastwater from Broken Rib

                With Margaret’s story grabbing the headlines, Veronique’s plight was relegated to the inside pages. The search for her continued, of course, but to no avail. Det. Chief Inspector Reid would say later, “it was as if she had vanished of the face of the earth”. 

                Detectives and mountain rescue team members never quite gave up hope of finding her, though, convinced she must be here somewhere on the surrounding fells. On May 6th, 1985, they were proved right.  A climber, named Mike Parkin, noticed a piece of clothing that had been washed out by rain. It lay in a gully 300ft below the top of Broken Rib (and about 1000ft above the lake). The remains of Veronique’s body were close by, lying where she must have landed after falling from the arête. The mountain had taken her to its bosom, shrouding her in bracken and heather, hiding her from the eyes of the searchers.  Over time, her rucksack had eroded, spilling out the garments that eventually betrayed her whereabouts.

                Broken Rib
                Broken Rib

                Before her life was cut so cruelly short, I hope Veronique got to see this landscape on a day like this. The visibility is extraordinary. It’s hard to express how edifying it is to see so far. To the west, over a verdant patchwork of coastal plain, the Irish Sea is a sweeping wash of blues and mauves. From its ephemeral shimmer rise the shadowy profiles of Snaefell and the mountains of the Isle of Man. Beyond the island’s northern tip, I glimpse the shore of Ireland; I can see the high ground of Wales and the hills of southern Scotland.

                I leave the escarpment, climb over Whin Rigg’s summit, and down to where the deep trench of Greathall Gill divides its grassy slopes like an ancient earthwork.  Beyond is Irton Fell. A path drops down its eastern flank into woods filled with the scent of bark and berries, resin and moss; at the bottom lies one of Lakeland’s best kept secrets.

                Greathall Gill
                Greathall Gill

                An old stone packhorse bridge, dreadlocked with ivy, leads over the River Mite into the secluded little valley that bears its name, Miterdale. A solitary lane wends in from Eskdale and peters out at a parking area. A young family are paddling in the river. We are the only people around. A donkey wanders down to the edge of his paddock to check me out, but quickly loses interest when I fail to produce Polos.

                Bridge over the River Mite
                Bridge over the River Mite

                Across another bridge, I find a languid scene of pastoral serenity, the road now a mettled farm track running beside the river.  Even Whin Rigg presents a tamer front. Gone are the wild ferocities of the Screes. Here, its white crags are mere outcrops on gentler slopes of heather, turned mustard and burgundy in anticipation of autumn. Trees soften the lower reaches, giving way to rolling grass, cropped close like parkland.  I follow the track to Low Park farm and out though its yard to the river. A ford marks a parting of ways. I stick with the west bank, entering wilder terrain, overrun with gorse, thistle, and bracken. Just before the last stand of trees is Bakerstead farm, once maintained by Wyndham School (in Egremont) as an outdoor pursuits centre, but now boarded up in an eerie echo of a legend that pervades here. For Miterdale Head, a short way beyond, is the haunt of the Beckside Boggle.

                Bakerstead Farm
                Bakerstead Farm

                In the early 1800’s, High Miterdale farm is said to have been home to Joe and Ann Southward, a sober and industrious couple who’d managed to each save a nest egg from their jobs as farm labourer and servant girl. Eventually, they had enough to wed and buy a farm of their own. An ancient packhorse route ran past the gate, but the old Nanny Horns Inn now stood empty and had fallen into disrepair. High Miterdale was a lonely and remote location. They had each other, however, and before long, they were blessed with a son. Hard work soon paid dividends, and Joe was obliged to visit Whitehaven on business. He would be away for a night, leaving Ann to look after the farm and their young child.  That evening, an old woman wrapped in shawl stopped at the door to ask how much further it was to Boot. She had walked far and was afraid she would not make her destination before dark. Ann took pity on her and offered her lodging for the night.

                The old woman settled by the fire, supped porridge, and nodded off to sleep. Ann started to doze too, but she was abruptly awakened by a loud clank as something heavy and metallic fell to the floor. To her horror, she saw it was a long sharp open-clasp knife, of the kind carried by soldiers. The woman must have been clutching it under her shawl, only the shawl itself had slipped to reveal the face, not of frail elderly woman, but that of a coarse thick-set man.

                Over the fire hung a cauldron of molten fat, which Ann had been heating to make tallow candles. In fear for her life and that of her son, she filled a dipper full of the boiling liquid and poured it over the imposter’s head, filling his gaping mouth and choking him to death.

                When Joe returned the next day, they buried the man in the grounds of the old inn, together with money and trinkets he had doubtless stolen from other farms. But his wretched spirit would not lie quiet and haunted them with such ferocity that they were forced to abandon the farm, as were all others who subsequently tried to make it their home. It now lies in ruins.

                Ruins High Miterdale
                Ruins of High Miterdale farm or the Nanny Horns Inn perhaps?

                You’d be forgiven for thinking that the River Mite flows out of Burnmoor Tarn, but you’d be wrong. A slither of land hides one from the other. Burnmoor Tarn’s outflow is Whillan Beck, a tributary of the River Esk, while the River Mite collects the run-off from Tongue Moor, which sits below the summit of Illgill Head. I climb the Tongue and follow a path across its shoulder to the slopes above the tarn. This is another place of ghosts.

                The corpse road tracks the far shore. One of the countless funeral processions to come this way is said to have borne the body of a young dalesman. On reaching the tarn, the cortège was disrupted: something unseen startled the horse carrying the coffin, causing it to bolt into the mist. Despite the best of efforts, neither horse nor coffin could be found. The news that her dear young son had been denied a Christian burial proved too much for his mother. Her frail heart gave out, and a matter of days later, another procession set out for Eskdale, this time bearing her own coffin. As they reached the place where her son’s horse had bolted, the same thing happened, and her horse took off in fright too. Another search was mounted, and this time, it fared better. A horse and coffin were recovered, but it was not the mother’s, it her son’s. Her own body was never found, never laid to rest, and ever since, there have been reports of a phantom horse, with a long wooden box strapped to his back, galloping across this lonely moor.

                Sca Fell and Burnmoor Tarn
                Sca Fell and Burnmoor Tarn

                I look down at the dark inscrutable waters, then I raise my eyes to the mountain that towers above. How many lives have played out in Sca Fell’s shadow? How many births, marriages and deaths has it witnessed? It has stood for 450 million years, human civilisation for a mere 6,000. How infinitesimal is our presence compared to its own? We barely register on its timescale. Yet somehow, this humbling realisation produces a profound sense of euphoria. It does us good to be stripped of our pretentions, to recognise our own insignificance in the face of a world so much bigger and so much older. We spend lifetimes striving to be remembered when what really matters is that we are here at all.

                It’s a rapture familiar to many fellwalkers, and, given her rapport with the landscape, I’m certain Veronique must have felt it too. I like to think so, as it suggests her life, though short, was richly fulfilled.

                Sources / Further Reading

                If I’ve left you wondering at the story behind the gruesome discovery of Margaret Hogg’s body in Wastwater, I tell it here:

                The details of Veronique’s disappearance were gleaned from contemporary newspapers, particularly the Newcastle Journal 25th July 1984, 8th May 1985, and 6th July 1985 editions.

                The most famous account of the Beckside Boggle was penned by Alice Rea in her book, The Beckside Boggle and other Lake Country Stories, published by T Fisher Unwin in 1886, but you can find it online here:

                https://www.fivenine.co.uk/family_history_notebook/background/miterdale/beckside_boggle.html

                The story of the lost coffin near Burnmoor Tarn is well known, but I first read it in my copy of Lakeland Ghosts, by Gerald Findler: Dalesman Books, 1984 (first published 1969).


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                  Thorn Of Crowns

                  The Rites of Spring & the Secret of Crummock Water

                  May 12th, 2019

                  In 1988, divers made a grisly discovery in Crummock Water: they recovered the body of a woman, chained to a car cylinder head. Her name was Sheena, and she has become the forgotten Lady of the Lake. Thirty one years later, I walk from Ennerdale Water over Great Borne, the air filled with the song of the cuckoo and the fragrance of hawthorn blossom. These traditional harbingers of spring are the stuff of folk ritual, but as I reach Red Pike and look down on Crummock Water, I recall Sheena’s story, and I wonder whether ancient beliefs may yet have something to teach us.

                  “I have a friend who’s a radio announcer. He stops talking when he walks under bridges”—just one in a rich seam of dry one-liners from the skewed imagination of US comic, Steven Wright. It’s a joke that may be lost on anyone who’s grown up with digital radio, unless, of course, they drive over Corney Fell. Here invisible bridges eat digital radio signal at regular intervals, so I miss most of what Radcliffe and Maconie are saying about the harbingers of spring, but I do catch something about superstition and the May Tree.

                  The radio show might have dissolved into stuttered fragments, but the view is unswervingly impressive. We’ve not been starved of sunny days recently, but the light has often been hazy, rendering the landscape as a washed-out impression. Today is different. Everything is in high definition. The pepper pot of Stainton Tower is pin-sharp and the Irish Sea bluer than I’ve ever seen. The Isle of Man rises in the distance like a mythical kingdom from a skirt of sea-mist. The rites of spring are afoot, and the staccato radio reception seems somewhat appropriate, for what are superstitions if not stuttered fragments of once coherent beliefs.

                  Ennerdale Water from Herdus
                  Ennerdale Water from Herdus

                  Before long, I’m edging down the single-track lane to Bowness Knott on the shore of Ennerdale Water with Herdus’s western ridge rising impressively ahead. As I step out of the car, another harbinger of spring reaches my ear: the slow repeating call of the cuckoo. In days gone by, people believed the cuckoo morphed into a hawk during the winter or took refuge in the faery kingdom. When it returned in its familiar form, it brought the spring with it. It’s the first cuckoo call I’ve heard this year. There are many half-forgotten customs you are supposed to enact in response. I seem to remember one about placing a stone on your head, running as far as you can, and launching it into the air. Wherever it lands, a stash of money will await when you return the following day. I think better of it. I’m in a car park after all. Knowing my luck, it’ll fly through someone’s windscreen and end up costing me a great deal more.

                  Another old belief says that every repeat of the first cuckoo’s call marks a year of your life. I’m encouraged that it shows no sign of abating as I stroll back along the track toward Rake Beck.

                  A pungent natural perfume reaches my nostrils from the white blossom of the hawthorn trees. This is the May Tree of Radcliffe and Maconie’s mention, so called for its May flowering. In Celtic tradition, it is the tree of Beltaine, the ancient festival that celebrates the start of spring and the coming of summer; like Beltaine, the hawthorn symbolises fertility and rebirth.

                  The fair maid who, the first of May,
                  Goes to the fields at break of day
                  And washes in dew from the hawthorn tree,
                  Will ever after handsome be”

                  Crag Fell from Bowness Knott
                  Crag Fell and hawthorn trees

                  Hawthorn boughs were cut and woven into May Day crowns or placed in the porches of houses to bring luck, but bringing them inside the house was taboo:

                  “Hawthorn bloom and elder-flowers
                  Will fill a house with evil powers”

                  The tree contains trimethylamine, a chemical found in decaying animal tissue. In medieval times, its blossom was said to smell like the Great Plague, and its presence indoors was associated with death. But this is perhaps a later superstition based on an unsavoury aromatic association. In earlier times, hawthorn was the tree of new life; it was her sister tree, the blackthorn, that was the tree of death.

                  In witchcraft, the blackthorn belongs to black magic, while the hawthorn (or white thorn) is the tree of the white witch. Blackthorn is the Celtic tree of Samhain, the festival that marks the coming of winter. Its bitter fruit, the sloe, sweetens after the first frost.

                  In Ireland, it was considered unlucky to chop down hawthorn trees as they were said to be home to faery folk. Indeed, thirteenth century Scottish mystic, Thomas Rhymer, met the Faery Queen by a May Tree. She gave him a brief tour of the underworld. It only lasted a matter of hours, but when he returned, he discovered he’d been gone a full seven years. By contrast, the blackthorn is a gateway to communing with the dead. This is not as macabre as it sounds. In ancient belief, communing with the dead helped the living prepare for what must come to us all eventually. 

                  Hawthorn near Bowness Knott
                  Hawthorn near Bowness Knott

                  The same dichotomy applies in traditional healing: blackthorn is an astringent and a purgative; it heals by bringing your pain and darkest thoughts to the surface; it intensifies suffering in order to banish it. Hawthorn is a balm; it soothes pain and eases troubles.

                  Blackthorn and whitethorn; winter and summer; death and rebirth; the perpetual cycle of life; and here on the shore of Ennerdale Water, in the warm sunlight, with the tang of new growth, the scent of tree blossom and the call of the cuckoo, all things more likely to trigger a hard-wired religious impulse (in me, at least) than psalms and psalters and thorny theological concepts of original sin.

                  Crag Fell over Ennerdale Water
                  Crag Fell over Ennerdale Water

                  During WWI, large amounts of wood were needed for the war effort. In 1919, the Forestry Commission was established to ensure the UK always had a steady supply of timber. In its early years, the Commission adopted a utilitarian approach, planting vast amounts of fast growing conifer. In Ennerdale, dense sitka spruce plantations blighted the natural landscape, replacing the indigenous flora. Wainwright called this “dark funeral shroud of foreign trees” an act of vandalism. But in 1968, the Commission refocused on conservation, and since 2003, it has been a partner in the Wild Ennerdale project, which is rewilding the valley, thinning the conifer and allowing the old woods to reassert themselves. Perhaps some of the ancient magic is returning.

                  I leave the road by a stile, cross Raise Beck and follow a path that climbs the fell side to gain the western ridge of Herdus. Across the valley, Crag Fell sprawls: a gargantuan beast in slumber—its shadowed crags an elephantine hide, its sunlit slopes a pink underbelly, and Anglers Crag its wrinkled snout. The lake is a plate of polished lapis lazuli. As I gain height along the ridge, I look down on Bowness Knott, its rounded top a fishbone pattern of forest green and stone white clearings.

                  Looking over Bowness Knott from Herdus

                  Traditionally, Herdus is the name for this whole fell, with Great Borne a name for the summit only, but the OS map assigns Herdus its own summit. This is marked on the ground with a cairn and acknowledged as a Birkett. The classification may confuse boundaries, but it does at least do justice to this remarkable viewpoint.

                  Great Borne’s summit lies east across a boggy depression. The circuitous path keeps to firmer ground, crossing the head of Rake Beck and joining the path that climbs beside it. As I approach the trig point and shelter that crown the top, the muscular mass of Grasmoor, Whiteside, Wandhope and Whiteless Pike rises in the northwest, dark and shadowy, like an angular edifice of chiselled granite.

                  Grasmoor range from Great Borne
                  Grasmoor range from Great Borne

                  Two fell runners are tracing a route with their fingers. It circuits the whole valley: Starling Dodd, Buttermere Edge, Haystacks, the Gable Girdle, Kirk Fell, Pillar, Scoat Fell, Haycock, Crag Fell.

                  “Are you going to run all that?” I ask, incredulous.

                  “Not today,” the girl replies, “but it’s what we’re in training for.”

                  I follow their dust down to the col and up the gentle grassy slope to Starling Dodd. They’re long gone by the time I reach its twin cairns, one of stones and one a twisted twine of rusted iron fence posts.

                  Summit cairns on Starling Dodd
                  Summit cairns on Starling Dodd

                  Ahead, the slanting pyramid of Red Pike is a sharp end to the High Stile ridge, and to the north,  Crummock Water is glimpsed, an indigo lustre beneath Grasmoor. Grasmoor itself, now free of shadow, is painted chocolate with veins and crests of cinnamon. Southwest, over Ennerdale Water, the Irish Sea is a band of pale blue beyond the green flatlands of the coast.

                  Grasmoor and Crummock Water
                  Grasmoor and Crummock Water

                  Buttermere over Bleaberry Tarn
                  Buttermere over Bleaberry Tarn
                  Crummock Water
                  Crummock Water

                  Between here and Red Pike, Little Dodd is a mere hummock, but its modest summit reveals more of the unfolding panorama, Loweswater now peeking coyly between Melbreak and Hen Comb. The peerless grandstand, though, is Red Pike. I eschew the path and scramble an easy gully to get there. As I reach the parapet, there’s a woosh of air and a paraglider takes flight. I watch it soar westward then arc round over Crummock Water. What a perfect day to have a hawk’s eye view. I look over at the small band of walkers assembled on the summit—everyone is rapt, everyone is smiling, all is well with the world.

                  Paraglider takes off, Red Pike
                  Paraglider takes off, Red Pike
                  Paraglider
                  Paraglider
                  Paraglider and Ennerdale Water
                  Paraglider and Ennerdale Water
                  Paraglider heading for Crummock Water
                  Paraglider heading for Crummock Water

                  ~

                  But all was far from well in the world of Kevin Owlett when he stepped from his car by Crummock’s shore and dragged his wife’s body from the boot. He’d wrapped her in chains to which he’d tied a car cylinder head and an open plastic barrel. He waded out into Crummock Water, pulling her corpse behind him. When she began to float, he swam out further and submerged the barrel so it filled with water and dragged her under. He nearly joined her. His foot had become snagged in the electrical wire he’d used to secure the barrel. But he managed to struggle free. So it was just his wife’s body that members of a sub aqua club discovered in 1988.

                  Her name was Sheena. She is the forgotten Lady of the Lake. The names of Margaret Hogg (found in Wastwater in 1984) and Carol Ann Park (found in Coniston in 1997) are better known. In 1988/1989, the Piper Alpha oil rig disaster and the Hillsborough stadium tragedy conspired to keep Sheena’s story from the front pages.

                  The Wastwater case had been an uncanny precedent. When he was tried for murder, three years earlier, Peter Hogg claimed his wife had been having an affair which she made no effort to disguise. On the fateful night, she tired of merely taunting him and physically attacked him. In a fit of rage he grabbed her by the throat and squeezed too long. He hadn’t meant to kill her.

                  Kevin’s defence was remarkably similar: Sheena had mocked his sexual prowess, boasted of having an affair and accused him of sleeping with a work colleague. When the shouting stopped, she’d attacked him with a wine bottle.

                  I’m not convinced a modern jury would have shown leniency in either case, but in 1985, jurors at the Old Bailey found in Peter’s favour and acquitted him of murder. He served three years for manslaughter and an additional year for perjury.

                  It didn’t work for Kevin. Even in the 1980’s, the apparent degree of planning that had gone into Sheena’s disposal made it impossible to believe her death had not been premeditated.

                  What degree of pain and desperation drives someone to go that far? How screwed up do you have to be to kill someone you presumably loved once. It’s tragic when a relationship breaks down, but there should be life beyond a broken marriage for both parties. Sitting here now, I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if Kevin had simply come here first. Just wandered, breathed this in, taken time out to think.

                  Crummock Water
                  Crummock Water

                  Doctors are increasingly waking up to the mental health benefits of the great outdoors; some prescribe country walks ahead of anti-depressants. Modern living divorces us from natural rhythms. Cities never sleep; they are places of perpetual light, heat and noise, where everything is always available, no matter what the season. It’s artificial and it disconnects us from who we really are. It makes us forget something that we have always known; something deep in our DNA: that we are children of nature, and nature works in cycles. Pain is an inescapable part of living, but however intense, and however great the effort to overcome it, it passes. And when it does, it gives way to joy, just as night gives way to day, and winter gives way to spring. Death and rebirth. Samhain and Beltaine. Blackthorn and hawthorn.

                  When I arrive back at the shore of Ennerdale Water, the cuckoo is still calling. I’ve a good few cycles left, it seems.

                  Ennerdale Water
                  Ennerdale Water

                  For more on Wastwater and Margaret Hogg, see my blog, A Walk on the Wild Side

                  Further Reading:

                  The hawthorn & the blackthorn

                  Trees for Life: Mythology and folklore of the hawthorn

                  Druidry~Tree Lore: The Blackthorn

                  Druidry~Tree Lore: The Hawthorn

                  Cuckoos

                  Legendary Dartmoor: Cuckoos

                  BBC Guersey: A few cuckoo superstitions

                  Sheena Owlett/Lady of the Lake murder

                  Ladies of The Lakes, case three: Sheena Owlett


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                    Rhiannon

                    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.

                    Buzzard
                    Buzzard

                    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.

                    Dixon Heights from Bishops Tithe Allotment
                    Dixon Heights from Bishops Tithe Allotment

                    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.

                    Path to DIxon Heights, Low Newton
                    Path to DIxon Heights, Low Newton
                    Ridge line Bishops Tithe Allotment
                    Ridge line Bishops Tithe Allotment
                    Bracken, foxgloves, and rocky outcrop, Dixon Heights
                    Bracken, foxgloves, and rocky outcrop, Dixon Heights

                    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”.

                    Bishop's Tithe Allotment
                    Bishop’s Tithe Allotment

                    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.

                    Top of Bishop's Tithe Allotment
                    Bishop’s Tithe Allotment above Buck Crag

                    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.

                    Rocky Outcrop Dixon Heights
                    Rocky Outcrop Dixon Heights

                    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.

                    The Tower Dixon Heights
                    The Tower Dixon Heights

                    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”.

                    The Tower, Dixon Heights
                    The Tower, Dixon Heights

                    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.

                    The Tower, Dixon Heights
                    The Tower, Dixon Heights
                    The Tower, Dixon Heights
                    The Tower, Dixon Heights

                    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.

                    White horse, Dixon Heights
                    Rhiannon
                    White Mare and the Bay from the Tower
                    Dixon Heights (Newton Fell South)
                    Dixon Heights (Newton Fell South)

                    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.

                    Arch, Dixon Heights
                    Arch, Dixon Heights

                    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.

                    The Arch, DIxon Heights
                    The Arch, DIxon Heights

                    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.”

                    White horse, Dixon Heights

                    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/


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                      Before the flood

                      Raven Crag & the Flooding of Thirlmere

                      In 1879, the Manchester Corporation obtained royal permission to turn Thirlmere into a reservoir by building a dam that would flood the valley, drowning the hamlets of Wythburn and Armboth and submerging a shoreline rich in beauty and folklore. I climb Raven Crag and Launchy Gill in search of the ghosts of a lost world.

                      Frost has iced the earth, feathering treetops in elegant plumes of winter. Above a lake of shadows, Raven Crag stands proud, mirrored in waters blue as midnight, its chiselled face furred with conifer. Not that anyone left alive remembers, but it once stood taller:

                      “Farewell! the dear irrevocable shore!
                      Dark firs, and blue-bell copse, and shallowing bright!
                      Stern Raven Crag is cheated of its height”

                      Raven Crag
                      Raven Crag

                      The words are Canon Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley’s, lamenting a Victorian act of vandalism wrought on this ancient landscape by the construction of the stone dam beneath my feet. He was not alone in his anger: W. G. Collingwood, founder of the Ruskin museum and designer of the Great Gable war memorial, declared, “Thirlmere… once was the richest in story and scenery of all the lakes. The old charm of its shores has quite vanished, and the sites of its legends are hopelessly altered, so that the walk along either side is a mere sorrow to anyone who cared for it before; the sham castles are an outrage and the formality of the roads, beloved of cyclists, deforms the hillsides like a scar on a face”. Ruskin himself was less generous, saying of the dam builders, “as to these Manchester robbers … there is ‘no profit’ in the continuance of their lives”.

                      The “robbers” were the Waterworks Committee of the Manchester Corporation. In 1877, they published a report predicting that Manchester would outgrow its current water supply within seven years—this in spite of municipal policies that discouraged water closets and baths in working class homes. They proposed a scheme to turn Thirlmere into a reservoir that would supply Manchester with fifty million gallons of water per day by means of a ninety-six-mile-long aqueduct. It would be an innovative triumph of engineering, and it would provide the city (and its cotton mills) with some of the purest water to be found anywhere in England.

                      Raven Crag and Thirlmere from the dam
                      Raven Crag and Thirlmere from the dam

                      To obtain the powers necessary, a private bill was brought before Parliament. The corporation had anticipated the kind of objections that were raised by wealthy landowners (such as, “undesirable disturbance by constructing the aqueduct through gentlemen’s private pleasure grounds”). They had even whipped up local support—when petitioned the ratepayers of Keswick voted 90% in favour (they’d been promised the scheme would free the town from flooding forever). But Manchester had underestimated the weight of opposition from another quarter.

                      Social reformer, Octavia Hill, called for a committee to examine the matter, devise a plan of opposition, and raise funds to fight the scheme. Under a name more evocative of a paramilitary force than a village green preservation society, the Thirlmere Defence Association was born. It was a coalition of creatives, including eminent writers, artists and philosophers.

                      The debating of a private bill is designed to consider objections from those who will be financially disadvantaged by its proposal. Unable to demonstrate any such private interest, the TDA presented the landscape as a public asset and its despoliation as an affront to the nation. Their argument was sufficiently strong, and whipped up enough public support, to commute the private bill into a hybrid bill, which considered the public as well as private interests.

                      The Defence Association was particularly incensed by Alderman Grave’s assertion that the scheme would improve on nature. John Grave actually had closer ties with the area than many of his opponents, being the son of a Cockermouth saddler. He had moved to Manchester to found a highly successful paper manufacturing business and had become mayor three times. He was now chairman of the Waterworks Committee—converting Thirlmere into a reservoir had been his brainchild.

                      Lord of the Manor, Thomas Leonard Stanger Leathes of Dale Head Hall, on the eastern shore, was outraged; he banned anyone associated with the scheme from his land. As a result, Grave and Sir John James Haywood had to conduct a clandestine survey, on hands and knees in appalling weather to avoid forcible ejection. As a consequence, they both spent several days in bed with severe colds.

                      But Leathes died in 1877, and the Manchester Corporation bought his estate. Despite spirited opposition, Parliament found in favour of Grave’s committee, and in 1879, the Corporation was granted royal permission by Queen Victoria to begin work; the first stone of the dam was laid in 1890. It would eventually raise the level of the lake by 54ft and increase its expanse to 690 acres, submerging the cottages and farmsteads of Wythburn and Armboth, and transforming the valley forever.

                      Thirlmere from the dam
                      Thirlmere from the dam

                      The Thirlmere Defence Association had lost the battle but not the war. It inspired the formation of the National Trust and was iconic in the development of modern environmental protection—it was, essentially, the birth of the Green movement in Britain.

                      Grave died in 1891, three years before the water supply was switched on, but not before the Cumbrian landscape had exacted a degree of poetic justice. With the scheme underway, Grave retired to Portinscale where he built a grand residence, the Towers. In a headstrong rush of pride, Grave augmented his property with an ostentatious gothic coach house, sporting steeples and cloisters. Locals warned him that the ground between the lake and road was too moist to support such a thing. When he refused to listen, they termed the building, “Grave’s folly”; and such it turned out to be. In a scenario reminiscent of a Monty Python sketch, it “sunk into the swamp”.

                      I walk on past one of the faux castles that so enraged Collingwood. They were built by the Manchester Corporation to house the dam’s workings—Grave’s vision of enhancing the landscape, no doubt.

                      A faux castle
                      A faux castle

                      Some people felt that the greater affront was the Corporation’s aggressive afforestation policy, replacing the thin skirt of indigenous oaks that lined the lake with dense spruce and larch plantations. The aim was to filter run-off water from the fells and preserve the lake’s purity, but the dense cover obscured magnificent vistas and gave Thirlmere a look more in keeping with Canada than the heart of the English Lake District.

                      These days, the prospect is changing. Even before handing stewardship to the Water Board, the Manchester Corporation had adopted more sensitive policies, thinning the conifer and planting broad-leaf tree varieties. As I climb through the woods, a clearing reveals the bay-dun majesty of Helvellyn and the Dodds, and splashes of deciduous shrub lick sombre greens with flames of autumnal copper. Ahead the larches are not without their charms. Unique among conifers in shedding the needles, their stark winter forms adorn the mossy terraces and vertical white walls of Raven Crag. Their perpendicular trunks are slender pillars, and their bare branches, rib vaults to a succession of rock galleries, enhancing the stately grandeur of this immense natural cathedral.

                      The path to Raven Crag
                      The path to Raven Crag
                      Helvellyn from Raven Crag
                      Helvellyn from Raven Crag
                      Larches on Raven Crag
                      Larches on Raven Crag

                      The path tracks uphill beside the cliff to the old iron age fort of Castle Crag. From here, I climb to Raven Crag’s summit from behind by means of a wooden boardwalk. The top commands a peerless view down the entire length of the lake.  This is the spot where Wainwright sketched himself, “apparently contemplating the view (but more likely merely wondering if it’s time to be eating his sandwiches)”.

                      Thirlmere from Raven Crag summit
                      Thirlmere from Raven Crag summit

                      Edward Baines, writing in 1834, helps us imagine what all this looked like in the pre-Manchester days:

                      “Before us, and lying along the foot of the fells, which separate this valley from that of Watendlath, stretched the dark, narrow lake of Thirlmere, which bears also the names of Leathes Water and Wythburn Water. It is nearly three miles in length, but about the middle the shores approach each other so as almost to divide it into two distinct lakes, —a bridge being thrown over the strait. It is overhung and shaded by crags, some of which are stupendous, and all naked and gloomy. The most conspicuous is Raven-crag, near the foot of the lake, which forms a striking object for many miles,—resembling a gigantic round tower, blackened and shattered by the lapse of ages. Thirlmere has a higher elevation than any other lake, being 500 feet above the level of the sea: its greatest depth of water is eighteen fathoms. Its borders are not adorned, like those of the other lakes, by wood, with the exception of a few fir plantations, (which rather increase the gloominess of the scene), and of a bold wooded eminence, called the How, at the foot of the lake. This valley has no luxuriance, and its general character is wild magnificence.”

                      (It was Thirlmere’s elevation that proved so attractive to the Manchester Corporation. Few other English lakes could have fed the aqueduct by gravity alone.)

                      Harriet Martineau, in 1855, adds to the picture:

                      “Of the two lake-roads, the rude western one is unquestionably the finest. The woods, which were once so thick that the squirrel is said to have gone from Wythburn to Keswick without touching the ground, are cleared away now; and the only gloom in the scene is from the mass of Helvellyn. The stranger leaves the mail road within a mile of the Horse’s Head, passes the cottages called by the boastful name of the City of Wythburn, and a few farmhouses, and soon emerging from the fences, finds himself on a grassy level under the Armboth Fells, within an amphitheatre of rocks, with the lake before him, and Helvellyn beyond, overshadowing it. The rocks behind are feathered with wood, except where a bold crag here, and a cataract there, introduces a variety.”

                      This old road has been lost beneath the waters, along with its landmarks, rich in stories. Submerged is Clark’s Lowp, a huge boulder opposite Deergarth How Island, from which Clark, a henpecked dalesman made mortally miserable by the nagging of his wife, sought peace by launching himself into the water and drowning. His wife apparently remarked with indifference, “he had often threatened to do away with himself, but I never thought the fool would find the courage to do such a thing”.

                      Where Launchy Gill crossed the old road was the Steading Stone. Here, the manorial courts were held and the Pains and Penalties of Wythburn were exacted.  The penalties included fines for allowing more than your allotted number of sheep to graze the fell or letting cattle wander and foul the becks. (Years later, Wainwright was rumoured to have fouled the becks in protest at “the dark forests (that) conceal the dying traces of a lost civilisation, lost not so very long ago.”

                      Thirlmere from Launchy Gill
                      Thirlmere from Launchy Gill

                      Many of these legends are woven into Hall Caine’s novel, The Shadow of a Crime, published in 1885.  Caine grew up in Runcorn but his mother was Cumbrian, and while his story is a fiction, the book is steeped in local heritage. Set just after the English Civil War, it tells the story of Ralph Ray, an honest dalesman, who won respect fighting in the republican army.  Times are changing, however, and with Cromwell in the grave and Charles II on the throne, opinion is turning against former Roundheads. Ralph saved the life of a turncoat royalist soldier, James Wilson, and brought him home to Wythburn to work on his father’s farm; but his father suspects Wilson is a snake-in-the-grass. When Wilson is found dead, suspicion falls on an impoverished tailor, called Simeon Stagg.  There is insufficient evidence to convict Stagg and he walks free, but the community, convinced of his guilt and fearful of divine wrath should they knowingly shelter a murderer, drive him out, forcing him to live in a cave on the slopes above Fornside.

                      Ray and Wilson are Caine’s inventions but the story of Sim’s cave and the “hang-gallows tailor” are a genuine part of the valley’s folklore. He allegedly murdered a traveller on the eastern shore road near the Nag’s Head tavern that once stood opposite Wythburn Church. Sim is said to have eventually left the area when the hardships of cave-dwelling became too much. 

                      In Caine’s version, however, Sim is innocent.  He knows what really happened that night but refuses to tell as the truth would harm Ralph, his only friend. Not even Sim knows the whole story, however. That only emerges when another villager is stricken with The Plague and resolves to die with a clear conscience.

                      The Great Plague of 1665 was a genuine concern for the residents of Wythburn and Armboth (as it was for many other Cumbrian villages). At its height, movement around the District was restricted, but livings still had to be made. Up above Launchy Tarn, at a confluence of paths, is the Web Stone, a boulder where webs of wool would be covertly traded well away from the villages.  Coins were washed in vinegar and water to disinfect them before they were brought back down the fell.

                      When the Manchester Corporation felled the last of the old oaks that used to line Launchy Gill, Canon Rawnsley was moved to write, “Where are the thrushes and blackbirds to build now? Every branch had been a possible home but for the axe. I have many a time heard thrushes singing from these lower branches, and watched the squirrels playing upon them. I shall hear and see them no more”.  The canon would be heartened to know that Launchy Gill is again flanked by indigenous broad-leaf trees, one of the most conspicuous examples of the more recent rewilding policies.

                      Storm Desmond also conspired to help with the rewilding.  The Corporation had incurred the wrath of the conservationists by erecting a wooden walkway and footbridge around the gill to encourage tourists to view its spectacular waterfalls.  The storm destroyed the bridge and obstructed the path with a succession of uprooted trees.  When I visited, I was obliged to don microspikes to ford the beck and scramble the wall of greasy boulders on the other side.  For the motorist looking for an easy twenty minute peramble in pub shoes and leisurewear, it might prove an unnerving experience. As a precaution, United Utilities (the present stewards) have removed the signpost and steps by the road.  For the romantically-inclined fellwalker, however, it feels like a victory for nature, and a far-more satisfying adventure.

                      Launchy Gill
                      Launchy Gill

                      Above the A591, that now skirts the eastern shore of the lake, is Wythburn church. With the exception of Dale Head Hall and the farms at Stenkin and Steel End, it is the only surviving building. Today, it is a church without a congregation.  The communion rail is dedicated to the Reverend Winfried Des Vœux Hill, vicar of Wythburn at the time of the dam’s construction; the pastor who saw his flock dispersed. Outside, gravestones stand as monuments to Wainwright’s “lost civilisation”.

                      Wythburn Church
                      Wythburn Church
                      Wythburn Churchyard
                      Wythburn Churchyard

                      On the wall is an old photograph, taken from the churchyard, looking down over farmland to Armboth Hall.  Superstitious villagers must have drawn some comfort from the church’s pre-eminent position, as the Hall was once considered the most haunted house in Lakeland.  Harriet Martineau reported:

                      “Lights are seen there at night, people say, and the bells ring; and just as the bells set off ringing, a large dog is seen swimming across the lake. The plates and dishes clatter; and the table is spread by unseen hands. That is the preparation for the ghostly wedding feast of a murdered bride, who comes up from her watery bed in the lake to keep her terrible nuptials. There is really something remarkable, and like witchery, about the house.”

                      According to W. T. Palmer, the hall played host to an annual supernatural jamboree for all the spooks in Lakeland, including the skulls of Calgarth:

                      “For once a year, on All Hallowe’en, it is said, the ghosts of the Lake Country, the fugitive spirits whose bodies were destroyed in unavenged crime, come here… Bodies without heads, the skulls of Calgarth with no bodies, a phantom arm which possesses no other member, and many a weird shape beside.”

                      But the spirits are all gone now, along with the homes of the dalesfolk who feared them.  Drowned beneath the waters of progress. It’s a fate that farmers whose lands fall across the proposed HS2 route may find painfully familiar.

                      In the wider context, what the engineers achieved was phenomenal. The Cumbrian water supply has long been a cause for celebration in Manchester, and it benefits local towns too. The Corporation proved a good employer, allowing workers to live on in their cottages after retiring, and protecting the surviving farmland from property developers.

                      Thirlmere is still astoundingly beautiful. But standing here in this lonely churchyard, with a head full of old stories, looking out over the rippled expanse of water, I can’t help but wonder whether its soul has been submerged.

                      The drowned village of Armboth
                      The drowned village of Armboth
                      Armboth
                      Armboth
                      Rainbow over Thirlmere from Armboth
                      Rainbow over Thirlmere from Armboth

                      Sources/Further Reading

                      Baines , Edward. 1834: A companion to the Lakes of Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Lancashire. London: Simpkin and Marshall

                      Martineau, Harriet. 1855: A Complete Guide to the English Lakes. Windermere: John Garnett.

                      Palmer, W. T. 1908. The English Lakes. London: Adam and Charles Black.

                      Carruthers, F. J. 1975. The Lore of the Lake Country. London: Robert Hale & Company

                      Caine, Hall. 1885. The Shadow of a Crime. New York:  W. L. Allison Company

                      Findler, Gerald. 1984. Lakeland Ghosts. Clapham: Dalesman Books

                      Pipe, Beth and Steve. 2015. Historic Cumbria. Off the Beaten Track. Stroud: Amberley.

                      Darrall, Geoffrey. 2006. Wythburn Church and the Valley of Thirlmere. Keswick: Piper Publications (available from Wythburn Church)

                      Wikipedia is also good on the history of the reservoir:

                      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirlmere


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                        An Unkindness of Ravens

                        How Castle Rock of Triermain got its name

                        A striking outcrop of Watson Dodd, Castle Rock of Triermain is named for a local superstition and a legend of King Arthur, popularised by Sir Walter Scott. It was a favourite of rock climbers until a recent event that bore an uncanny resemblance to the story. On a crisp and frosty morning, I go in search of Merlin in the Vale of St John.

                        A sheer wall of white rock, marbled with indigo and mauve shadow, rises over stark winter branches. Spindly rowan saplings extend white twigs like spectral fingers, and burgundy berries hang in clusters over copper bracken. I climb over littered boulders to the foot of a crag that looms like the ruin of a colossal fortress. The earth is crisp with frost and the air hangs still but for the staccato croak of ravens. These giants of the crow family have kept guard, since time immemorial, over this natural castle in the Vale of Saint John.

                        Castle Rock of Triermain
                        Castle Rock of Triermain

                        The Vikings believed ravens to be the eyes and ears of Odin; the Greeks considered them associates of Apollo, god of prophecy, and ill omens in the mortal world; native Americans thought them tricksters. Collective nouns for ravens include: an unkindness, a treachery, and a conspiracy.

                        Deceptive spirits are associated with this crag. In 1773, William Hutchinson published perhaps the first real Lakeland guidebook, An Excursion to the Lakes in Westmoreland and Cumberland. In its pages he gives rein to a local superstition, and in doing so, helps cement a change of name for this towering outcrop of Watson Dodd, once known as Green Crag. Hutchinson writes:

                        “In the widest part of the dale you are struck with the appearance of an ancient ruined castle, which seems to stand upon the summit of a little mount, the mountains around forming an amphitheatre. This massive bulwark shows a front of various towers, and makes an awful rude and Gothic appearance, with its lofty turrets and ragged battlements; we traced the galleries, the bending arches, the buttresses. The greatest antiquity stands characterised in its architecture; the inhabitants near it assert it is an antediluvian structure.

                        “The traveller’s curiosity is roused, and he prepares to make a nearer approach, when that curiosity is put on the rack, by his being assured, that, if he advances, certain genii who govern the place by virtue of their supernatural art and necromancy, will strip it of all its beauties, and by enchantment, transform the magic walls. The vale seems adapted for the habitation of such beings; its gloomy recesses and retirements look like the haunts of evil spirits. There was no delusion in the report; we were soon convinced of its truth; for this piece of antiquity, so venerable and noble it its aspect, as we drew near changed its figure, and proved no other than a shaken massive pile of rocks, which stand in the midst of this little vale, disunited from the adjoining mountains, and have so much the real form and resemblance of a castle, that they bear the name of the Castle Rocks of St. John.”

                        Overhead, the guttural squawk of the ravens assumes a mocking tone.

                        In Susanna Clarke’s novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, the Raven King is the custodian of English magic and the builder of the King’s Roads, the realm behind the mirrors that affords access to other worlds. Clarke’s figure is a fiction, but a Raven King does exist in Celtic mythology. He was Brân the Blessed, a Welsh giant, and high king of Britain. Brân’s sister, Branwen, was due to marry the Irish king, Matholwch, however, resentful that his permission had not been sought, their brother, Efnysien, mutilated Matholwch’s horses. Matholwch was incensed, but Brân placated him with the gift of a magic cauldron which could bring the dead back to life.

                        Back in Ireland, Matholwch began to brood afresh on Efnysien’s affront, and banished Branwen to the kitchen where she was beaten daily. In retaliation, her brothers waged a vicious war which only seven of the Welsh and none of the Irish survived; the Irish were initially indomitable as they could use the cauldron to resurrect their fallen, but Efnysien dived in and destroyed it from within, sacrificing himself in the process . Mortally wounded in the foot, the Raven King instructed his seven survivors to cut off his head and carry it with them. The head continued to talk. Eventually, it instructed them to carry him to England, to White Hill, where the Tower of London now stands, and to bury him facing France so that he could forever ward off invasion.  To this day, six ravens are kept at the Tower. Should they leave, superstition says, the kingdom of Britain will fall.

                        A Celtic king whose spirit is eternally entwined with the fate of the realm has an Arthurian overtone. Indeed, in one Cornish version of the Arthurian legend, the dying King Arthur transforms into a raven. King Arthur has a direct association with the Castle Rocks of St John, courtesy of Sir Walter Scott’s epic poem of 1813, Bridal of Triermain. The poem was in part, inspired by Hutchinson’s account, and it is set right here in St. John’s in the Vale, where Gategill fell, that steep pyramidal buttress to Blencathra, dominates the northern skyline, and the Helvellyn massif is a high eastern rampart.

                        Gategill Fell, Blencathra from Legburthwaite in St John’s in the Vale

                        Scott’s poem intertwines three stories. The first is that of the narrator, a lowly musician attempting to win the hand of his high-born sweetheart, Lucy. Afraid that Lucy’s head may be turned by a rival with greater wealth or breeding, he recounts the tale of Roland De Vaux, the twelfth century Baron of Triermain, as a cautionary tale against maidenly pride. In the story, the Baron has a vision of a maiden so fair, he swears he will wed none other than she. He dispatches his faithful page to Ullswater to seek the advice of the Lyulph, a sage whose ancestry stretches back to King Arthur’s time (and who gave his name to the lake: originally, Ulph’s Water).  The Lyulph recognises the girl from the page’s description:

                        “That maid is born of middle earth
                        And may of man be won,
                        Though there have glided since her birth,
                        Five hundred years and one.
                        But where’s the Knight in all the north,
                        That dare the adventure follow forth,
                        So perilous to knightly worth,
                        In the valley of St. John?”

                        He goes on to recount “a mystic tale… handed down from Merlin’s age”. In the Lyulph’s tale, King Arthur rides out from Carlisle and reaches Blencathra (which curiously, Scott calls Glaramara).  Arthur passes Scales Tarn and descends beside the fledgling Glenderamackin river until he reaches the Vale of St. John, where he spies a formidable castle. Arriving at the gate, the castle appears deserted: it is silent, no banners flutter, and no guards patrol the battlements. Arthur sounds his bugle, and immediately, the portcullis is raised, and the drawbridge lowered. The king rides in to find a castle inhabited entirely by fair young maidens and their beautiful queen, Guendolen, in whose seductive company, he wiles away the next three months.

                        Guendolen has an ulterior motive for seducing the unsuspecting king:

                        “Her mother was of human birth,
                        Her sire a Genie of the earth,
                        In days of old deemed to preside,
                        O’er lovers’ wiles and beauty’s pride,
                        By youths and virgins worshipp’d long,
                        With festive dance and choral song,
                        Till, when the cross to Britain came,
                        On heathen alters died the flame,
                        Now deep in Wastdale solitude,
                        The downfall of his rights he rued,
                        And, born of his resentment heir,
                        He train’d to guile that lady fair,
                        To sink in slothful sin and shame
                        The champions of the Christian name.”

                        While Guendolen’s charms hold sway over Arthur, his kingdom languishes, ravaged by Saxons and Vikings alike. Eventually the king remembers himself and resolves to return to Camelot, but mindful of a lover’s responsibility, he first swears an oath to Guendolen: if, as a result of their union, she should bear him a son, the boy shall be heir to Arthur’s kingdom.  Should she bear him a daughter, Arthur will hold a tournament, where the best of his knights will battle for the girl’s hand in marriage.

                        With the king mounted on his charger, Guendolen offers a parting drink: “not the juice the sluggish vines of earth produce”, but “the draught which Genii love”.  She quaffs from a goblet and hands it to Arthur, but as he raises the cup toward his mouth, a drop falls on his horse’s neck and burns it so badly, it leaps twenty feet in the air:

                        “The peasant still can show the dint 
                        Where his hoofs lighted on the flint”

                        Dropping the goblet, Arthur returns to Carlisle, resumes command of his knights, and defeats the Saxons in a series of twelve bloody battles.  Fifteen years pass, then during an extravagant feast at Camelot, a fair young maiden appears on a white charger. At first, Arthur thinks it is Guendolen, but quickly realises he is wrong. This is Gyneth, his illegitimate daughter by Guendolen, come to claim her birthright.

                        Arthur is true to his word and organises a tournament, offering Gyneth’s hand together with a handsome dowry of Strathclyde, Reged and Carlisle to the victor.  However, fearing the cost to his army should his knights battle to the death, he instructs Gyneth to stop the combat before any blood is shed. But Gyneth is her mother’s daughter, and she refuses. 

                        As one by one, Arthur’s knights begin to fall, and their hearts’ blood stains Gyneth’s sandals red, Merlin appears from a cleft in the ground and orders a halt the proceedings, condemning Gyneth for her pride and sentencing her to unbroken sleep in the Castle of St. John…

                        “until a knight shall wake thee,
                        For feats of arms as far reknown’d
                        As a warrior of the Table Round”

                        To make the quest more difficult, a spell will hide the castle from mortal eyes.

                        ~

                        The musician’s tale has the desired effect, and Lucy marries her humble lover, but following their wedding, she presses him to tell her what becomes of Gyneth and whether Sir Roland De Vaux goes in search of her…

                        …Of course he does. Sir Roland spends many long days and nights in the Vale of St. John, searching in vain for the castle.  Then one night, he is awakened from his wild camp by a strange sound echoing around the fells. A meteor passes over, and by its ethereal light, he glimpses the castle, but such is the enchantment, that by the time he reaches its walls, they once again resume the form of a shattered crag. In frustration, Sir Roland raises his battle axe…

                        “And at the rocks his weapon threw,
                        Just where one crag’s projected crest,
                        Hung proudly balanced o’er the rest.
                        Hurl’d with main force, the weapon’s shock
                        Rent a huge fragment of the rock”

                        In response to the blow, the rocks come tumbling down, and when the dust has settled, a fractured and mossy staircase is revealed that leads Sir Roland up to the castle’s entrance.  He swims the moat, and enters the castle where, in successive chambers, he runs a gauntlet of ferocious tigers, declines the offer of untold riches, resists the charms of wanton maidens who declare themselves slaves to love, and declines offers of power and influence. Having thus conquered fear, pleasure, wealth and pride, he proves his worth and dissolves the spell that holds Gyneth in perpetual sleep. On awakening, King Arthur’s daughter happily agrees to wed her rescuer, and they leave the castle to lead a long and happy life together.

                        However, in their absence, the enchantment on the castle resumes:

                        “Know too, that when a pilgrim strays,
                        In morning mist or evening maze,
                        Along the mountain lone,
                        The fairy fortress often mocks
                        His gaze upon the castled rocks
                        Of the valley of St. John;
                        But never man since brave De Vaux
                        The charmed portal won.
                        ‘Tis now a vain illusive show,
                        That melts whene’r the sunbeams glow,
                        Or the fresh breeze hath blown.”

                        ~

                        Today, Harvey maps name Castle Rock, the Castle Rock of Triermain, in reference to the poem. Its north face offers popular rock climbs with names like Zigzag and Overhanging Bastion. But in 2012, a large crack was discovered in the buttress; a block the size of bungalow threatened to splinter from the main cliff, and climbers were cautioned to keep away.

                        On 18th November 2018, in an uncanny echo of the poem, the block finally detached and came crashing down, disfiguring the cliff face and littering its foot with shattered rocks. I climbed over its remnants to get here, and now, I stand gazing at the jagged spot from which it cleaved. A steep irregular gully climbs behind it, carpeted with green moss and fractured rock. It ends in a vertical wall. Yet, however hard I stare, it refuses to resolve into an ancient staircase and a castle gate.

                        A loud croak comes from a raven perched on the crag; its beady eye fixes me in cool appraisal. A raven’s stare is quizzical; it’s easy to see why our ancestors thought these birds prophetic, or spies for the gods. It could be a genie bent on trickery. Its demeanour is haughty, and the raucous cackle of its call sounds like mockery. Is it laughing at me for something it knows, and I don’t? That I am staring blindly at a faery castle? I see only ruptured rock—the will of Merlin perhaps, or an unkindness of ravens.

                        Further Reading

                        Bridal of Triermain by Sir Walter Scott.

                        You can probably find a digital transcription, but it’s much more fun to pick up an old edition, like this one, on line or in an antiquarian book shop. They can be had for just a few quid.

                        Rockfall at Castle Rock of Triermain

                        In this article, mountain leader, Graham Uney, laments the toppling of the North Crag and reminisces about climbing Zigzag and Overhanging Bastion…

                        https://www.grahamuneymountaineering.co.uk/rock-fall-at-castle-rock-of-triermain


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                          Pedestrian Verse

                          St. Sunday Crag, Fairfield, Seat Sandal & Grisedale Tarn

                          Inspired by the words of National Trust founder, Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, I trek over St. Sunday Crag, Fairfield and Seat Sandal to Grisedale Tarn, where a prized Celtic crown lies deep in the water, a spectral army stands guard, and a lonely rock bears a poignant inscription from William Wordsworth to his shipwrecked brother, John.

                          “A sparrowhawk swung out from the crags, and the swifts screamed at us while we watched him. St. Sunday Crag itself cannot be viewed to finer advantage than from here, and the little Cofa Pike, like a watchtower guarding the portcullis, was a remarkable feature in the near foreground.

                          One was sorely tempted to climb Cofa and drop down upon the narrow neck that divides Fairfield from St. Sunday Crag—for St. Sunday Crag is said to be one of the few mountain heights that can boast remarkable flowers and plant growth—but we contented ourselves with the marvellous beauty of the colouring of the red bastions of Helvellyn as they circled round to Catchedecam, with the ebon-blue water patch of Grisedale Tarn in the hollow. With memories of Faber’s love of that upland lake, and of Wordsworth’s last farewell to his sailor brother on the fell beside the tarn, we turned our faces from the battle-ground of the winds to Great Rigg, but not before we had wondered at the piling up of the gleaming cloud masses above the long range of High Street to the west, and the sparkling of the jewel of Angle Tarn between Hartsop Dod and the Kidsty Pike.”

                          Grisedale Tarn and Seat Sandal from Fairfield

                          Thus wrote Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley of a walk upon Fairfield—“the battle-ground of the winds”—in 1911. Rawnsley was a vicar, a social reformer and a conservationist to whom us Lakes lovers owe a significant debt. Influenced by William Wordsworth and John Ruskin, Rawnsley believed that education and immersion in nature were key to improving the lot of the impoverished. His work began in the slums of Bristol where he arranged classes and country walks for the residents of Clifton, one of the city’s poorest areas. In 1878, he moved to Cumbria to become vicar of Wray. Five years later, he moved to the parish of Crosthwaite on the outskirts of Keswick.  Here, he and his wife, Edith, founded the Keswick School of Industrial Arts as an initiative aimed at tackling the widespread unemployment that dogged the town during the winter months.

                          The school began in 1884 as free evening classes in the parish rooms offering professional instruction in wood carving and decorative metalwork. The proceeds from sales of the work were used to fund tuition and materials, and the school rapidly gained a reputation for quality. By 1890, it was winning prizes in national exhibitions, and by its tenth year, it had outgrown the parish rooms and was obliged to move into purpose-built premises, where it continued for ninety years, finally closing in 1984.

                          Understandably, Rawnsley’s belief in the benefits of the natural landscape burgeoned with his move to Lakeland, and he became an ardent conservationist, battling against the proliferation of both slate-mining and the public transport network. He campaigned to keep footpaths and rights of way open and quickly realised the biggest threat to the landscape and its traditions came from private property developers. In 1895, together with Octavia Hill and Robert Hunter, he founded the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty.  The Trust aimed (as it still does) to acquire and hold land to protect it from development.  Thanks to the efforts of Rawnsley, Hill and Hunter (and the bequest of Rawnsley’s protégé, Beatrix Potter), the establishment of the Lake District National Park was made possible.

                          On this occasion, Rawnsley had climbed Fairfield from Grasmere via Stone Arthur and would return down the ridge from Great Rigg to Nab Scar—half of the horseshoe that remains the most popular way to ascend the mountain. But for my money, the finest way up is the one he gazes over: St. Sunday Crag and Cofa Pike.

                          St. Sunday Crag
                          St. Sunday Crag

                          Inspired by Rawnsley’s words I ready myself for the route. I see a sparrowhawk before I even leave the house. It’s perched on an old wooden chair in the garden, beneath the bird feeder, wondering why the gang of sparrows that perennially besiege the spot have all mysteriously disappeared. By the time I reach Patterdale, the sun is out, marking a welcome change in what has so far been an underwhelming August.

                          Sparrowhawk
                          Sparrowhawk

                           I’m heading for Birks but intend to forego the summit in favour of the path that crosses its north-western shoulder and provides spectacular views over Grisedale to Striding Edge, Nethermost Pike and Dollywagon Pike. I was there in February when the Helvellyn massif was a dark volcanic rampart, frosted with snow and illuminated in a spectral light that would have had you believe you had somehow traded Wainwright for Tolkien’s Pictorial Guides to Middle Earth. I’m keen to see how it has transformed in high summer. 

                          Striding Edge from Birks
                          Striding Edge from Birks
                          Striding Edge & Dollywagon Cove
                          Striding Edge & Dollywagon Cove

                          It’s a tough old pull up Birks, but the backward prospect of Ullswater stretched out below, a cool blue languid pool, gives ample excuse to stop. Over a rickety stile, I gain the clear path that traverses the shoulder. The summit is up on my left, but to my right, the slopes fall steeply away to Grisedale, and across the valley are the flanks of Helvellyn, with Striding Edge a crowning wall, ahead.

                          Ullswater from Birks
                          Ullswater from Birks

                          Some argue these fells assume their true mountain character in winter, shorn of green vegetation, their physiques chiselled, their craggy profiles sharpened and highlighted with snow. But only a churl would deny the splendour of their summer majesty; their lower slopes mottled as they are now, olive, gold and forest green; higher daubs of purple heather are stippled with exposed stone, tinged coral pink by the ever shifting splashes of sun that dance across their sides. A slim stream of silver tinkles down from the dark cliffs of Nethermost Pike to meet a broad river of light cascading over Dollywagon to illuminate its lower crags. If you don’t believe in magic, you have simply never stood here in February and then again in August.

                          Nethermost Pike
                          Dollywagon Pike
                          Dollywagon Pike
                          Nethermost Pike
                          Nethermost Pike
                          Helvellyn from St Sunday Crag
                          Helvellyn from St Sunday Crag

                          The gentle shoulder affords a temporary respite from the steepness of the incline, but beyond the col with St. Sunday Crag, the strenuous effort resumes. The stiff climb finally relents, but the remaining ground to the summit presents a fresh challenge—the wind is gusting hard. Rawnsley’s “battle-ground of the winds” has extended along the ridge. Even if I had his botanical insight, today might not be the time to study the “remarkable flowers and plant growth”. Simply staying upright is taxing, but it’s edifying, and just beyond St. Sunday Crag’s summit is a sight to further lift the spirit.

                          In the distance, the mighty trinity of Fairfield, Seat Sandal and Dollywagon Pike form a circle as if to guard something of value in their midst. That something is Grisedale Tarn. From here, it looks like a dewdrop in the hollow, or perhaps a tear shed for the last king of Cumbria—a deep well of myth and religious impulse.

                          Grisedale Tarn between Fairfield, Seat Sandal and Dollywagon Pike
                          Grisedale Tarn between Fairfield, Seat Sandal and Dollywagon Pike

                          Rawnsley talks of “Faber’s love of that upland lake”. Frederick William Faber was a theologian and hymn writer, and a friend of William Wordsworth, who would take long vacations in the Lake District to soothe the spiritual and intellectual stress of wrestling with divergent forms of the Christian faith. In 1840, he published a poem, Grisedale Tarn, in which he imagined that if he were “a man upon whose life an awful, untold sin did weigh,” then here is where he would build a hermitage.

                          Grisedale Tarn
                          Grisedale Tarn

                          John Pagen White’s poem, King Dunmail, tells a darker story that links the Tarn with the large pile of stones at Dunmail Raise. According to the legend, Dunmail was the last king of Cumbria, a kingdom that then stretched as far north as Glasgow. This Celtic stronghold had long resisted subjugation by the Saxons and the Scots but was finally overthrown when they joined forces. Dunmail was supposedly slain at Dunmail Raise and his men are said to have built the large cairn to mark his grave. As White puts it:

                          Mantled and mailed repose his bones
                          Twelve cubits deep beneath the stones
                          But many a fathom deeper down
                          In Grisedale Mere lies Dunmail’s crown.

                          Dunmail’s crown held magical powers and his dying wish was that it should be kept from Saxon hands. A small cohort of his men took the crown and fought their way to Grisedale Tarn where they cast it in. To this day, they keep a spectral guard, and every year their apparitions carry another stone from the tarn to Dunmail Raise.

                          And when the Raise has reached its sum
                          Again will brave King Dunmail come;
                          And all his Warriors marching down
                          The dell, bear back his golden crown.

                          Grisedale Tarn
                          Grisedale Tarn

                          It’s a long descent to Deepdale Hause, and from the trough, the sight of Cofa Pike towering above is formidable. In actual fact, the path cuts a canny zigzag up through the crags and three points of contact aren’t required quite as often as you’d imagine. On a good day, it’s an exhilarating airy scramble, but as I start up its slopes, the heavens open and the wind whips the rain into a stinging scourge.

                          Cofa Pike from St Sunday Crag
                          Cofa Pike from St Sunday Crag

                          In the notes to his poem, White suggests the idea of Dunmail, and King Arthur, as once and future kings may have been a legacy of the Vikings. In old Norse belief, Odin would enact a winter trance in which he rode across the sky, accompanied by wolves, ravens and an army of the dead, in pursuit of a wild boar or, in some versions, a whirlwind. Shortly after dispatching his quarry, the god himself would die, only to be born again when next he was needed. In the eye of a mountain storm, it’s a dramatic notion and one that haunts as I tread lightly over the slender summit of Cofa and climb into the mist atop the Battleground of the Winds.

                          Cofa Pike from Fairfield
                          Cofa Pike from Fairfield
                          Cofa Pike from Fairfield

                          Thankfully, the rain is easing by the time I negotiate the steep eroded path down to Grisedale Tarn. As I lose height, I come into the lee of Seat Sandal and the wind abates. After Birks, St. Sunday Crag and Cofa Pike, another stiff ascent will be taxing, but Seat Sandal shows no mercy. As I scramble up its rock steps, I’m passed by two fell runners. I catch up with them at the top. Above, the clouds are rolling back, and down towards Grasmere, summer is re-revealing itself.

                          “They’ve got sunshine down there”, one says.

                          “And beer”, replies the other.

                          And with that, they take off down the southern ridge.

                          Down the valley towards Grasmere

                          I sit awhile in the shelter of the summit wall, then retrace my steps down to the water’s edge, now dark and inscrutable as the legend it harbours. Beyond the far shore, I follow the stepping-stones across the tarn outlet to join the Patterdale path.  In the shadow of Dollywagon’s Tarn Crag, I keep my eyes peeled for a brass sign affixed to the top of a hefty boulder.

                          Wordsworth Brothers Parting Stone
                          Wordsworth Brothers Parting Stone

                          Here did we stop; and here looked round
                          While each into himself descends,
                          For that last thought of parting Friends
                          That is not to be found.


                          Brother and Friend, if verse of mine
                          Have power to make thy virtues known,
                          Here let a monumental Stone
                          Stand–sacred as a Shrine;

                          The words are William Wordsworth’s, inscribed on a slab set into a rock that stands about 200 metres from the path. The stone is now so weather-beaten, the words are hard to read, but they combine two halves of different stanzas from Wordsworth’s Elegiac Verses, written, “In Memory of My Brother, John Wordsworth, Commander of the E. I. Company’s Ship, The Earl Of Abergavenny, in which He Perished by Calamitous Shipwreck, Feb. 6th, 1805”

                          This is the spot where the brothers bade farewell, neither knowing it would be for the last time.

                          The brass sign says, “The Brothers Parting, Wordsworth”. It was a later addition, intended, I suppose, to highlight the stone’s whereabouts to those passing along the path. I confess to having walked by unawares before, but after reading Raymond Greenhow’s blog, I’ve come looking for it. Raymond’s article provides rich historical detail and tells the little-known story of how the brass sign went missing just before the outbreak of WWI. It was retrieved, some years later, from Grisedale Tarn, where, like Dunmail’s crown, it had apparently been flung.

                          Wordsworth Brothers Parting Stone
                          Wordsworth Brothers Parting Stone

                          Inspired by Wordsworth’s elegy, Raymond asks an interesting question: “What would you say if you knew it was the last you would ever see of your kin”? This gets right to the heart of why this simple inscription retains such power to move. Wordsworth elevates his account of his brother’s loss above the personal and speaks to us all about our own uncomfortable farewells to those we love. It captures the awkward reticence, the sense of something left unsaid, that intangible emotion we perpetually fail to put into words. There will, we assume, be time enough for that anon. But what if that opportunity is denied us as it was for William?

                          Robbed of the opportunity to ever see his brother again, the Lake Poet wishes for a monumental stone to stand on this spot as a shrine to John. That wish was granted some thirty years after the William’s death by the Wordsworth society and Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley… And here it stands, a monument to fraternal love, near the site of Faber’s imagined hermitage and the watery refuge of a lost Celtic crown, it’s inscription now as spectral as Dunmail’s army.

                          When in late September 1800, John, William and their sister, Dorothy, said their last goodbyes, William and Dorothy returned to Grasmere, but I turn now in the opposite direction and follow in John’s footsteps—down through Grisedale to Patterdale.

                          Grisedale Tarn and Dollywagon Pike
                          Grisedale Tarn and Dollywagon Pike from Seat Sandal

                          Further Reading

                          Raymond Greenhow’s blog on the Brother’s Parting Stone is well worth a read:

                          https://scafellhike.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-wordsworth-brothers-parting-stone.html

                          … as is the Grisedale Family blog, which has an interesting quote from Dorothy Wordsworth about her brother, John, and features the full Elegiac Verses at the end:

                          https://grisdalefamily.wordpress.com/tag/brothers-parting-stone/

                          You can find Frederick William Faber’s poem, Grisedale Tarn, here:

                          https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/grisedale-tarn

                          … but you’ll have to look for John Pagen White’s Lays and Legends of the English Lake Country (1923), which contains his King Dunmail, in printed form, or search harder than I on t’Internet.


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                            UNDERWORLD

                            Glenridding Dodd, Sheffield Pike, Greenside Mine & Operation Orpheus

                            What connects an Ancient Greek legend about a lovelorn musician and his snake-bitten sweetheart, an American scientist with an explosive theory, an international initiative to stem the nuclear arms race, and an old lead mine in the hills above Ullswater? I trek over Glenridding Dodd and Sheffield Pike to find out.

                            In Greek mythology, Orpheus was a musician so accomplished that his playing could charm all living things. When his lover, Eurydice, fell into a viper’s nest and died of snake bites, Orpheus descended into the underworld where his song induced the god, Hades, to release Eurydice back into the land of the living. Her freedom came with a condition, however: Orpheus was to walk in front and not to look around until they were both out in the upper world. But Orpheus turned too soon, and Eurydice was lost to the underworld forever.

                            Sheffield Pike/Glenridding Screes
                            Sheffield Pike/Glenridding Screes

                            Orpheus was to return to the underworld in 1960, in Cumbria, and sadly, the objective of his endeavours would again fail to make it out alive. This time, the underworld was Greenside Mine near Glenridding, Orpheus was Operation Orpheus, and the object of his endeavour was not Eurydice, but the ratification of a nuclear weapons test ban treaty between the West and the Soviet Union.

                            The years following the end of WWII saw the West and the Eastern Bloc embroiled in the Cold War; a period of mounting political tension and mutual distrust that led both sides to amass nuclear arsenals in the hope that Mutually Assured Destruction would deter attack. By the 1950’s, the cost of this arms race had become unsustainable, and both sides were looking for some form of non-proliferation agreement. In 1958, negotiations began towards a test ban treaty. 

                            Unfortunately, an American scientist, named Albert Latter, lobbed a large spanner into the works. Latter theorised that if a subterranean explosion was suspended in an empty chamber roughly the size of the hole that would have been created by the blast had it been detonated in tightly packed rock, then the explosion would register as many times smaller than it actually was on seismographs located above ground. If Latter was right, either side might be able to cheat a ban by testing underground.

                            Greenside Mine below Raise
                            Greenside Mine below Raise

                            Proving or disproving Latter’s theory became a matter of international urgency, and joint Anglo-American research projects were launched. The British initiative, code-named, Operation Orpheus, was the work of scientists from the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE). Underground explosions were tested in Cornwall, but the second phase of the investigation required a larger chamber, and AWRE turned its attention to Greenside Mine.

                            Greenside Mine sign
                            Greenside Mine sign

                            Stybarrow Dodd is a prominent peak on the Helvellyn massif. Its western slopes fall to Thirlmere, and it is closely bounded by Raise to the south and by Watson Dodd and Great Dodd to the north-west and north-east, but to the south-east it extends a long shoulder over Greenside and Sheffield Pike to Glenridding Dodd above Ullswater. Greenside Mine nestles in the col where Greenside, Raise and Sheffield Pike meet. Between 1825 and 1962, it was one of England’s most successful lead mines, extracting large amounts of the metal along with smaller quantities of silver. It spearheaded the use of hydroelectric power, harnessing the natural resources of Swart Beck and Glenridding Beck, the latter fed by Helvellyn’s Red Tarn and Kepple Cove Tarn, both of which were dammed to provide greater capacity. Its main tunnel ran deep below Greenside’s eastern ridge, but by the end of the 1950’s, its lead seams were exhausted, and the mine was in the process of closing down. Operation Orpheus was to be its swan song.

                            Greenside Mine
                            Greenside Mine

                            Once AWRE had reassured anxious Glenridding residents that no fissile material would be involved in the experiment, months were spent putting everything in place. The tests would comprise two explosions: the first, a large detonation “decoupled” from the rock by its suspension in a large empty chamber; the second, a smaller explosion “coupled” to the rock by packing the explosives into a narrow cross shaft. The decoupled detonation would require 3000 lb of explosive, arranged in 7 layers of 36 boxes, each weighing 12 lb. The coupled explosion would be approximately 3 times smaller. If Latter’s theory was correct, the recording equipment would register each as roughly the same size. Six recording stations were set up, the nearest half a mile from the mine, the furthest, 47 miles away in Malham, Yorkshire.

                            Swart Beck
                            Swart Beck

                            On Saturday 19th December 1959, the button was pressed and the decoupled explosive detonated. Significantly, a recording station in Sedbergh failed to register any seismic activity at all, suggesting decoupling might be even more effective than Latter had anticipated. Below the surface, however, the blast was so powerful it destroyed some of the electrical equipment that had been set up to trigger the second detonation with the result that it had to be postponed until after Christmas. 

                            Greenside Mine buildings
                            Greenside Mine buildings

                            Tragically, preparations for the second test claimed two lives. The first explosion released large quantities of carbon monoxide and smaller amounts of cyanide. Blowers were installed to disperse the gas, and a mix of high-tech detection equipment, and old school methods (mice and canaries) were used to identify its lingering presence. Despite all the precautions, two mine workers, William Sinkinson and Alex Santamara, wandered into a stope that was still contaminated. When shift boss, John Pattinson Brown, realised they were missing, he went in search of the men with the help of Arnold Lewis and Fred Dawes. Dawes climbed the ladder to the stope where he saw Santamara’s body slumped. While Brown went for help, Dawes and Lewis entered the stope, holding their breath for protection, and managed to pull Santamara to the edge by the ladder, but could get him no further. When Brown returned with a rescue team and a doctor, Dawes and Lewis had passed out too. Luckily, they recovered, but the help had come too late for Santamara and Sinkinson.

                            With the second detonation, hopes of ratifying the treaty died too. Albert Latter’s theory had been proven right. Both sides temporarily resumed nuclear weapons tests, but they returned to the table in 1963 when a partial test ban was agreed. This treaty excluded underground testing, which, as Operation Orpheus had helped demonstrate, could too easily be disguised.

                            Glenridding Beck
                            Glenridding Beck

                            ~

                            Beyond Troutbeck, mist fills the roadside hollows, and the tops are hidden, but as the car crests the brow of the Kirkstone Pass and begins the winding descent to Patterdale, the cloud-line is a little higher. As I drive through the village, the eastern shoulder of Birks stands proud, and as I approach Glenridding, Glenridding Dodd has a narrow band of clear sky above.

                            In the carpark, a woman who looks exactly like the Queen is examining the pebbles that line the top of the drystone wall. I can’t tell if she’s pinching some to augment the rockery at Balmoral, or whether she’s donating specimens from the royal collection—a spot of benefactory community service perhaps, before zipping off to Carlisle for the races.

                            On Greenside Road, I get talking to a lad who’s heading for Helvellyn; he’s a little concerned at the lack wind and the prospect of spending all day with his head in the clouds. When I say I’m heading for Glenridding Dodd and Sheffield Pike, he tells me he did those a couple weeks ago. We look up at the craggy drama of the Pike, perched above the sheer screes that line the old mine road.

                            “There is a path,” he assures me. “Not that you’d guess it from here.”

                            Heron Pike
                            Heron Pike

                            We part company when I leave the road to climb behind the old miners’ cottages and join the rake that runs up to the col between Glenridding Dodd and Sheffield Pike. It’s unrelentingly steep, especially in the lower reaches, and my calves complain all the way up to the wall that runs across the saddle.

                            In Wainwright’s time, Glenridding Dodd had fallen from public favour. “Fashions change”, he writes. “When people climbed hills only for the sake of the views, the heathery summit of Glenridding Dodd must have been more frequented than it is today, for once-popular paths of ascent are now overgrown and neglected.”

                            While still a lesser-trodden fell, the legacy of AW’s Pictorial Guide has ensured a steady stream of Wainwright baggers so the path is now easier to pick out. He’s not wrong about the views. The summit grants a grand vista north-eastward over the lake.

                            Ullswater changes her mood to match the seasons: on long summer days she’s joyful and uplifting; in autumn, brooding and mysterious; today, she’s sullen and reflective, as if pondering the folly of humans who spend lifetimes perfecting weaponry powerful enough to destroy themselves and the planet with them.

                            Glenridding Dodd and Ullswater from Heron Pike
                            Glenridding Dodd and Ullswater from Heron Pike

                            Footsteps break my thoughts, and a man from Egremont joins me at the cairn. As we chat, he says he’s heard of another cairn, further down on the south-eastern side, that commands magnificent views over Glenridding and the southern end of the lake. I follow him down through the heather to a small stone beacon, perched above a plunging drop. The aspect is brooding and dramatic. Across the water, Place Fell hides in mist and the water below is the steely grey of armour plate.

                            This gentleman is heading for Sheffield Pike too. On the way back down to the col, he tells me how he lost the path on Grange Fell, the other day, and had to make a tricky, improvised descent to get down before dark. When we reach the col, he opts not to join me on the crags of Heron Pike—apparently last time he tried it, he lost the path here too.

                            I’m not so easily deterred, the ridge that leads to the subsidiary summit of Heron Pike promises to be the best bit, and I’m up for a bit of semi-scrambling, if needed. His words strike a note of caution, all the same. In the event, the trod is narrow but well-defined. It picks such a canny line between the steep craggy outcrops that (despite appearances) three points of contact are never required. I start to wonder if losing paths is a regular affliction for my new acquaintance, but then I note the ubiquitous heather, now winter-brown and died-back; in late summer, I’ll warrant the way is easily lost under foliage.

                            Heron Pike from Glenridding Dodd
                            Heron Pike from Glenridding Dodd

                            The top of Heron Pike yields yet more arresting vistas over Ullswater. Filtered through the cloud, the light is subdued but ethereal. To the south, the spectral outline of Catstye Cam is slowly emerging from veils of mist. It’s a scene far more evocative of Greek mysteries than the harsh realities of the Cold War. Perhaps because the deeper truths of mythology are timeless, whereas the Cold War tensions should long ago have been confined to the history books.

                            Ullswater from Heron Pike
                            Ullswater from Heron Pike
                            Catsye Cam from Sheffield Pike
                            Catsye Cam from Sheffield Pike

                            But of course they haven’t. I was born six years after Operation Orpheus, and I grew up in Salisbury, the quaint market town that has now become a symbol of renewed distrust between Russia and the West. The Bishop’s Mill—the pub where the Skripals stopped for a drink before collapsing on a nearby bench—was a favourite haunt in my late teens. It was the venue for many a near alcohol poisoning, but it’s galling to imagine it as the backdrop to an assassination attempt. It’s such a shame. I visited St Petersburg with work a few years ago.  It’s a beautiful city, and I was made very welcome.  I was there to meet doctors, pharmacists and biomedical scientists: men and women dedicated to saving lives, not taking them.

                            The ground changes beyond the top of Heron Pike, the rock and heather give way to a soggy depression before climbing again to the stony outcrop that forms the summit of Sheffield Pike.  Wainwright loses interest at this point and gets positively hostile about Greenside mine below: “westwards the fell is drab and, in the environs of a vast lead mine, hideously scarred and downright ugly. Its rich mineral deposits have, paradoxically, caused its ruin: it has been robbed not only of its lead but of its appeal and attractiveness to walkers.”

                            Greenside over Sheffield Pike
                            Greenside over Sheffield Pike
                            Sheffield Pike summit cairn
                            Sheffield Pike summit cairn

                            My friend from Egremont has arrived already. He’s planning to follow the path around the prettier northern slopes back to Glencoyne, avoiding the mine. But industrial heritage holds its own fascination for me, especially as nearly sixty years of disuse has allowed nature to soften lines. The old mine buildings are now hostels and camping barns. For all its spoil heaps and scars, the hill is slowly healing itself.  In a million years, there’ll be no trace of its wounds.  There may no longer be any trace of humans either, but the hills will still be here. Such a timescale seems an eternity to us, but in mountain years, it’s a matter of weeks, and that’s only if these fells are middle-aged.  For all we know, they might be in the first flush of youth, or barely out of the cradle.

                            Greenside from Sheffield Pike
                            Greenside from Sheffield Pike

                            The cloud is slowly lifting.  The tops of Raise and Stybarrow Dodd are still concealed, but Greenside’s summit (known as White Stones) has emerged; shafts of sunlight break through to illuminate its grassy eastern ridge. If Wainwright thought these slopes drab, he must never have seen them emerge from shadow like this.  I’m seized by the urge to stride on up Greenside and on to the Helvellyn massif, but I don’t have time.  I have family coming around later, and I’ve promised them roast chicken, Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes—the whole nine yards. I glance at my watch, but in my mind’s eye, I see hungry expectant faces turning to indignation and disappointment as they discover their chef was last seen ascending into the clouds with a head full of Greek tragedy and Cold War drama.

                            Footbridge over Swart Beck
                            Footbridge over Swart Beck

                            So instead, I descend to the track between the spoil heaps—the road to the underworld. The sun intensifies, and above, Greenside is a golden green ramp leading through the mists to a finer realm—a world where you can leave behind Wainwright’s “hideous scarring” and the perennial power struggles of human politics and gain fresh perspectives, learn nobler truths—just so long as you take heed of Orpheus and don’t look back too soon.

                            Greenside
                            Greenside

                            Further Reading

                            Murphy, Samuel. 2015: Grey Gold: Men, Mining and Metallurgy at the Greenside Lead Mine in Cumbria, England, 1825 to 1962.
                            Moiety Publishing, 1996. Extract available at:
                            http://www.subbrit.org.uk/rsg/features/operation_orpheus/index.html

                            Havis, Michael. (2017) ‘REVEALED: Britain’s lost nuclear test tunnels that survived a REAL blast’, The Daily Star, 10 March. Available at:
                            https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/595495/excelsior-tunnel-operation-orpheus-nuclear-uk-cold-war-ussr-usa-russia-cornwall/amp


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                              Riddle of the sands

                              Humphrey Head

                              How does something too small become a fell? When it’s a place of extinctions and exotic new colonists? When the curative powers of its holy waters have been celebrated alike by Roman lead miners and modern celebrities? When it has one foot on land and the other in the sea? When its charms outweigh its diminutive height to the degree that Wainwright felt duty bound to honour it as one? When it’s the outstretched finger of the Cartmel Peninsula, jutting out into the perilous mudflats of Morecambe Bay? Tim and I cross a salt marsh to explore the beguiling mysteries of Humphrey Head—historic home of England’s last wolf.

                              Twenty years ago, I joined the RSPB in a remote hide in the middle of Riggindale. It was an easy sell. I’d just seen a golden eagle perched on the crags of Riggindale Edge (the slender spine that Wainwright calls the “connoisseur’s route” up High Street). His mate (the eagle’s, not Wainwright’s) circled above Kidsty Pike. When I looked up from the telescope, the steward proffered a pen and the membership form, and I signed without hesitation.

                              The eagles were the only nesting pair in England. Sadly, the female died a few years later. The male hung on until late in 2015, but has not been spotted since, and the RSPB has now taken down the hide. Fortunately, some of the Society’s flagship work has had happier outcomes. The organisation started life with a campaign to protect another bird, the little egret. During the 19th century, egret feathers, alongside bird of paradise feathers, had become the must-have costume accessory among the Absolutely Fabulous, Vogue-reading fashionistas of the day. Indeed, the feathers became so sought-after that they were worth more than their weight in gold (literally). The social standing of contemporary Edinas and Patsys rose in inverse proportion to life-expectancy of the young chicks, and in 1889, Emily Williamson formed the Society for the Protection of Birds (later the Royal Society…) to campaign against this barbaric trade.

                              Today, the RSPB website describes the little egret as “a small white heron with attractive white plumes on crest, back and chest, black legs and bill and yellow feet”. Back when I joined, a little egret sighting would have been almost as rare as a golden eagle sighting. The birds first appeared on these shores in significant numbers in 1989 and didn’t breed here until seven years later. Over the intervening years, numbers have grown to the point where they are now quite at home in our coastal areas. Indeed, one has just taken off from the salt marsh in front of us: a flurry of white beating wings and an elegant, aerodynamic profile, rocketing skyward. Tim and I watch in wonder. Such an encounter may no longer count as uncommon, but it’s still a thrill to behold.

                              We’re on our way to Humphrey Head, one of Wainwright’s Outlying Fells, despite his emphatic assertion that, “not by any exercise of the imagination can Humphrey Head be classed as an outlying fell of Lakeland. Outlying it certainly is: a limestone promontory thrusting from the Kent Estuary coast and almost surrounded by mudflats at low tide but awash at high. A fell it is certainly not, being a meagre 172 feet above the sea and, away from it’s dangerous cliffs, so gentle in gradient and surface texture that the ascent is a barefoot stroll.”

                              Humphrey Head
                              Humphrey Head

                              Just as you’re scratching your head and wondering whether Wainwright has taken a bump to his, he explains that nevertheless, “it’s isolation, far-ranging views and seascapes, bird life (of national repute), rocky reefs and interesting approach combine to make the place unique in the district, giving better reason for its inclusion in this book than its omission.”

                              That recent colonists like the little egret have made a new home here feels like poetic justice when you consider that Humphrey Head is traditionally associated with a final act of extinction: it’s the spot where the last wolf in England was slain.

                              In her book, Tales of Old Lancashire, Elizabeth Ashworth tells a romanticised version of the story…

                              So determined was Sir Edgar Harrington to rid the Cartmel area of this ferocious beast, he offered his niece’s hand in marriage to the man who could slay the wolf. His niece, Adela, held a candle for Sir Edgar’s son, John, and the feelings were reciprocated, but Sir Edgar disapproved of the match. Besides, John was abroad fighting a foreign foe, and had been gone so long, that even Adela had given him up for dead.

                              Despite her lack of egret feathers, Adela’s beauty was such that many young men vied for her attentions, and wolf hunt was organised to determine who should wed her.

                              Her most ardent admirer was a local knight called Laybourne, but on the eve of the event, a mysterious stranger appeared on the Cartmel peninsula, riding a fine Arab stallion. The next day, the hunt raged long and hard, and one by one the competitors dropped out except for Laybourne and the stranger, who rode neck and neck. Eventually, they chased the wolf to Humphrey Head, where Laybourne’s horse pulled up at a vast chasm and refused to jump. The stranger’s horse was braver but failed to clear the distance and plunged to its death. The stranger, himself, managed to cling to the crag’s edge and pull himself to safety on Humphrey Head summit. Here, he confronted the wolf on foot and dispatched it with his sword.

                              When the stranger claimed Adela as his bride, he revealed himself to be none other than Sir Edgar’s missing son, John, and the couple enjoyed a long and happy marriage.

                              John Harrington is buried in Cartmel Priory. The church’s weather vane is a wolf, but as Ashworth astutely observes, the grave names his wife as Joan, not Adela.

                              For me, there is another troubling inconsistency in the story. I will admit to being adept in the art of the “man look”. I frequently spend long minutes looking for what is right under my nose, before giving it up as irretrievably lost. However, I’ve been to Humphrey Head before, and if the way to the summit lay over a gaping chasm, too wide for an Arab stallion, I’m sure even I would have noticed. Besides, how did the wolf get across?

                              The slightly more prosaic version of the story says the wolf was killed by angry villagers, armed with pikes, after the animal attacked a child in the woods.

                              As Wainwright recommends, we set off from Kent’s Bank Station. Wooden boards permit pedestrians to cross the tracks, and a little white gate leads out on to a concrete parapet that runs parallel to the line. Wainwright’s descriptions of the shenanigans needed to shin the wall and avoid the eye of the station master are no longer required, it seems. The parapet tracks the line for about a third of a mile and stops before the rocky outcrop of Kirkhead End. Here the path drops on to the mudflats and weaves between the rocks. And it’s here we pause to watch the egret.

                              Kent's Bank Station
                              Kent’s Bank Station

                              The Bay fascinates me. Locals call it the watery desert, and it’s an apt description. At low tide, the sands run as far as the eye can see in a beguiling pattern of spiral shapes, carved by wind and water, glittering with the mesmeric shimmer of orphaned puddles and pools. A place of barren beauty and hidden hazards: quicksands proliferate and the tide returns so fast it can outrun a horse.

                              Humphrey Head Point is the outstretched index finger of the Cartmel Peninsula, and on this side, we look across the Kent Estuary to Arnside Knott. Together with its neighbours, Hampsfell and Whitbarrow Scar, Humphrey Head would once have been part of one long limestone reef, forged over millions of years when this whole area lay below a shallow sea. These vestigial outcrops may lack the lofty drama of Lakeland’s mountains, but they have character aplenty.

                              Arnside Knott
                              Arnside Knott

                              We follow the path through the verdant grass of the salt marsh, leaping streams and scouting for stepping stones in the soggiest sections. By Wyke House farm we turn a corner and join a section of the Cumbrian Coastal Way heading for the foot of Humphrey Head’s gentler wooded eastern side. Just before the Outdoor Centre, we turn right through a kissing gate and fight our way up a narrow footpath, overrun with brambles and nettles, their extravagant growth nurtured by the same warm spring sunshine that has cruelly encouraged us to wear shorts.

                              Humphrey Head summit
                              Humphrey Head summit

                              We join a country lane that leads to the beach, then turn up towards the Outdoor Centre. From here, a path climbs gently beside a fence above the cliffs to the headland’s summit. Stunted hawthorn trees line the route, their trunks bent from years of relentless subservience to the wind. Behind us, over gentle rolling pastures, rise the Coniston Fells, the ominous vanguard of the high ground beyond. Before us is the Bay, a vast wilderness of slowly ebbing tidal waters and exposed silvery sands. Humphrey Head’s abrupt western cliff is a ha-ha, the grassy summit plateau looks to run seamlessly into the sea with no hint of the hidden drop; and a gate appears to open on to the waves.

                              Humphrey Head summit
                              Humphrey Head summit
                              Humphrey Head summit
                              Humphrey Head summit

                              Across the bay, the Lancashire coastline is interrupted by a large unnatural rectangle. The Heysham nuclear power plant dwarfs its surroundings. To the west, over the Leven estuary an army of thin white wind turbines occupies the sea beyond the Furness peninsula. One goal, two very different game-plans, separated by about ten miles of sea and a vast ocean of ideology.

                              Humphrey Head Point
                              Humphrey Head Point

                              With the tide running out, we were hoping to make a circular walk—returning via the beach—but a channel of water still laps the foot of the cliff. We descend to the rocks of Humphrey Head point. The water here still looks deep—we can’t see the bottom—and there’s no telling how firm the sand below might be. We take off our shoes and resign ourselves to sitting on the rocks and dipping our feet in the sea before heading back over the headland. A black Labrador is bolder and dives in. When I look over at him, I do a double take. He’s not swimming, he’s standing. The water’s barely up to his waist. I tentatively dip a foot in. It finds the bottom, so I slip off the rock and into the water. It comes halfway up my calf, and the sand is firm.

                              Humphrey Head cliff face
                              Humphrey Head cliff face

                              Laughing at our hesitancy, we paddle back beneath the cliff face toward the beach. As the water clears, it reveals the channel to be something of a marine nursery. Tiny crabs scurry beneath the surface, and a baby fluke, no longer than the tip of my finger, attacks a rag worm nearly twice its size.

                              Tim crab spotting
                              Tim crab spotting
                              Dead crab
                              Dead crab

                              Mustard coloured algae cover the rocks, and shrubs and wild flowers shoot from crevices in the crags. As we reach dry sand, a man is telling his grandchildren about the cave in the rock behind them, and how you can clamber all the way through. The boy and girl’s faces light up and they tug at their father’s sleeve. They disappear into an opening in the cliff where mineral strata form eye-catching stripes. Excited shouts and laughter echo from within, and in a matter of minutes, they emerge a hundred yards up the beach.

                              Fairy Chapel entrance
                              Fairy Chapel entrance

                              The big kid in me wants to play too, so I climb over boulders to the cave entrance. It’s a narrow passage known as The Fairy Chapel. Daylight permeates in from the other end, but the width tapers before I reach it, and I’m slightly concerned this might turn out to be a case of Fat Man’s Agony. Would Mountain Rescue come out if I end up wedged firm between the walls? Or would they quote Wainwright at me, “we’re MOUNTAIN RESCUE and ‘not by any exercise of the imagination can Humphrey Head be classed as an outlying fell’”? Fortunately, I prove more svelte than I feared and emerge into the open, where the young lad is demanding of his dad, “AGAIN”.

                              The Fairy Chapel
                              The Fairy Chapel

                              Somewhere here is the site of a holy well. The waters were said to possess healing powers, and lead miners from as far back as Roman times would walk here to drink in the hope that the liquid would flush the toxins from their bodies. In 2003, Phil Lynott (a local landowner, not the late Thin Lizzy frontman) launched Willow, a brand of mineral water bottled from a spring in his nearby field.

                              Humphrey Head
                              Humphrey Head

                              His curiosity was roused when he moved two sick ponies into the paddock and found that each made a remarkable recovery. When Lynott realised that the ponies were drinking from the spring, he had the water analysed and found it contained traces of salicin, a natural anti-inflammatory. Salicin is formed from willow bark and is the natural origin of aspirin. Willow trees were once prevalent, and their remains now form a layer in the earth, through which the water is filtered. Lynott was convinced the water helped him recovery from cancer, and celebrity chef, Clarissa Dickson-Wright, claimed, live on television, that it had cured a benign cyst on her breast and a gungey toe. The company got into trouble with the consumer safety authorities when they went a step further and launched an advertising campaign claiming their product could cure a range of skin complaints such as eczema and psoriasis.

                              In its heyday, the holy well lay behind a door in the rock. All that remains now is a rusty pipe, but I can’t find it (“man look”, probably).

                              As the kids lead their dad back to the entrance to the Fairy Chapel, an inscription on a slab of rock catches my eye. It says, “Beware how you on these rocks ascend. Here William Pedder met his end. August 22nd, 1857. Aged 10 years”. It’s a sobering note, like a soulful minor cadence in a feel-good hit of the summer.

                              We head back past the Outdoor Centre and retrace our steps to Kent’s Bank. From the salt marsh, I cast a goodbye glance at Humphrey Head: a place of endings and beginnings, miracle cures and tragic demises, historic extinctions and exotic new colonists, prettiness and peril; and every bit deserving of the honorary fell status, Wainwright accords it.

                              Further reading:

                              The little egret:

                              https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/wildlife-guides/bird-a-z/little-egret/#f6IlRMpFi3iUhtw5.99

                              The last wolf

                              The holy well:

                              Willow Water

                              http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/working_lunch/rob_on_the_road/2720253.stm

                              https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/miracle-cure-spring-water-to-face-food-safety-investigation-46791.html


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