Tag Archives: Coniston Fells

Fell Walk, General, Literature, Natural History

Here’s where the story ends

December 26, 2018 George Kitching 12 Comments

Paw Prints of the Plague Dogs part II

News bulletins, artillery fire and the shadow of Sellafield conspire to recreate the atmosphere of Richard Adams’ 1977 bestseller, Plague Dogs, as I continue to follow Rowf and Snitter’s footsteps through the fells. It’s an adventure that takes me off the beaten track in the Duddon Valley, and out to the coast at Drigg, where the story reaches its dramatic finale.

Seathwaite Tarn, Dow Crag, Caw & Brown Haw

It’s as if Seathwaite mine has been swallowed by the mountain. The entrance to level no. 1 is buried under a bed of spoil. You could easily miss it, your attention seduced by the precipitous face of Dow Crag reflected in the still waters of Seathwaite Tarn, or the sheer slopes of Brim Fell, Swirl How, and Great Carrs plunging to enclose the valley like a steep sided bowl. Even when looking its way, your gaze would likely lift above to the imposing crags of Grey Friar.

But the keen-eyed might notice the remains of two small walls extending from the rubble like the outstretched arms of an avalanche victim. These ruins demarcate the cutting. I climb up and pull away a few loose stones from the top to reveal the hollow behind—the dark of a tunnel entrance. You’d need a JCB to excavate it, but readers of Richard Adams’ The Plague Dogs have a clue to its whereabouts. It sits behind a small plateau of grass, “about the size of a lawn tennis court” on top of a spoil heap; this terrace, at least, is just as Adams described.

The Plague Dogs is the story of Rowf, a big black mongrel, and Snitter, a small fox terrier, who escape a vivisection lab, fictionally located on the east shore of Coniston Water. The dogs have been subjected to harsh experiments. Before his incarceration, Snitter remembers a happy life, tragically cut-short when his loving master was hit by a lorry. When he and Rowf escape, he imagines the outside world will be a familiar place of houses, gardens, dustbins and lampposts, populated by kindly men and women, who will give them a happy home, like the one he used to know. Their initial encounters are discouraging, however, and the pair flee into the Coniston fells, a frighteningly alien wilderness, where they realise that they must learn to live as wild animals. This old copper-mine tunnel is where Rowf and Snitter first take refuge.

In a previous post, Whitecoats, I trace the first leg of their journey, using the maps and illustrations contributed to the book by Alfred Wainwright. Today, I pick up their path again.

Earlier, I met the farmer from Tongue House Farm. He was driving a flock of Herdwicks on to the fellside. I was walking up the narrow lane from Seathwaite village when the sheep charged out of the farm drive. My presence stopped them in their tracks, and in a flash, his sheepdog was beside me, blocking their path and sending them the other way.

“That was lucky,” said the farmer, as he arrived at the rear, “there’s not usually someone there to turn them. It’s always the same. If there are two options, they always go the way you don’t want them to.”

As he took off up the lane on his quad bike, I gazed across at the farm house. It features in the story, and the occupant in the book is a real-life former tenant, Dennis Williamson. After years of struggling to make a go of things, Williamson is now just about comfortable, so it’s with some alarm that he finds one of his ewes lying dead on the path at Levers Hause. This was Rowf’s first kill, but it was a rookie error to leave the carcass where Williamson so easily finds it.

Fortunately for the dogs, they’re not the only occupants of the tunnel. In the dead of night, an elusive presence tries to steal the sheep’s leg that Snitter dragged here. Rowf jumps up aggressively. Snitter is close behind, but when the shadowy creature starts to talk, the dogs are astonished, “for the voice… was speaking, unmistakably, a sort—a very odd sort—of dog language.”

The animal is the tod, a shrewd, sharp-witted fox. He speaks in a broad rural Northumbrian dialect, and scorns at the dogs’ naivety, “By three morns, the pair on yez’ll bowth be deed”. All the same, he’s impressed with Rowf’s ability to kill ewes, so he offers to school them in survival, if they share their kills with him. On top of Dow Crag, the tod teaches the dogs to kill a sheep by driving it over the precipice (this way, its death looks like an accident). He shows them how to raid chicken runs and snatch ducks from the stream. But when Rowf kills a ewe on Tarn Head Moss, five hundred yards from the tunnel entrance, the tod is incensed: “Forst ye kill on th’ fell—reet o’ th’ shepherd’s trod, clartin’ th’ place up wi’ blood like a knacker’s midden. An’ noo ye kill ootside wor aan nyeuk! Thon farmer’s nyen se blind! He’ll be on it, sharp as a linty. Ye’re fee th’ Dark, nee doot, hinny. Yer arse’ll be inside out b’ th’ morn.” (Translation: now you’ve killed outside our own lair. That farmer’s not blind. You’re as good as dead.)

Despondent, Rowf considers giving himself up, but the tod knows better, “Yer nay a derg noo, yer a sheep-killer. The’ll blaa yer arse oot, hinny. Howway let’s be off, or ye’ll bowth be deed an’ dyeun inside haaf an hoor, ne bother.”

The tod leads the way up above the reservoir, below the summits of Dow Crag and Buck Pike, and down to the Walna Scar quarries. From there, they climb over Caw to a cave on the slopes of Brown Haw.

Two paths lead that way from here: one follows Far Gill up to Goat Hawse, over the summit of Dow Crag and along the ridge line. The other tracks the southern shore of Seathwaite Tarn. The animals’ route is somewhere in between. Looking up, I see only crags, sheer and unassailable, but the OS map shows that the incline eases above them, and a strip of gentler terrain runs below the spine. There are no paths here, but if I follow the course of Near Gill to its source above crags, then walk on a bearing to Bleaberry Gill, the stream will take me down to a wall that leads to the quarries. At one point, Adams says the dogs are nine hundred feet above the reservoir road; I count the contours; this looks about right.

Seathwaite Tarn from copper mine — Tarn Head Moss

The path across the squelching bog of Tarn Head Moss is no more than a line of flattened reeds. I leap the beck and cross the sketchy trod that leads up to Goat Hawse. I ford Far Gill and start my pathless ascent beside Near Gill. It climbs steeply beside the crags. Where they finish, the slope relents and the stream curves round into the wetter ground above. Green sphagnum moss carpets the spongy peat. I check the compass and track below the ridge.

The moorland is moist, but firmer than the valley bottom. Hassocks of straw-coloured grass anchor the hummocks of soft moss. Elsewhere are red stalks of bog cotton, its white candyfloss flowers long gone. Harter Fell rises across the valley—a mossy pyramid, upper reaches defended by charcoal crags. Its lower slopes are swathed in russet, striped with yellow and coppiced with evergreen. Underfoot, clumps of rare red sphagnum now compliment the green.

I cross a brow and start to descend. The distant wall is in sight below, with the Walna Scar quarries beyond. Ahead, there is a break in the long rampart of hillside where the slopes of White Pike drop steeply away. The high ground rises again to the summits of Pikes and Caw, but through the gap, I can see silver inlets of the Irish Sea. The sky above is a rolling ocean of cloud – raging white breakers and darker swells.

I stray northward to overlook the reservoir road. From here, the tod spots Dennis Williamson, walking purposefully toward the mine, shotgun in hand.

When I reach the Walna Scar quarries, I have a dearth of daylight hours left to me so turn down to Seathwaite. I return at first light, when the grey fluffy clouds above the fell have orange underbellies. Across the valley, the Scafells are flood lit red. Harter Fell wears incandescent robes of gold and green, and in silhouette against the flaming sky, the slate ruins of quarry buildings are dark satanic mills.

A Herdwick ewe eyes me with suspicion. She carries a red smit mark on her back. The tod understands that smit marks are shepherds’ marks. He points out to Rowf and Snitter how the colours used here are different from those on the ewes near the copper mine. If Rowf were to kill here, it wouldn’t further antagonise Williamson.

Under White Pike, the path traverses the soggy sump of Yaud Mire, and I leave it to scramble between the crags to the summit of Pikes. Caw lies across another boggy depression; a trig point stands on a slender rocky plinth to crown its highest point.

The descent to Long Mire Beck is steep and slippery. Ahead, on the slopes of Brown Haw, I spy the cave that becomes the dogs’ new hideout. Once I reach it, however, I realise it’s an illusion; what I took for an entrance is just shadow cast by the low winter sunlight. I hunt further along, but the cave eludes me. I meet a walker, striding with the easy confidence of someone who knows his way. I ask if he knows of a cave, but the only one he can think of is a quarry tunnel on the north-western face of Caw. He’s curious at my question, so I ask if he’s read The Plague Dogs.

“Rowf and Snitter?” he grins, his face suddenly animated with memories of childhood.

I show him a photo of the Wainwright map that gives the cave’s location. We agree it’s pretty much where we’re standing.

I never do find it, but I climb to the tops of Brown Haw and Fox Haw (which seems appropriate), then return to Seathwaite on a track that the dogs will come to know.

When further sheep are found dead, and word gets out that two dogs have escaped from the Lawson Park laboratory, Dennis Williamson kicks up a fuss. Mr Ephraim, a gentleman’s outfitter, organises a hunt, hoping the publicity might boost trade. Unfortunately, he doesn’t know one end of a shotgun from the other, and his inexperience results in a tragic, fatal accident. Snitter is seen running from the scene. When the story reaches the offices of the London Orator, a notorious tabloid, it’s the opportunity they’ve been looking for. Their owner is keen to discredit the government. There has been some controversy about the public funding for Lawson Park. If the Orator can discredit the lab, they can embarrass the Secretary of State. An unscrupulous but brilliant young reporter, named Digby Driver, is dispatched to Cumbria with a remit to dig dirt on the lab and spin the story of the killer dogs into a national scandal.

As the heat rises in Dunnerdale, the tod leads the dogs over Crinkle Crags and Bowfell, through Langstrath to Wythburn and up on to the Helvellyn range. From here, Sticks Pass offers access to the farmsteads of Glenridding.

Rowf and Snitter are caught raiding a chicken coup. The farmer has a shotgun, but inexplicably, he backs away in fear and encourages the dogs to escape. Unbeknown to them, Digby Driver has published some shocking revelations. As part of top-secret research for the MOD, Lawson Park has been cultivating a strain of bubonic plague. There is no way the dogs could have been infected, but fact never got in the way of a good headline and now, in the public mind, Rowf and Snitter have become the Plague Dogs—public enemy number one; pawns in a political game.

Driver has the Secretary of State in check, and just as intended, awkward questions are asked in the House. To save his skin, the minister employs an age-old politician’s trick—misdirection. If he can be seen to act decisively, perhaps the concerns about funding and who knew what about the plague research will all go away.

Two battalions of paratroopers are dispatched to Cumbria, and the minister means to preside, in person, over the Plague Dogs execution.

Back in Dunnerdale, Snitter watches helplessly as the tod is torn apart by hounds. With the army closing in, he and Rowf make one last brilliant move. By night, they flee over Harter Fell and down into Boot, where they hide out in a wooden crate; exhausted, they fall asleep. When they awake, they’re moving. Unknowingly, they’ve stowed aboard L’ile Ratty, the steam train that runs between Eskdale and Ravenglass. Rowf and Snitter are heading for the coast.

If he knew, Dennis Williamson would undoubtedly be delighted. He bitterly regrets raising the alarm. The dogs were no trouble at all compared with the human circus that has followed. He knows the plague hysteria is nonsense and wholeheartedly hopes the dogs escape. It’s a faint hope, however. They’re spotted in Ravenglass, and the army units are mobilised.

Ravenglass and Drigg

It’s out of season when I cross the footbridge in Ravenglass station. L’ile Ratty isn’t running, but an open carriage, like Rowf and Snitter’s, is parked in the siding below.

All the way here, the car radio was reporting on the furore unfolding in Westminster. Theresa May has just presented her Brexit plan to parliament, and her ministers are queuing up to resign. Pundits are particularly bemused by the departure of Dominic Raab, who helped negotiate it. As the papers spin the story to favour whichever faction best suits their agenda, it dawns on me that this has all the hallmarks of Adams’ novel. Plague Dogs is how he saw the British political landscape in 1977; forty-one years later, it seems little has changed. Vox pops with members of the public reveal attitudes not dissimilar to Dennis Williamson’s—whatever it was we wanted, it wasn’t this.

The rivers Irt, Mite and Esk commingle in the Ravenglass estuary. The tide is out, leaving moored yachts beached and the river channels exposed. This is just how it is when Rowf and Snitter arrive. They escape the village by running across the mudflats and swimming the River Irt to reach the Drigg sand dunes. My route there is a little more circuitous. I follow a country lane from Low Saltcoats to Hall Carlton and cross by the packhorse bridge at Holme Bridge. From here, a path runs over fields to the sleepy coastal village of Drigg. Beside the quaint rural station, a road leads down to the beach.

Before I reach the shore, I pass something altogether more menacing. High security fences topped with rolls of barbed wire protect the Drigg low level nuclear storage facility. A sign warns that armed guards patrol at unpredictable times. Another says that the site is protected under section 12b of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005. This is all very evocative of eighties’ TV drama, Edge of Darkness, about a low-level nuclear storage facility that’s illegally processing weapons-grade plutonium. Swap a nuclear facility for a laboratory researching germ warfare, and we have a scenario not a million miles away from The Plague Dogs.

Behind the Drigg facility is Sellafield, the nuclear reprocessing plant that really was designed to extract plutonium from spent fuel rods. It’s visible through a gap in the sand dunes. Someone has positioned a bench such that you can sit and look at it. This may seem bizarre, but it’s perhaps indicative of the regard in which Sellafield is held around here. It’s rejuvenated the area, providing large numbers of people with well-paid jobs. To others, though, it is a Sword of Damocles, hanging over our heads by the finest of threads.

Drigg Low Level Nuclear Waste Repository

By the time I reach the beach, the nuclear facilities are hidden by the dunes. What’s here instead is a breathtakingly beautiful stretch of coastline, a nature reserve and a site of special scientific interest, a haven for natterjack toads, stonechats, sandpipers, skylarks and all manner of marine life. The tide has turned but a wide stretch of sand is still exposed, riven with delicate channels and intricate rock pools, studded with shells—cockle, razor clam—and patterned with the honeycomb stencilling of lug worm colonies.

I walk the one and half miles to Drigg Point, lost in the lazy, wild wonder of the beach. But as I reach the headland, my reverie is broken by an explosion. Across the estuary, a red flag is flying. The artillery are conducting large calibre gun testing on the Eskmeals range. I look back to Ravenglass and the route Rowf and Snitter took to get here. For them too, armed troops are closing in.

The sun slips behind a bank of cloud, and the sky darkens. Out to sea, slender shafts of golden light pierce the gloom and spotlight the white crests of waves. The horizon is a band of ethereal yellow. All of a sudden, the scene assumes a drama befitting of the book’s dark heart.

And that dark heart is human. It asks us hard questions about ourselves and our relationship with the natural world. Near the end, Snitter has a revelatory vision:

“The world, he now perceived, was in fact a great, flat wheel with a myriad spokes of water, trees and grass, forever turning and turning beneath the sun and moon. At each spoke was an animal—all the animals and birds he had ever known—horses, dogs, chaffinches, mice, hedgehogs, rabbits, cows, sheep, rooks and many more which he did not recognize—a huge striped cat and a monstrous fish spurting water in a fountain to the sky. At the centre, on the axle itself, stood a man, who ceaselessly lashed and lashed the creatures with a whip to make them drive the wheel round. Some shrieked aloud as they bled and struggled, others silently toppled and were trodden down beneath their companions’ stumbling feet. And yet, as he himself could see, the man had misconceived his task, for in fact the wheel turned of itself…”

But the novel is also an allegory about how we treat each other. The Brexit vote was howl of protest at a disengaged elite, governing in their own interest—out of touch with the hardships faced by ordinary people. Average incomes have flat-lined over the past ten years, and we’ve been hurt by savage cut-backs, implemented in the name austerity, to bear the cost of bailing out our banking system. In the run up to the referendum, the finger was pointed at immigration, but the causes of our current situation are multi-faceted and far-reaching. They stretch back to the 1980’s and the deregulation of the money markets that sent the value of the pound skyrocketing and did for British manufacturing. They encompass the takeover of the City of London by large American investment banks, and forty years of ripping up employment law in the hope that leaving everything to the free market will bring prosperity.

And it has. To some. We’re now the sixth richest nation in the world, but 20% of all that wealth lies in the hands of just 680,000 people, while almost twice than number are obliged to use food banks. Can we really lay the blame for all of that at the feet of the ordinary individuals who are now being spat at in the street and told to “go home”? They’ve become the scapegoats, the Plague Dogs, callously used by media moguls to sway public opinion in favour of political initiatives that advance in their own agendas. With the current farce unfolding in Westminster, the guns sounding across the estuary, and the shadow of Sellafield on the sands, the atmosphere of Adams’ novel is perfectly evoked.

I sit down on a dune and gaze out at the encroaching waves. In my mind’s eye, a small fox terrier and a black mongrel stand before them. To stay on land means certain death, but to swim out to sea seems like suicide. An optimist to the last, Snitter wonders whether they could reach the Isle of Man. Rowf doesn’t like the sound of that, but Snitter has heard tell of another place, a better island, the Isle of Dog. It has to be out there somewhere. Perhaps, just perhaps, they could reach it. Despite his suffering, Snitter has always been sustained by hope, and it sustains him now as he leads his friend out into the icy waters.

The book and the film conclude differently. I’ll divulge neither denouement, but they both play out in my head as I sit on the beach and gaze over the Irish Sea—for according to Wainwright’s final map, right here is where the story ends.

Fell Walk, General, Literature

Whitecoats: On the Path of the Plague Dogs, Part I

November 25, 2018 George Kitching 20 Comments

Raven Tor, Levers Hause and Seathwaite Tarn.

In Richard Adams’ 1977 bestseller, Plague Dogs, Rowf and Snitter are two dogs subjected to cruel experiments in a vivisection lab. When an unsecured catch and a loose bit of wire afford a means of escape, they find themselves in the Coniston Fells. Adams describes the landscape in vivid detail, and original editions of the book are illustrated in characteristic part sketch/part map style by one of Lakeland’s greatest apostles. Inspired by the story, I put on my boots and set off on the path of the Plague Dogs.

I’ve never read Watership Down. I was seven when it was published, but it didn’t cross my radar until the film of 1978. By then I was thirteen, and I’d just discovered Black Sabbath. I had long hair and a full-length leather coat from Oxfam, which I thought made me look like Geezer Butler. My mum had a different take. It was only after a year of people telling me the same thing that I came to accept that she might actually be right: the padded shoulders, pinched waist, faux fur collar and the particular arrangement of buttons meant it was unquestionably a woman’s coat, and if it made me look like anyone, it was Bet Lynch.

My teenage tunnel vision dismissed Watership Down as a cartoon about rabbits, soundtracked by Art Garfunkel and clearly aimed at girls; not the sort of thing a pimply, pubescent Prince Of Darkness should be watching, even if he was unknowingly experimenting with cross-dressing.

Eventually, I ditched the coat but never recovered sufficient good sense to read the book or watch the film. Now, at the tender age of fifty-two, I’m desperate to put that right because I’ve been utterly bowled over by The Plague Dogs.

The Plague Dogs was Adams’ third novel. It tells the story of Rowf and Snitter, a big black mongrel and a little fox terrier who escape from a vivisection laboratory and make for the hills. At first, they incur the wrath of local farmers whose sheep they kill in an attempt to stave off starvation, but when an unscrupulous tabloid journalist, with a remit to embarrass the Secretary of State, gets involved, the story snowballs into a national furore, inflamed by an unsubstantiated allegation that the dogs could be carrying the bubonic plague. Questions are asked in the House, and the army is despatched to assassinate our innocent canine heroes.

It’s a rollicking adventure, an emotional rollercoaster and a biting political satire, but it’s also a passionate anti-vivisection statement. The cruelty and utter pointlessness of the procedures beggars belief, yet in his preface, Adams confirms that “every ‘experiment’ described is one which has actually been carried out on animals somewhere”.

It’s not a wholly one-sided picture, however. No sooner do we sense that Stephen Powell, a young scientist at the lab, is becoming increasingly uncomfortable with his work than we learn his young daughter is suffering from a terminal illness. It’s Powell’s desperate hope that animal research will yield a breakthrough before it’s too late to save her.

And yet the experiments are as barbaric as they are futile: Rowf has been subjected to a succession of near drownings, repeatedly submerged in a tank of water and only revived once he goes limp and sinks to the bottom. He has never known men other than the “whitecoats”. Despite his traumatic experiences at their latex-sheathed, disinfected hands, he still wants to be a good dog and please his masters; but he can’t face another day in the immersion tank. Snitter’s story is even sadder as he remembers a blissfully happy home life before his beloved master was knocked down by a lorry—an accident for which Snitter blames himself. The details are incoherent because the whitecoats have cut open Snitter’s head and rewired his brain to confuse the subjective and the objective. As a result, he suffers disorienting confusion and bouts of vivid hallucination. In his lucid moments, however, he’s smart. Smart enough to notice an unsecured catch and a loose bit of wire. Smart enough to figure out how he and Rowf might escape. When they do, it’s into a landscape very familiar to lovers of Lakeland.

The real Lawson Park was a remote fell farm on the eastern bank of Coniston Water; now it’s an artists’ retreat, run by Grisedale Arts. Never in reality has it been any sort of research lab, but it’s the fictional location of Animal Research (Scientific and Experimental), A.R.S.E. for short—the setting for Rowf and Snitter’s inhumane treatment in the interests of science. When they make a break for hills, they find themselves in the Coniston Fells, which Adams renders in rich detail.

My friend, Gillian, grew up in Coniston and suggested I should read the book for this very reason. “You could walk the routes and write about it in your blog”, she said. It sounded a fine idea, so I searched for The Plague Dogs on Amazon. I was one click away from buying the current paperback, when a customer review caught my eye.

“Before buying a copy of The Plague Dogs I took out a request from the library and ended up with an older edition. It was a wonderful hardback – the illustrations of the Lake District by the late Alfred Wainwright complimented Adams’ rich, vivid prose perfectly. Sadly though, the illustrations have been removed from this recent (2015) re-issue.”

The original hardback was illustrated by Wainwright? This was the edition I had to have. Google found me a second-hand copy for £1 + £3.99 p&p. It arrived two days later, and it looked wonderful. As well as hatched pencil drawings of the fells, there were eight characteristic route maps, rendered in the same part sketch, part map style, familiar to readers of AW’s Pictorial Guides. Indeed, for Wainwright fans, the book is a welcome supplement.

Wainwright was also an ardent anti-vivisectionist, and Adams says in the preface, “I seriously doubt whether an author can ever have received more generous help and co-operation from an illustrator”.

It’s in the early hours of a crisp autumn morning that Rowf and Snitter make good their escape. As the sun rises, they find themselves on the wild expanse of Monk Coniston Moor. Snitter is appalled. What have the men done? “They’ve taken everything away, Rowf—the roads, cars, pavements, dustbins, gutters—the lot. How can they have done it?”

The pair head down hill, cross the road and trot along the shore of Coniston Water. Here, Snitter is entranced by how still everything looks beneath the surface. Would his racing mind be as calm if he was in there? Rowf is terrified of the water, however, and remonstrates with his friend not to go in. “You can’t imagine what it’s like”.

Buoyed up by the sight of houses in the distance, the fugitives head along the road to Coniston village, but Snitter is overcome by one of his turns and has to lie down. A car stops, and two men get out to help, but when they try to pick Snitter up, Rowf assumes they are trying to recapture him and return him to the lab. He springs forward in attack and frees his friend, and the pair run for the village.

Rowf is understandably wary of men, but Snitter knows they’re not all like the whitecoats. On the streets of Coniston, he remembers shops. In his former life, these were places where people made a fuss of you and gave you treats. They try their luck in a butchers’ shop. The friendly but fastidious proprietor comes over. He means no harm and crouches to greet them, but his hands smell of disinfectant, he’s carrying a knife, and a pair of scissors protrude from the pocket of his WHITE COAT.

The two dogs flee up the walled lane beyond The Black Bull and out into the Coppermines Valley. On page 46, Wainwright documents their route, and on a bright November morning, this is where I pick up the trail.

Above Miners’ Bridge, the Old Man, Brim Fell, Swirl How and Wetherlam are ablaze, lit orange and blue in the first light of morning, just as Adams describes. I follow the track beside Low Water Beck to the Youth Hostel. Here I pause to check the map and imagine the scene. As I do, I hear a faint patter and something soft brushes my leg. It’s a black dog. After a startled double take, I make friends with an excitable border collie, who can’t hang about because he’s just spotted a big stick. His loving owners are laughing as they catch us up, “that’ll be the first of many, today”, the woman grins. Proper masters, as Snitter might say.

Border Collie, Coniston Youth Hostel — Rowf?

The main track swings right along the lower slopes of the Black Sails ridge, but I turn left towards the quarry, its marbled face, a dark daubed cubist canvas below the tufts of russet scrub. The road is blocked by a gate. It’s padlocked, but perhaps only to vehicles. Beyond, the word “Footpath” has been scrawled on a slate. I climb the bars and start up the faint grassy trod to which it points. Above the spoil heaps, I join the path from Crowberry Haws. Two slate cairns stand guard, and a Herdwick grazes unperturbed.

I cross the footbridge into Boulder Valley and pause by the Pudding Stone. The path continues to Levers Water, but immediately above, Brim Fell towers, craggy and intimidating. Anxious to escape the reach of man, it’s up these steep slopes that Rowf and Snitter start. I feel duty-bound to follow, although perhaps not strictly in their paw steps. They have me at a disadvantage: for one, they’re dogs—replete with four legs and a low centre of gravity; and two, they’re fictional, so they have the intrinsic power to do whatever Adams’ imagination invents. He has them climbing on the line of Low Water Beck, clambering up its boulders, skirting its shallow falls and splashing through its brown pools. His co-conspirator, Wainwright, plots the path. But from where I’m standing, the beck is an angry cascade, crashing down a severe ravine. I see no way up for a meagre middle-aged mortal.

In his Pictorial Guide, Wainwright advocates a mildly more man-friendly route, which climbs a grassy rake on the opposite side of the crag. I detect what might be a path leading to the crag’s foot. It proves something of a mirage, and I’m quickly off piste, but I track around the bottom of the rocks toward the strip of mossy green. A brief scramble provides a short-cut, and soon I’m clambering up steep and slippery grass. It’s hard going, requiring hands and feet, and I can see why AW advises against it for descent. But it’s not far from the beck, so I feel I’m being as true as I can to the plot, and besides, I’ve always wanted to try this ascent, AW promises it furnishes a fuller understanding of the fell’s true structure.

Simon's Nick, Coppermines Valley — Simon’s Nick, Coppermines Valley

I reach an old mine level, where the curled ends of rail tracks protrude like vestigial limbs. Here a path of sorts emerges; it’s a steep rocky staircase, skirting a river of loose stone, but the going is firmer than before, if no kinder on the calves. Eventually, the gradient relents, and I’m confronted with a vision that fills Rowf with dread—the limpid corrie tarn of Low Water, a pool of primeval tranquility, a dark oasis of serenity below the plunging slopes of the Old Man, but to poor traumatised Rowf, a huge, menacing immersion tank. He races away up the slope to the summit of Raven Tor. I sip coffee, catch my breath, and just as Snitter does, I follow.

Looking back down from Brill Fell ascent

Beyond the summit, the ground drops abruptly to Levers Water. Strangely, despite its larger size, the tarn holds no fresh dread for Rowf. It’s just as well because Snitter spots a line of sheep by the western shore. They’re being pursued by two border collies and a man. The man is whistling and calling to the dogs, encouraging them to chase the sheep, and the dogs are listening and responding. Man and dog, working as a team. Here at last is a proper master. All he and Rowf have to do now is bound down the fell side and join in. If they chase the sheep too, perhaps the man will give them a home, and food, and a happy life away from the whitecoats.

My descent is more circumspect. The slopes below the col look precipitous. In his Pictorial Guide, AW shows a route beside Cove Beck. I follow a narrow trod over the spine of Gill Cove Crag, in the shadow of Brim Fell’s summit, and as the contours diverge, I descend through increasingly soggy ground. Eventually, I hear the sound of running water, and the beck appears, a narrow scar trickling elusively through scrubby moorland.

Beyond, a cairn marks the path up to Levers Hause. Between here and the waterline, Rowf and Snitter make their ill-fated attempt to gain a master by chasing his sheep. Luckily, his sheep dogs reach them first and vent their anger in broad Cumbrian:

“Art out of the minds, chasing yows oop an’ down fell, snappin’ an’ bitin’?”, fumes one. “Wheer’s thy farm at? Wheer’s thy master?”.

When Snitter explains, “we haven’t a master. We want to meet yours”, the answer is unequivocal: “He’ll fill thee wi’ lead”.

I turn and follow the forlorn fugitives’ escape route up steep rocky steps to Levers Hause. Here, the dogs ruefully acknowledge they’ll find no welcome in the world of men. They must become wild animals. Still stoked from the chase, Rowf attacks a mountain ewe. He makes the kill, but takes a fair battering in the process. With his hunger satiated, exhaustion takes hold, and the big black mongrel lies down in the bog myrtle to nurse his injuries. Meanwhile, Snitter despairs at the bleakness of their prospects. As his synapses start to misfire, he scampers down the steep slopes to the Duddon Valley in a firestorm of neurotic confusion.

A right of way runs from Levers Hause to the far shore of Seathwaite Tarn. Or at least it does on the map. There’s little sign of a path on the ground, and the gradient is frightening. I’d have to be as mad as Snitter to attempt it, and yet somehow, I do. I climb down a little way to test the going, stepping sideways from grassy tuft to stony shelf. Emboldened, I soldier on. Part way down, I imagine a path, but it’s just a loose spray of scree, too shallow to offer much support. Zigzagging avoids the severest sections, and earlier than I’d reckoned, I’m approaching the tumbling waters of Tarn Beck. Here, the ground grows marshy; the valley bottom is a quagmire, red with reed beds as it reaches out to Seathwaite reservoir. I keep to a contour to stay out of the worst. The sun is streaming over Dow Crag, bleaching the fell sides and blinding me with its glare.

Here, Snitter does what I decline to do. Lured by the fevered machinations of his scrambled mind, he breaches the beck and splashes through the boggy ground on the other side. The kindly man in the brown tweed coat that he imagined was there is an illusion, but as the fit passes and the world comes back into focus, he spots something else. Something welcome. Something real. Just shy of the reservoir he finds a small spoil heap:

“On top was a levelled space of turf and small stones, perhaps half the size of a lawn tennis court. It was completely empty, but on the further side, where Great Blake Rigg, the south face of Grey Friar, rises like a wall was a symmetrical, dark opening, lined and arched with stones”.

I’m looking at it now (through binoculars). It’s an old level of Seathwaite copper mine, and in the book, it becomes a temporary home for Rowf and Snitter. Here, they meet the tod, a wily fox, well-versed in the ways of the wild. His savvy, calculating instinct for self-preservation contrasts markedly with the dogs’ innocent loyalty. He’s appalled by their naivety and sees them as a liability, likely to draw the attention of farmers and their shotguns. Yet, in Rowf he also sees a valuable asset: there’s not many a wild Lakeland beast can bring down a full-grown ewe. The dogs might have their uses after all, and an uneasy alliance is formed.

Short winter daylight hours dictate that here, for now, I must take my leave. But as I make the day’s last ascent out of lonely Dunnerdale and up to Goat Hawse, the peace is broken by an alarming bark, fuelled with feral bloodlust. A chilling chorus of murderous howls swells into an amplified echo, and on the lower slopes of Grey Friar, I make out a swarm of white dots moving fast across the fell. With binoculars comes comprehension: fuzzy points resolve into a pack of foxhounds. They’re coursing an aniseed trail. It’s profoundly unsettling because it’s a scene straight from the book. In all my years on the fells, I’ve never witnessed this, yet later in the story, Snitter sees the self-same thing. Only this time, it’s not aniseed they’re hunting… it’s the tod.

To be continued…

Read the second part of my journey along the path of the Plague Dogs here:

Here’s where the story ends

Fell Walk, General, History

Away from the Numbers

June 24, 2018 George Kitching 12 Comments

Grey Friar, Great Carrs, & Dow Crag from Seathwaite

It was to be my 100th Wainwright. Not quite halfway, but a minor milestone nevertheless. The day begins inauspiciously with a series of farcical calamities worthy of Basil Fawlty, but en route to the Seathwaite reservoir, the disarming beauty of the Duddon valley works its magic. After a splendid ridge walk, I celebrate in the rural charm of the Newfield Inn—the scene of a violent riot, 114 years ago, which ended in the fatal shooting of a navvy. Hard to believe these days, but I’m on my best behaviour just in case.

It’s not as if I was expecting fanfares, a red carpet and a Champagne breakfast on the terrace. That would be ridiculous—we haven’t got a terrace. But on a morning that marked a minor milestone in my fell walking career, I did, at least, want things to go smoothly.

It wasn’t to be. I awoke to find the cat had thrown up over the sofa cushions. He’d even managed to hit a car rug perched over the arm. The scatter pattern suggested he’d been projectile vomiting while spinning like a whirling dervish. Was he violently ill or possessed by a legion of demons? It didn’t look like it.

I’ve seen enough episodes of CSI to know how to work a crime scene, and here I found grass and a sizeable clump of matted fur (quite possibly not his own). Cat lovers will know that grass is an emetic which cats imbibe deliberately to shift fur balls. The ensuing upchuck is relatively controlled, so this extravagant distribution was clearly a matter of choice. The proud perpetrator was now standing by his bowl, demanding his breakfast.

After half an hour of intensive fabric cleaning, I stuffed Wainwright’s Pictorial Guide to the Southern Fells into my rucksack and set off for Seathwaite.

I’ve lived in Cumbria for twenty years and I’d never been into the heart of the Duddon valley. I’ve gazed down on it many times from the tops of the Coniston fells, ever struck by its lonely beauty. In autumn, the Seathwaite reservoir had shone like a sapphire on a baize of burnished gold. Today, the fields and trees are a swatch of fresh June green, licked into life by the early morning sun. I could easily lose myself in carefree reverie, but I need to concentrate because I’m not entirely sure where I’m going.

After Seathwaite, the map shows a fork in the road, with the right-hand prong giving way to the old quarry track that leads up to the Walna Scar Pass and on to Coniston. The reservoir track starts from the same point. Sure enough, the road forks where expected and there is even a sign saying “Coniston, unfit for cars”. But as the winding single-track road narrows to no more than my car width, I start to question why it is I think there is off-road parking at the end of it.

The road ends abruptly in a gate—with no parking space anywhere to be seen. A farmer on a quad bike is approaching from the other side. He clearly wants to come this way. I recall a distinct lack of passing places and the road is too narrow for a three-point turn. There’s nothing for it but to reverse back to the farm I passed quarter of a mile back.

Parking sensors are wonderful things, but they don’t know the difference between dry stone walls and cow parsley. Given the abundance of foliage overhanging the verges, my dashboard is lit up like a Christmas tree and my ears are ringing from the continuous high-pitched beep. I reach the farm, but I’m too close to the opposite wall to back in. I effect a painfully faffing five-point manoeuvre, while trying to avoid the eye of the farmer, who I sense is laughing heartily. Eventually, I manage to let him past. He gives a cheery wave and speeds off down the lane, no doubt dying to get home and tell his wife all about his encounter with Mr Bean.

I follow him back to the Seathwaite road. On the edge of the village, there are four parking spaces. One is still free. Perhaps my luck is changing.

It’s a rash hope. I open the hatchback to find the top isn’t properly on one of my water bottles and it’s emptied itself entirely into one of my boots—the one I’d put my socks in. I pour 500ml of water out of the boot and wring out the socks as best I can, then I squelch one and a half miles back up the road to the gate. I go through and just on the other side, I find the parking spaces.

Then, I step in a cowpat.

As I tramp up the reservoir track, I feel every bit like Basil Fawlty scouting around for a branch with which to give the day a damn good thrashing… But subconsciously, I start to change gear. There’s a song going around in my head. It’s The Waterboys’ Don’t Bang the Drum—it was playing on the radio on the way here:

“Here we are in a fabulous place
What are you gonna dream here?
We are standing in this fabulous place
What are you gonna play here?
I know you love the high life, you love to leap around
You love to beat your chest and make your sound
But not here man – this is sacred ground
With a Power flowing through
And if know you you’ll bang the drum
Like monkeys do”

The song warns of being so pumped up with our own self-importance, or perhaps with peeved indignance at the banana skins life leaves littered in our path, that we can stand in the most astounding of places and fail to realise.

I stop to apply sun cream, and I wake up to where I am. The epiphany strikes like an earthquake. A minute ago, the Duddon valley was a place of cowpats, frustratingly hidden car parks and wet feet. Now it’s a place of astonishing power and disarming beauty.

Across the valley, a conspiracy of sun and shadow renders the Scafells as an Art Deco railway poster—broad, flat, angular and stylised.

To the east, the sheer green slopes of Brim Fell, Dow Crag and Walna Scar form a colossal rampart to rend the valleys of the Duddon and Coniston. And straight ahead, rising over rippling foot hills, is the grassy dome of Grey Friar—the only Coniston fell I’ve yet to set foot on. Except, it isn’t really a Coniston fell at all. As Wainwright points put, Grey Friar belongs entirely to the Duddon.

Grey Friar from the Seathwaite reservoir track

Ticking off all the Wainwrights hadn’t been a goal. I was more interested in getting to know my favourites well—experiencing all their ascents and ridge walks. However, some gentle hectoring from my neighbours, Paul and Jeanette, convinced me that tackling the full 214 is a great incentive to explore new ground. They’re right, and since committing to the challenge, my knowledge of the peaks has grown exponentially.

I’ve climbed all the other mountains in this range at least twice and some (like The Old Man) as many as eight times. But Grey Friar, I’ve been saving. It will be my 100th Wainwright.

The OS map shows no path, but Wainwright sketches two that wend in parallel up the south western ridge. The first, a grass rake, is clearly visible from the track, but the intervening ground is marshy. AW suggests continuing to the reservoir and starting from just beyond the outtake channel. His second path is more direct and starts from the same place.

After a mile or so, I crest the hill and the long buttressed curve of the dam wall appears at the foot of dark shadowy slopes. As I reach the walkway that traverses the top, the sun slips behind a cloud, so now over the parapet, the dark waters stretch out—a long black placid pool, cool and inscrutable.

The reservoir’s tranquillity belies the violence in its construction. The ancient tarn was dammed in 1904, to extend its capacity as a water supply. The summer was a scorcher; the work was hard, and tempers were frayed. In such a small and remote community as Seathwaite, tensions were strained between locals and the labourers drafted in to sweat and toil. It would only take a spark to ignite the tinder.

In the event, alcohol proved the accelerant. According to Dick Sullivan’s book, Navvyman (Coracle Press, 1983), Owen Cavanagh had been drinking heavily since 9am. By noon, the landlord of the Newfield Hotel (now the Newfield Inn) judged he’d had enough. As Cavanagh’s rowdiness threatened to get out of hand, the landlord demanded he and his mates leave the premises. The men refused. They smashed up the pub and stole bottles of whisky, then they spilled into the street where they pelted the church and the vicarage with rocks. The publican, a barman and an engineer confronted the rioters with firearms. Shots were fired wounding three—fatally in Cavanagh’s case. The gunmen were arrested but later acquitted on the grounds their actions were legally justified in protecting property.

A primeval peace pervades now. The ghosts of rampaging navvies don’t haunt the fruits of their labours. I follow the walkway along the top of the dam and cross the footbridge over the main and auxiliary tarn outlets.

Between the crags of Great and Little Blake Rigg, Grey Friar’s slopes are more forgiving—grassy terraces peppered with rocky outcrops. Where Wainwright shows the start of his direct route, the tiniest of cairns hints at a faint path. I augment the cairn with a couple more stones—now you’ll have to blink a fraction longer to miss it.

In places, you have to rely on instinct and common sense to determine the line of the path. In others, it’s more pronounced, but nowhere is there any difficulty. A moderate pull up grassy slopes attains the ridge, and I make for the summit. Two cairns, a little way apart, stake equally convincing claims. Wainwright judges the north-eastern contender to be the true summit but concedes the south-western has the better views. He’s right, I pull myself up a rocky step and hunker down beside it to gaze across at Harter Fell and the Scafells.

A blue haze, like a sea mist, transforms the peaks into a mythical realm, where black spires, full of menace and foreboding, rise above dappled flanks, pretty and beguiling, and dark hollows harbour mysteries, old as the hills themselves.

One hundred Wainwrights under my belt is still seven short of halfway. Even so, it’s a ton, a nicely rounded sum, and it feels like an accomplishment. Grey Friars was a fine choice. It’s an underrated mountain, but away from the numbers, these are the kind that can reward the most. It’ll be a different story across on Scafell Pike. At this time of year, walkers will be arriving by the coach load. The Let’s Walk the Lakes Facebook group are tackling that today. Three weeks ago, I climbed Skiddaw with them. It was my first outing with the group, and a nicer bunch of like-minded people you couldn’t hope to meet. I wave in their direction and look forward to our next hike together. Then I set off for Great Carrs.

Just shy of the summit is a memorial cairn to the wreck of a Halifax bomber that crashed here in 1944. I’ve written about that at length in Ghost of Canadian Airmen, so I won’t repeat myself here, but the cairn with its cross and its plaque, together with the little wooden crosses people plant among the stones to commemorate their own departed loved ones, never fail to move me.

I don’t know how this looked in Wainwright’s day. It’s been rebuilt, so perhaps its appearance is more poignant now, but I find AW’s casual dismissal of it as a pile of aeroplane wreckage a tad perplexing. I’ve always suspected his curmudgeonly character was a slightly tongue-in-cheek persona: the bonhomie and humour in his writing suggests someone a little better disposed to people than is commonly supposed. But this throwaway line in the Grey Friar chapter does seem to reveal a more damaged individual, either lacking empathy, or perhaps, so used to burying his feelings he found them awkward to deal with when they surfaced.

I cross the shoulder of Swirl How and head over Brim Fell. The sky darkens, and it spots with rain. The hills are now a solemn grey, the Seathwaite reservoir a sombre sheen. But the dark clouds above Dow Crag are clearing and the ones overhead are insubstantial. They lack the ammunition for a proper downpour. Halfway to Dow Crag’s summit, the sun breaks through in triumph. By the time I reach the top, it’s glorious.

I read a number of walking blogs, and I enjoy Tessa Park’s, not only because it’s called Mountains and Malbec (which scores double points in my book), but because she champions the use of the ARSE CRAMPON. The concept is not entirely new, Wainwright remarks on the usefulness of the posterior, particularly in descent, but Tessa coined the phrase and she deserves a shout-out as I make liberal use of this piece of equipment in scrambling off the summit rocks.

Dow Crag’s buttresses and gullies are some of most dramatic features to be found anywhere in Lakeland. Its top is peppered with plunging vistas of heart-stopping beauty. Intrepid climbers perch on precarious outcrops high above the blue glimmer of Goat Water.

On the way down over Buck Pike and Brown Pike, Coniston Water is a hazy aquamarine wash to the east, while to the west, a band of barley forms a golden heart in the Lincoln green of the Duddon Valley. On reaching the Walna Scar Road, I turn right and descend past the old quarry into the pastoral perfection of Dunnerdale. Harter Fell looms ahead and Tarn Beck burbles over rocks as I meander lazily back to Seathwaite.

The Duddon valley from the Walna Scar track

The Newfield Inn is the epitome of a charming rural pub. I sit in its pretty beer garden, enjoying the warm sunshine and a cool hoppy pint of Mosaic from the nearby Foxfield brewery. It’s impossible to imagine this was the scene of a violent riot and fatal shootings one hundred and fourteen years ago.

I’m quite sure the landlord doesn’t keep a loaded firearm behind the bar anymore, but just in case, I return the glass, thank him kindly and take extra care not to break anything on the way out.

Fell Walk, General

White Winter Hymnal

January 28, 2018 George Kitching 14 Comments

The Old Man and the Raven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Low Water - Old Man — Low Water – Old Man

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

Fell Walk, History, Scramble

King of the Copper Mountains

November 14, 2016 George Kitching 4 Comments

Dow Crag via the South Rake, The Old Man of Coniston, Swirl How and Levers Water

Dow Crag is one of the finest rock faces in the Lake District. It is usually thought to be the preserve of climbers, but a hidden gully known as the South Rake affords the adventurous walker an ascent that doesn’t require ropes. In this post, I recount an exhilarating scramble to the top via this route and delve into the rich history of the Coniston area and the nearby port of Whitehaven, which was once so strategically important that it was invaded by the US navy during the war of independence.

Coniston, Copper and the Birth of a Sausage

When I was little I had a favourite book called The King of the Copper Mountains. The story hailed from Holland but the title could easily apply to Coniston. The Cumbrian village enjoys a commanding position at the foot of the copper-rich Furness fells, overseeing the lake that shares its name – a name that derives from the Norse for king.

Coniston Water has a history of aquatic adventure. It is the setting for Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons and it’s where Donald Campbell set four world water speed records between 1955 and 1964 in his boat, Bluebird. It was here too that he made his final, fatal attempt to reach 300mph in 1967.

Brantwood, on its eastern shore was home to John Ruskin, the leading Victorian art critic, philanthropist and social reformer. Ruskin declared the view from his house to be the “the best in all England”, although, to be fair, he said the same of Church Brow in Kirkby Lonsdale and described a vista on Friar Crag as the finest in Europe. In fact, when it came to lavishing his affections on superlative views, Ruskin was a bit of a brassy tart, but such was his love of Brantwood, that shortly before his death in 1900 he declined the opportunity to be buried in Westminster Abbey, preferring to be laid to rest in the peace of the Coniston churchyard.

Today Coniston thrives on tourism but its past prosperity owed much to slate and copper. Its copper mines reached their zenith in the early 19th century when the ore produced here was used to make coins and weaponry and even to clad the hulls of the naval fleet. The original shafts were dug two centuries earlier under the patronage of Elizabeth I, who licensed German engineers to spearhead the effort. The Germans brought more than mining expertise however. They also brought a recipe for a coarse, spicy, unlinked sausage which proved so popular with the locals that it evolved into a regional delicacy. Copper mining may be long gone but every Cumbrian butcher worth his salt can boast an award winning Cumberland sausage.

American Invasion

Spices were in steady supply due to Coniston’s relative proximity to Whitehaven. In its heyday, Whitehaven was a major port. Indeed, so great was its strategic importance that in 1778, at the height of the War of Independence, the town was subject to a hostile American invasion. The assault was the brain-child of John Paul Jones, a US naval commander of Scottish descent, who had spent his early working life in Whitehaven. Jones planned a raid to burn the boats in the harbour and inflict significant damage on British ships and supplies. But his enthusiasm was not shared widely among his crew and by the time the USS Ranger dropped anchor on the evening of April 22nd, they were close to mutiny; a situation that can’t have been helped by the arduous three hour row to the harbour.

The raiding party was divided between two boats. Jones himself took charge of one, which was to storm the Lunette battery and disable the guns, thus securing a safe passage back to the ship. Meanwhile, the other boat, led by Lieutenant Wallingford, was to make for the quay and torch the ships that were docked there. His crew must have rowed the final furlong steeling themselves for a bloody skirmish only to find that on a cold night in Whitehaven, with no prior warning of their arrival, there was no-one around to fight. Furthermore, their primary mission of burning the boats faltered when they realised they had no matches and the candles they’d brought had long since blown out. Faced with such compromising circumstances, Wallingford’s men did the only reasonable thing. They went to the pub, where they were soundly defeated by the strength of the local ale.

By the time Jones arrived back from the battery, half his men were three sheets to the wind. Undeterred, he improvised matches from strips of canvas dipped in sulphur and managed to start fires in a couple of the cargo holds. The invaders then beat a hasty retreat, hoping to watch the town go up in flames from the safety of their ship. Fortunately, the townspeople were one step ahead. With the Great Fire of London a recent memory, Whitehaven had invested in fire engines, which were swiftly deployed, successfully extinguishing the flames before they reached the rigging.

In the meantime, the guards that Jones had overpowered at the fort had freed themselves and got the guns back in operation. The resulting canon fire failed to hit the retreating rowing boats but the loud bangs can’t have done much for the burgeoning hangovers, kicking in among the crew. As the people of Whitehaven returned to their beds, Jones and his men sailed back to America with their tails between their sea legs, their bungled raid destined to become a footnote in the history books; everywhere but Whitehaven that is, where it is still a cause for celebration.

A Coward’s Route up Dow Crag

The Coniston Coppermines Valley is flanked on three sides by majestic mountains: Wetherlam, Swirl How, Brim Fell and the Old Man of Coniston. Beyond the Old Man lies Dow Crag which Wainwright described as one the grandest rock faces in the Lake District. Its cliffs and gullies are a big draw for rock climbers and it has a particular attraction for me as I can see it from my house.

The Crag is usually ascended along the ridge from the Walna Scar Pass or from Goat Hawse, which links Dow Crag to the Old Man. Its imposing cliffs, with the deep clefts of Great and Easy Gully, look unassailable to walkers although climbers class the latter as a scramble. In his Pictorial Guides to the Lake District, Wainwright pours gentle scorn on this classification, concluding that climbers have no concept of “easy” and suggesting that, while a walker might manage to get up that way if he were being chased by a particularly ferocious bull, it is best avoided on all other occasions. He does reveal, however, that there is a “coward’s way up”. It should be stressed here that Wainwright is using “coward” in an ironic sense to mimic the climber mindset that named Easy Gully, “Easy”, but nevertheless, he goes on to describe a steep and loose scramble that will take those, unaverse to putting hand to rock, all the way to the top of the crags without the need for ropes. At the time, it was unnamed – Wainwright proposed “the South Rake” and the moniker stuck.

My friend, Tim, is an ardent hiker with a taste for adventure, so what better challenge for the pair of us than to tackle the South Rake and walk the ridge to Swirl How? We set out with a little trepidation at the prospect, not least because I’d climbed the Old Man two weeks earlier and spied the Rake, which looked well nigh vertical from there. Reserving the right to declare discretion the better part of valour and take the soft option if necessary, we started up the steep tarmac lane from Coniston to the start of the Walna Scar road, a stony track leading to the Walna Scar Pass.

About a mile down the track, a wooden sign directs us right along the footpath leading to the Cove. With the southern slopes of the Old Man on one side and imposing face of Dow Crag towering ahead, we climb steadily to the copper-green tarn of Goats Water. On the far shore, scree slopes rise sharply to the foot of the Crag. A quick peek through the binoculars reveals a group of climbers perched below the main buttress and other tiny figures, further to the left, ascending diagonally up a gully that must surely be the Rake. Reassuring ourselves that we’re not the only ones daft enough to attempt this, we pick our way around the foot of the tarn and follow a faint path up the steep scree. As we reach the bottom of the Crag near the dark gash of Great Gully, the mountain rescue stretcher box comes into view imparting a frisson of foreboding. After a short pause to catch our breath and admire the view – Goats Water already seems a long way below – we tread around the base of the buttress to the start of the South Rake.

South Rake Ascent — Ascending the South Rake

Tim opts to go first, making his way gingerly up the steep incline. I follow at a safe distance, knowing the rocks are loose and easy to dislodge. To his credit, Tim does this only once. Patience and concentration are required at all times as solid holds are never guaranteed and it’s imperative to test the steadfastness of each step before putting your weight on it. It’s unnerving when successive stones give way under your grip but a little careful investigation eventually yields a firm ascent.

We pass the entrance to Easy Gully which reminds us we’re on the “coward’s route” but it certainly doesn’t feel like it when, about half way up, the gradient steepens further and it all seems more than a little exposed. Tim later confesses to have glanced down at this point and experienced a momentary wobble. It was only that I was concentrating so hard on where to tread that I kept my eyes ahead and was spared the same misgiving. Nearing the top, the gully forks and we opt for different routes, arriving on the flatter ground of the summit several yards apart. This is when the elation kicks in and for a few minutes we feel every bit the Kings of the Copper Mountain. The euphoria is only slightly dampened when we spy the climbers ascending the vertical cliff!

We walk on over Dow Crag and drop down to Goats Hawse where we bear right to ascend the Old Man. In contrast to the handful of walkers on the previous peak, ramblers are arriving here by the coach load. We forgo the overcrowded summit platform and break for a picnic overlooking Low Water before pressing on over Brim Fell and climbing to the summit of Swirl How.

Along the ridge the views south west to Seathwaite Tarn are striking; and across the Duddon Valley, Harter Fell honours its geological ancestry by looking every inch the volcano, a plume of cloud erupting from its peak. To its right, Sca Fell and Scafell Pike loom like great brutal rock giants locked in an eternal standoff across the ridge of Mickledore. On top of Swirl How, Crinkle Crags, Bow Fell, the Pike O’ Blisco and the Langdale Pikes hone into view and we take our time drinking in the aspect. To the south lies Morecambe Bay and to the east are Windermere and Coniston. Below is Levers Water, our next destination, which we reach by clambering down the rocky path of the Prison Band and turning right at Levers Hawse to reach the water’s edge.

Panic at Levers Water

Levers Water is a natural tarn that was dammed in 1717 to create a reservoir for the copper mines. It now acts as the water supply for Coniston itself. In order to raise the water level, the entrances to the neighbouring mine shafts had to be sealed to prevent the tarn from flooding the tunnels and turning the becks descending to Coniston into raging torrents. Rumour had it that, in one case, the builders had used a giant wooden plug – a story confirmed in the 1980’s when a group of cavers managed to locate the timber stopper.

Another caving party visited the plug in the early nineties and were shocked to discover an improvised explosive device wedged against it. The Bomb Squad was dispatched and managed to render the device safe, removing it to the nearby fell side where they carried out a controlled detonation. The Sunday Times postulated it was a weapon of terror, placed there by the IRA in an attempt to assassinate John Major, then Prime Minister, who was due to visit the area. The story was dismissed by the police who believed the makeshift bomb to have been the work of cavers, hoping to blast through to the next level, unaware of weight of water behind. The fuse had been lit but good fortune had intervened and it had petered out.

Best Defence

From Levers Water we make our way down through the Coppermines Valley to the Sun Hotel in Coniston for revitalising pints of Loweswater Gold. The bar and terrace are packed – proof that while his mines are consigned to history, the King of the Copper Mountains remains in rude health. Sadly, the years have treated Whitehaven less favourably. Its prominence as a port declined as the greater capacities of Bristol and Liverpool took over and today it is a modest coastal town, its glory years marooned in its nautical past.

These days the American invasion is commercial and cultural, with nearly all British cities sporting identikit chains like the ubiquitous Starbucks and MacDonalds. Ruskin would have hated this homogenization of the high street and the revival of the Laissez Faire Capitalism he railed so ardently against. But as a champion of the artisan, I think he’d approve of the Sun Hotel with its impressive array of locally sourced ales. Round the corner at the Black Bull, they even brew their own Bluebird Bitter. No corporate conformity here then, and if it’s true that history repeats, pubs well stocked with potent local brews might just prove our best defence.

Lakeland Walking Tales

Tag Archives: Coniston Fells

Here’s where the story ends

Paw Prints of the Plague Dogs part II

Seathwaite Tarn, Dow Crag, Caw & Brown Haw

Ravenglass and Drigg

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Whitecoats: On the Path of the Plague Dogs, Part I

Raven Tor, Levers Hause and Seathwaite Tarn.

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Grey Friar, Great Carrs, & Dow Crag from Seathwaite

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White Winter Hymnal

The Old Man and the Raven

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King of the Copper Mountains

Dow Crag via the South Rake, The Old Man of Coniston, Swirl How and Levers Water

Coniston, Copper and the Birth of a Sausage

American Invasion

A Coward’s Route up Dow Crag

Panic at Levers Water

Best Defence

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Walks, stories and musings from the Lake District Fells

Paw Prints of the Plague Dogs part II

Seathwaite Tarn, Dow Crag, Caw & Brown Haw

Ravenglass and Drigg

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Raven Tor, Levers Hause and Seathwaite Tarn.

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Grey Friar, Great Carrs, & Dow Crag from Seathwaite

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The Old Man and the Raven

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Dow Crag via the South Rake, The Old Man of Coniston, Swirl How and Levers Water

Coniston, Copper and the Birth of a Sausage

American Invasion

A Coward’s Route up Dow Crag

Panic at Levers Water

Best Defence

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Walks, stories and musings from the Lake District Fells