Tag Archives: Honister

Whisky in the Jar

Great Gable via Grey Knotts, Brandreth & Green Gable

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

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

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

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

Herdwick lamb (no artificial colouring)

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

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

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

John Wilkinson Obelisk, Lindale

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

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

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

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

Mine ownership marker, Seatoller Fell (Grey Knotts). Photo by Richard Jennings

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

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

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

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

Buttermere Edge
Buttermere Edge
Buttermere & Crummock Water
Buttermere & Crummock Water

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

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

Gable Crag

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

Pillar
Ennerdale
Ennerdale
Grasmoor over Haystacks from Brandreth
Great Gable from Green Gable

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

Great Gable Memorial
Great Gable Memorial

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

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

Wasdale from the Westmorland Cairn

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

Kirk Fell over Beckhead from Great Gable

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

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

Great Gable from Kirk Fell

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

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

Gable Crag
Gable Crag

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

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

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

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

Gable Crag from Green Gable
Gable Crag from Green Gable

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

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

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

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

Sources/Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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


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    In My Time Of Dying

    Haystacks and Wainwright.

    As a teenager, my overriding aspiration was to move to the city and form a band. It was the start of a journey that would take me from the clubs of Newcastle to the pages of the NME and the very cusp of success, only to change direction and drop me in the wilds of Cumbria. En route, Jimi Hendrix would make room for a Borough Treasurer from Blackburn who disliked music, didn’t much like people, but loved the hills and whose writing opened my eyes to a whole new world. I pay tribute to this unlikeliest of heroes on top of Haystacks, the heather-clad hill where his ashes are scattered.

    From Hendrix to the Hills

    My heroes were all musicians: Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townshend, Gram Parsons, Paul Weller, Black Francis… I could go on.  I grew up in the country among the gentle hills of Wiltshire, but when I was 18, it wasn’t higher fells I craved, it was the city. Somewhere with nightlife and a thriving alternative music scene; somewhere I could join a band and play loud electric guitar in dark, sweaty, smoky clubs.

    I secured a place at Newcastle University but my studies came second to my musical aspirations. After some false starts and a few years learning how to make noises other people might deign to listen to, I found friends with the right collective chemistry and we formed a band that was half decent.  We were called Hug, and together we achieved most of our teenage ambitions.  We toured the country in a transit van; played support to some of our heroes; we secured a record contract and released three e.p.’s and an album. We recorded sessions for Radio 1; and, at the start of 1991, the New Musical Express named us, alongside the Manic Street Preachers and Ocean Colour Scene, as one of their top tips for the coming year.

    Hug 1990
    Hug 1990. Photo by Sandy Kitching

    Hug 1990
    Hug 1991. Photo by Sandy Kitching

    Unfortunately, we were the exception that proved the rule. While others on the list shot into the arena of international stardom, our journey stalled at the perimeter, performed a three-point turn and deposited us back at the Gateshead DHSS, where our hopes of evading more traditional employment were unceremoniously quashed.

    I signed up for a course at Newcastle Poly or Northumbria University, as it had just become (supposedly an eleventh-hour name change, after some bright spark on the committee realised that rebranding it, “The City University of Newcastle upon Tyne” wouldn’t abbreviate well). I was to learn about IT, a far cry from my original vision of a career, but one that might, at least, earn me a living.

    I hadn’t long qualified when my wife, Sandy was offered a dream job in Cumbria. I urged her to take it and set about seeking opportunities for myself, eventually securing a role with a small company developing medical software for managing people on dangerous drugs (the prescribed, not the proscribed kind). It seemed an interesting and worthwhile use of my new skills and we settled in the South Lakes.

    Our first house was on the edge of a wood, right out in the sticks. It took a few weeks to adjust.  I’d never really understood the term, “the roaring silence” until then.  When you live in a city for any length of time you stop hearing the constant hum of traffic, but it becomes a vaguely hypnotic backdrop; a subliminal reassurance that the buzz of human activity continues as normal. To have it suddenly removed was disconcerting.  I remember lying awake, acutely aware that I could hear absolutely nothing. Then a barn owl screeched outside the open window and I nearly shot through the ceiling.  A few months later, I heard the bark of a stag for the first time and thought the Hound of the Baskervilles was coming through the wood.

    But the countryside had started to work its magic and, before long, I felt the draw of the mountains. I invested in a set of OS maps and some walking guides, including a set of laminated cards, which I still use, although their age is now apparent from the supporting notes, which advise the intrepid explorer to “invest in a pair of walking stockings and a spare pullover”.

    An Unlikely Hero

    As my interest grew, I become acquainted with a name that seemed almost synonymous with the Lakeland fells.  In the Carnforth Bookshop, I chanced upon a second-hand copy of one of his books, “The Southern Fells” and snapped it up to see what the fuss was about.  The pocket-sized tome was a little dog-eared and it had obviously witnessed, first-hand, the summits it described; but it was all the more special for it. Its content, however, was a revelation: a series of pen and ink drawings, part map, part sketch that ingeniously captured the essence of a mountain and rendered it on a 2D page in such a way that the reader instantly understood its character and topography. I had always admired the way artist, David Hockney could convey so much with such an economy of line. Here too, the author accomplished a similar feat; and the accompanying text was pure, heartfelt poetry. It spoke volumes in a few simple paragraphs shot-through with warmth, humour, passion and practical advice.

    Suddenly, Jimi Hendrix and Pete Townshend had to shuffle along to make room for a pipe-smoking, whiskered, staunchly conservative old curmudgeon, who went by the name of Alfred Wainwright. An unlikely coalition to say the least – Wainwright once assured a bemused Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs that, “music has never played an important part in my life. It’s never been an inspiration to me. Rather an irritation, very often.”

    Born in Blackburn, Alfred Wainwright grew up in relative poverty. His father was an alcoholic, who drank much of what little he earned as a stonemason. The young Alfred was bright and a model pupil at school, where he consistently scored top marks, but he was forced to leave at thirteen in order to support his mother.

    He got a job as an office boy with the Blackburn Borough Engineer’s department, but continued his studies at night school and eventually qualified as an accountant, which enabled him to climb the career ladder and become Borough Treasurer.

    If the young Wainwright’s diligent attempts to better his lot were an attempt to escape the hardships of his upbringing, poverty was not the only thing he wanted to flee. From an early age, he had shown a keen interest in walking and cartography. He produced his own maps and frequently eschewed the industrial urban environment for long days in the tranquility of the countryside.

    At the age of twenty three, Alfred, or AW as he preferred to be known, came to the Lakes for a walking holiday with his cousin, Eric. They climbed Orrest Head, above Windermere, where they witnessed the Lakeland fells for the first time. He described the experience as “magic; a revelation so unexpected that I stood transfixed, unable to believe my eyes”.

    A year later, AW entered into a disastrous marriage with Ruth Holden. Throughout their courtship, Wainwright kept his cap on. When he finally removed it on their wedding night, the sight of his red hair revolted her and both parties rapidly came to regret their decision. Despite the birth of their son, Peter in 1933, domestic relations did not improve and the lure of the Lakes as an escape grew ever stronger.

    Wainwright’s biographer, Hunter Davies is convinced that had AW found happiness in his first marriage, he would have “walked far less and written nothing”. As it was, his trips to  the fells became a weekly pilgrimage and he eventually took a pay cut to move to Kendal in 1941. Eleven years later, he started writing his Pictorial Guides as a “love letter” to the landscape that held him in such rapture.

    That AW sought solace among the summits is abundantly obvious throughout his books. He describes finding “a balm for jangled nerves in the silence and solitude of the peaks” and of “man’s search for beauty, growing keener as so much in the world grows uglier”.

    An intensely private man, he disliked crowds and disapproved of group excursions as evidenced in his mournful description of the popular route up the Old Man of Coniston: “This is the way the crowds go: the day trippers, the courting couples, babies and grandmothers, the lot. On this stony parade, fancy handbags and painted toenails are as likely to be seen as rucksacks and boots.”  This is accompanied by a sketch of a lone walker looking to the fells while a crowd stares in the opposite direction, trying to spot Blackpool Tower.

    By his own admission, Wainwright was a shy child who grew up to be anti-social, but the popular perception of an old curmudgeon is a little unfair. Bonhomie toward like-minded explorers runs right through his writing and his dry humour is everywhere.

    In a personal note at the conclusion of his final Pictorial Guide, “The Western Fells”, AW lists his six best Lakeland mountains as “Scafell Pike, Bowfell, Pillar, Great Gable, Blencathra and Crinkle Crags”, then quickly qualifies the list, explaining, “These are not necessarily the six fells I like the best. It grieves me to have to omit Haystacks (most of all)”.

    Haystacks is not technically a mountain, being just short of the requisite 2000 ft, and AW is being objective in omitting it on these grounds; but this relatively diminutive hill captured his heart more than any other. He describes it as standing “unabashed and unashamed amid a circle of higher fells, like a shaggy terrier in the company of foxhounds”… “For a man trying to get a persistent worry out of his mind, the top of Haystacks is a wonderful cure.”

    Haystacks from Fleetwith Pike
    Haystacks from Fleetwith Pike

    Innominate Tarn
    Innominate Tarn

    The “persistent worry” of his home life continued until, in his own words, “my wife left me, took the dog and I never saw her again”. AW eventually found matrimonial happiness when he married an old friend, Betty McNally. She became not only his spouse but his walking companion. After his death in 1991, Betty carried out AW’s long-held wish and scattered his ashes by Innominate Tarn on top of his beloved Haystacks.

    Haystacks and Fleetwith Pike

    It’s been years since I climbed Haystacks and when I did, the top was shrouded in mist. It’s high time I return. I leave the house at 6:00 am for a glorious drive that runs the full lengths of Windermere, Rydal Water, Grasmere, Thirlmere and Derwent Water. From the high level drama of the Honister Pass, I descend to Gatesgarth with Buttermere stretched out before me, sparkling in the September sun.

    I park the car and follow the stream through the farmyard and out toward High Crag, towering ahead. To my left, Fleetwith Edge soars up over Low and High Raven Crags to the top of Fleetwith Pike. This is my intended descent. It looks a little daunting from below, but the views will be outstanding. Between these two loftier neighbours lies Haystacks, a dwarf in comparison but no grassy hillock, its craggy rock-face hints at the interest on top.

    I must have slept at an odd angle as I have a stiff neck which the drive has turned into a dull headache. Wainwright famously declared, “one can forget even a raging toothache on Haystacks”, so I’m sure it won’t bother me for long, but as I round a little coppice of trees, I find a sealed tray of paracetamol in the path. I don’t really believe in fate but can’t deny the serendipity and it feeds a strange feeling that I’m somehow supposed to be here today.

    Buttermere and High Snockrigg
    Buttermere and High Snockrigg

    I start the climb up to Scarth Gap between Haystacks and High Crag, pausing occasionally to cast an eye back  over Buttermere and Crummock Water. On reaching Scarth Gap, I’m greeted with fine views over Ennerdale to two of Lakeland’s heavyweights, Pillar and Great Gable. Pillar’s precipitous northern slopes are bathed in green shadow, sheer and formidable. I try to trace the High Level Traverse between the crags to the magnificent column of Pillar Rock, from which the mountain takes its name. I lose the line of the path (apparently it’s not much easier to follow when you’re on it).

    Pillar from Scarth Gap
    Pillar from Scarth Gap

    A cloud floats across the face of Gable, a huge dark turret rising from the valley head. Over Buttermere, the bulky mass of Grassmoor dominates, while here, across the saddle, the path climbs steeply to the rocky heights of High Crag. These are the “foxhounds” in whose company the “shaggy terrier” behind me stands “unabashed and unashamed”. I turn around and continue the climb to discover why.

    Great Gable at the head of Ennerdale
    Great Gable at the head of Ennerdale

    The question is quickly answered as the ascent turns into a scramble; nothing technically difficult, but challenging enough to establish this as mountain terrain, good and proper, and the rival of any of its neighbours. On reaching the parapet, Haystacks’ treasures are revealed in full – a heather-clad castle of rocky towers and tiny tarns, leading eyes and feet in a merry dance of intrigue. Two excrescences of stone vie for the distinction of summit, although the honour is usually bestowed on the farther one, which boasts a cairn as its crown.

    Summit cairn, Haystacks
    Summit cairn, Haystacks

    Cloud shadows dapple the flanks of High Crag as I look back across a small blue pond that glistens like an overture to the watery expanse of Buttermere beyond. I’m almost entirely alone, but for two distant figures perched precariously atop the turret of Big Stack, framed against the plunging crags of Fleetwith Pike. Everywhere I turn is magical and somehow otherworldly. Haystacks has all the rugged drama of its neighbours but here, in place of a desolate wilderness of boulder, is a wild beauty and a pervading sense of tranquillity.

    Walker perched on Big Stack with Fleetwith Pike behind
    Walkers perched on Big Stack with Fleetwith Pike behind

    High Stile over Haystacks summit tarn
    High Stile over Haystacks summit tarn

    High Stile over summit cairn, Haystacks
    High Stile over a summit tarn on Haystacks

    Buttermere from Haystacks summit cairn
    Buttermere from Haystacks summit cairn

    I cross a depression and clamber to the true summit for another breathtaking panorama; then meander down through the heather, where herdwicks graze happily, to the peaceful shore of Innominate Tarn. AW’s wish to be scattered here is expressed more than once in his writings, but never as fully and eloquently as in Memoirs of a Fellwanderer, where he says this:

    “All I ask for, at the end, is a last long resting place by the side of Innominate Tarn, on Haystacks, where the water gently laps the gravelly shore and the heather blooms and Pillar and Gable keep unfailing watch. A quiet place, a lonely place.

    “I shall go to it, for the last time, and be carried – someone who knew me in life will take me and empty me out of a little box and leave me there alone. And if you, dear reader, should get a bit of grit in your boot as you are crossing Haystacks in the years to come, please treat it with respect. It might be me”.

    Innominate Tarn
    Innominate Tarn

    Herdwick grazing among the heather
    Herdwick grazing among the heather

    I’m transfixed by the gently rippling waters and could easily linger all day. AW was not a religious man. He knew heaven was right here and to mingle with this soil and feed the heather was his hope for an afterlife. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…

    Innominate Tarn
    Innominate Tarn

    To Wainwright, true music was here – in birdsong, or the tinkling of a mountain stream, or the sound of the wind among the peaks. I can’t argue with that. It’s perfect.

    Innominate Tarn
    Innominate Tarn with Gable keeping watch

    Eventually, I wrestle myself away and follow the path as it wends down through some remarkable rock scenery to Dubs Bottom, from where I start the ascent of Fleetwith Pike.

    Rock scenery on route to Dubs Bottom
    Rock scenery on route to Dubs Bottom

    Rock scenery on route to Dubs Bottom
    Rock scenery on route to Dubs Bottom

    The contrast could not be more striking. The intoxicating spell of a natural Shangri-La is broken by the harsh scars of industry in the spoil heaps and engineered gullies of Dubs quarry. From here, the path follows the line of an old works tramway to the head of Honister Crag, known as Black Star. Wainwright describes Black Star as “a place without beauty. A place to daunt they eye and creep the flesh”. The crag itself is not in view, but on the horizon a spoil heap rises, battleship grey, like a dark and sinister tower. If Haystacks was a fairy tale fortress, the vision ahead is the Castle of the Dolorous Guard, straight from the page of Arthurian legend. “Dub” is a Celtic word for black and right on cue, the sky darkens. It’s enough to send a slight shiver down the spine.

    It would be remiss to imply the old quarry workings are a lamentable eyesore, however. Industrial heritage holds its own fascination, especially as it is slowly reclaimed by nature. AW understood that Lakeland isn’t a true wilderness. The hand of man is everywhere, from the intricate pattern of dry stone walls enclosing lush green grazing pastures in the valley bottoms to the shafts and tunnels of old mines that pierce the fell sides. As he put it (in describing Honister), “there is no beauty in despoliation and devastation but there can be dramatic effect and interest and so it is here”.

    But the desolate outcrop of Black Star is not my destination and I turn left after Dubs Hut (maintained as a bothy by the Mountain Bothies Association) and climb beside a slate-filled gully to two spoil heaps where I pick up a path left, which meanders over open moorland to the summit of Fleetwith Pike. Here, one of the finest views in Lakeland awaits, looking straight down the valley over Buttermere and Crummock Water with distant Loweswater curving off to the left.

    Buttermere from Fleetwith summit
    Buttermere from Fleetwith summit

    I sit and stare at this majestic scene as I eat my lunch, then begin the plunging descent of Fleetwith Edge. It’s not nearly as daunting as it appeared from below. There are some steep rock steps to negotiate and some minor scrambling, but nothing too difficult if due care is taken. The path follows well chosen zigzags and is impossible to rush, not only because you need to watch your footing, but also because it’s absolutely necessary to pause frequently and marvel at the improving vista.

    Buttermere from Fleetwith Edge
    Buttermere from Fleetwith Edge

    Descending Fleetwith Edge
    Descending Fleetwith Edge

    At the bottom, I join the road and I’m suddenly struck by the hope that my gaitors have done their job. What if I find a bit of grit in my boot? I can’t leave AW in the car park, he hated cars.

    I look back and notice the white wooden cross low on the fell side. This marks the spot where Fanny Mercer, a servant girl from Rugby, fell from Fleetwith Edge in September 1887 (130 years ago, this month). Her simple memorial is a sobering reminder that the fells can be treacherous as well as beautiful. It’s heartbreaking to think one so young was robbed of her life on what should have been a joyful excursion.

    Fanny Mercer's cross
    Fanny Mercer’s cross

    Tragic accidents occur daily, some of much greater magnitude than the sad story of a servant girl from over a hundred years ago. And yet this simple cross remains affecting because there’s no objective yardstick for pain. That whole communities are devastated by fire, flood, disease or famine doesn’t negate the suffering of someone bruised by a failed relationship or grieving the loss of a loved one. We all have our crosses to bear, however big or small, but ironically, it’s often hardship that sharpens our senses to the beauty in the world. The most affecting songs are rooted in heartbreak and it was perhaps the pain of a loveless marriage that led Wainwright to find hope, inspiration and validation among these hills. I hope Fanny experienced a little of that wonder too, before her life was cut so abruptly short.

    “The fleeting hour of life of those who love the hills is quickly spent, but the hills are eternal. Always there will be the lonely ridge, the dancing beck, the silent forest; always there will be the exhilaration of the summits. These are for the seeking, and those who seek and find while there is still time will be blessed both in mind and body” – A Wainwright.


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