Tag Archives: Windermere

To the Shores of Lake Placid

Landscape of Liberty: from Auschwitz to Ambleside

My quest for heritage in the landscape takes me over a wintry Lingmoor Fell to the Merz Barn in Elterwater and finally to Windermere library where I learn of 300 children who survived the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz and Theresienstadt to start a new life here beside the lake. They described their journey as one “from hell to paradise”.

Lingmoor Fell

Snow clouds are forming, light as yet, smudges of soft graphite like finger blurs of a 3B pencil sketch, bunched together like blankets on an unmade bed. Through the gaps, shines an ethereal yellow light, haunting, heavenly. For an unapologetic atheist, the experience is unnervingly religious. These celestial beams spotlight the shoulders of the Langdale Pikes, illuminating bands of warm ochre between the iced granite of their snowy summits and their long skirts of winter scrub.

The Langdale Pikes
The Langdale Pikes

Ling is the Norse name for heather and Lingmoor is just that; now in January, dead foliage wraps the fell in a winter coat of chocolate. From Blea Tarn House, I climb beside a ghyll to a wall at its head, cross a stile and track the line of a fence up the slope. A further step stile leads to the summit at Brown How, and here the brutal force of the wind hits home, forty miles per hour, gusting over fifty. I’m buffeted about and struggle to retain balance.

Lingmoor Fell
Lingmoor Fell

I find a little respite in the lee of the cairn and look east to Windermere, a long slim finger of molten silver. This tranquil stretch of water shares a surprising legacy with a busier waterway I knew as a kid. In my pre-teen years, we lived near Rochester in Kent. I learnt to dinghy sail on the River Medway, in the shadow of the Royal Naval dockyard at Chatham. Cargo ships were a common hazard, their arrival invariably coinciding with a lull in wind, necessitating some frantic paddling. Forty years earlier, we’d have had something swifter to contend with. 

Windermere from Brown Haw
Windermere from Brown How
Windermere from Brown How
Windermere from Brown How

In 1937, the Short brothers began production of the Sunderland ‘Flying Boat’ at their factory near Rochester Castle. These seaplanes could land and take off from water and would play a significant role in WWII, particularly in the North Africa campaign, where they protected supply convoys sailing from the USA to Britain. In 1939, however, the Luftwaffe began targeting the Medway, and a decision was made to move production somewhere more secure. It 1941, manufacture moved to White Cross on the shore of Windermere. 

Just under half of Shorts’ Westmorland work force comprised local labourers. The rest moved up from Rochester. To house them all, a purpose-built estate of red brick bungalows was erected at Troutbeck Bridge. With asbestos roofs, indoor bathrooms and hot running water, the Calgarth Estate was modern by Lake District standards, and by 1942 it boasted a primary school, an assembly room, a club house, canteen, sick bay and two shops. It is all gone now. The Lakes School stands on the site. Indeed, Shorts’ official records were lost in a fire, and beyond a handful of official photographs and the fading memories of those they employed, little evidence remains of their tenure here.

Short Sunderland Flying Boat
Short Sunderland (photo by Canadian Forces Expired crown copyright)

My thoughts drift to another war refugee whose journey also ended here. (Sometimes, life is like a length of rope where disparate threads intertwine in unexpected ways.)

When I first moved to the South Lakes, my wife, Sandy, worked at Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal. I was a frequent visitor, and one picture never failed to arrest my attention (it still does).  It’s a tiny collage called Mier Bitte by German artist, Kurt Schwitters. 

Schwitters was born in Hanover and trained at the Dresden Academy, but in the aftermath of the First World War, everything seemed chaotic and broken, and he felt conventional modes of expression had lost their relevance. He experimented, creating collages from found objects as a way of forging new meaning from the detritus of everyday life. It was a technique he called Merz. Mier Bitte is an example: it is named for the two German words in the top right-hand corner, often taken to mean, “to me, please”.  But the phrase only looks German. The collage was made here in Langdale, and the words are just the visible portion of a label, lifted from a bottle of Yorkshire Premier Bitter.

Mier Bitte, Kurt Schwitters
Mier bitte (1945-7), Kurt Schwitters, Abbot Hall Kendal

Some of Schwitters’ earlier works incorporated wheels that turned only to the right, a commentary on the drift in German politics that would turn his life upside down. 

During their reign of terror, the Nazis murdered six million Jews. Six million. That’s more than the entire population of Scotland. But Jews were not the only victims. Anyone who didn’t fit the Führer’s blueprint for the Aryan race was marked for extermination. Alongside Jews, the Nazis murdered gypsies, the mentally and physically disabled, homosexuals, political and religious dissidents. The total death toll is estimated at between nine and eleven million.

By 1937, Hitler’s ire had turned on modern artists; he denounced them as “incompetents, cheats and madmen”. There would be no room for their kind of degeneracy in the Reich. Between July and November, the Nazi party staged an exhibition of degenerate art in Munich, where confiscated items, including works by Schwitters, were hung upside down to be ridiculed and to demonstrate to the public what should no longer be tolerated. When the Gestapo ordered Schwitters to attend an interview, he fled to Norway, and when the Germans invaded Norway, he escaped to Britain.

After months in an internment camp, Schwitters moved to London, but he never really gelled with British art establishment. In 1942, he visited Lakeland and discovered a mountain landscape that could inspire him afresh. He moved to Ambleside in 1945 and rented an old stone barn near Elterwater from a landscape gardener friend, called Harry Pierce. This would be his studio, his Merz Barn. Happy at long last, Kurt would write to a friend, “Thanks to England, we live in an idyll, and that suits me just fine. England in particular is idyllic, romantic, more so than any other country.”

Studios were never just studios for Schwitters. Ideally, they were Merzbauten: works of art in their own right, with walls, corners, ceilings and floors transformed into installations. The Langdale Merz Barn was to be his third and final incarnation of this concept. He transformed an entire wall into a large abstract sculptural relief, but that’s as far as he got. Schwitters died in 1948.

After his death, the barn fell into disrepair, but the finished wall was rescued in the 1960’s by renowned British Pop artist, Richard Hamilton. It now hangs in the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle. The Merz Barn itself was acquired by the Littoral Arts Trust in 2005, but with the onset of austerity, they suffered funding cuts, and last year, newspapers reported that the Barn had been put up for sale. I’d always intended to visit; now, it seems, I’ve missed my chance. All the same, when I get back down to the valley, I’m going to look for it. At the very least, I might be able to glimpse it from the outside.

I start a spectacular descent along Lingmoor’s western ridge. The snow hasn’t made it down this far, but the higher fells are all white capped. A drystone wall protrudes like an emaciated spine from the hide of brown heather, dropping, twisting and curving with the contours. Crinkle Crags and Bowfell form an epic  backdrop, winter-shorn of green summer cloaks to reveal gaunt Alpine profiles; the chiselled countenance of Side Pike dominates the foreground—a precipitous dome of brutal black rock.

Lingmoor Fell and Side Pike
Lingmoor Fell and Side Pike
Langdale Pikes and Side Pike
Langdale Pikes and Side Pike
Side Pike
Side Pike

The bitter wind shows no mercy. I’m battered and blown about, glad of the wall as a buffer. Reaching the col with Side Pike, I skirt the cliff on the southern side, attain the western ridge, and climb up through the crags. From the summit, Langdale looks wild, windswept, yet in this unearthly light, every bit as romantic as Schwitters asserts. When I reach the Old Dungeon Ghyll Hotel, I retrieve my car and go in search of his studio.

Merz Barn

I hardly need the deductive powers of Sherlock Holmes to find it. Opposite the Lakes Hotel is a stone wall and recessed gateway that I must have passed a hundred times, my mind too full of mountains to notice the sign.  The heavy wooden gates are shut, but a small notice says “open”. 

Beyond the gate, a dirt path curves through a small copse to a stone barn I recognise from pictures. By the door, a slate plate bears the words, “Merz Barn, Kurt Schwitters, 1947”. There is some salvaged iron machinery, and an incongruous bay window. Propped against the wall is a sign that says, “AHUMBLESHELL”.

Merz Barn, Elterwater
Merz Barn, Elterwater
Merz Barn
Merz Barn

With the principal artwork long gone, you’d be forgiven for thinking a humble shell is all that remains. But the barn has been renovated from the dilapidated state it was in when the Trust acquired it. A full-size photograph of the Merz wall stands where the original once did, so your imagination isn’t taxed in picturing it.  A photographic portrait of Schwitters stares out from the corner—his expression animated, mischievous, eccentric. It’s easy to see why this place inspired him: it’s tranquil; somewhere to soothe the trauma of forced exile; somewhere to unfetter the mind and the let the muse take hold.

Merz Barn
Merz Barn

Director, Ian Hunter, comes over to greet me.  He tells me they are in the process of commissioning a replica of the Merz wall to replace the photograph. It sounds as if the scare stories about selling up were premature.  Before I can ask,  he’s guiding me to the smaller back room with the bay window.  He calls it the Cake Room—Schwitters had intended to use it as a café.

Merz Barn
Merz Barn

Here, they’ve staged a little exhibition to mark Holocaust Memorial Day. Schwitters wasn’t Jewish, but he deeply empathised with the Jews’ plight. On one wall is a photograph of Hitler at the opening of the Degenerate Art Exhibition. Most of the space is devoted to the work of children, however, screen-grabs from episode 9 of Simon Schama’s Civilisations, which tells the story of Friedl Dicker Brandeis and the children of Theresienstadt. 

Theresienstadt was a concentration camp in Bohemia that acted as a staging post for the mass extermination centres like Auschwitz. Propaganda films portrayed it as a self-governing Jewish ghetto, where happy children played in the streets, and enjoyed pageants and sports days. But it was all a sham. As soon as the cameras stopped rolling, a brutal regime of beatings, hangings and shootings resumed; many more died of starvation and disease.

Friedl Brandeis was an art teacher. When she learned she was bound for Theresienstadt, she filled her suitcase with art materials. She spent the rest of her life surreptitiously teaching children to paint and to draw: to create better worlds into which their imaginations could escape. Brandeis was murdered at Auschwitz on 9th October 1944.  Seven months later, the Soviet army liberated Theresienstadt. When they searched the buildings, they discovered two suitcases she had hidden. They contained 4,500 pieces of art made by the children.

Friedl Dicker Brandeis
Friedl Dicker Brandeis

In Civilisations, Schama devotes time to these pictures, and the one that captivates him most is the one that holds my attention longest now. It is a striking collage of stylised white shapes—mountains and trees—mounted on a red background.  It’s the work of a young girl called Helena Mändl, and it absolutely belongs here in the Cake Room. For if you look closely at the shapes, they are cut from filing paper, replete with the remnants of columns and numbers—a discarded leaf from a ledger, perhaps. Helena has forged a landscape of liberty from the bureaucratic instruments used to administer her incarceration. Schwitters would have been proud. This is Merz.

Other paintings show boats on lakes and one depicts an open window looking out on to a mountainous terrain that could easily be Langdale. Helena didn’t survive. Very few of the children did. But for a handful, those dream landscapes were about to become a reality.

From Auschwitz to Ambleside

Seven months have passed since I visited the Merz Barn. I’m upstairs at Windermere library, viewing a small exhibition by photographer, Richard Kolker, entitled The Landscape of Auschwitz. There are no people in these monochrome shots, just the awful machinery of mass murder: a field of brick crematoria, arranged in neat rows, precise, orderly, like troops on a parade ground, cold, Teutonic, and ruthlessly efficient. The Spartan branches of leafless trees hang over railway tracks where the iron horses of the Reich carried train loads of innocents to their deaths. I’ve never been to Auschwitz, but I’ve been to Dachau, and these pictures evoke its memory: high wire fences and watchtowers; row upon row of soulless functional buildings, built for containment and execution. I remember a shower block. A large  communal room, designed to deprive its users of their dignity. They  would be herded in naked, like cattle, to be sanitised. Then the doors would lock. No water ever sprayed from the nozzles mounted in the ceiling. They were only disguised as a shower heads. This was a gas chamber.

Kolker’s pictures hang heavy with doleful atmosphere, the stifling weight of appalling memory. But if this room depicts the very worst the human race is capable of, the next room represents the best.

On the wall is a short piece written by curator, Trevor Avery. It recalls an exhibition at the Brewery Arts Centre, Kendal, in 2005 to mark the 60th anniversary of VE Day. One room was given over to Kolker’s pictures, but in another were photographs and information boards about the Flying Boats and the Calgarth Estate. It was in here that Trevor overheard two elderly gentlemen enthusiastically reminiscing about their time at Shorts. They were looking at an aerial photograph of the estate, recalling who had lived in each of the bungalows. Trevor starting chatting with them, enjoying their stories, then one of them astounded him by saying, “Of course, this is where the children from Auschwitz came.”

When the allied forces liberated the concentration camps, many of the surviving children were orphans with nowhere to go. Homes had to be found, and the British government offered to take a thousand.

On the banks of Windermere, production of the Flying Boats had ceased, and operations at White Cross were being wound up. Some of the married quarters at Calgarth were still occupied, but most of the single bungalows were free. With its school, sick bay and canteen, the estate was perfect. In August 1945, ten RAF Stirling bombers flew three hundred children from Prague to Crosby-on-Eden airfield near Carlisle. They were the survivors of Auschwitz and Theresienstadt. Buses brought them on to Calgarth which was to become their home for the next few months.

A couple of local newspapers carried the story, and the BBC wanted to make a documentary, but their carers thought it unwise. As such, it is a story little known until recently.

Since that chance conversation in 2005, Trevor Avery has devoted much effort to researching and curating the Auschwitz to Ambleside exhibition that now has a permanent home at Windermere library. Its centrepiece is a short film, narrated by Maxine Peak, in which four of those children, Minia Jay, Arek Hersh, Ben Helfgott and Jack Aizenberg, are reunited and revisit the lake to talk about their experiences

Minia explains how Josef Mengele (the Angel Of Death) devised a system to determine who would work and who would be sent to the gas chamber. She failed these assessments twice. It was only a shortage of transport that delayed her execution long enough for her to face a third. When the guards were distracted, she climbed a division and hid amongst the party that had been spared. Had she been caught, she’d have been shot.

Jewish Prisoners Arrive at Theresienstadt
Jewish Prisoners Arrive at Theresienstadt

Jack recounts a crushing cross country march from Colditz to Theresienstadt. It lasted days and they had almost nothing to eat. Anyone who lagged or weakened was shot and thrown in the ditch. They stopped at a bombed engineering works and scoured the building for food. Jack found a single dried pea. He wanted to boil it, but when he saw all the faces staring at him, he feared they might attack him, so he ate it dry, breaking it into four crumbs to make it last.

Child Survivors of Auschwitz
Child Survivors of Auschwitz

These survivors, now pensioners, describe their journey to Lakeland as a voyage from hell to paradise. They eulogise about the clean linen, the food, and the warmth and kindness they were shown. Minia recalls looking in wonder at the lake and the mountains, and someone shouting. “Good morning, beautiful day”, from their garden. Few of us will ever know just how beautiful that day was for her.

All four have gone on to lead successful lives, driven no doubt by the instincts that kept them out of the gas chambers. They all struggle to understand how they survived, but they draw strength from the fact that they have. Minia says she constantly reminds herself, “I am alive, and Hitler and Mengele are dead”.  Jack confesses he always stops in front of the frozen food section in the supermarket to look at the peas, acutely aware he could buy the whole freezer if he chose.

We live in troubling times. Far right groups are on the rise again, here, across Europe and in America. Thankfully, for now, they are fringe movements, given short shrift by ordinary decent people. Whatever our disagreements in the broad sphere of mainstream politics, we must unite in keeping it that way. In the words of Jo Cox (the Batley and Spen M.P. murdered by a man with psychiatric issues and links to an American neo-Nazi group), “we have far more in common than that which divides us.”

I feel proud that the Lake District played a small but pivotal role in changing the lives of these brave children, and I applaud the sterling work of Trevor Avery and the Lake District Holocaust Project in telling their story. It should be told. It deserves to be shouted from the roof tops. For theirs is a legacy not of hate, but of hope.

Windermere
Windermere

Exhibitions and Further Reading

Visit the Lake District Holocaust Project exhibition, “From Auschwitz to Ambleside” at Windermere library

Lake District Holocaust Project
Windermere Library
Ellerthwaite
Windermere
LA23 2AJ

Tel: 015394 88395

Website: http://ldhp.org.uk/

Visit the Merz Barn at:

The Merz Barn, Cylinders Estate, Langdale, Ambleside LA22 9JB

Telephone: 015394 37309

Website: https://merzbarnlangdale.wordpress.com/


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    Reconstruction of a Fable

    The Fairfield Horseshoe and the Skulls of Calgarth

    In which I walk the fine mountain ridges of Fairfield Horseshoe, tell the spooky story of the Calgarth skulls, bag a free beer in Rydal, become a social pariah in Ambleside, and  learn a life lesson from Laurence Fishburne.

    The Skulls of Calgarth

    As I drive through Troutbeck Bridge, I pass a sign for Calgarth Park, offering two-bedroom supported retirement apartments. Viewings are available.  I’m sure both my age and my bank balance disqualify me (although one is depressingly nearer than the other). All the same, I’d be tempted to have a peek—the building has an interesting history, and a sinister backstory.

    The house is an elegant lakeside villa—all Georgian pillars and neatly manicured lawns—overlooking Windermere. It was built by Bishop Richard Watson in 1790. In its early years, it played host to such eminent neighbours as Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge. During the First World War, it was transformed into a hospital, and later became a children’s orthopaedic unit, specialising in TB and polio.

    When Bishop Watson bought the estate, it already had a hall, but he didn’t much like the look of it. Perhaps it was the cold and austere demeanour. Perhaps he was a forerunner of Kevin McCloud’s Grand Designers and fancied something modern, handsome and hospitable. Or perhaps, he knew about the skulls.

    In the sixteenth century, a humble cottage stood on the spot. It was the home of Kraster and Dorothy Cook. They weren’t rich, but they worked hard, and they ran a productive and profitable farm.

    Living and working in such an idyllic location should have brought endless happiness, but there was a fly in the ointment. Their land was coveted by a rich and influential justice of the peace, named Myles Philipson. He was a greedy man. His estate was substantial, but it wasn’t enough. The Cooks had something he wanted, and it consumed him. He swore he’d acquire the land by any means.

    It proved harder than he thought. Money didn’t work: the Cooks were simple, honest folk, who appreciated what they had and wanted nothing more. Philipson tried bullying, but the Cooks were strong and stood firm.

    In the end, their steadfastness paid off. Philipson backed down. Indeed, it seemed he’d had a complete change of heart and deeply regretted his behaviour. To make amends, he invited them round for dinner on Christmas Eve.

    Dorothy and Kraster must have felt their troubles were over, but they were rudely awakened the next morning by soldiers demanding to search their cottage—Philipson had accused them of stealing a silver goblet. It was soon found in Dorothy’s bag—precisely where the maleficent magistrate had snuck it.

    The Cooks were arrested and imprisoned, awaiting trial. They must have been scared stiff, but they had faith in their own innocence and in the British justice system. Imagine their dismay when they entered the courtroom to find Philipson presiding.

    Philipson declared them guilty and sentenced them to death, decreeing that all their land be signed over to him as compensation. He quickly set about demolishing their cottage and building a hall on the same spot.

    From the gallows, Dorothy uttered a terrible curse: for as long as the Philipson family remained in residence, Kraster and she would haunt them night and day, and their business affairs would never prosper.

    One year later, the hall was complete and the Philipsons moved in, but any celebrations were derailed when they found two skulls on the bottom stair. They had their servants throw them out and retired to bed, but they were kept awake by a terrible screaming and wailing. When they rose in the morning, the skulls were back.

    Over the coming months, Myles had the skulls crushed, burned, buried and thrown in the lake. Whatever he tried failed: the infernal screams persisted, and every morning the skulls returned.

    Living under such a curse quickly put paid to visitors; the family became reclusive and their business affairs suffered. In the end, Myles had to sell everything but the hall to cover his debts. He bequeathed the hall to his son, but the curse remained. Only once the Philipson family quit the hall for good, did Kraster and Dorothy lie quietly in their graves.

    The Fairfield Horseshoe

    Each lake has its own character: Wastwater is feral and fiercely beautiful; Coniston, tranquil; Ullswater dark and mysterious (especially when cloud envelopes the fell tops); but Windermere has grandeur. It’s a grandeur that has little to do with her flotillas of yachts or the moneyed mansions that line her eastern shore. A daunting profile dominates her northern skyline, her head cradled by a ring of high fells, a vision of strength and drama. Dressed in snow and reflected in the long mirror of the lake, the Fairfield Horseshoe is a sight to stir the blood and quicken the heart; in the spring sunshine of this May Day Bank Holiday, its slopes are gold and green, softer than in winter but every bit as inspiring.

    I park in Ambleside and head up Nook Lane to Low Sweden Bridge, following a wide track that then winds its way up the lower reaches of Low Pike. A dry-stone wall meanders in from the left. The track swings right in search of a gentler ascent, but a narrow path handrails the wall, heading up over steeper ground to Low Brock Crag. This way signals greater adventure.

    A short and easy scramble brings me to the crest of Low Brock Crag. Windermere commands the backward view, nestling languidly in a glacial groove—long cool and periwinkle blue.

    Low Brock Crag
    Low Brock Crag

    The summit of Low Pike is further half-scramble, rising in a rocky outcrop like a bouldered earthwork, wedded to the wall, which curves away below like a castle’s outer curtain. Dropping down from this little tower, I land in its shallow moat. The ground between here and High Pike is a soggy morass. In the weeks to come, an extended heatwave will dry Lakelands’ most pervasive bogs, but for now, I have to pick my path with care.

    By the time I reach the top of High Pike, the wall is broken down in places, blending ever more closely with the crag, as if born of the mountain, it aspires to revert.

    Windermere from High Pike
    Windermere from High Pike

    High Pike
    High Pike

    After a long grassy rise, I reach Dove Crag’s summit cairn, and gaze out again over Windermere—its further reaches now visible beyond the headland, stretching out toward a white sheen of Irish Sea, blurring the distinction between earth and sky.  In February, I stood on this very spot, when snow, cloud and soft light conspired to blend lake, sky and fellside in an ambient glow of pink and white. Now the soft blue haze of imminent summer inflects the lowland, and the slopes are olive green with young bracken; shafts of sun stage shadow plays across the crags ahead.

    Windermere from Dove Crag in snow
    Windermere from Dove Crag in snow

    This ancient landscape of immutable rock is in a constant state of flux. Pinnacles, crevices, crags and gullies are thrown into sharp relief, then retreat into shadow; hues of red and yellow, mauve and purple streak fleetingly across the slopes, then blur and are swallowed again by dark recesses of green. It’s an animated impressionist painting of ever-shifting ephemera.

    Mountains are restless chameleons. As John Berger expresses it so beautifully, in Hold Everything Dear: “There are moments of looking at a familiar mountain which are unrepeatable. A question of a particular light, an exact temperature, the wind, the season. You could live seven lives and never see the mountain quite like that again; its face is as specific as a momentary glance across the table at breakfast. A mountain stays in the same place, and can almost be considered immortal, but to those who are familiar with the mountain, it never repeats itself. It has another timescale.”

    From Hart Crag and over Link Hawse to Fairfield’s rocky shoulder, the terrain grows more rugged and dramatic; precipitous crags plunge to Dovedale and Deepdale and I’m compelled to make small diversions to gain a better view.

    On reaching one of Fairfield’s summit shelters, I sip coffee from a thermos and stare over at St Sunday Crag, rising like a dinosaur across Deepdale Hause. In sun, its livery is flecked with gold and purple, and streaked with stripes of exposed stone like strips of armour plate. Captured on canvas and hung in a gallery, critics would think it a stylised exaggeration, and yet the reality is more intense.

    I head south, following the cairns down the western spine of the Horseshoe to the summit of Great Rigg.

    Great Rigg summit
    Great Rigg summit

    Between 1955 and 1966, Alfred Wainwright published his Pictorial Guides to the Lake District, a series of seven books that document 214 peaks with hand-drawn maps, pen and ink drawings, practical direction and poetic description. The series has been continuously in print, and to climb all 214 has become known as “bagging the Wainwrights”.

    The desire to bag Wainwrights now infects my judgement. Where once, I’d have been content to continue directly down the main ridge, the prospect of ticking off Stone Arthur waylays me, and I make a detour to the right, descending rapidly over ground that will all have to be regained.

    It’s not obvious where the summit is as it isn’t really summit at all, just an outcrop on the ridge—and there are several. I meet a couple who are asking themselves the same question. We alight hopefully on the first contender (hopefully, because it’s not too far down the slope—but somehow, we know this would be too easy). They check their GPS and confirm the elevation is too high. We carry on together down the incline.

     Approaching Stone Arthur
    Approaching Stone Arthur

     Approaching Stone Arthur
    Approaching Stone Arthur

    They tell me they’re attempting all the Wainwrights in a year, so the Horseshoe, with the addition of Stone Arthur, is like concocting several syllables from all the high-ranking Scrabble letters and landing on a triple word score—a grand total of nine ticked off for about eleven miles of effort.

    When we reach the proper “summit”, the vivid blue of Grasmere beguiles below.

    It’s a slog back up the slope to Great Rigg and a great relief to finally descend toward Heron Pike, with the forget-me-not fingers of Windermere and Coniston Water outstretched below. The final stretch down the pitched zigzags of Nab Scar overlooks Rydal Water, glittering like a teardrop in the green of the valley.

    Rydal Water from Nab Scar
    Rydal Water from Nab Scar

    When I reach the bottom, fatigue kicks in, and I sit on a wall above Rydal Mount, looking at a sign for the Coffin route to Grasmere (and trying not to read it as a suggestion).

    I walk on through the grounds of Rydal Hall where a girl is emptying paper plates into a bin. She looks up and smiles and says, “Do help yourself to a beer if you’d like one.”

    I pinch myself to make sure I’m not dreaming, but she’s still here, and she’s gesturing behind me, where three kegs are perched on the wall.

    “We’ve had a wedding reception but there’s some beer left over, so we thought we’d offer it to walkers. We’ve no glasses so you’ll have to make do with a jam jar—they’ve all been washed”, she explains brightly.

    I thank her and pour myself a sparkling jam jar of Jennings Cocker Hoop. We chit chat for a minute or two, then she heads back inside. As she reaches the door, she turns and says, “take it with you if you want—we don’t need the jam jar back.”

    A good cool hoppy ale never tastes better than after a long walk. Sipping this unexpected trophy, I head on down the wide Rydal-to-Ambleside path, where I pass several groups of strollers: not sweaty fell walkers now, but smartly dressed, respectable types, out for a gentle Bank Holiday peramble.

    And they’re giving me decidedly funny looks. The third time it happens, I check my flies. Then it dawns on me—I’m carrying a jam jar that’s now about a quarter full of frothy amber liquid. They think it’s a urine sample. And I’m swigging it.

    Cocker Hoop
    Cocker Hoop

    To Have or to Be

    As I drive back past Calgarth Park, I notice that the next lane is called Old Hall Road. Out of curiosity, I turn down it. After a few hundred yards the road narrows and a large sign warns, “Private Road—Keep out”.  I wonder about continuing and try to think of a cover story, but better judgement prevails.

    Later, I’ll wonder if it actually said “no access”, but “keep out” is the message I get, loud and clear, and right now this feels hostile. Perhaps it’s the apparent terseness of the wording or just the abrupt end to the freedom of the fells; or perhaps it’s the recollection of a newspaper article about the scandal of London councils selling social housing to luxury property developers. Perhaps it’s because She Drew the Gun’s Poem has been playing on the car stereo, “How long before they put up a wall and call it a private city?” But all of a sudden, the story of the Calgarth skulls seems very real.

    This is when I realise it’s not a ghost story at all but a morality tale about a man haunted to the edge of insanity by his conscience.

    In the 1970’s Erich Fromm wrote a book called To Have or to Be. He suggested people are governed by a having orientation—the desire to possess things—or a being orientation—the desire to experience things. Those of us who tread the fells have our walking boots firmly in the being camp.  (That said, perhaps our desire to bag summits and tick off Wainwrights betrays an underlying having orientation. Here, I should probably confess I got all this from an episode of CSI. I did buy the book, but I haven’t read it yet, so for now, this is coming via Laurence Fishburne.)

    While the being orientation is the likelier path to happiness, Fromm predicts that our western obsession with consumerism means the having orientation will predominate. Forty years on, we’ve already travelled a long way down that road.

    Beware the skulls.

    Find a route map and directions for this walk at https://www.walklakes.co.uk/walk_42.html


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      The Boatman’s Call

      Claife Heights and Sawrey

      The western shore of Windermere in the English Lake District was home to children’s author Beatrix Potter. Its wild uplands are also said to be haunted by the tortured spirit of a Cistercian monk, whose blood-curdling cries lured ferrymen to their doom.  On this walk through these atmospheric woods, I recount the ghostly legend and consider how Potter’s legacy stretches way beyond her enchanting books.

      The Crier of Claife

      The first rays of sun blaze blood orange through the dark skeletons of December trees, casting flame-yellow auras around their stark reflections in the pewter pool of Windermere. As the lake becomes the River Leven under the old stone parapets of Newby Bridge, these shafts of warmth conjure a mist from the tranquil surface to shroud the shores in secrecy. Eerie and arcane, the scene evokes a primeval power that the uninhabited boats and empty tables of the hotel terrace can do little to dispel. Fitting then, that my thoughts should turn to the supernatural.

      Newby Bridge First Light
      Newby Bridge First Light

      On Windermere’s eastern shore a long line of grand lakeside residences gives way to the honey pots of Bowness and Ambleside. By contrast, the western shore is wild and remote; and supposedly, haunted.

      It is said that the wooded uplands of Claife Heights imprison the troubled ghost of a Cistercian monk from Furness Abbey. His quest was to save the souls of immoral women but the temptations of the flesh overthrew the aspirations of the spirit and he fell madly in love with one of his charges, abandoning his vows and pursuing her to Claife. She shunned his advances and the rejection destroyed him. He spent the rest of his days wandering the Heights wailing in anguish. When his weakening body gave up the ghost, it proved to be one the grave could not contain, and his tortured soul continued to haunt the woods with riven wails.

      Newby Bridge
      Newby Bridge

      Fearing no good could come from a meeting with the spectral Crier of Claife, the ferrymen of Bowness chose to ignore his blood-chilling summons whenever they came echoing across the lake after dark. But eventually, a young recruit arrived who laughed at their superstition. Whether out of bravado or a noble concern that the plaintive cries might belong to the living, the fearless newcomer heeded the call and set out across the choppy waters.

      When he returned, his boat held no passenger – at least none the mortal eye could see. But he was fatally deranged: his eyes wide in terror, his brain apparently fried and his powers of speech utterly lost – all he could manage was to shake and sob in abject fear. He died two days later without ever regaining the power to describe what he saw.

      Naturally this raised considerable alarm among the locals and another monk was summoned from Lady Holme island to perform an exorcism. As darkness fell and the howls once more sent shivers down the spines of the ferrymen, the monk rowed out with a bible and a bell. The demented spirit proved a powerful adversary and, despite his best efforts, the monk was unable to exorcise the ghoul completely, but he did succeed in confining it to an old quarry where he compelled it to stay until such a day “as men walk dry shod across Windermere”.

      Furness Abbey and Bekan’s Revenge

      The fate of the Crier’s monastic brethren was equally dark. According to the history books, Henry VIII laid waste to Furness Abbey and seized its lands during the dissolution of the monasteries. In John Pagen White’s 1853 poem – The Rooks of Furness – however, the seeds of monks’ doom were sown centuries before.

      Furness Abbey
      Furness Abbey

      The abbey was built in the dale of Bekan’s Ghyll, so called for a Norse sorcerer, whose bones lie buried in the earth and whose name was originally given to the herb with which the valley abounds. The herb, better known as Deadly Nightshade, is a toxic hallucinogen associated with both witchcraft and medicine. According to the poem, it was once sweet-tasting and benign, but its roots and fibre were entwined with Bekan himself. When the monks began to harvest the plant, they disturbed the sleeping sorcerer. He wrought his revenge by turning its taste bitter and endowing it with poisonous qualities:


      “Witchery walked where all had been well:
      Well with Monk, and well with maid
      That sought the Abbey for solace and  aid.
      But the lethal juices wrought their spell:
      One by one was rung their knell:
      One by one from choir and cell
      They floated up with a hoarse farewell;
      And the altars fell, and the Abbey bell
      Was hush’d in the Deadly Nightshade Dell.”

      Furness Abbey built over Bekan's Ghyll
      Furness Abbey built over Bekan’s Ghyll

      The souls of the monks are said to inhabit the rooks that caw continually from the trees that surround their ruined monastery.

      Beatrix Potter

      By the time I reach Ash Landing beside the Claife ferry terminal, the sun has risen and the western woods have lost their menace. Now the trees are bathed in dappled sunlight and the forest floor is a carpet of red and ochre leaves. The lake is a cool expanse of blue.

      Ash Landing Windermere
      Ash Landing Windermere

      As I cross the fields by St Peter’s church, the ground is crisp and white with frost. Dark and troubling images recede before the winter sun and make way for the kind of enchanting whimsy associated with the parish’s most famous past resident, Beatrix Potter. As I enter Near Sawrey, her house, Hilltop, is on the left, its garden straight from the pages of Peter Rabbit.

      Across the fields to Sawrey
      Across the fields to Sawrey

      Just past the pub I turn right down a lane between cottages and on to the bridleway to Claife. After a gentle ascent the idyllic expanse of Moss Eccles Tarn appears. This was one of Beatrix Potter’s favourite spots; in fact she loved it so much, she bought the land. An information board displays her memoir of a romantic summer evening spent in a boat on its calm waters with her husband, William.

      Beatrix Potter's House, Hill Top at Near Sawrey
      Beatrix Potter’s House, Hill Top at Near Sawrey

      It would be easy to imagine Potter leading a charmed life of privilege, spending her days sketching animals and writing children’s stories. In reality she fought hard for her independence. As a gifted natural historian, she battled a scientific establishment that would give her no platform because she was a woman. She weathered the disapproval of her family and devoted herself to farming and conservation. Her stewardship of the Lakeland landscape and its indigenous Herdwick sheep won her much respect.

      When she died she left nearly all her land to the National Trust and it was her bequest that made it possible to preserve much of the area that now constitutes the Lake District National Park.

      A little further up the track, the magnitude of her legacy unfolds as the gentle countryside gives way to sweeping Lakeland grandeur, the mighty Wetherlam rising dramatically  across Wise Een Tarn with Crinkle Crags, Bow Fell and the Langdales arcing round to its right.

      Claife Heights

      I follow the track up into the woods, past a tarn and out into the open once more. As the track bends round to the left, I turn right to follow the way-marked footpath that leads all the way back through the wooded slopes to Ash Landing on the lake shore.

      I miss the sign pointing uphill to the trig point (apparently it’s a little overgrown), but find a track that runs beneath the summit instead. This route at least allows short detours through the trees to glimpse beautiful vistas of Belle Isle and the lake with its flotillas of moored yachts. Soon enough, I pick up the signposts to the ferry which confirm I’m back on track.

      Windermere from Claife Heights
      Windermere from Claife Heights

      Eventually, a steep descent leads down through the trees to a ruined tower. Imagination fires and I wonder if this is where the ferryman faced the Crier. Alas, the notion is a fanciful one; this is the Claife Viewing Station, built in 1790 to provide the first wave of Lakeland tourists with a purpose-built platform from which to marvel at the magnificence of Windermere. It fell into disrepair in the 1900’s but has been rescued and recently reopened by the National Trust who have restored its coloured glass window panes, which give filtered views of the lake suggesting how its appearance might vary with the seasons.

      Claife Viewing Station
      Claife Viewing Station

      But the tower may have something in common with the spook after all. In her fine blog on Cumbrian history, Diane McIlmoyle makes a strong case for the story of the Claife Crier being a 19th century concoction, perhaps, like the viewing station, intended to attract tourists. Read Diane’s full post here:

      The Claife Crier: Windermere’s famous spook

      However, even Diane concedes the tale was probably stitched together from fragments of older stories. If this is true, the question still remains: did something sinister happen here centuries ago that terrified the locals and could not be easily explained away?

      Claife Viewing Station
      Claife Viewing Station

      In the midday sunshine, these woods look pretty and inviting, but in a few hours time as the light dies and the colours drain; and the temperature plummets and wind picks up a pace, whipping through the hidden hollows and around the stark silhouettes of trees, making all manner of ungodly noises, you’d be forgiven for experiencing a quickening of the pulse and a shiver down the spine. And should the mist roll in, you might just find yourself glancing anxiously lakewards, hoping to catch a glint or a shimmer or some reassurance that a  great body of water is still out there as a barrier to men walking dry shod across Windermere.