Tag Archives: Cumbria

Fell Walk, General, Ghost Story, Lake District, Legend, Literature, Mountains

Troubled Waters – The Unquiet Graves of Coniston

September 24, 2023 George Kitching 12 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

The Giant and the Bower Maiden

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

The Lonely Dell of the Tarns (Tarn Hows)

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Spirit of a Smuggler

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

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

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

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

Black Crag Trig Point and Coniston Water

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Druid and the Immortal Raven of Dow Crag

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

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

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

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

Fell Walk, General, History, Lake District, Literature, Mountains, Natural History, Nature, Scramble

The Savage Temple at the Heart of Scafell

July 23, 2023 George Kitching 26 Comments

Wainwright compared Scafell Crag to a great cathedral where a man may lose all his conceit. I set off for Lord’s Rake and the West Wall Traverse with Wainwright archivist, Chris Butterfield and Lakeland Routes author, Richard Jennings to rediscover a sense of awe, experience the spiritual power of savage places and ponder whether we all need to reconnect with the sublime.

Cults of Nature

Norman Nicholson called it a cult of nature. Even at this early hour, a long line of pilgrims snakes up the grassy zig zags to Lingmell Col, above which the boulder field awaits: the desolate rocky desert at the summit of England’s highest mountain—Scafell Pike.

The author looking up at Mickledore Pikes Crag, Great Gable and the Lingmell Col path in the background - photo by Chris Butterfield — The author looking up at Mickledore; Pikes Crag, Great Gable & the Lingmell Col path in the background – photo by Chris Butterfield

All this began with a book. Until the late 1700’s, no-one visited Lakeland for pleasure. It was seen as a savage wilderness. Then in 1756, Edmund Burke published A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, in which he ascribed aesthetic taste to two fundamental instincts: self-propagation and self-preservation. All objects perceived by the senses appealed in some degree to one or other of these. Objects that were pleasing and gentle, suggesting comfort and safety, appealed to the instinct of self-propagation, those that were great and vast, suggesting fear and wonder aroused the instinct of self-preservation. The category of things that appealed significantly to the instinct of self-propagation, he called the Beautiful; the category that aroused the instinct of self-preservation, he called The Sublime.

The Sublime inspired the Picturesque movement in art. Suddenly, gentle pastoral scenes and sylvan idylls were out of fashion and savage wildernesses were in vogue. Apostles of the Picturesque like William Gilpin and Thomas Gray visited Lakeland and published accounts of their travels, exaggerating the height of the mountains and peppering their prose with heady hyperbole—the crags were terrible (in the literal sense of terror-inducing), and the towering heights were awful. They had found a sublime landscape—one that could shock and awe, and their early guidebooks fanned flames of interest.

Then came the Romantics. For the Lake Poet, William Wordsworth, the rugged integrity of the dalesmen and their close harmony with nature offered a panacea for all the ills industrialisation and urban living had inflicted on society. Gray never ventured much further than the Jaws of Borrowdale and thought the idea of climbing Skiddaw comically impossible, but Coleridge narrowly escaped death descending Scafell’s hazardous Broad Stand and experienced a religious-like rapture at having survived. William Hutchinson had described Wasdale as a valley infested by wildcats, foxes, martins, and eagles, but for Wordsworth, “no part of the country is more distinguished by sublimity”.

As the Victorians flocked to Lakeland so their relationship with the fells became more physical. Climbing Skiddaw became a must, and the more adventurous embraced rock-climbing. Owen Glynne Jones published a hugely popular book, Rock Climbing in the English Lake District, which remains a vibrant distillation of the dashing spirit of the age.

For Nicholson, these cults of nature are “symptoms of a diseased society, a consumptive gasp for fresh air”. They have arisen “because modern man has locked himself off from the natural life of the land, because he has tried to break away from the life-bringing, life-supporting rhythms of nature, to remove himself from the element that sustains him, in fact, he has become a fish out of nature.” But this is not only a sign of disease, “it is also a sign of health—a sign, at least, that man guesses where the remedy might be found.”

Krampus

It’s nearly 50 years since Nicholson published The Lakers, his insightful history of those early Lakeland writers, yet hordes still flock to these hills. Scafell Pike has become a bucket list must for YouTubers, Instagram photo op’ers, and charity-eventers, all faithfully following the crowd, checking social media as they go, some streaming Spotify, some carrying beers and disposable BBQ’s for summit parties… and amid this hubbub, I can’t help wondering whether we’ve forgotten what it is we came here for.

My misgivings run deeper than the litter and the wildfire risk, although these are increasingly alarming. In On Sacred Ground, the second of two beautifully written books documenting a genuinely awe-inspiring walk of 7000 miles through from the southern tip of Italy to Norway’s northern cape, Andrew Terrill describes how, in Salzburg, he stumbles on Krampusnacht, a gruesome Halloween-like parade of horned monsters roaming the streets, striking delighted terror into the crowds of wide-eyed children.

“Krampus has inhabited Austrian folklore for centuries. The creature originated thousands of years ago in pagan rituals as a horned wilderness god. In medieval times, Christianity appropriated them, inserting them into religious plays as servants of the Devil. By the seventeenth century, Krampusse found themselves paired inextricably with Saint Nicholas, and celebrations on Saint Nicholas Day soon featured saint and monster side by side, the evil Krampus a useful tool for convincing doubters to follow a righteous path.”

“I found myself wondering what effect Krampus would have had on my own childhood. I hadn’t thought much about wild nature while growing up in suburban London. I’d barely known it existed…

“The culture I’d been raised within insisted that I was separate from nature and above it; that it existed for my use. But the threat of Krampus might have helped me question that, might have hinted at my true place in the natural order of things. It might have reminded me that nature could never be controlled. That it deserved great respect. Perhaps it was something the human race needed too, and desperately; a critical reminder that wild nature would run rampage and devour us all if we stepped too far out of line.”

The Roaring Silence

The sublime is all about escaping the trappings of civilisation and facing the savage grandeur of the wilderness, reminding ourselves we are a tiny grain of sand on a vast shore with towering cliffs and pounding waves; it means feeling humbled and insignificant in the face of something so ancient and immense. And yet, here we are venturing into it brandishing all the trappings of the modern world like shields to keep Krampus at bay.

As John Pepper writes in Cockley Beck, one of the keys to fully engaging with the exhilarating wonders of nature is to shut off the noise of everyday living, and yet (even in 1984) we’d come to think of such a roaring silence as an existential threat.

‘”Anything for a quiet life,’ we sighed, and filled it with noise. The racket we engineered to escape from ourselves was more too than the relentless product of transistors, hi-fis, TVs, videos, one-arm bandits, space invaders, pubs, parties, theatres, musical events, football matches and all the other forms of popular entertainment. It was the shrieking of newspaper headlines and advertisement hoardings, high fashion, low fashion, modern architecture, paperback jackets and political panaceas.

“It was the ‘buzz’ we got from alcohol, drugs, coffee, tea and flattery; from gurus and meditation. The excitement of screaming at one’s wife, of gossip, and watching our cities in flames. The sound of our wheels and wings speeding us from nowhere to nowhere but sparing us the exigencies of having to be somewhere. It was the garbled silences administered by Valium. The graffiti over our walls, the two fingers everywhere thrust in the air… A man on the top of Scafell, plugged into ‘The Archers’”.

Wainwright: an Apostle of the Sublime

Yet awe is all around on the path to the Roof of England. We just need to put our phones in airplane mode, leave our earbuds at home, step away from the crowd, fall silent, and drink it all in. And if you really want spiritual transcendence, take a detour off the beaten path where it veers left for Lingmell Col…

“By going forward, a profound hollow is entered amongst a litter of boulders and scree fallen from the enclosing crags. The surroundings are awesome. Pikes Crag soars into the sky on the left, ahead is the gap of Mickledore, topping long fans of scree and rocky debris, and towering on the right the tilted cliffs of Scafell Crag dominate the scene and seem to threaten collapse. This grim fastness is Hollow Stones, and its deep confinement between high and near-vertical walls of rock will make sufferers from claustrophobia and others of timid disposition decidedly uncomfortable.”

Scafell Crag and Shamrock from across the scree of Hollow Stones

The words are those of Alfred Wainwright, whose Pictorial Guides continue to inspire legions of fellwalkers. Of Hollow Stones, Wainwright penned perhaps the perfect expression of the Sublime…

“A man may stand on the lofty ridge of Mickledore, or in the green hollow beneath the precipice amidst the littered debris and boulders fallen from it, and witness the sublime architecture of buttresses and pinnacles soaring into the sky, silhouetted against racing clouds or, often, tormented by writhing mists, and, as in a great cathedral, lose all his conceit. It does a man good to realise his own insignificance in the general scheme of things, and that is his experience here.”

Scafell Crag: The Pinnacle and Pisgah Buttress from the top of Deep Gill

At the conclusion to his final Pictorial Guides, AW lists his six best Lakeland mountains. Number one is Scafell Pike; curiously, its sibling, Scafell doesn’t make the list. And yet for all the magnificence of Pikes Crag and Pulpit Rock, Wainwright wasn’t looking at the Pike when he wrote than beatific paragraph, he was facing Scafell.

“The most formidable of these natural bastions is Scafell Crag which towers in supreme majesty above a stony hollow in the fellside: a vertical wall of clean rock some 500 ft high, divided by gullies into five buttresses, the whole appearing to be totally unassailable…

“The aspect of the Crag from below is intimidating, even frightening, and it is so palpably impossible for common or garden mortals to scale that none dares venture up the rocks from the safe ground at the foot, readily acknowledging that those who do so are a superior breed. But Nature has provided a breach in the defences of the Crag by which active walkers may gain access to its innermost secrets, make intimate acquaintance with magnificent and spectacular rock scenery, and emerge unscathed at the top: an achievement earned only by arduous effort and much expenditure of energy. This is the only route on Scafell Crag where walkers can tread safely without encountering serious climbing and without danger to life and limb. Lord’s Rake and the West Wall Traverse are special privileges of the fellwalker and make him feel that perhaps he is not too inferior after all.” (Fellwalking with Wainwright).

Whatever his head counselled, Wainwright’s heart belonged to Scafell Crag. I’m here with Chris Butterfield, a Wainwright archivist who has amassed a vast collection of the author’s books, letters, sketches, and printing materials, and our friend Richard Jennings, who runs the brilliant Lakeland Routes website. Chris has climbed Scafell before, but never by Lord’s Rake and the West Wall Traverse, and he has come here today in search of awe.

A Pagan Place: Lord’s Rake and the West Wall Traverse

Chris looks puzzled as Richard leaves the rough path to Mickledore and starts up a stiff fan of scree, heading for what looks like an impenetrable wall of crag. Wainwright’s breach in the defences is concealed from view, making the act of striking out for Shamrock a fitting leap of faith. The gradient is steeper than it first appears, and the scree is loose and shifts easily underfoot. Ahead the soaring wall appears to grow taller with every step. At its centre is the Scafell Pinnacle. In 1898, O. G. Jones and G. T. Walker broke climbing convention by shunning cracks and gullies and heading straight up its rock face. Five years later, an attempt to do something similar lead to the deaths of R. W. Broadrick, A. E. W. Garrett, H. L. Jupp, and S. Ridsdale. As we climb beside the foot of Shamrock, an unobtrusive cross carved into the rock comes into focus. It is a humble memorial to these four men, a cenotaph, standing not in a mossy graveyard but on the mountain where they fell—the ground they considered hallowed.

The cross at the foot of Lord's Rake — The cross at the foot of Lord’s Rake

As we near the cross at the base of the Pinnacle, the sham dissolves. Proximity reveals what the angle of approach had kept concealed— like the parting of the Red Sea, a navigable channel appears between these tidal waves of rock—a steep scree and boulder strewn gully separating Scafell Crag from its illusory shoulder, Shamrock. Here is Wainwright’s breach in the defences—this is Lord’s Rake.

Chris and Richard ascending Lord's Rake — Chris and Richard ascending Lord’s Rake

We start up this wild craggy corridor, clinging to its jagged walls in forlorn hope of solid footing. Halfway up, a striking feature appears on the left—a chockstone blocks the entrance to Deep Gill creating a cave, vivid green with moss, flanked with scales of slate, like a gaping reptilian mouth. Deep Gill is the inner sanctum of Wainwright’s great cathedral, and this is its gatehouse, but the way in is a rock climb above the chockstone, mere mortals like us must settle for a side entrance, albeit one of immense grandeur.

The cave in Deep Gill above the chockstone of the first — A second cave lies above the first in Deep Gill. Its first two pitches are rock climbs

The top of the first section of the Rake is littered with large boulders, the remains of a larger chockstone that fell and shattered in 2016. If you scramble the boulders, you can follow the Rake through four more distinct sections, two descents and two more ascents (all striking though none as dramatic as this first). However, to do so would be to enter the nave of the great cathedral and walk straight out into the cloisters. To approach the altar, means climbing out of the nave into the chancel. A faint trod forms a natural staircase up the left wall. Richard leads the way up on to the West Wall Traverse—a footpath along a slender shelf above Deep Gill, which rises to meet the Traverse.

Chris and Richard pause for breath by the boulders at the top of the 1st section of Lord's Rake — Chris and Richard pause for breath by the boulders at the top of the 1st section of Lord’s Rake

Richard leads the way onto the West Wall Traverse below the towering Pinnacle – photo by Chris Butterfield

Here, eyes are compelled upward to the imperious tower of the Pinnacle. Wainwright’s simile of a great cathedral captures the sudden soaring rush of awe and wonder it instils; but to me this is a pagan place—a colossal savage temple. The Pinnacle looks like a vast hooded hawk—an immense stone idol, humbling the beholder. As you steal along the Traverse in hushed reverence, it only appears to grow in stature, until eventually you see how the cleft of Jordon Gap separates it from the muscular mass of Pisgah Buttress.

The last pitch of Deep Gill is an easy scramble. In trying to maintain three points of contact, I’m given a stinging reminder of why this volcanic rock was highly prized for Stone-Age axe heads. I slice my finger on a razor-sharp stone. It’s a paper cut but enough for Chris to spot my trail of blood on the scree. I hope Krampus will be placated with this offering and not demand a greater sacrifice.

The wall at the end of gill is not high but looks green and slippery, only when you’re right in front of it does a hidden exit appear on your left—an easy haul over a rock step and out through a dry channel. We track round the head of the Gill to feast our eyes on the magnificent spectacle of Deep Gill Buttress, the west wall of the gill, rising imperiously from the ravine to the majestic summit of Symonds Knott.

The Pinnacle and Pisgah Buttress from the ground above Deep Gill — The Pinnacle and Pisgah Buttress separated by the Jordan Gap

Deep Gill Buttress rising from the depths of Deep Gill

A slender grassy shoulder leads to Pisgah Buttress, and we pull ourselves up the rocks to its top. Across the plunging ravine, the West Wall looks even more monumental, and to our right across the cleft of Jordan Gap is the summit of the Pinnacle. I lack the climbing skills to make the sheer descent and re-ascent, but it is thrilling to stand so close. I spy the modest cairn on its summit and recall O. G. Jones’s mention of a tobacco tin stashed discretely below it, in which Victorian climbers left their calling cards. I wonder if it still there. Chris is gazing around enrapt. The view of Great Gable is astounding.

The summit of the Pinnacle from Pisgah Buttress

The author on Pisgah Buttress – photo by Richard Jennings

The Savage Temple and the Roof of England

Wainwright declared, “The face of Scafell Crag is the grandest sight in the district, and if only the highest point of the fell were situated on the top of Deep Gill Buttress, perched above the tremendous precipices of stone, it would be the best summit of all”. The fact that Symonds Knott is not the summit, and the real summit is offset, somewhat removed from this sublime drama, was a disappointment to him, and the fact that much of the rest of Scafell lacks the awe-inspiring majesty at its heart, is perhaps why Wainwright, the accountant, the objective quantifier, marked it down in relation to its marginally higher sibling. But for Wainwright the poet, the romantic, the eloquent apostle of the sublime, this “towering rampart of shadowed crags” is “the greatest display of natural grandeur in the district, a spectacle of massive strength and savage wildness… an awesome and humbling scene.”

Chris has an early draft of AW’s Fellwalking with a Camera. It contains a page on the West Walk Traverse which was dropped from the final publication (much against Wainwright’s wishes) as the photograph was slightly out of focus. In the text he describes Deep Gill as “the most enthralling place in Lakeland”.

We wander back to the head of the gill from where Wainwright sketched the Pinnacle and Pisgah Buttress, including himself bottom right as “the Oracle”. Last year Chris published a book called Wainwright Memories in which he takes Andrew Nicol, Wainwright’s publisher back to the scenes of several photoshoots and retraces a holiday the pair took with their wives in Scotland. Andrew had the unenviable task of persuading AW to cooperate with publicity initiatives, but he soon learned to broach such matters the right way, and a deep respect and friendship grew between the two men. The book is a warm, touching, and nostalgic insight into that friendship. One of its themes involves recreating old photographs from the Scottish trip and Lakeland locations, with Andrew looking remarkably unchanged and Chris or his wife Priscilla, or her sister, Angela, or Angela’s husband, Glenn standing in for AW or Betty or Andrew’s wife, Bernice. We are certainly not going to let Chris get away without recreating Wainwright’s iconic Deep Gill sketch now. Richard takes charge, fishing out a copy of The Southern Fells and painstakingly arranging Chris’s position.

Chris recreates Wainwright’s iconic sketch – photo by Richard Jennings

Once done, and after a brief visit to the true summit, we pick our way down the eroded scree of a natural amphitheatre to the puddle that is Foxes Tarn, then scramble down its gully to ascend Mickledore from the Eskdale side. After gazing in hushed reverence at the “the sublime architecture of buttresses and pinnacles soaring into the sky”, we venture back through Hollow Stones, to join the hordes descending the “tourist route” from Scafell Pike.

I understand why AW cited Scafell Pike as number one on his list of six best Lakeland mountains. There is something special about the feeling that you are standing on the Roof of England—the nation’s highest ground. I remember being there in the golden light of a winter afternoon, with snow on the ground and the low sun bathing Yeastyrigg Crags and Bowfell in an ethereal amber glow. Despite the biting cold, everywhere emanated a magical warmth. It felt like hallowed ground.

And yet, it was only when I turned my head that my pulse truly quickened. Scafell had fallen into shadow, and across Mickledore, Scafell Crag reared like a mighty black tower, fierce and intimidating, the realm of Krampus—a savage temple at the sublime heart of Lakeland.

Whiskey Man: Lanty Slee – a Legend of Langdale

March 19, 2023 George Kitching 16 Comments

Wainwright described the square mile between Tilberthwaite and Langdale as “one of the loveliest in Lakeland”. In the 1800’s it was home to a notorious bootlegger, famed for his ingenuity, audacity, and ability to outwit the authorities. I walk from Rhunestone Quarry, over Holme Fell, to Tarn Hows on the trail of Lanty Slee.

Mountain Dew

Over Little Langdale Tarn, Lingmoor extends a long flank, dressed in the earthy tones of winter scrub—ochre, umber, and maroon. Where its slopes fall to Blea Tarn, the shadowy Langdale Pikes rise like rough-hewn turrets, carved from the bedrock by elemental forces. To the northeast, low-lying cloud conspires to paint the curve of the Fairfield Horseshoe as the rim of a mighty volcano, plumes of white mist belching from its crater like ash and steam.

The illusion is fitting as these ancient hills were indeed spewed from the vent of a submarine volcano somewhere in the vicinity of the Scafells, then transported, submerged, compacted, pressured, exposed, and sculpted by the relentless effects of tectonic shifts, ice, and water over hundreds of millennia. As Ian Jackson explains so well in his book, Cumbria Rocks, it was this very journey that formed the rippling patterns which make Coniston green slate so alluring. They are the swirling imprint of tides and waves, the watermarks of the deep Ordovician ocean that once covered these hills.

Two centuries ago, quarrying here in Tilberthwaite was rife, excavating fellsides already peppered with copper mine levels, and creating the landscape that Wainwright described as “pierced and pitted with holes—caves, tunnels, shafts and excavations”. But these scars are not a blot. To quote Wainwright again: “Wetherlam is too vast and sturdy to be disfigured and weakened by man’s feeble scratchings… The square mile of territory between Tilberthwaite Gill and the Brathay is scenically one of the loveliest in Lakeland (in spite of the quarries) and surely one of the most interesting (because of the quarries)”.

Behind me, Rhunestone quarry on Betsy Crag has gouged a long gully in the fellside. After decades of disuse, nature is slowly reclaiming this cross-section, softening its splintered sides with speckles of lichen and sprouting foliage from its fissures. A grass walkway divides the gully into two distinct pits. The crumbled remains of buildings nestle beneath walls of stacked spoil, and a long flat slab provides the roof of an arch, the gateway to the higher reaches of the upper pit. But it’s this pit’s lower reaches that have drawn me here, for during a short spell in the mid 1800’s, they produced more than slate. I scramble down a grassy bank, and climb with care down a loose and shifting bed of slippery spoil, damp with morning dew. And I smile at the thought, because Morning Dew (or Mountain Dew) had another meaning here.

In the very bottom, lies a small opening, a cave entrance, crowned with mossy grass and overhung with the spindly branches of a rowan. It’s pitch dark inside, but torchlight reveals a sunken floor submerged in emerald water. In times gone-by, any water collected here would have been distilled into something altogether more potent, for in the tight confines of this cave, Lanty Slee made Mountain Dew.

Lanty Slee was a notorious bootlegger, and Mountain Dew or Morning Dew was slang for his whiskey—although to place an order you supposedly had to enquire whether he’d had a good crop of “tatties” (potatoes). He started operating in a small way in the early 1820’s, and by 1840, he was producing 400 to 500 gallons a year and supplying a good many residents of the Langdale, Tilberthwaite, Yewdale, and Colwith area—much to the consternation of the excise men whose duty it was to shut him down. To evade their clutches, his whiskey-still was constantly on the move, and several quarries and cottages in the area claim to have hosted it for a while.

Little Langdale and Fairfield Horseshoe over Lanty Slee's Cave — Little Langdale and Fairfield Horseshoe over Lanty Slee’s Cave

Tee-total in Tilberthwaite

Indeed, last year as I was returning from a fell walk and approaching one such cottage, a scene reminiscent of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner unfolded—a gentleman with a “long grey beard and glittering eye” stopped me with a quizzical expression and engaged me in conversation. His was not a dark story of superstition and ancient curses, however, he was extremely convivial and excited to know which peaks I had visited. As a former fellwalker and quarryman, he was full of warm nostalgia for the higher ground, and when I admired his cottage, the conversation got really intriguing.

“Oh, I’ve had those history types round,” he said. “They reckon it’s where Lanty Slee had one of his stills. See those steps over there. There were pipes and all sorts under there, and the floor’s been concreted, but you can tell it’s moved. I’d love to know what used to be down there.”

In 1841, a similar cottage gave up its secret. On the 2^nd October, the Kendal Mercury reported:

“On Tuesday last the Exciseman, having received information of a still being at work, proceeded with the Hawkshead police to a lonely cottage at Tilberthwaite, five miles from Hawkshead, the residence of Lancelot Slee to search for a hidden store, and after a careful examination they discovered the place of the works in a vault excavated under the stable, the entrance to which was by a trap-door at the head of the stall, under the horse’s fore feet.

The stall was kept well filled with straw, and if Lanty had occasion to go in or come out, he had nothing to do but to call the horse by name, and repeat the necessary word, and the docile animal would instantly stand off, or rise up, for the free ingress or egress of his master. The flue of the boiler was ingeniously carried underground into the chimney of the cottage.”

According to the Westmorland Gazette:

“All the traps were hoisted off to Ambleside, whiskey and all; and it is supposed that there were some of the strongest spirits that ever were made, for those that only smelled were sent half sensover. It is said that a Tee-total Society is going to be commenced by the mountaineers, for they say that they can be as good temperance chaps as any when Lanty’s whiskey is done, and he must make no more.”

Whatever they told the reporter, the dalesmen had other ideas. When the seizure of another Lanty’s stills made the papers, twelve years later, The Gazette’s Sawrey correspondent recalled what had happened previously: “A few years ago, when the worm and the still had been taken, and were lodged at Ambleside, a party of dalesmen went by night, broke into the warehouse that contained the apparatus, and, on the proprietor returning from a six month’s sojourn at the tread-mill, he was presented with his much-loved and valuable engines.” Another report suggests this pattern of events had happened at least three times before.

Hodge Close and Holme Fell

From Rhunestone quarry, I double back to the Tilberthwaite/Langdale track and take the footpath that skirts Moss Rigg Wood, detouring into the trees to take a look at Moss Rigg quarry. This is the rumoured location of another of Lanty’s stills. Great walls of chiselled slate rise like cubist sculptures from a deep pit lined with spoil. A screen of garnet and ginger twig—larch and silver birch—softens the angular stone, as nature, here too, reclaims what’s hers.

Beyond the wood, the path brings me to Slater bridge over the Brathay, which Wainwright describes as “the most picturesque footbridge in Lakeland, a slender arch constructed of slate from the quarries and built to give the quarrymen a shorter access from their homes”.

Two thirds of a mile from Stang End, I come to Hodge Close, where old quarry buildings have been repurposed as holiday lets, the Old Riving Shed still named for its former function. Here quarried boulders, known as clog, would be split along lines of weakness, called bate, by rivers working with hammer and chisel.

A few yards further on, the ground drops away dramatically to Tilberthwaite’s most celebrated and visited quarry pit. Sheer walls of slate, iron-red with haematite, plunge to a deep pool of copper green. A charcoal grey tunnel opening sits just above the water line like a huge skeletal eye socket. This feature has given rise to the name, Skull Cave, for when photographed along with its reflection in the water and the image turned on its side, the scene resembles a skull. The resemblance doesn’t stop there. From inside the cave, another opening, less prominent from above, resembles a second eye socket, and the narrow pillar of rock dividing them becomes a nose, giving the impression of standing inside a giant stone skull. No doubt these macabre illusions helped in the cave’s selection for location filming in Netflix serial, The Witcher.

Beyond the pit, a path leads up through the trees, past disused reservoirs, to the flanks of Holme Fell, its lower contours feathered with auburn-branched larches and tinted ginger with rusted bracken; its craggier tops are dressed in chocolate waistcoats of winter heather, like the fleeces of Herdwick yearlings. Norman Nicholson once described the Yewdale Fells as “vicious crags, not very high, but fanged like a tiger”. The image extends to their next-door-neighbour. Holme Fell’s southern face plunges to Yewdale in a series of steep rocky drops: Raven Crag, Calf Crag, Long Crag, and Ivy Crag; but if these are the bared teeth of an alpha predator, the gentle approach from the north is a stroll up the soft nape of its neck. The top of its head is the finest of viewpoints for a landscape washed in the earthen tones of winter: clay red, ochre, russet and charcoal, and hatched grey with spoil. Coniston Water snakes southwestward like a sliver of molten silver; the Langdale Pikes are a slate-grey castle, conjured from Middle Earth; and the old reservoir sparkles like a sapphire amongst the scrub.

Herdwicks and Mrs Heelis

A scramble down the summit rocks leads to the subsidiary peak of Ivy Crag, and a descent to Yew Dale Tarn, nestled below the trees of Harry Guards Wood. I pass Yewdale Farmhouse, with its seventeenth century spinning gallery, used for drying Herdwick wool. The farm was bequeathed to the National Trust by Herdwick Breed Association President-Elect, Mrs Heelis, better-known beyond these parts as Beatrix Potter.

Across the road, a path climbs through the trees beside the crystal cascades of Tom Heights—a hypnotic dance of wood and waterfall. At the top is Tarn Hows, landscaped by the Marshall family in the 1800’s. Along with Yew Tree Farm, it was part of the Monk Coniston estate, which Beatrix Potter bought from the Marshalls on behalf of the National Trust. Once the Trust had raised sufficient funds, it purchased part of the estate from her, but kept her on as estate manager, which led to some colourful clashes with their land agent. Beatrix bequeathed them the remainder in her will. Today, Tarn Hows is one of Lakeland’s top attractions, but for all its serene waters and arboreal splendour, it’s not my primary destination this afternoon. I’m still on Lanty’s trail and a little further up the Cumbria Way lies High Arnside Tarn. Its waters are a draw for anglers, but around 1853, they may have had another use too.

Contraband in Colwith

That year, the seizure of another of Lanty’s stills again made the papers. On Saturday 26^th of March, the Westmorland Gazette reported:

“A remarkable discovery of a cave containing an illicit still and all the appurtenances for the illegal manufacture of whiskey was made on the 12th inst. by Mr. Bowden, officer of inland revenue of this town. The locale of this discovery was on the farm of Mr. Lancelot Slee, High Arnside, Colwith, Little Langdale, about five miles from Ambleside and six from Coniston. The secluded character of the place, and the crafty concealment of the cave, renders it a matter of some wonder how Mr. Bowden contrived to discover and find access to it.

The cave has been evidently hollowed out entirely by labour. It is situated near the edge of a somewhat precipitous bank, the abrupt natural fall of one field of the farm into another. The access to it is not at the side, but perpendicularly through a hole at the surface, covered with a flat stone or flag. This aperture, which no doubt did the double duty of a chimney as well as a door, was covered carefully over with brackens. On descending it was found that the sides and floor and roof of the cave were all flagged, the flags of the roof overlapping each other quite in a clever workmanlike style, so as to throw off the water towards the bank above-mentioned. Strong posts and rafters made this subterranean retreat secure from any danger of falling in. The size of this underground apartment is about three or four yards long by two or three yards broad, and at the end where the contraband work was transacted a man could stand up-right. The mode by which that indispensable requisite, water, was supplied for the distilling process formed part of the ingenious adaptation of the place. A little mountain rivulet was contrived, by a small dam about twenty or thirty yards from the cave, to aid in the illicit production of ‘mountain dew’. When it was wanted the little stream found its way to the cave under a covering of turf and brackens, and having done its office this Alpheus of the whiskey-still sank underground and re-appeared about four or five yards from the cave like any ordinary drain. When not wanted for distilling a stone just shifted at the dam turned it off to another field, as though for the simple purpose of irrigation.”

Local historian, Phil Burrows has made it his quest to seek out the locations of Lanty’s stills, and with the help of the current residents of High Arnside Farm, he thinks he has found the spot where Mr. Bowden triumphantly uncovered this cave. Without a full archeological dig, he cannot prove it, but if he’s right, the stream that Lanty so cunningly diverted would have been an outflow from High Arnside Tarn.

In 1897, The Lakes Herald reported the passing of exciseman, Mr. D. Flattely, and reminisced about the cunning of the bootleggers he’d made a career of chasing. Chief among them was Lanty, who it was claimed could produce a bottle of his whiskey within 5 minutes, anywhere within a 20 mile radius of his home. Indeed, one magistrate was foolish enough to believe he’d got the better of Slee on this score:

“It is related that upon one occasion when Lanty had been in durance over night, and appeared in the justice room next morning, one of the magistrates—I think it was Dr. Davy—said to him, ‘I am told that you are able to furnish your friends with a glass of spirit at any time when desired, but I think we have broken the spell this time.’ Considerable was the merriment as Lanty produced a full bottle from his capacious coat pocket, and holding it up replies, ‘Mappen’ ye’r rang. Will ye hev a touch’.”

While the excisemen occasionally uncovered his stills, they never found where Lanty stashed his bottles. And despite his best efforts, neither has Phil Burrows. In a landscape so potted with holes, perhaps it’s not surprising, but maybe, just maybe, everyone has been looking in the wrong place.

Matters of the Spirit

In 1916, Jonathan Denwood and John Denwood published a book called Idylls of a North Countrie Fair, in which they documented, in dialect, a series of recollections, stories and conversations with colourful local characters at Cumbrian fairs. The 8^th August edition of the Penrith Observer carried a review. The reviewer is a little sniffy at the coarseness of some of the language used, concluding, “The introduction of these words and phrases—there are many of them—mars the pleasure of the reader, and will not let him leave the book lying about for his women folk to read.” However, some of the sketches are so entertaining that he overcomes his prudish distaste:

“the best of them is the account of Lakeland smugglers… This purports to be the reproduction of a ‘crack’ Mr. J. M. Denwood had more than twenty years ago with an old resident of Little Langdale, who professed to know Lanty Slee, a noted smuggler of his time; at any rate he told some capital stories about him which are chronicled in most readable style.

Then there was Whisky Walker, a Borrowdale quarryman, who was an adept both at distilling whisky, in illicit fashion, and in disposing it. He is described as a man who was ‘weel behaved, weel larned, an’ far travelled.’

Then there was this little dialogue about one of the characters of Lakeland whose supposed merits have often been written about, and quite as frequently discounted:

“Was he [Whisky Walker] any relation to Wondeful Walker, the famous Wasdale priest, John!

Ah couldn’t tell ye that.

Did you know Wondeful Walker, John!

No, but Ah knew his dowter at was weddit on t’lanlword at Cunniston, an Ah’ve hard it said he was wonnerfal oald scrat, ‘at nivver did a turn for any of his neighbors widoot he was weel paid. He hed a laal kurk, a laal salary, an’ a big lot o’ barnes, but he mannished to seave a fortun ‘at when he deid com to mair nor his wages he’d iver eddled.

(I knew his daughter who was married to the landlord at Coniston, and I’ve heard it said that he was a wonderful old penny-pincher, that never did a turn for any of his neighbours without being well-paid for it. He had a little church, a little salary, and a big lot of children, but he managed to save such a fortune that when he died it came to more than all the wages he’d ever earned).

Did he aid and abet the smugglers, John!

Ah’ll nut say that, but t’ meast of t’ kurks in them days war used as hidin’ pleaces by t’ smugglers an’ whisky makkers. Ah know a family vault in a country kurkyard ‘at Lanty Slee an’ me hev sleeped in an’ hidden stuff in mair nor yance or twice, fra daybrek till t’ neet fell again.

(…most of the churches in those days were used as hiding places by the smugglers and whisky makers. I know a family vault in a churchyard that Lanty Slee and me have slept in and hidden stuff in more than once or twice, from daybreak to nightfall.)

What, beside coffins, John!

Aye, it t’ wick fwok we war flate on, nut t’ deid uns.

(Aye, it was the living folk we were wary of, not the dead ones.)

Did the priests connive at your doings!

Weel, they war niver agean takkin owt they could git for nowt, nor agean buyin’ a sup spirits on t’ cheap.”

Never let it be said that the 19^th century clergymen of Borrowdale and Langdale were anything less than dedicated to all matters of the spirit!

Sources/Further Reading

All these newspaper reports are available through the British Newspaper Archive, but for those without a subscription, local history writer, Raymond Greenhow has done a fine job of collating all the detail and more into a chronological portrait of Lanty, rooted in fact.

https://scafellhike.blogspot.com/2020/06/lanty-slee-and-his-mountain-dew.html

Phil Burrows has made an intriguing and highly entertaining video about his quest to uncover all of Lanty Slee’s hideouts and his theories about High Arnside Tarn. Well worth a watch:

Ian Jackson’s book, Cumbria Rocks is a fascinating guide to the geology of Cumbria, written by an expert but aimed at walkers. Accessible and readable, it is packed full of brilliant photographs and profits go to the Cumbria Wildlife Trust. It is published by Northern Heritage and available from their website:

https://www.northern-heritage.co.uk/product/search/cumbria-rocks-60-extraordinary-rocky-places-that-tell-the-story-of-the-cumbrian-landscape

The following modern day interview on sirgordonbennett.com gives fascinating details insights into to the process of riving slate:

Coniston Stonecraft Interview

Fell Walk, General, Lake District, Mountains, Natural History, Scramble

Over The Edge: The Soaring Majesty of Pinnacle Ridge

August 21, 2022 George Kitching 21 Comments

Pinnacle Ridge on St Sunday Crag is a head-rush of wonder and adrenaline, but as a grade 3 scramble, I had long imagined it beyond my capabilities. Then something happened, and I found myself on belay on one of Lakeland’s most dramatic arêtes.

“Somewhere in an old guide-book, published more than fifty years ago, I remember reading: ‘St. Sunday Crag IS the Ullswater mountain,’ and, when you come to think about it, it’s not a bad description. For St. Sunday Crag dominates the western reach of Ullswater far more dramatically than Helvellyn and, in a sense, commands the whole length of the lake better than any other mountain”. So wrote Harry Griffin in The Roof Of England in 1968. He expresses surprise at how walkers and climbers have long overlooked “this long line of crag, as big as several Napes Ridges crowded together” when, “the Grisedale face of the mountain, which drops nearly 2000‘ in half a mile is one of the most dramatic fellsides in the country… Rock climbers had missed it for years and only started making climbs there 12 years ago”.

These days, walkers are a more regular feature thanks in no small part to a book published eleven years before Griffin’s: Alfred Wainwright’s, The Eastern Fells. Wainwright completists now regularly discover St Sunday Crag by way of Birks or Arnison Crag, or by Deepdale Hause from Grisedale Tarn or Fairfield. Few brave its most dramatic ascent, however, as that lies within the liminal realm where walking ends and climbing begins. Pinnacle Ridge is a grade 3 scramble, much celebrated by those who have experienced its airy drama, but in Wainwright’s view, the grade 1-classified Jack’s Rake on Pavey Ark is “the limit” for fellwalkers, and like many others, I had long imagined Pinnacle Ridge to be beyond my capabilities.

Then something happened. On the evening of April 1^st, I spotted a Facebook post by Graham Uney Mountaineering offering fellwalkers, who want to step up a level, a guided and roped scramble over this iconic arête. Underneath was a comment from Nikki Knappett saying, “that looks amazing”. I know Nikki. We’ve been Facebook friends for a while but finally met in February when we both attended a three-day winter skills course in the Highlands. Having braved the frozen slopes of Cairngorm together, climbing Pinnacle Ridge seemed an appropriate next step. The offer was for two fellwalkers who would be roped together and share a climbing rack. It would be well outside my comfort zone, but sometimes you have to seize opportunities when they arise, and I was pumped full of Dutch courage, courtesy of a glass or two of Rioja, so I replied, saying, “I’m up for that, if you are”. Nikki messaged me almost immediately to say “Are you serious? YES!!”, and we emailed Graham before either of us could chicken out.

Our initial date of May 10^th had to be abandoned due to high winds and persistent rain. We rescheduled for June 27^th, which just gave me longer to contemplate whether this snap decision had been the act of a colossal April Fool. But now the morning has arrived, excitement holds sway over nerves.

We meet Graham in the car park of the Patterdale Sports Club. He has asked us to bring big rucksacks to accommodate the climbing gear, and promptly hands me a harness and 30m of rope to stow. He offers me a helmet, but I’ve brought my own. It’s currently acting as a makeshift lunch box, but my utilitarian packing is soon disrupted when the heavens open, and I dive to the bottom of my bag for waterproof over trousers.

The author and Nikki (photo by Graham Uney)

Nikki roars with laughter as my Gore-Tex over trousers are still patched with pink duct tape replete with unicorns, courtesy of misstep with a crampon on Cairngorm, and trusting Hayley Webb, a Winter Mountain Leader with a wicked sense of humour, to “fix” them for me. No sooner are they on than the rain stops. Such is the power of the pink unicorns. Now, Graham and Nikki won’t let me take them off.

We walk through Grisedale to the end of the Elmhow plantation, then leave the main path to zig zag steeply up hill, roughly following a beck. As we approach Blind Cove, the gradient eases and we track right below the crags. Across the valley, the east ridge of Nethermost Pike rears sharply upward to meet the summit plateau. Just a little further south, the Tongue makes a similar upward thrust to the top of Dollywagon Pike. These are stiff ascents: I’ve made both in recent weeks to try and build fitness in preparation for today. Each is rich in wild mountain drama, yet from each, my eyes wandered across the valley trying to pick out Pinnacle Ridge. I failed on both occasions. Graham assures me this is not unusual. The ridge is hard to spot from a distance, and the initial challenge that faces most scramblers is finding the start.

In his classic book, Scrambles in the Lake District: North, Brian Evans instructs you to cross two small scree shoots and then a larger one, then look out for a rowan tree about 45m up on the right hand side. Graham tells me the rowan tree blew down some years back. Furthermore, what counts as a small scree shoot seems somewhat open to interpretation. We all agree when we reach the larger one but depending on your definition, we’ve crossed anything from zero to about eight of the smaller kind. Luckily Evans’ final landmark, “a prominent gun-like block higher up the ridge” is a more reliable clue. Graham points it out, and we walk up to a small grassy ledge below a wall of blocks and boulders. To the right, the ground banks down into a gully.

The climb to the start of Pinnacle Ridge

Here, rope and harnesses are retrieved, and Graham talks us through the gear we’ll be using: slings, nuts, and cams or friends will provide temporary means of attaching carabiners to the rock to create belays for the rope which he now ties to our harnesses. Graham will lead and create these secure anchors. When he shouts, “you’re on belay”, that is our cue to move. Nikki will go second. I will go last and remove whichever nut, cam or sling we were hitherto attached to, twist it to compact, and clip it to my harness, then return it to Graham when we next converge. He will inspect my work like a sergeant-major offering the slightest of nods if it passes muster or a rueful, “that’s a right dog’s dinner” if I present him with a tangled mess.

He shows us how to tie a clove hitch in the rope to attach to a carabiner, providing a secure hold when taut, and easy adjustment when slack. Then he cheerfully exclaims “this way” and disappears into a groove in the wall of boulder, his head emerging seconds later a few feet higher. Nikki and I hasten into the breach to see where he’s putting his hands and feet. He disappears over a parapet and a minute or two later, we hear, “You’re on belay”.

Nikki smiles then turns to face the rock, but there’s a problem. Nikki has much shorter legs than Graham and can’t reach the footholds he used. At first, she laughs, but after three or four abortive attempts, she turns to me with a look of genuine concern and whispers, “I’m not sure I can do this”.

I try to sound encouraging when I say, “of course you can”, but I needn’t have worried. Before the words have left my lips, Nikki’s expression hardens into a steely determination, and she looks again, this time spotting less-obvious options. She can’t get her foot over the parapet like Graham did, but she can get a knee on to it, and it’s enough purchase to haul herself over.

Nikki and Graham starting up the jumbled blocks

The rope between us goes taut, and I’m reminded of the obvious: when Nikki moves, I must move too. I feel a guilty relief that the holds aren’t quite such a stretch for me. As we converge, Graham grins and asks, “what kept you?”. Nikki laughs and exclaims indignantly, “I’ve only got short legs!” It’s an exchange that will become something of a refrain.

Learning to move in synch has its teething problems. I have to anticipate when Nikki’s next move is going to be successful (which it usually is), or when she’s going to step back down and reconsider. My initial failure to do so results in an inadvertent kick in the head. Nikki apologises profusely and reminds me she only has short legs. The mistake was all mine, but thanks to Graham’s insistence on helmets I scarcely felt the knock. With my attention duly sharpened, I read the next abortive attempt correctly and move my fingers before they get trodden on. Nikki succeeds on her third attempt, and suddenly I’m obliged to move quickly to avoid pulling her back down.

As we reconvene at the top of the step, the ridge opens out before us, and we survey the scene with a head-rush of wonder and adrenaline. The next section is an erratic jumble of blocks, rising like toppled dominos to the gun-like boulder we spotted from below. Beyond, the ridge tapers to a slender spine above the plunging cleft of the gully. The spine is spiked with pinnacles, like the plates on the back of a stegosaurus.

Graham climbing the jumbled blocks on Pinnacle Ridge

Under Graham’s supervision, Nikki ties us on to the carabiner and we watch Graham pick a route up over the blocks and boulders. Once on belay, we follow his line. Our next resting point affords a vista over the foot of Ullswater, an “L” shaped oasis of muted blue amid the forest green of its banks. The dappled fells are lighter shades, a dancing ephemera of sunlight and shadow.

When we reach the top of the jumbled blocks, it looks as though the onward path is barred. The pinnacles sit atop a castle wall of rock. It looks unbreachable. Graham leads on and stops at the foot of a chimney which looks as unassailable as the walls we have passed. This is what Evans calls The Crux, and this is where he advises the use of rope even to those with climbing experience. Earlier, Graham had explained how climbing grades like Diff (Difficult) and V Diff (Very Difficult) are considered relatively moderate these days, but they were named by early pioneers who lacked the equipment we have now. Pioneers like Owen Glynne Jones, whose book, Rock climbing in the English Lake District did much to popularise the sport. Indeed, Jones’s book is illustrated by the Abraham Brothers’, who produced iconic photographs of Victorian climbers standing proudly atop Scafell Pinnacle or Pillar Rock in nailed boots and tweed suits. Apparently, there was a surge in demand for “grippy” tweed to tailor such garments. Nikki looks up at the Crux and exclaims, “we could do with grippy tweeds!” Graham laughs and says, “It’s funny you should say that as at one point in his book, O G Jones says, ‘imagine a foothold that isn’t there, and put your foot on it’. That’s what we’re going to have to do here!”

He points to a crack in the wall, and then to a couple of small footholds on the wall opposite. Using these as a springboard, he jams a fist into a fissure in the sidewall, steps across the gap and places a foot into the crack. It doesn’t appear to be resting on anything, but it supports him well enough to pull himself up an over the crest. When he gives us the go-ahead, Nikki attempts to follow.

Such is the height of the wall in proportion to the length of rope separating us, that I must follow too before she reaches the top. Nikki can’t reach the fist jam that Graham used but throws her weight across the gap and relies on momentum to carry her across to the foothold that isn’t there. It works well, and as she gets a handhold over the parapet, I follow suit. The crack must narrow inside as the toe of my left boot finds a secure hold. I want to push up and use the momentum trick to get my belly over the top of the wall, but Nikki has stalled. Her short legs are struggling to reach the higher footholds that Graham used to propel himself over. I’ve nothing to hold on to, so I lurch right getting my fingers over the ledge and the sole of my right boot balanced on the slightest of rocky knuckles. I have an uneasy sensation of being suspended in mid air. At this point, Nikki asks if I can take a step back. It’s impossible from this angle with no other handholds, and a worried silence ensues. We appear stuck in a stalemate where neither of us can move.

Then, that look of steely determination returns to Nikki’s face. She looks up and shouts, “have you got me, Graham?”

“I’ve always got you, Nikki, you’re tied to my rope”, comes the reply, but Nikki hasn’t waited for it. From nowhere, she summons a burst of upward energy that carries her knee over the top. There’s a lot of grappling around, but she’s laughing now and asking if she looks like a “graceful walrus”. Soon she’s over and safe, and it’s my turn to worry. I’m not in the ideal position to push off, but, inspired by Nikki, I just go for it and happily, it works. I pull myself up, getting my right knee over the edge and my left foot onto a rocky spur which gives me the purchase I need to complete the move, albeit no more gracefully.

Contemplating the Crux (photo by Graham Uney)

We’re now on top of the castle wall, below which the grassy bank drops abruptly into the gully. The next challenge is to negotiate the crenellations. Graham grins, “You’ve done the hardest part, all of you have to do now is walk along the top of the pointy bits.”

The Pinnacles on Pinnacle Ridge — The Pinnacles

It’s easier than it looks, yet just as exhilarating. Graham was slightly economical with the truth, however, in suggesting that all the hard bits were over. The spine culminates in the largest pinnacle and we regroup on top. The way off lies down a sloping slab which looks a little too smooth for comfort. There’s a large drop to the right. To ensure we are all secure during this traverse, Graham says we must change the order. I will go first, still belayed from the pinnacle. He’ll feed out just enough rope to get me over while negating the risk of falling far should I slip. He then hands me a sling to place over a boulder at the other end so we can belay him.

Just walk over the pointy bits (photo by Graham Uney)

We survey the slab together. Graham points out that the direct route down to the rocky platform at the base is over the smoothest part of the slab, but by veering right, the rock is more broken and a couple of angled boulders act as steps off the face and on to the platform. There is no room for error here, however, as this way lies right above the chasm.

I turn in and, gripping tight with both hands, start to down climb, feeling around with my feet for holds. They prove hardest to find above the boulders. Persistence discovers the slightest of ledges, but the last reach backward on to the boulder is uncomfortably far, and I’m filled with the uneasy feeling of stepping off the rock into the void. After seconds that feel like minutes, my foot reaches the reassurance of solid rock, and I step down on to the boulder. From here, a simple sideways step gains the platform.

Nikki has watched and concluded that the boulder is a step too far for her, so she opts instead to tackle the smooth face head on. She must have donned her imaginary grippy tweeds, either that or the rock face is more finely ridged than it looks, as she affects what amounts to a very well controlled slide. Graham is impressed, and once we have secured the sling, he follows her route.

Between here and the top is another tower of irregular blocks, but hand and footholds abound, and the exposure is less extreme. This final section feels like child’s play compared to what we have just done.

At the top, I look back over the spiky magnificence of the ridge, rising like a fossilised dinosaur from the gully, and a warm radiance of elation washes over me. I have always thought the phrase, “conquering a mountain” reeks of misplaced arrogance, but I get it now. It’s not the physical mountain we are conquering, but the mental one born of our own doubts and misgivings. With expert guidance and shared know-how, with technique, teamwork, a little trial-and-error, and the invaluable assistance of imaginary footholds and grippy tweeds, such conquests are possible. Even for those with short legs, which apparently includes Nikki, although she can’t remember whether she’s mentioned it.

The final blocks – Nethermost Cove as a backdrop (photo by Graham Uney)

More Info / Further Reading

Find out more about Graham’s courses at:

https://www.grahamuneymountaineering.co.uk/

… or find him on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/grahamuneymountaineering

Read about our Cairngorm adventures, learning Winter Skills with Hayley Webb Mountaineering:

Walk Out To Winter: New Skills

General, Natural History, Nature

A Bustle in the Hedgerow

June 19, 2022 George Kitching 20 Comments

Hedgerow Diary—Cartmel Valley, 2021/22

When lockdown kept me from the mountains, I woke up to what was right on my doorstep. During those first few weeks of tight restrictions, I would make a daily circuit of four country lanes. As the restrictions eased, I ranged a little further, exploring in earnest the low hills that ring the Cartmel Valley.

But that short walk around the lanes remained, and still remains, my lunchtime ramble. It’s a landscape very like the one where I grew up: small rotational farms; hay meadows rich in wildflowers; compact fields with hedges and wide margins where micro wildernesses thrive.

The more I focused on the minutiae, the more I saw: a perpetually changing cycle of life, growth, decay, and regeneration. As the hedgerows became more familiar, they became less familiar, and I came to appreciate how they constantly evolve.

I started to learn the names of the wildflowers, the types of lichen even, and from May 2021, I began to keep a diary of photographs and descriptive writing—a paragraph or two, roughly every two weeks, documenting those changes.

The following pages are that diary. They chart twelve months in the life of the hedgerows and hillsides of the Cartmel Valley.

Navigation: each month has its own page. Use the green buttons to move through sequentially or the picture links below to jump straight to a particular month.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Fell Walk, General, Ghost Story, History, Lake District, Legend, Mountains, Natural History

Loweswater Gold: the Remarkable Mysteries of Mellbreak

May 22, 2022 George Kitching 8 Comments

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

Loweswater Gold

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

Mellbreak

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

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

The Direct Ascent

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

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

Blake Fell and Loweswater from Mellbreak

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

Rannerdale Knotts over Crummock Water and Buttermere

Twin Peaks

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

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

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

Buttermere and Crummock Water

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

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

A Supernatural Tale

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

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

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

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

Scale Force and Hen Comb

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

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

Buttermere and Fleetwith Pike from Hen Comb

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

Haweswater and the Lost Kingdom of Mardale

February 27, 2022 George Kitching 25 Comments

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

The Drowned Valley

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

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

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

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

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

The Manchester Corporation & Haweswater

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

Holy Trinity Church - the lost kingdom of Mardale — Holy Trinity Church, Mardale Green

The Water Take-Off Tower, built with the stones and windows from the church,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Last Days of Measand

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

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

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

Measand Hall - the lost kingdom of Mardale — Measand Hall

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

The Lost Kingdom of Mardale

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

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

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

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

Remote Riggindale

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

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

Hugh’s Cave – Hideout of the First King

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

Richard and Frankie set off for Rough Crag

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

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

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

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

Rewilding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mardale Uncovered

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Sting in the Tail

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

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

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

Credits/Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

Manchester, So Much to Answer For

Fell Walk, General, History, Lake District, Literature, Natural History, Nature

Four Great Books About Lakeland or Walking

December 12, 2021 George Kitching 10 Comments

As 2021 draws to an end, I review four great books about Lakeland or walking: James Rebanks portrays three generations on a Cumbrian fell farm and finds the key to a sustainable future in the teachings of his grandfather. Chris Townsend walks Scotland’s spine. John Bainbridge takes us on furtive forays into Forbidden Britain; and Beth Pipe teams up with Karen Guttridge to blaze a new Lakeland trail, connecting the district’s distilleries..

English Pastoral by James Rebanks
Along the Divide by Chris Townsend
The Compleat Trespasser by John Bainbridge
Gin, Cake and Rucksacks by Beth Pipe and Karen Guttridge

English Pastoral

An Inheritance

James Rebanks

2020, Allen Lane

Change doesn’t always come from those in power. Sometimes it happens quietly from the ground up as ordinary men and women find the courage of their convictions.

English Pastoral is a remarkable book: a work of rare lyrical beauty and an argument of astonishing power. Moreover, it is acutely in tune with the zeitgeist: as the world grows impatient with the hollow greenwash slogans of politicians, here is a simple honest testament, a voice of integrity, and an insight of major environmental significance.

It is a book written by a Cumbrian fell farmer, renouncing the ecologically damaging efficiencies of industrial agriculture (efficiencies he once embraced), in favour of a sustainable model rooted in the past. But it is not a declamatory manifesto or dry scientific treatise. Instead, it is an engaging human-interest story spanning three generations of a family on a small farm in Matterdale.

Woven from threads of reminiscence, it begins as the author recollects how his grandfather taught him to farm. His grandfather had a strong connection with the earth, born perhaps of walking behind a horse-drawn plough, feeling every trough and stone as the blade cut into the soil. He never lost that understanding, even when he reluctantly replaced the horse with a tractor. Rebanks remembers a day his grandfather jumped down from the tractor to rescue four curlew’s eggs from the path of the plough, diligently restoring them once the furrow had been cut, and watching from the gate to check that the bird returned.

It was a relationship with the natural world that many of his generation possessed. Yet, two decades later, the face of farming had changed drastically. Tractors were three-times the size, combine harvesters were ivory towers of technology, driven by contractors in air-conditioned cabs with music blaring. Cows were no longer grazed on pasture but packed into barns to be fed silage and commercially produced foodstuffs. That connection with nature had been severed, and the curlews (like many other species) were in decline.

The centuries-old practice of small mixed rotational farming was jettisoned in the name of science. You could farm industrially, stripping out hedges, ploughing right up to the edges, and sowing the same crop in the same field year after year, replenishing nutrients through the magical application of chemical fertilisers. It seemed like progress, and yet, there were worrying signs that it might be the wrong road.

When Henry died, a unexpected discovery sent a mini shockwave through the valley. Henry had been the last of the old guard, stubbornly refusing to modernise, eschewing chemicals in favour of manure, making hay instead of silage, mowing late. He was well liked, but perceived as a relic, marooned in the past. When his land was put up for sale, an analyst reported that the soil was the best he’d ever tested.

To glimpse where this industrial highway might lead, Rebanks visits the Midwest. Here the tone turns chilling bleak. It is worth pausing to pay tribute to the transportive quality of the writing. Rebanks has a poetic way with words. The way he describes the landscape is painterly. We can almost smell the grass of the Matterdale meadows and, equally, taste the dust of the American near-desert, where much of the top soil has blown away and the vast acres of crop are choked with weeds, grown resistant to the pesticides. Much of the work is automated, administered by drones, while farming communities languish, their incomes gone, their buildings dilapidated, their windows dressed with confederate flags and Trump stickers—testimony to a collective refusal to face facts, placing faith instead in charlatans with ready-made scapegoats.

Back home in Matterdale, Rebanks changes course. He brings in ecologists and begins restoring biodiversity: planting trees, laying hedges, re-wiggling rivers, fencing off boggy areas to create wetland habitats, cultivating hay meadows and resowing indigenous wildflowers. And the rewards come quickly. Curlews return. Barn owls appear.

He is not alone. Many of his neighbours are following suit. The benefits are not financial, but the work is vital. Unhelpfully, the government pursues destructive trade deals with nations still wedded to the industrial model. Some activists demonise stock farming, advocating a vegan future, where swathes of land are designated as wilderness while the rest is given over to intensive crop production. But those intensive methods are the very ones that have been destroying the soil. They are unsustainable.

Rebanks doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but he is busy doing what his grandfather did—making sure that what happens within the boundaries of his own farm is done right. He humbly suggests that in a world of noise, living quietly might actually be a virtue. By farming in harmony with nature, he shows that agriculture and wilderness can co-exist. Change doesn’t always come from those in power. Sometimes it happens quietly from the ground up as ordinary men and women find the courage of their convictions.

I grew up in a village of small mixed rotational farms; several surround the place where I live today. Thanks to English Pastoral, I no longer view them as a link with the past, but a signpost to the future.

Follow James on Twitter @herdyshepherd1

Next: Along the Divide by Chris Townsend

Pages: 1 2 3 4

Fell Walk, General, History, Lake District, Literature, Natural History, Scramble

In the Footsteps of Wainwright – Striding Edge to Catstycam

September 26, 2021 George Kitching 23 Comments

“For Those Who Tread Where I Have Trod”

In 1930, Alfred Wainwright crossed Striding Edge for the first time. It was shrouded in mist and doused in rain. For all its terrors, it sparked a passion that led AW to pen his celebrated Pictorial Guides, documenting 214 Lake District fells. This year, I walked the same ridge en route to Catstycam to bag my final “Wainwright”. As I recount my precarious negotiation along craggy crests and plunging precipices, I consider what it was about an antisocial pen-pusher from Blackburn that made him such an inspiration.

An Ex-Fellwanderer Remembers

“Before reaching the gap in the wall we were enveloped in a clammy mist and the rain started…We went on, heads down against the driving rain, until, quite suddenly, a window opened in the mist ahead, disclosing a black tower of rock streaming with water, an evil and threatening monster that stopped us in our tracks. Then the mist closed in again and the apparition vanished. We were scared: there were unseen terrors ahead. Yet the path was still distinct; generations of walkers must have come this way and survived, and if we turned back now we would get as wet as we would by continuing forward. We ventured further tentatively and soon found ourselves climbing the rocks of the tower to reach a platform of naked rock that vanished into the mist as a narrow ridge with appalling precipices on both sides. There was no doubt about it: we were on Striding Edge.”

Thus writes Alfred Wainwright in Ex-Fellwanderer, recalling his second full day on the Lakeland Fells. He was 23 and having saved £5 from his spending money, he recruited the company of his cousin, Eric and embarked on the first holiday he had ever had. The pair had arrived in Windermere two days earlier and climbed Orrest Head, where the sight of “mountain ranges, one after the other” proved a startling revelation for a young man who knew little of the world beyond the “tall chimneys and crowded tenements” of industrial Blackburn. Well it did for Alfred, Eric fell asleep in the grass. There would be no sleeping the following day, however. Alfred, or AW as he preferred, was on a mission and dragged his cousin up High Street because he had read about the Roman Road that once ran over it.

High Street was my first mountain too and for the same reason: I hadn’t yet heard of Wainwright but I had heard about the Roman Road, and the sight of High Street rearing above Haweswater in all its wild, rugged magnificence made the notion seem so implausible, I just knew I had to go up there. In 1998, I made the climb from Mardale Head, following directions in a Pathfinder guide, which I bought expressly because it contained that very walk.

In 1930, AW and Eric ascended Froswick from the Troutbeck Valley and walked over Thornthwaite Crag to High Street’s summit. Wainwright took comfort from the thought that the Romans had walked that way 2000 years earlier. For one unnerving moment, I thought I was coming face to face with a ghostly legion. My ascent along Riggindale Edge had been breathless not only for the exertion but for the richness of the unfolding panorama. As I reached the top of Long Stile, however, my head entered the clouds literally as well as metaphorically. Not that I cared, it was immensely atmospheric, and I was busy imagining cohorts of legionaries marching beside the summit wall. Then all of a sudden, I realised I could hear them. Slowly their outlines started to emerge from the mist, moving two abreast in strict military two step. Part of me wanted to run, but I was rivetted to the spot transfixed by the image crystallising in front of me… It was somewhat deflating to discover their armour was Gore-Tex and their spears were trekking poles. I swear I have never since seen a party of fellwalkers march with such precision.

I made a round of Mardale Ill Bell and Harter Fell, but AW and Eric followed the line of the old road for quite some way before descending to Howtown and walking along the shore of Ullswater to Pooley Bridge. The very next day they set off for Striding Edge:

“In agonies of apprehension we edged our way along the spine of the ridge, sometimes deviating to a path just below the crest to bypass difficulties. We passed a memorial to someone who had fallen to his death from the ridge which did nothing for our peace of mind. After an age of anxiety we reached the abrupt end of the Edge and descended an awkward crack in the rocks to firmer ground below and beyond, feeling and looking like old men.”

The experience filled Eric with dread, but it sparked a passion in AW that would consume him for the rest of his life. In 1955, he published the first of his Pictorial Guides, The Eastern Fells, in which he described Striding Edge as “the finest ridge there is in Lakeland”.

Helvellyn swiftly followed High Street for me too, chiefly because my Pathfinder Guide drew a parallel between Striding Edge and Long Stile. Just as it had for Wainwright, High Street had sparked a passion in me, and I was hungry for more.

Pipe & Socks: Discovering Wainwright

In the weeks between tackling Long Stile and Striding Edge, my wife, Sandy, and I popped into Kendal Museum to see our friend, Meriel, who worked there. She was talking to an outdoorsy couple in front of a display case containing a walking jacket, boots, a pipe, and a pair of old socks that had belonged to Alfred Wainwright. Meriel explained that Wainwright had been Honorary Curator of the museum between 1945 and 1974, and as her own maiden-name was “Wainwright”, visitors frequently assumed (wrongly) that she was related to him. The couple laughed and stared at the socks with a kind of hushed reverence.

Intrigued, I sought out a second-hand copy of one of Wainwright’s Pictorial Guides and immediately began to understand why fellwalkers held him in such esteem. The book was totally unlike my Pathfinder Guide. It contained no handy advice on parking or refreshments. The walks weren’t graded as easy, medium, or hard. The maps were not official OS versions, but hand-drawn impressions that morphed into sketches; yet every page felt sacred, as if the author was imparting arcane secrets. The book communicated an almost religious devotion, a profound understanding, and a deep, deep love for this remarkable landscape.

The weather was kinder to me on Striding Edge than it had been to AW and Eric; I found it utterly exhilarating. Inspired, I went on to tackle Scafell Pike, the Coniston Fells, Great Gable, Crinkle Crags, the Langdale Pikes and more. And yet, somehow, as the years passed, with work, and moving house, and everything else life throws at you, my newfound passion for the fells dwindled. Eventually, in 2015, Storm Desmond flooded the gym I had joined and forced me to think about an alternative form of exercise. I bought a new pair of walking boots and headed for the hills. I never renewed my gym membership.

I bought all the other Pictorial Guides and immersed myself in them. Yet to start with, I would cherry pick my walks, always favouring the high fells. Two years on, my great friends and neighbours, Paul and Jeanette would persuade me to attempt all 214 hills that AW documents. Some of the smaller ones have the most spectacular views, they said, and your understanding of how everything fits together grows exponentially.

All of which is why I am now heading towards Lanty’s Tarn with a mind full of memories. You see my Pathfinder guide took me over Helvellyn via its Edges, but it missed out Catstycam. When I repeated the walk several years ago, I made the same omission. Today, Catstycam will be my 214^th Wainwright, and I shall reach it by repeating one of my first mountain experiences: Helvellyn via Striding Edge and Swirral Edge.

Nature’s Cathedrals—Striding Edge

As I climb the slopes of Keldas, I’m gifted a glance at Ullswater, shining like a silver plate, the backward scene a moody wash of early morning monochrome, but ahead, the sun breaks through the leafy canopy to render all in summer colours, the tarn a sparkling cut of aquamarine. I remember spotting a red squirrel here, twenty three years ago, the first I had seen since moving to the Lakes.

Today should have been a shared celebration with friends, but unexpected events forced a last-minute reschedule. No-one else was free today, but the weather forecast was perfect, and I was too impatient to wait longer. Yet as vivid memories of first fell walks flood back, part of me is grateful for the solitude to indulge them. Today marks a significant milestone in a journey, not only physical but emotional, through a landscape that has come to possess me entirely, just as it did the man whose footprints I have been following.

I emerge from the trees into Grisedale and follow the path that climbs steadily to the Hole in the Wall—up slopes where pink foxgloves rise like beacons from a rippling sea of green bracken. Two magnificent ridges dominate the forward view: one rising dramatically to enclose Nethermost Cove and attain the summit of Nethermost Pike, and beyond, the airy majesty of Dollywagon’s craggy Tongue. I’m yet to climb either—so while I’ll attain the last of Wainwright’s summits today, there are many more adventures lurking in the pages of his guides.

Grisedale -The path to the Hole in the Wall

From the Hole in the Wall, I’m greeted with the glorious vision of Helvellyn, looking every bit like an immense organic castle, its summit a broad stronghold rising above the languid navy moat of Red Tarn. It is defended on either side by the crenelated walls of its Edges, terminating in conical pyramid of Catstycam; to reach it via two of Lakeland’s most dramatic ridges promises to be the finest of adventures—a precarious negotiation along craggy crests and plunging precipices.

The going is easy at first but gets craggier from Low Spying How. Soon the rocky turret of High Spying How looms. This is Wainwright’s black tower. Partially glimpsed through mist, its true height unknown, it must have been an intimidating prospect for two fledgling fellwalkers. In today’s brilliant light, it is less daunting, yet still imparts a frisson of nervous excitement, as on reaching the top, you are greeted with the sight of Striding Edge tapering to a slender Toblerone before rising in a steep upward sweep to the summit plateau high above.

But where are all the people? Reports of late have suggested Striding Edge is overrun, and I was worried I’d be joining a thronging queue. I’m not entirely alone—I’m one of a handful of walkers, but we’re well spaced out, and no-one else is currently in view. It’s reassuring to know that if you pick your time, even on a Saturday in summer, there are still opportunities to wander lonely as a cloud.

I pass the memorial that did so little for AW and Eric’s peace of mind. It reads:

“In memory of Robert Dixon of Poolings Patterdale who was killed on this place on the 27th day of Nov 1886 when following the Patterdale Fox Hounds.”

On reaching this point in Terry Abraham’s Life of a Mountain film, Stuart Maconie professes, “I’m not sure I’m a fan of memorials on mountains—sends out the wrong message.”

A narrow bypass path runs below the crest on the right, but it feels more adventurous to clamber along the naked rock. Besides, I find three points of contact more reassuring than walking along a narrow ledge where one misstep could send you tumbling.

I recall the exhilaration I felt when I first stepped out on Striding Edge, and the years have done nothing to diminish the feeling. To my left, the slopes drop abruptly into the wild green bowl of Nethermost Cove, and to my right, to the inscrutable blue waters of Red Tarn.

A little further along, I glance back to High Spying How. The ridge looks every bit like the spiky spine of a fossilised dinosaur.

The King & the Pen Pusher

AW grew up in poverty. His father was an alcoholic stonemason who drank what little he earned between long bouts of unemployment. AW adored his mother who made sure the children never went hungry even when it meant going without herself. Despite exceptional academic promise, AW left school at 14 to help put food on the table.

He started as an office boy in the engineer’s department at Blackburn Town Council, but soon transferred to the Treasurer’s office and studied at night school to become an accountant. He embraced work with a passion and attributes the failure of his first marriage to the mismatch between his own ambition to climb the professional ladder and his wife’s reluctance to leave the bottom rung. At Kendal, he rose to become Borough Treasurer, and it’s easy to think of his move to Cumbria as the logical next step in an upward trajectory. But it wasn’t. It was a voluntary step down, which involved a pay cut. Reaching the next rung was no longer his motivation. He moved here to be closer to the hills, and although he remained diligent about his work, his heart now belonged to the mountains:

“Down below I was a pen pusher. Up here I was a king; a king amongst friends.”

The fells were to give the spiritual nourishment that organised religion had failed to provide:

“At Blackburn I had attended chapel. Now I worshipped in nature’s cathedrals”.

For me too, these hills have become hallowed ground.

Helvellyn

Striding Edge ends in an abrupt drop—a scramble down a craggy chimney. As bad steps go, however, it isn’t Lakeland’s worst—hand and footholds abound, and with due care and attention, it is tackled with relative ease.

What remains is the stiff climb to the summit plateau. On the approach, it looks daunting, but it’s an illusion that serves to test your resolve. Close up, the gradient is less severe and a plethora of options reveal themselves. It is worth pausing on the little rocky platforms to gaze back at Striding Edge, which now looks razor sharp. The aspect is best seen from the top, where a smug smile of self-congratulation is permitted.

The author in front of Red Tarn and Striding Edge

A memorial to Charles Gough, who died here in 1805, is a poignant reminder of the dangers. Gough’s death made him, or more particularly his dog, something of a celebrity, but to learn more of their story, you’ll either have to climb Striding Edge or read my first ever blog:The Stuff of Legend— http://www.lakelandwalkingtales.co.uk/grisedale-tarn-helvellyn/

Looking west from the summit, I recall AW’s remark about “mountain ranges, one after the other”, but today, it’s the north-eastern aspect, over Red Tarn to Catstycam, that sets my pulse racing.

Swirral Edge & Catstycam

A large cairn marks the start of Swirral Edge. People talk of Swirral Edge as the less difficult of the two, but the initial scramble down bouldery rocks is the rival of anything on Striding Edge. The going gets easier after that and all too soon, I’m climbing the slope of Catstycam.

Red Tarn from the scramble on to Swirral Edge

At the summit, I delve into a rucksack for a prop that I have painstakingly placed between sheets of stiff cardboard to protect it. In our age of social media, it’s customary on completing the Wainwrights to take a summit selfie with a sign saying “214”. Sandy is an artist, so I asked her if she could draw me a doodle of a pipe—well I thought it more iconic than the socks. She did much better than that and produced a larger-than-life cardboard cut-out beautifully painted to look like a 3D pipe, replete with a puff of smoke bearing the magic number.

The trouble is there’s no-one else here and my arm is barely long enough to to take a selfie that fits in me, the pipe, and Ullswater curving away in the distance. After several squinting attempts, I just about manage it. Shortly afterwards, a girl arrives and grins as she obliges by snapping me with a wider sweep as the backdrop. The views are majestic, and I sit long in quiet contemplation.

In places, Ex-Fellwanderer descends into the rant of an old man at odds with the modern world. Yet the digs are not directionless. His most extreme suggestion—that convicts be used in vivisection experiments—is not just Daily Mail style vitriol but part of a passionate plea against performing such atrocities on animals. AW loved animals and poured the royalties from his books into building an animal sanctuary—a selfless act in a decade that celebrated selfishness.

Even before the 1980’s, the quest for ruthless efficiency was driving out values AW held dear:

“I retired from the office early in 1967, and was glad to go. I had enjoyed the work immensely but methods of accounting were changing…Computers and calculating machines and other alleged labour saving devices, which I could not understand, were coming in and pushing out the craftsmen”.

A master craftsman is exactly what Wainwright was: a man whose ledgers were almost works of art, and who would go on to pen his stunning Pictorial Guides in the same immaculate copperplate handwriting. It is wrong to think of these are mere guidebooks. Guidebooks are functional things, carefully targeted at specific segments of the market. Wainwright’s books are works of spiritual reverence. His devotion to nature was a form of worship he knew could cure many modern ailments. He describes the fells as “the complete antidote to urban depression”.

A party of energetic young people arrives on the summit. One lad is curious about the pipe. He’s heard of Wainwright and comes to sit beside me, eager to know more. I fish out my copy of the Eastern Fells and watch as he turns the pages, transfixed. When they leave, he turns back to me and says, “I’m going to get that book. I’m going to get them all”, and I feel as if I have passed on a little piece of magic.

Eventually, I leave too, and make my way down the lonely north-west ridge to the old Keppel Cove dam. As I follow the steep path, I remember the dedication at the start of Ex-Fellwanderer: “for those who tread where I have trod”; and I feel proud to count among them.

Wonderwall – The hidden world of Crinkle Gill

July 30, 2021 George Kitching 18 Comments

Crinkle Crags via Crinkle Gill

A breathtaking scramble on to Crinkle Crags, through the ravines and rock pools of Crinkle Gill, is nearly blocked by a waterfall known as “The Wall”.

The Mists of Time

Trepidation and euphoria are the two faces of that coin we flip each time we step out of our comfort zone. Apprehension and self-doubt weigh heavily, cajoling us to wriggle out of the challenge; and yet rarely do we feel more alive than when we conquer our misgivings. For me, that has a habit of happening on Crinkle Crags.

My forays into the fells began twenty three years ago. These days, when I find myself tutting at ill-equipped fell-walkers, it does me good to remember that that was me back then. Walking like John Wayne for the best part of a week after attempting Scafell Pike on the hottest day of the year taught me that jeans are not a fellwalker’s friend, but it was Crinkle Crags that was to give me my first real wake up call.

I had a decent guidebook, an OS map, and a compass, but I didn’t know how to use the latter properly. If I had, I’d have realised it was little more than a toy, capable of pointing north, but with no facility for taking a bearing, even if I’d known what one was. Fortunately, on this occasion, just knowing which way was north would prove my salvation.

I hadn’t intended to be reckless: my guidebook warned that Crinkle Crags was a walk for a fine day, the path along the ridge being sketchy and hard to follow in mist. As I left Stool End Farm, the sky was a clear expanse of blue, but by the time I reached Red Tarn, clouds were gathering, and by the time I reached Long Top, the summit, they were down. Crinkle Crags is a ridge comprising 5 peaks (the Crinkles) running in a straight line south to north. Long Top is the second. With moderate visibility, they unfurl in front of you and you simply follow the ridge between them. Now, in the clag, I couldn’t see the third, let alone the fourth and fifth. I could make out a path, however, and the security of knowing I was following in the footsteps of others gave me courage enough to continue.

Pretty soon what started as a mild thrum of unease built into a cacophony of anxiety. This was wrong. I was descending. My rudimentary compass was at least capable of showing I was heading west. Carrying on in this direction would deposit me in the wilds of Upper Eskdale, miles from my car, miles from anywhere. I retraced my steps back to the crest and forced my rookie self to forgo the faux security of the trod and venture north into the pathless mist. I can still remember the heady mix of elation and relief when the murk resolved into the Third Crinkle.

Before I reached the fourth, I heard the welcome sound of voices, and out of the gloom appeared a party of about twenty fell-walkers. Relief must have been written large on my face as they welcomed me to their number, urging me to “stick with us. Martin’s very good. He knows what he’s doing.”

Martin was their leader, an officious little man, somewhat pumped up with a sense of his own importance. Not that I was complaining—confidence born of experience was exactly what I wanted, and I was happy to be led.

Or at least, I was until we started descending towards Eskdale again. Having made this mistake once, I was anxious not to repeat it, and I spoke up. Martin dismissed my concerns, and several of his disciples turned to repeat, with pious assurance, that “he knows what he’s doing”. To me, the evidence said otherwise, and for the second time I had to make a difficult wrench in favour of reason over apparent security. Only this time, I wasn’t alone. A Liverpudlian couple walked over and confided that they were thinking the same. Together, we left the party, regained the ridge, and found the two remaining Crinkles. At Three Tarns, lurking beneath a shadowy Bow Fell, we found the path down The Band that led us back to Great Langdale.

That evening, I watched the local news with dread, awaiting a story about a group of fellwalkers missing on Crinkle Crags. Thankfully, no such report emerged. Perhaps Martin knew what he was doing after all. But I had learned a valuable lesson. The next day I bought a proper compass and started learning how to use it.

The next time I was on Long Top, I tackled the Bad Step, a short but near vertical scramble out of a gully blocked by chockstones that I had baulked at on that first occasion. This time, I would learn that patience and persistence pay dividends, yielding handholds not obvious on first inspection.

Over the subsequent years, Crinkle Crags had come to feel like an old friend, still richly endowed with dramatic scenery, but no longer a keeper of secrets to set my pulse a racing. I was wrong.

Answering the Call

When the phone rang, it was Richard, “Jaclyn and I are doing Crinkle Crags via Crinkle Gill on Thursday. We wondered if you’d like to come?”

We’d been planning to meet up, but I’d envisaged something a little less demanding. I was still to fully lose my lockdown legs. Richard has a knack of taking me out of my comfort zone, however, (we did Sharp Edge and Jack’s Rake together), and his enthusiasm is infectious: “It’s like entering another world, you’ll forget you’re in Great Langdale. It’s nothing you can’t handle, mainly walking, some easy scrambling and just a couple of big waterfalls near the end that are a bit tricky”.

It was the “bit tricky” part that provoked the tingle of misgiving, but even so, I heard myself agreeing.

“Good”, said Richard. “Bring microspikes and a helmet”.

Oxendale Beck and Browney Gill

Oxendale Beck is formed where three principal gills that collect the run-off from Crinkle Crags commingle. Buscoe Syke starts as a trickle near Three Tarns at the northern end of the ridge and flows south-east to become Hell Gill, before cascading majestically over Whorneyside Force; Browney Gill tumbles down from the waters of Red Tarn, nestled between Pike O’ Blisco and the southernmost Crinkle. Between them, Crinkle Gill flows east, cutting a deep ravine in the slopes beneath the Third Crinkle. Once we’re out of the trees around the Old Dungeon Ghyll Hotel, we can see it—a purple scar on the pale green face of the fell.

A popular route to Crinkle Crags climbs above Browney Gill to Red Tarn and tackles the ridge south to north. We follow it as far as Oxendale Beck, but turn right, tracking the bank a little way before descending to its bouldery bed. A spell of dry weather has reduced the weight of water, leaving a broad tumble of rocks, worn smooth and round, their grey faces streaked yellow with lichen. Between the boulders, jets of water hiss white and collect in limpid pools of mineral hues: green, turquoise and rust.

Wet stone is slippery as hell and we pause to don microspikes, which grip damp rock as effectively as they do ice. This is where we suffer a setback. As Richard stretches the rubber harness over his left boot, it snaps—an unseen tear from a previous trip finally giving out.

He’s determined to continue, “I’ll just have to keep out of the water”, he says. “It shouldn’t be difficult today, but I’ll probably have to bypass the waterfalls.”

I can see the disappointment in his face. Jaclyn looks relieved.

“You can still do them!” he exclaims to her with a smile. She laughs, then turns to me to explain that she has long had a phobia about water, which she’s desperate to overcome for the sake of their four-year-old daughter. She’s been making tremendous progress, but this will be her biggest test to date. My comfort zone suddenly seems much closer than hers.

We stride on up the beck, clambering over the boulders, Richard hugging the dry ones, Jaclyn resisting the urge to do the same. Shortly before the confluence of Crinkle Gill and Whorneyside Gill, a narrow tree-lined ravine opens on the left, its walls of mottled rock so straight it resembles a railway cutting. Water cascades over littered stones to form a languid pool at its mouth. This is the entrance to Browney Gill. Browney Gill and Crinkle Gill quickly diverge, but in their initial stages, they are separated only by a grassy tongue. Crinkle Gill starts as an open boulder bed, so Browney Gill holds more initial interest. We enter the narrow leafy gorge and scramble gently upstream. Everything is bathed in dappled light, shifting hues of yellow and green. Langdale already seems distant.

Crinkle Gill – The Pool and the Dam

As the ravine begins to widen, we make our exit up the bank of the grassy tongue running down from Gladstone Knott. We cross the thin trickle of Isaac Gill and drop into the bed of Crinkle Gill itself. It’s not long before it too cuts into a ravine. As walls of mossy rock converge, green with bracken and overhung with rowan, our eyes are drawn to the distant Crinkles, looming like majestic pyramids ahead. They are our lofty destination, but we have many hurdles to cross first.

Now the walls become steeper, the tree canopy obscures the wider world, and Crinkle Gill becomes its own realm, pushing Great Langdale and Crinkle Crags out of mind. Richard’s mental map divides the gill into four distinct sections. Each harbours obstacles which the scrambler must overcome. He has names for them all. Overhead, a fallen tree spans the banks like a bridge and heralds our first challenge, The Pool, a deep basin collecting the water that shoots over a barrage of boulders. The scramble looks simple, but the pool has no obvious bypass. Richard explains the way around involves a tricky traverse of the ravine’s nigh vertical right wall. I anticipate a soaking, but as we reach the water’s edge, we find some enterprising soul has manoeuvred two large rocks into the bottom to make a ford. We’ve been spared our first trial.

We venture on over water-rounded rocks. Everywhere, boulders hiss with swishing cascades, and we wade through crystal pools, copper green and iron red. All are but overtures, however, for what lies ahead. The first section ends in a barrier that Richard calls The Dam, a 10ft wall formed around a large chockstone. I stare in wonder. It’s beautiful. It looks like the fantastical head of a giant insect: atop the mossy green armour of its mandibles is perched a giant eye of black granite, while the crashing cataract at its centre resembles a probing white proboscis, plumbing the myrtle green waters below. I’m roused from this flight of fancy by the need to circumvent it, which is accomplished easily enough, in the event, by pulling ourselves up the pitched rocks to its right.

Crinkle Gill – The Chute and the Overhang

The gill bends left to start its second section and narrows to a long course of rapids, which Richard calls The Chute. The rocks on the right provide an obvious climb. The stone is green with moss, but mostly dry. Richard tackles the damper sections with caution but encounters no difficulties. Jaclyn climbs last, apparently unfazed by the crashing torrents to her left.

At the head of The Chute, the wall of the ravine becomes a large slab of overhanging rock with the beck forced into a narrow gap beneath it. Scrambling up the cascade and ducking under the overhang is awkward, but we tackle it stoically, aware that greater tests lie ahead.

Crinkle Gill – The Canyon of Carrion

Now, the ravine deepens, hemmed in by high walls of crag comprising dark slabs of gun-metal grey. Richard calls this section, The Canyon. Surprisingly, there are sheep here, hardy Herdwick mountaineers drawn down by the prospect of water, or shelter, or some tasty flora not to be had on the grassy slopes above. As we enter the mouth, three ewes bolt past us, escaping the confines for a grassy rake that leads to open fell. A little further on, we disturb a raven feasting on dead flesh. As it takes flight, the walls echo with its indignant croaks and the downbeat of big black wings. Then the putrid stench of carrion assaults our nostrils and we find the body of a ewe. She must have fallen from the crag above. Beside her is a smaller carcass—the young lamb that loyally followed her to its death.

As we emerge from the tunnel, sunlight illuminates the rocks, and a small frog hops over white stone crackle-glazed with charcoal lines. As we look up our eyes are greeted with remarkable vista: the Third Crinkle rears above the head of the gill, a colossal white dome, defended by plunging walls. Shadowy gullies hint at lines of weakness, breaches that might afford an upward passage.

Crinkle Gill – The Wall

But the way ahead is barred by the biggest obstacle we will face: a large waterfall, which Richard fittingly calls The Wall. It is a formidable rampart. The watercourse is defined by slabs, worn to the shape of a man rising from a crouch. A sparkling cataract shoots down his torso, crashes into his lap, before running over his knee to drop vertically into the pond beneath. It’s a sight both exhilarating and terrifying. When we’re standing right in front of it, looking up in anxious wonder, Richard points out a grassy rake behind us that leads out of the gorge—an escape should we desire it. But we don’t—it’s time to step out of the comfort zone; everything we have encountered so far feels like a rehearsal. But Richard won’t manage this safely without microspikes. It occurs to us that if I go first, I can throw mine down for him to use. I’d hoped to watch and learn, but strangely, I’m not fazed. I can see the route, and my confidence is bolstered when Richard talks me through it, pointing out a shallow ledge that is the key to the upper section. From there, I’ll have to put a knee in the stream to get over the lip, he tells me.

I walk around the glassy pool to the sheer face of slate grey stone, its damper sections maroon with algae. At its foot, a narrow ledge leads to the cascade. Stepping over onto the boulders, I climb slightly away from the water to a grassy bank which leads, in turn, up to slab of exposed stone. Moving back beside the torrent now affords the footholds I need to reach the lap. Before I know it, I’m standing on the narrow shelf we spied from below. My outstretched hand is level with the parapet. There is another good foothold, but I can’t reach it without something to grip, and I can find nothing but precarious tufts of grass. I spend what feels like an eternity hunting around. Just when I wonder whether I’m stuck, patience and persistence pay off. My hand chances on a smooth spur of stone. It’s all the grip I need to pull myself up high enough to get a knee in the water and a hand on to the rock at the far side. I’m now lying firm but prostrate over water gushing off a steep lip. A final inelegant heave, part shuffle, part wiggle, part crawl gets me over the edge. I stand up in triumph and throw my microspikes down to Richard. Much to Richard’s delight and surprise, Jaclyn opts to come next, tracking my route and my long hunt for handholds. For a horrible moment I think she’s going to slip, but she doesn’t, and she effects a similar wriggle over the edge (perhaps with a tad more elegance). I expect Richard to make it look easy, but even with his experience, the hunt for handholds in the final section is long and tense.

Crinkle Gill – The Fallen Man, Dour End, & the Amphitheatre

Beyond The Wall, a massive, toppled boulder rests like a buttress against the side of the ravine. Richard tries to think of a name for it. Its top resembles the chiselled face of an Eastern Island head; “The Fallen Man”, he declares.

The Fallen Man, Crinkle Gill — The Fallen Man

The head of the gill now opens into a savagely beautiful amphitheatre: a vast natural cathedral of craggy pillars, lofty domes, and cavernous alcoves. I take a moment to stare enrapt, feeling hopelessly small amid this hidden temple of mountain grandeur.

The Amphitheatre, Crinkle Gill — The Amphitheatre

Three gullies diverge like aisles, the leftmost is the nave, and this is the one we follow. It leads us to our last major obstacle—a shadowy waterfall, which Richard has christened Dour End. It’s a challenge, but we are now veterans of The Wall, and we have its measure. I go first again so I can throw back my spikes. Jaclyn shows no hesitation in following. The top section is smooth like a water slide and I see no way up it, so opt for steeper pull over rock and grass to its right. When Richard appears over the parapet, it’s obvious he found a way to follow the water.

Crinkle Crags

We climb through a gully littered with fallen trees and emerge on to open fell. We stand on a grassy knoll and drink in the heady views over Great Langdale and the Langdale Pikes. After hours immersed in world of cascades and canyons, dappled light and dramatic vistas, crystal rock pools and crashing cataracts, it’s a shock to be back on familiar ground.

Our journey replays on fast-forward in my head, and for an instant, I am back on The Wall, groping for an elusive handhold, the water crashing vertically down the sheer face; and now I’m hit with the trepidation I was too focused to feel before. As it subsides, a warm wave of euphoria washes over me. I look at Jaclyn, who’s face is etched in a quiet smile—her phobia well and truly conquered—and I see Richard beaming with pride.

The Third Crinkle is bathed in sunshine, but Long Top is shrouded in low lying cloud, and suddenly, I’m transported back twenty three years, reliving that one small step into the clag and that one giant leap in my outdoor education. Crinkle Crags—ever a mountain for overcoming misgivings.

Faeries Wear Boots

May 23, 2021 George Kitching 23 Comments

Green Crag, Harter Fell & Hard Knott

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“PINNED UNDER A ROCK
Climber’s Ordeal
A young man, Eddie Flintoff, of Hayworth Avenue, Rawtenstall, was seriously injured whilst climbing Harter Fell, a mountain about 2000 feet high at Eskdale, Cumberland.
He arrived on holiday at the Stanley Ghyll Guest House, Eskdale, a few days ago.
He was one of a party of 35 who set out to climb Harter Fell, three miles from the guest house.
The party, which included a number of women, was in charge of the host, Mr M’Lean, and they reached the summit of the mountain without mishap.
In starting the return journey, it is stated, Mr Flintoff decided to descend by the face of the mountain instead of taking the usual gully route.
Suddenly rocks on which he was standing gave way, and he was carried down a number of feet and partly buried under a rock weighing about 25 cwts (1.25 tons).
Crowbars Useless
Mr M’Lean, who has only one arm remained with the party, while Mr H. Eccles, the guest house secretary, hurried to Askdale (sic) to obtain iron crowbars with which to lever the rock and release Flintoff.
Eight men of the party remained to render assistance, but were unable to release Flintoff owing to the weight of the rock.
Mr Eccles telephoned to Whitehaven, 25 miles away, for the ambulance and a doctor. On his return, Flintoff was liberated. He had been under the rock for two hours, but he had not lost consciousness.”

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

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

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

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

Green Crag and Crook Crag from the quagmire

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

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

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

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

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

Song From The Wood

November 15, 2020 George Kitching 16 Comments

Rusland Horizons Greenwood Trail 3

With the arboreal serenity of High Dam Tarn, the heather-clad open fell, the mountain panoramas, and the spooky story surrounding the woods at Fearing Brow, Rusland Horizons’ Greenwood Trail 3 is a rich and varied walk. As I learn about the Trust’s conservation work in this beautiful valley between Windermere & Coniston, I discover a link to a man I once knew: a charcoal burner who lived in the forest and made yurts; as it transpires, that was only one chapter in a truly remarkable life.

High Dam, Rusland Heights, Fearing Brow, Finsthwaite

In my recent post about Dixon Heights, the sight of semi-feral fell pony in the soft light of a summer evening provoked a flight of fancy about Rhiannon, the Celtic horse goddess, sometimes depicted as an ethereal white mare. About a week after posting that article, my friend, Sarah, showed me a video she’d taken on Dixon Heights of a young foal. Rhiannon was standing over him protectively. Was Rhiannon the mother, I wondered? Yet, when the foal trotted off to greet a black mare, I realised how big and muscular Rhiannon looked in comparison. Then Rhiannon lowered his undercarriage and there could be absolutely no doubt about his masculinity.

Several days later, I discovered the Fell Pony Adventures’ Facebook page. This Equestrian Centre runs the Hades Hill herd of indigenous fell ponies that graze Dixon Heights (Hades rhymes with shades). I posted a picture of Rhiannon, which they loved and helpfully informed me, “George, this is Hades Hill Geronimo – 8 year old Registered Fell pony stallion who’s running with the mares”.

Geronimo! Definitely not Rhiannon, then.

The page made interesting reading. The Equestrian Centre is committed to the preservation of the breed, now classed as vulnerable by the Rare Breeds Survival Trust, but also to the ponies’ heritage as working animals (a tradition stretching back to Roman times). The centre offers wild camping pack pony treks to hidden corners of the Lake District. Indeed, I had just read Joanna Eede’s excellent account of one in the May/June 2020 edition of Lakeland Walker. Intrigued, I clicked through to their web site to read more about the organisation. The herd is now managed by Tom Lloyd, but it was established in 1957 by Tom’s father, Walter. Walter had been inspired by a letter in Horse and Hound Magazine, contradicting a claim that there were no pure bred ponies running wild in the country any longer. The correspondent, Miss Peggy Crosland, had stated that there were indeed still herds of fell ponies on the Lake District Fells. Walter got in touch and ended up buying two Heltondale mares in foal. Hades Hill lies on Shawforth Common in Lancashire, but in the early nineties, Walter moved to Cumbria with his ponies; Tom took over the herd in 1994, which is how Geronimo came to have the run of Dixon Heights.

Lockdown taught me the joy of waking up to what is right on your doorstep. The Dixon Heights post prompted Mandy Lane to get in touch and ask whether I had done much walking in the Rusland valley. To my shame, I admitted I’d done very little. Mandy explained she was a volunteer with Rusland Horizons, a charitable trust dedicated to conservation of the natural environment in the valley that lies between Windermere and Coniston. The trust also promotes education in the landscape and the revival of traditional rural skills. Mandy told me about the Greenwood Trails, which Rusland Horizons has created with the help of local school children, and she gave me the address of their website. In the About section, I learned that the newly renamed Rusland Horizons Trust is a successor organisation to the Lottery-funded Rusland Horizons Landscape Partnership Scheme. However, Rusland Horizons Trust began life in 1987 as an independent charity called Woodmanship Limited, formed to continue the work of Walter Lloyd, “a well-known coppicer and woodsman in the South Lakes area”.

Might this be the same Walter Lloyd? I Googled Walter and found his obituary in The Guardian. Walter died in 2018, aged 93, after what, by any standards, had been a remarkable life. What hit me first, however, was the picture staring back at me from the page: a kindly face, eyes sparkling with vitality and mischief, framed by a shock of wild white hair and matching moustache; for it was a face I’d known. Not well, and only briefly, over twenty years ago, but someone I’d known, all the same…

When I first moved to Cumbria in 1998, I signed up for Tai Chi lessons in Kendal. Walter was in the same class, an unmissable character, full of warmth, charm, and humour, turning up in battered jeans and a check shirt, smelling of woodsmoke. Despite being in his early seventies, he told me he was a woodsman and a charcoal burner, who made yurts and lived in a horse-drawn wagon in the woods near Newby Bridge.

…I read on and discovered he’d been very much more than that.

Walter grew up in Cornwall, where he showed a greater inclination for roaming the countryside with his donkey than he did for school. In the end, his parents packed him off to boarding school, but when war broke out, the school was evacuated to Wales where Walter met a company of charcoal burners who would prove a seminal influence. With the nation at war, Walter joined the Royal Navy and served off the Normandy beaches on D Day, and on the Artic convoys, for which he was recently awarded a medal by Vladimir Putin. After the war, he gained a degree in agriculture from Cambridge University and turned his hand to farming. After founding the Hades Hill herd, his annual trips to the Appleby Horse Fair and his prowess as a folk fiddle player ingratiated him with the gypsy horsemen society. Walter helped scupper official attempts to shut down the festival.

To supplement his meagre farm income, Walter pursued a parallel career as an Emergency Planning Officer for Greater Manchester, a role which saw him appear on television advising people what to do in the event of a nuclear attack: he pulled a bottle of whisky from his pocket and said “Drink all of it. You’ve got four minutes. Die happy!”. Walter also founded Civil Aid, which trained people to help out in emergencies, and offered a life-saving service at the explosion of free music festivals in the 1970’s: from a second-hand “Green Goddess” military fire engine, he dispensed drinking water, blankets, and vegetable curry to hungry and borderline-hypothermic hippies.

When he retired, Walter moved to the South Lakes where he was instrumental in reviving a number of derelict woodlands and re-establishing traditional crafts, still capable of producing local income from coppiced wood: charcoal-burning, coracle making, swill basket-weaving and rope-making (using Herdwick wool gathered from fences). In doing so, he inspired a generation of would-be artisans to abandon the rat-race and pursue their dreams of living closer to nature, forging a living from the land using almost forgotten skills.

Before Walter’s time, the woods around Stott Park were coppiced to produce birch, ash, and sycamore wood for the Bobbin mill. During the nineteenth century, hundreds of Cumbrian mills supplied the bobbins essential to the cotton industries of Lancashire and Yorkshire. Stott Park is the only working example left. The British textile industry flourished at the start of the twentieth century, but the outbreak of WWI destroyed the export market and the cotton mills closed. With demand for bobbins plummeting, Stott Park adapted its machines to make wooden tool handles and managed to survive as commercial enterprise until 1971. It is now a working museum run by English Heritage. The mill recently won silver in the Small Visitor Attraction category at the Enjoy England awards, (although medium and larger-sized visitors are also welcome, I believe).

Stott Park Bobbin Mill — Start Park Bobbin Mill

The Bobbin Mill is the starting point for Rusland Horizons’ Greenwood Trail 3. As I step out of the car into dazzling August sunshine, I feel I couldn’t have picked a better day to explore Walter’s old stomping ground. I follow the small country lanes towards Finsthwaite and turn right on to a track that passes the National Trust High Dam car park and information boards. The track becomes a rough path, entering Bell Intake woods and climbing beside a stream. Before long, I reach the leaf-green pool of Low Dam. In 1835, Finsthwaite Tarn was dammed to provide a water supply to drive the Stott Park waterwheel. Low Dam is a small catchment pond on the outflow from High Dam, the much larger tarn restrained by the dam wall.

High Dam appears a little further up the slope, a shimmering oasis of arboreal serenity, its languid surface an ephemeral dance of reflected leaves, twigs, trunks, and branches. Sunbeams dispersed through tall trees light the waters in an impressionist palette of greens and golds, sun-kissed yellows, and earthy browns, stippled here and there with blue polka dots of sky. I cross the bridge over the outlet and follow the footpath that encircles the tarn, walking slowly, lazily, bathing in the reflective calm of this little sea of tranquillity. About half-way up the western shore, the Greenwood Trail turns left to follow an old enclosure wall out on to open fell. Too enchanted with the tarn to take the trail on my first lap, I stick with the shore path up around the head of the water and down its eastern bank. A wooden boardwalk provides sure footing over a mire awash with sweet-scented bog myrtle. Electric blue dragonflies flit over foliage, and dead foxgloves stand like rusted fence posts against drystone walls mottled with lichen and softened with moss.

When I reach the trail junction for the second time, I follow the enclosure wall out of the wood to much wilder terrain beneath the slopes of Great Green Hows. The ground turns marshy, but a boardwalk crosses the worst sections. I’ve left all human company behind, but a newt darts over my foot. On reaching a stone stile, I’m met with a sudden sweeping prospect over the Rusland Valley and Grisedale Forest to the Coniston Fells. The Old Man stands proudly centre, flanked by Dow Crag on the left, and Brim Fell, Swirl How, and Wetherlam on the right, all soft grey silhouettes except where the southern tip of the Lad Stones ridge has found the morning sun.

A wooden signpost, replete with a Greenwood Trail arrow, points south to Rusland Heights. The OS map shows no path, but the trod is mostly clear and helpfully marked in indistinct stretches by white-topped posts. The open fell is awash with seasonal colour: green summer bracken interleaved with autumnal copper, outcrops of heather in vibrant purple, soft mauve, and chocolate brown—a last parade of high summer on the cusp of autumn. I pass rocky outcrops and deep green holly bushes, cross another stone stile, and handrail an old drystone wall to the highest point. Here, a grand panorama of Lakeland peaks awaits. The entire Coniston range from Caw to Wetherlam occupies the western aspect, while tracking north, I can see Seat Sandal, the Fairfield Horseshoe, Red Screes, Stoney Cove Pike, Thornthwaite Crag, High Street, and Ill Bell. Froswick is all but hidden in shadow, but Yoke, Harter Fell, and Kentmere Pike are discernible. Dark shadowy forms all, like the ghosts of fells below the celestial snowy peaks of cloud above.

Beyond a wall junction, the path starts to descend then climbs again on slopes of yellow gorse and purple heather. A little detour up a rocky knoll affords a glimpse of Boretree Tarn, its iridescent waters, dragonfly-blue below the wooded rise of Yew Barrow. The path initially skirts the wood, descending through a small rock-walled gorge to a reed-lined pond at its edge, then it dives into the trees and descends steeply to a minor road; a shady stretch, which bears the sinister name of Fearing Brow.

Fearing is local dialect for a ghost or evil spirit, and the ghost in question is that of Margaret Taylor, known since her untimely demise as the Ealinghearth Dobby. In 1825, driven to despair by the cruelty and callous neglect of her father, Margaret resolved to end her misery by drowning herself. She was buried at Finsthwaite, but sadly, her suffering didn’t end with the grave. Her heartless father left her funeral before she was even interred, yet Margaret’s spirit was racked with guilt, and she remained earthbound, locked in an eternal quest to find him, and to profess her devotion despite his disdain. She was said to hitch rides on travellers’ carts or fall in with those that trod the lane, always announcing her presence with strange waffling sound. The story led one eighteen-year-old lad, named Christopher Cloudsdale, to make a fatal choice. One winter afternoon he visited Rusland Smithy on an errand from the Bobbin Mill. It was after dark by the time he set off back, and despite the snow, he wouldn’t follow the road for fear of the Dobby, attempting instead to make his way over Great Green Hows. Disoriented in the dark and with his clogs balled up with snow, he wandered in circles for hours before falling and freezing to death.

From Fearing Brow, the trail doubles back into the wood and follows a shady avenue to Townend, where it crosses the Finsthwaite road and tracks round to the farm buildings at Tom Crag. From here, it climbs through an ancient meadow known as the Dales. The Dales were thin strips of land allocated to villagers, on which they would grow oats, barley, and vegetables. Their livestock would graze the fellside and overwinter in the wood, known as Wintering Park, which the trail now enters. There are sheep here still. I can hear a lamb before I see it. It sounds distressed, and when I catch sight, I realise it has got its head stuck in a wire fence while attempting to eat the perennially-greener grass on the other side. I walk over to try and free it, but the sight of me approaching gives it all the impetus it needs to free itself.

From Wintering Park, the trail crosses fields, named by Norse settlers, to Finsthwaite with its Alpine looking church. The Greenwood Trail leaflet (downloadable from the website) includes a picture of the Hunter family of Finsthwaite weaving swill baskets in Plum Green Yard in 1891. By the 1980’s, many of these traditional skills were in danger of dying out, and much of the surrounding woodland had become derelict. It seems counter-intuitive to think that cutting wood is a form of conservation, but properly managed coppicing can extend the life of trees and create habitats much richer in biodiversity. Thanks to Walter Lloyd and Rusland Horizons, these woodlands and their traditional crafts are flourishing again. A Greenwood sign reminds me this wonderful trail was devised by school children, and I acknowledge the sterling work the charity is doing in education as well as conservation.

Then I think of fell ponies on Dixon Heights, and I remember clumsily stumbling through a Tai Chi kata with a remarkable man I only wish I’d known better.

Sheep & Wolf’s Clothing

May 17, 2020 George Kitching 22 Comments

Eagle Crag

Its north-west face is a daunting rampart of rock, its eastern flank, a sheer wall. From the confluence of streams where Greenup meets Langstrath, Eagle Crag looks unassailable, but Wainwright isn’t fibbing when he says there’s a single line of weakness in its defences. Just over a year ago, I made the exhilarating ascent to reach a summit that was, once, the territory of a wolfman.

It is harder for a rich man to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a camel to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Something like that—I may have all the right words not necessarily in the right order, but you get the gist—the biblical lesson about excessive wealth being a bit of a disadvantage in gaining entry to the Pearly Gates. Even us atheists might recognise a metaphorical truth in that, but in 1195, the warning was taken very literally. Especially, if your name was Alice de Rumeli, and you were heiress to the Barony of Allerdale. Alice was a deeply pious woman, but she was also a very wealthy one—hence her anxiety about needles and camels.

When her only son died in a tragic hunting accident, Alice vowed to make many a poor man’s son her heir. She decided that the surest way to avoid eternal damnation was to donate her land to the Cistercian monastery at Fountains Abbey. Well some of it anyway. Not the fertile farmland around Cockermouth, obviously. That was highly productive and supplied her with a good revenue in feudal taxes. No, she would donate her Borrowdale estates at Crosthwaite, Wanderlath and Stonethwaite. The land had been forest until about three hundred years earlier when Norse settlers made clearings to provide summer grazing for their cattle. In agricultural terms, it was still very poor, yielding just enough to feed the villagers but with precious little left for their feudal overlord. It would make a fine gift for the Abbey, and it would guarantee salvation for Alice’s soul (so long as The Almighty was too busy being all-knowing and all-seeing to bother with a survey).

The monks were not afraid of a bit of hard graft, and they were canny enough to realise the land would support sheep better than cattle. Despite a statute from 1380, which described Borrowdale’s wool as the ‘the worst wool in the realm’, the monks turned Alice’s gift into profitable farmland along the lines that it is still worked today. In fact, they made such a decent fist of it that their rivals at Furness Abbey took exception. This may have had something to do with the fact that in 1209, Alice sold her Cockermouth estate to Furness Abbey for £156 13s 4d—a princely sum back then. Being charitable Christians, their hearts full of humility and healthy disdain for material wealth, the monks of Furness complained to the King about the terms of ownership. The King settled the dispute by claiming the Borrowdale land as his own; then he sold it back to Fountains Abbey for £2. Quite how that all left everyone in regard to the camel, I couldn’t tell you, but it does at least explain how the valley as we know it now took shape.

Ruin of a sheepfold in front of Eagle Crag — Ruin of a sheep fold in front of Eagle Crag

From over the fence, a Herdwick hogg eyes me with indifference. A National Trust information board proclaims the charity’s commitment to protecting these indigenous Lakeland sheep against agricultural shifts in favour of more commercial breeds. That this Stonethwaite meadow is about 90% full of Texels makes it look like a losing battle; but hardy fell sheep lamb a little later than the lowland breeds. Over the coming weeks, the new-borns and their mothers will be moved into these in-bye pastures for the richer grass, and Herdies will again predominate.

As I’m counting sheep, a teenage girl in a pink top skips past me. She doesn’t look kitted out for a long walk, but as I cross the bridge over Greenup Gill and turn right beside the drystone wall that tracks its course, I catch the odd fleeting glimpse of pink through the trees. A little further on, I find her sitting on a small wooden footbridge, staring wistfully down the valley. Perhaps this her favourite spot, but something in the look of wonder on her face suggests she’s here on holiday, escaping the town for the Easter weekend and already transfixed by this novel environment. In the hazy sunlight of early morning, it does seem the stuff of magic.

Across Greenup Gill, people are emerging from a parade of tents, yawning, stretching and looking equally awe-struck, for a few hundred metres further on is a sight of breathtaking magnificence. At the confluence of two streams the formidable face of Eagle Crag splits the valley into Greenup and Langstrath. In geographical terms, the fell is simply a northern buttress of High Raise, but anyone with a beating heart and the faintest spark of fire in their blood cannot help but agree with Wainwright that “it is, to the eye of the artist or the mountaineer, a far worthier object than the parent fell rising behind”. Its north western face is a daunting rampart of rock, rising defiantly skyward, impregnable. Its eastern flank is a sheer wall. In between, the initial slope is grassy if alarmingly steep, but it gives way to crags well below the summit. It would seem unassailable, but I’ve done this walk before, and I know Wainwright isn’t fibbing when he says there’s a single line of weakness in its defences.

Eagle Crag from Stonethwaite — Eagle Crag

When I reach the confluence of streams, Langstrath opens up to the west, stretching out to Bow Fell and Esk Pike. A footbridge affords a way across Greenup Gill, and a plaque reveals it was rebuilt to commemorate Gordon Hallworth, a member of the Manchester Mountaineering Club who died of exhaustion in the valley in 1939. I register quiet relief that Gordon didn’t die trying to scale Eagle Crag, then I realise that’s uncharitable and unlikely to aid my chances of passing through the eye of a needle, should the need ever arise.

Over the footbridge, I turn left, climb a stile, and cross two fields at the foot of Eagle Crag. Through a gap in a tumbledown wall, I reach the beginning of Wainwright’s ascent and start up the unforgiving incline, heading for the knoll of Bleak How above. A path emerges, swinging beneath the knoll then climbing to a fence and a rickety wooden stile. The valley already looks a long way down, and opposite, the slopes of Ullscarf are a calotype of umber shadow and sepia sun-bleached earth.

Beyond the stile, the narrow stony path climbs between a wall of crag and grass slopes that fall away alarmingly (but the cliffs above are peppered with spindly rowan trees, and rowan trees are the Celtic symbol of life and protection, so I watch my step and place my trust in an ancient belief).

I scramble up a small gully to a heathery knoll beneath a cliff. Here, the path turns right, but a short detour provides a magnificent view of Eagle Crag’s vertical face: a brutal wall rising indomitably from the valley below.

I cross a narrow ledge to a series of rock terraces above Heron Crag. The great stone bulwark of Sergeant’s Crag rises to a dome ahead, its steep side plunging to Langstrath Beck. The long knotty ridge of Glaramara encloses the valley on the other bank, with the iconic profiles of Great Gable and Honister Crag (Black Star) standing proud beyond. At the valley’s head, the slopes rise abruptly toward England’s highest ground.

Above me, a series of small rock walls, white in the sunlight, separate the heather-clad terraces. They rise in a succession of narrowing tiers toward the summit. The heather is turning olive with new growth, and it’s leavened by lighter shoots of bilberry.

The terrace tapers to almost nothing as it approaches Sergeant’s Crag, so the only way is up. A faint path exists (for the eagle-eyed). It zigzags up through the levels, but it’s easily lost, and the real trick is to look for any breach in the rocks that allows access to the ground above. Spotting the way becomes a game—a real-life Snakes and Ladders (without the snakes, hopefully). It’s exhilarating, and it’s almost too soon when I reach the sloping slab of rock and the modest cairn that mark the summit.

It was here, in 1975, that a woman got a nasty shock, for attached to this very slab was a plaque inscribed with the words, “You are now in Wolfman country”. Terrified, she fled the scene and complained to the National Trust. The Wolfman was, in fact, a Borrowdale resident by the name of John Jackson, so nicknamed for his red hair and extravagant beard. The plaque had been carved as an affectionate joke by a stonemason friend, but given the alarm it caused, The National Trust removed it, and it stood for many years by the door of the café at Knotts View in Stonethwaite.

Wolfman or no, this summit is an eyrie worthy of an eagle, and a peerless lookout over Alice’s gift.

For the full Wolfman story, visit Richard Jennings’ website:

The Wolfman of Eagle Crag

This article first appeared in the March/April 2020 edition of Lakeland Walker magazine:

http://www.lakeland-walker.com/

Fell Walk, General, History, Literature

The Fell King

April 13, 2020 George Kitching 18 Comments

High Rigg and the Poet Stonemason of St John’s in the Vale

Named for a 13th century’s hospice built by the Knights Hospitaller, St John’s in the Vale is an idyllic glacial valley, hemmed in by High Rigg & Helvellyn with Blencathra at its foot. In the 1800’s, it was home to a stonemason turned schoolteacher who became a minor celebrity when he published two volumes of dialect rhymes that capture the comedy and romance of Cumbrian life like few others could. A few weeks before lockdown, on a brooding day between seasons, I walked through the vale to visit his modest grave, then returned over High Rigg where I found the view that inspired one of his finest poems.

The valley is soft grey and mauve, a wash of impressionist watercolour, bathed in fine mizzle, like a comforting memory that patters faintly on the cosy cocoon of my waterproofs. Through a bare-branched lattice of beech and silver birch, Wren Crag rises, a gaunt white face of rock, furrowed with olive wrinkles, its lower reaches wrapped in a scrubby winter blanket of mustard and salmon pink. At the bottom of the slope, St John’s Beck roars and hisses, gushing and crashing over rocks in a surging torrent of youthful exuberance.

Here and there, a fallen tree testifies to the brutal winds that have scourged the land in recent weeks. Battered and weather-beaten, but perennially resilient, the first signs of spring rebound in the respite of this gentler day. The moss that clothes the mottled stone of an ancient wall is vivid green, as is the grass of the grazing pasture beyond. Across the valley, shafts of sunlight tint the orange bracken that cloaks the foot of Calfhow Pike, while above, its charcoal crags are flecked yellow with straw grass.

At Low Bridge End Farm, a tea-room (self-service today) is testimony to a farmer’s ability to diversify, while a vintage tractor, inert in a meadow, is a silent echo from an older time. Further along the track, a lichen-stippled ruin tells of a farming heritage that stretches all the way back to the Vikings; its roofless gables mirror the mighty pyramids of Blease and Gategill fells, Blencathra’s western buttresses, that rise as a colossal rampart beyond.

Soon after the Norman conquests, Ranulph Engayne, chief forrester of the Forest of Inglewood (which once stretched from Carlisle to Penrith), is said to have built a hospital at Caldbeck for the relief of travellers that had fallen victim to the “desperate banditti” that roamed the woods. The same dangers may have beset travellers journeying south from Keswick. Perhaps this is why, in the thirteenth century, The Knights Hospitaller of St John are said to have built a hospice on the pass between High and Low Rigg.

The Knights Hospitaller were a religious and military order with their own papal charter, which exempted them from the laws of the countries through which they travelled and held them answerable only to the Pope. They were originally formed to staff a hospital in Jerusalem, providing succour for sick or injured pilgrims, but they began to offer armed escorts through the Holy Land, and they became an elite fighting force in the crusades. By the late thirteenth century, the order had acquired significant lands in several countries, including England.

The Hospitallers’ chief rivals in terms of power and influence were the Knights Templar. The Templars are widely accredited with having invented modern banking. Noblemen planning to visit the Holy Land could assign their wealth over to the Templars, and on arrival at a Templar stronghold in the East, they could withdraw money and treasures to the same value.

By 1312, the Templars had become victims of their own success. With banking came credit, and with credit, debt. King Philip IV of France owed so much that he was desperate to wriggle out of his obligation. When an ex Templar brought some dubious criminal charges against the order, Philip seized the opportunity to have the Grand Master and many prominent members arrested. The Templars’ secret initiation ceremonies bred distrust, and the confessions Philip extracted under torture “revealed” that Templar recruits were required to spit on the cross, deny Christ, worship false idols and indulge in acts of homosexuality: all highly dubious claims that nonetheless resulted in dozens of members being burnt at the stake as heretics. Under duress, Pope Clement V disbanded the Templars, signing over much of their property (like Temple Sowerby in the Eden Valley) to the Knights Hospitaller.

Evidence for the hospice below High Rigg is sketchy, but there is a mention of a “House of St John” in a land bequest to Fountains Abbey in 1210. It is thought the hospice evolved into the inn that stood on the pass for many centuries. It likely lent its dedication to St John’s church, which dates back to the 1500’s (possibly earlier). For many centuries, St John’s was an outlying chapel of the parish of Crosthwaite, Keswick. (It became a parish church in its own right in 1863). It’s a lonely setting for a country chapel, but it serves both the Naddle valley and St John’s in the Vale, and if James Clark’s Survey of the Lakes of 1778 is anything to go by, the presence of the inn may have been an incentive for the faithful to turn out for worship:

“all the inhabitants of the parish, old and young, men and women, repair to the ale house after Evening Prayer”.

According to Clark, the valley was properly known as the Vale of Wanthwaite but calling it the Vale of St John had already become common practice. In his wonderful parish history, former vicar, Geoffrey Darrall, suggests that the variation, St John’s-in-the-Vale, was first used to differentiate the chapel from St John’s Keswick, when the latter was built in 1838.

By 1845, the chapel had fallen into disrepair to the extent it needed rebuilding. The man who was given the job was a local stonemason who had built many of the area’s dry stone walls and dwellings. His name was John Richardson, and he lived at the end of this footpath.

Beyond Sosgill Bridge, the beck that has been a constant companion takes a wider birth, swinging back for a final parting kiss beneath the copper-bracken clad slopes of Rake How. Lonscale Fell commands the forward view now, soft purple but for a thin band of snow that defines its pointed eastern peak, the valley at its foot is fleetingly gilded by a shaft of sunlight. Ahead, beneath an intricate tracery of black branches, appears the white-walled haven of Bridge House, the Richardsons’ residence from 1858, when they moved from Stone Cottage on the Naddle side of the Fell.

The path meets the winding lane that climbs the pass. I turn up it, and in no more than a hundred yards, I reach the church. This humble edifice of weathered slate, nestled under High Rigg, in the shadow of Blencathra, looks as if it has been carved from the hillside—an enduring unassuming testament to rural faith.

Originally, the pass served as a corpse road. Anyone who died in the valley had their coffin carried to Crosthwaite for burial. In 1767, the chapel was granted the right to bury its own dead in its own chapel yard. It wasn’t until nine years later that the first burial took place here. A local superstition held that the Devil was waiting to claim the soul of the first interred, and the belief was so strong as to compel all ageing locals to insist they be carried to Crosthwaite when their time came (unless, by chance, someone else had beaten them to the first lot). According to Richardson, that “someone else” was an ailing vagrant who dropped dead on the road. Rather than being bemoaned as burden by the parish saddled with his burial costs, the poor soul met with a hero’s funeral.

John Richardson grave and St John's church — John Richardson grave and St John’s church

In the churchyard, opposite the east window, stands an old gravestone in the shape of a Celtic cross, its edges softened by moss and its face mottled with lichen. The circle at the centre of the cross holds a Christogram, intwining the letters “I”, “H” and “S” into a gothic motif—iota-eta-sigma—the first three letters in the Greek for Jesus. The foot of the cross broadens into a tablet, which bears the following inscription:

IN LOVING MEMORY OF JOHN RICHARDSON
Of Bridge House
ST JOHN’S IN THE VALE
WHO DIED ON THE 30TH APRIL 1886
Aged 68 Years
ALSO OF GRACE, HIS WIFE
WHO DIED FEBRUARY 11TH 1909
Aged 90 Years

John Richardson's gravestone — John Richardson’s gravestone

Writing in 1975, Frank Carruthers lamented, “Today (the grave) is seldom visited because memories of John Richardson have faded”. Almost ninety years earlier, the whole valley turned out for his funeral, and they were joined by many, many more from far further afield. For John Richardson was more than a stonemason, and his legacy, more than the humble church in whose shadow he lies.

After rebuilding the church, Richardson built the school next door (now the Carlisle Diocesan Youth Centre), then put down his chisel and took up the position of school master. It was during these years that he gave full reign to another talent—a gift for capturing the rural life of the fells and valleys in a way few others have ever managed.

In 1871, Richardson published Cummerland Talk—being short tales and rhymes in the dialect of that county. A second volume followed five years later, and between them, the books turned Richardson into a minor celebrity. Seamus Heaney has described his own poetry as “the music of what happens”, and this too is what Richardson makes, a celebration of the commonplace, rendered in the everyday parlance of the district and the time, a Cumbrian counterpoint to the writings of his hero, Robbie Burns

Tom an’ Jerry (written forty years before the cartoon when the term meant a drinking den) tells the story of a man and wife, who procure a barrel of ale, which they plan to pay for by selling pints at threepence apiece to their neighbours.

Says Ben to t’ wife, “Auld wife”’ says he,
“We’ll hev a Tom an’ Jerry;
An’ thoo can wait, an’ I can drum.
By jing! but well be merry!
We’ll hev a cask o’ yal for t’ start,
An’ than when we want mair.
We’ll pay wi’ t’ brass we’ve selt it for.
An’ summat hev to spare.”

As each decides to sample the ale, the other insists they hand over the requisite threepence. In the absence of any other punters, they carry on like this all evening until they both pass out. When they awake, they find they’ve drunk the barrel dry, and they’ve no means to pay for it as, all night, they were simply swapping the same threepence back and forth.

In “FOR SHAM O’ THE’, MARY!” SES I, the narrator admonishes his wife for spreading gossip, but in his eagerness to express his own disdain for such “clattin’ an’ tattlin’ ‘s aboot nowt”, he manages to repeat every piece of salacious tittle-tattle he’s heard.

The Cockney in Mosedale tells of a farmer chancing upon a strange red-whiskered creature running about the fellside in fear of everything around him: the farmer, his dog, the sheep, and the fells themselves. In his panic, the poor creature gets stuck fast in a “peet-pot”. Fearing it might come to harm if left to its own devices, the farmer leaves it “stack theer as fast as a fiddlepin” while he fodders his flock. Then he hauls it out, ties it up in his hay sheet, and carries it down to Troutbeck station, where he discovers the creature is a cockney, who’d taken the train out of London for the first time and alighted, in the dark, at the wrong station.

By way of an introduction to Sneck Posset, Richardson explains the term:

“The old fashioned mode of courting in the northern counties, which is still common in many places, is for the young man to go to the house where his sweetheart lives, late at night, after all the other members of the family have retired to rest, when gently tapping at the window, the waiting damsel as soon as she has ascertained, by sundry whisperings, that he is the expected swain, admits him. If from any cause she refuses to let him into the house, he is said to have got a ‘Sneck Posset’.”

John used the same mode (albeit with more success) to court Grace, and he tells the story (from her point of view) in It’s Nobbut Me:

“Ya winter neet; I minds it weel,
Oor lads ‘ed been at t’fell,
An’ bein’ tir’t, went seun to bed,
An’ I sat be messel.
I hard a jike on t’window pane,
An’ deftly went to see;
Bit when I ax’t, ‘Who’s jiken theer?’
Says t’chap, it’s nobbut me!”

By turns comical and romantic, Richardson’s rhymes drip warmth and earthy authenticity. As he explains in the preface to Volume II, they are “strictly Cumbrian in character and idiom, the author having taken pains to ascertain that the real incidents related actually happened in that county; while in the few pieces which are purely imaginary, he has been careful to preserve the same characteristics.”

He could be reflective too, philosophical even. Carruthers describes him as “the supreme example of one of the popular images of the Lake Country Dalesman—quiet, resolute, kind-hearted and self-effacing”. In What I’d Wish For, Richardson concludes,

“Oor real wants are nobbut few
If we to limit them would try”

It’s a sentiment I’ll dwell on more than once in the weeks to come, when the country goes into a painful lockdown, and yet the birdsong seems louder and the sky, free of vapour trails, clearer than I have ever known. Such was the wisdom of a man who prized peace of mind over celebrity and chose to live all his life in the parish of his birth, under the vaunting ridges of Blencathra.

It’s a steep pull up High Rigg from the Youth Centre, but the effort pays back handsomely. On this brooding day between seasons, the ridge is a patchwork of grassy paths, rocky turrets, drystone walls, tiny tarns and swathes of scrub in shades of ochre, tan, russet and green. The views are procession of riches: Skiddaw and Blencathra, Clough Head and the Dodds, Castle Rock, Raven Crag and Thirlmere. Helvellyn is capped in snow and wrapped in mist. Skiddaw is brown and snow-free, just as they both were when I stood here in November. Then, the snow marked the onset of winter, now it marks the season’s last stand.

Surely this is where Richardson stood when the muse struck in 1876, for this very picture is the premise for one of his greatest rhymes, the Fell King, which I’ve reproduced in full below; so I’ll leave the last words to John.

(If you’re struggling with the dialect, read it aloud—persistence rewards richly).

THE FELL KING.

By John Richardson of Saint John’s, 1876

Breet summer days war aw gone by
An’ autumn leaves sa’ broon,
Hed fawn fra t’ trees, an’ here an’ theer,
War whurlin’ up an’ doon;
An’ t’ trees steud whidderin’ neàk’t an’ bare,
Shakken wi’ coald an’ wind.
While t’ burds war wonderin’ hoo it was
Neah shelter they could finnd.

Helvellyn, toorin’ t’ fells abeun,
Saw winter creepin’ on,
An’ grummelin’ sed, “Hoo coald it’s grown;
My winter cap I’ll don.”
Clean wesh’t an’ bleach’t, as white as drip,
He poo’t it ower his broo;
An’ than to t’ fells aw roond he sed,
“Put on ye’r neetcaps noo.”

Auld Skiddaw, lap’t i’ heddery duds,
Laal nwotish seem’t to tak:
An’ seun wi’ lood an’ thunnerin’ voice,
Agean Helvellyn spak:
“I say, put on that winter cap,
Broon hill ower-groun wi’ ling;
Rebellious upstart! put it on;
Obey thy lawful king!”

Auld Skiddaw lang hed hanker’t sair
Itsel to be t’ fell king;
An’ Saddleback hed egg’t it on,
Thinkin’ ‘t wad honour bring;
An’ bits o’ profit it mud be,—
Fwok see eneuf o’ that;
When kings an’ girt fwok thriven ur
Their flunkies oft git fat.

Seah, Skiddaw stack it’ hedder up,
An’ pertly sed, “Is yon
Rough heap o’ crags an’ shilly beds,
To tell us what to don?
I’ll freely oan it’s wise eneuf
To hap itsel wi’ snow;
If I was neak’t an’ bare like it
I’d hide mysel an’ aw.

“I’s nut asham’t my heid to show,
Withoot a neetcap on;
An’ claim mair reet to be t’ fell king
Nor a bare hill like yon,
Fra t’ farthest neùks o’ t’ warld fwok come
Fam’t Skiddaw bit to see;
Whoar ten climm up Helvellyn breest,
Ten twenties climm up me!”

With threetnin’ storm, Helvellyn laps
Dark cloods aroond it’ heid;
An’ noo a voice fra t’ clood com oot,
“A bonny king, indeed!
A hill thrown up by mowdiwarps,
An’ cuvver’t ower wi’ ling,
Withoot a crag, withoot a tarn,
Wad mak a nice fell king!

“Laal brag it is for enny man
To climm up Skiddaw side;
Auld wives an’ barnes on jackasses,
To t’ tippy top may ride;
When theer, it’s nut sa’ much they see,
Bit level country roond;
They’re better pleas’t when gangin’ up.
Nor when they’re comin’ doon.

“Bit let them climm Helvellyn side,
If climm’t they nobbut can;
They munnet be auld wives or barnes;
It taks a strang hale man,
To stand on t’ dizzy edge, an’ leuk
Doon t’ screes, whoar Gough was lost;
An’ he’s neah snafflin’ ‘at can say,
Ower Striden edge I cross’t.

“Than what a glorious scene it is
‘At ‘s spread befwore his eyes,
O’ lakes an’ tarns an’ woody deàls.
An’ fells ower fells ‘at rise.
A dozen lakes, an’ twenty tarns,
Ur spread befwore his een;
An’ Skiddaw, like a low black hill,
Far doon to t’ north is seen!”

What mair palaver theer hed been,
It’s hard for yan to tell;
For gnimmelin’ soonds, an’ snarlin’ words.
Noo spread fra fell to fell;
An’ some their caps o’ white don’t on,
While udders went without;
An’ some proclaim’ t Helvellyn king,
While some wad Skiddaw shoot.

Bit noo roond Scawfell Man theer hung,
As midneet black, a clood;
An’ oot fra’t brast a thunner clap,
‘At rwoar’t beàth lang an’ lood:
Than hail an’ snow com whurlin’ doon.
An’ hap’t beàth crags an’ ling;
While t’ fells aw roond, as whisht as mice,
Oan’t Scawfell as their king!

Sources/Further Reading

Richardson, John. 1871: Cummerland Talk. London: John Russell Smith; Carlisle: Geo. Coward.

Richardson, John. 1876: Cummerland Talk (Second Series). London: Bemrose and Sons; Carlisle: G. & T. Coward.

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

Darrall, Geoffrey. 2009. The Story of St John’s-in-the-Vale. Keswick: Piper Publications (available from St John’s Church)

Fell Walk, General, Ghost Story, History, Legend, Literature, Natural History, Nature

Before the flood

February 23, 2020 George Kitching 21 Comments

Raven Crag & the Flooding of Thirlmere

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harriet Martineau, in 1855, adds to the picture:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources/Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wikipedia is also good on the history of the reservoir:

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

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