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Here’s where the story ends

Paw Prints of the Plague Dogs part II

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

Seathwaite Tarn, Dow Crag, Caw & Brown Haw

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

Seathwaite Tarn and Levers Hause
Seathwaite Tarn and Levers Hause
Grey Friar
Grey Friar

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

Seathwaite mine level no. 1
Seathwaite mine level no. 1

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

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

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

Herdwicks
Herdwicks

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

Tongue House Farm
Tongue House Farm

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

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

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

Great Gully, Dow Crag

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

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

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

Seathwaite Tarn from copper mine
Tarn Head Moss

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

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

Harter Fell from Dow Crag Fell
Harter Fell from Dow Crag Fell

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

Bleaberry Beck
Bleaberry Beck
Clouds over Dunnerdale
Clouds over Dunnerdale

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

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

Caw from the Walna Scar road
Caw from the Walna Scar road
Scafells at first light
Scafells at first light
Walna Scar quarry buildings
Walna Scar quarry buildings
Walna Scar quarry buildings
Walna Scar quarry buildings

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

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

Caw summit
Caw summit
Grey Friar from Pikes
Grey Friar from Pikes

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

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

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

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

Brow Haw from Caw
Brow Haw from Caw

~

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harter Fell from Park Head road
Harter Fell from Park Head road

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

Ravenglass and Drigg

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

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

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

Ravenglass estuary
Ravenglass estuary
Ravenglass estuary
Ravenglass estuary

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

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

Drigg Low Level Nuclear Waste Repository

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

Drigg Beach
Drigg Beach
Drigg Beach
Drigg Beach
Drigg Beach
Drigg Beach

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

Drigg Beach
Drigg Beach

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

Drigg Beach
Drigg Beach

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

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

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

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

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

The Irish Sea
The Irish Sea

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

Drigg Beach
Drigg Beach


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

    Raven Tor, Levers Hause and Seathwaite Tarn.

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

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

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

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

    Plague Dogs by Richard Adams
    Plague Dogs by Richard Adams

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

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

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

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

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

    Coniston Fells
    Coniston Fells

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

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

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

    Page 46
    Page 46

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

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

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

    Monk Coniston Jetty
    Monk Coniston Jetty

    Coniston Water
    Coniston Water

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

    Coniston village
    Coniston village

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

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

    Track to Coppermines Valley
    Track to Coppermines Valley

    Church Beck
    Church Beck

    Track to Coppermines Valley
    Track to Coppermines Valley

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

    Miners' Bridge
    Miners’ Bridge

    Church Beck waterfall
    Church Beck waterfall

    Border Collie, Coniston Youth Hostel
    Rowf?

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

    Quarry, Coppermines Valley
    Quarry, Coppermines Valley

    Quarry, Coppermines Valley
    Quarry, Coppermines Valley

    Wetherlam from Boulder Valley
    Wetherlam from Boulder Valley

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

    Low Water Beck ravine
    Low Water Beck ravine

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

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

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

    Looking back down from Brill Fell ascent
    Looking back down from Brill Fell ascent

    Raven Tor
    Raven Tor

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

    Levers Water from Raven Tor
    Levers Water from Raven Tor

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

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

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

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

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

    Levers Water from Levers Hause path
    Levers Water from Levers Hause path

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

    Seathwaite Tarn from Levers Hause
    Seathwaite Tarn from Levers Hause

    Tarn Beck

    Duddon Valley and Seathwaite Tarn
    Duddon Valley and Seathwaite Tarn

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

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

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

    Rowf and Snitter's new home

    Rowf and Snitter’s new home

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

    To be continued…

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

    Here’s where the story ends


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      Away from the Numbers

      Grey Friar, Great Carrs, & Dow Crag from Seathwaite

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

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

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

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

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

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

      The Duddon valley
      The Duddon valley

      Herdwick lamb in the Duddon valley
      Herdwick lamb in the Duddon valley

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

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

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

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

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

      Then, I step in a cowpat.

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

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

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

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

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

      The Scafells from the Duddon valley
      The Scafells from the Duddon valley

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

      Grey Friar from the Seathwaite reservoir track
      Grey Friar from the Seathwaite reservoir track

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

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

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

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

      Seathwaite reservoir
      Seathwaite reservoir

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

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

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

      Seathwaite reservoir from the walkway
      Seathwaite reservoir from the walkway

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

      Great Blake Rigg
      Great Blake Rigg

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

      Seathwaite reservoir from Grey Friar
      Seathwaite reservoir from Grey Friar

      Summit cairns, Grey Friar
      Summit cairns, Grey Friar

      South-western summit Cairn, Grey Friar
      South-western summit Cairn, Grey Friar

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

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

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

      Memorial Cairn on Great Carrs
      Memorial Cairn on Great Carrs

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

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

      Brim Fell from Swirl How
      Brim Fell from Swirl How

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

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

      Dow Crag
      Dow Crag

      Climbers on Dow Crag
      Climbers on Dow Crag

      Goat Water from Dow Crag
      Goat Water from Dow Crag

      Dow Crag
      Dow Crag

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

      The Duddon valley from the Walna Scar track
      The Duddon valley from the Walna Scar track

      Tarn Beck, Duddon valley
      Tarn Beck, Duddon valley

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

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

      Foxfield Mosaic at the New Field Inn
      Foxfield Mosaic at the New Field Inn


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