Tag Archives: Grange-over-Sands

Riddle of the sands

Humphrey Head

How does something too small become a fell? When it’s a place of extinctions and exotic new colonists? When the curative powers of its holy waters have been celebrated alike by Roman lead miners and modern celebrities? When it has one foot on land and the other in the sea? When its charms outweigh its diminutive height to the degree that Wainwright felt duty bound to honour it as one? When it’s the outstretched finger of the Cartmel Peninsula, jutting out into the perilous mudflats of Morecambe Bay? Tim and I cross a salt marsh to explore the beguiling mysteries of Humphrey Head—historic home of England’s last wolf.

Twenty years ago, I joined the RSPB in a remote hide in the middle of Riggindale. It was an easy sell. I’d just seen a golden eagle perched on the crags of Riggindale Edge (the slender spine that Wainwright calls the “connoisseur’s route” up High Street). His mate (the eagle’s, not Wainwright’s) circled above Kidsty Pike. When I looked up from the telescope, the steward proffered a pen and the membership form, and I signed without hesitation.

The eagles were the only nesting pair in England. Sadly, the female died a few years later. The male hung on until late in 2015, but has not been spotted since, and the RSPB has now taken down the hide. Fortunately, some of the Society’s flagship work has had happier outcomes. The organisation started life with a campaign to protect another bird, the little egret. During the 19th century, egret feathers, alongside bird of paradise feathers, had become the must-have costume accessory among the Absolutely Fabulous, Vogue-reading fashionistas of the day. Indeed, the feathers became so sought-after that they were worth more than their weight in gold (literally). The social standing of contemporary Edinas and Patsys rose in inverse proportion to life-expectancy of the young chicks, and in 1889, Emily Williamson formed the Society for the Protection of Birds (later the Royal Society…) to campaign against this barbaric trade.

Today, the RSPB website describes the little egret as “a small white heron with attractive white plumes on crest, back and chest, black legs and bill and yellow feet”. Back when I joined, a little egret sighting would have been almost as rare as a golden eagle sighting. The birds first appeared on these shores in significant numbers in 1989 and didn’t breed here until seven years later. Over the intervening years, numbers have grown to the point where they are now quite at home in our coastal areas. Indeed, one has just taken off from the salt marsh in front of us: a flurry of white beating wings and an elegant, aerodynamic profile, rocketing skyward. Tim and I watch in wonder. Such an encounter may no longer count as uncommon, but it’s still a thrill to behold.

We’re on our way to Humphrey Head, one of Wainwright’s Outlying Fells, despite his emphatic assertion that, “not by any exercise of the imagination can Humphrey Head be classed as an outlying fell of Lakeland. Outlying it certainly is: a limestone promontory thrusting from the Kent Estuary coast and almost surrounded by mudflats at low tide but awash at high. A fell it is certainly not, being a meagre 172 feet above the sea and, away from it’s dangerous cliffs, so gentle in gradient and surface texture that the ascent is a barefoot stroll.”

Humphrey Head
Humphrey Head

Just as you’re scratching your head and wondering whether Wainwright has taken a bump to his, he explains that nevertheless, “it’s isolation, far-ranging views and seascapes, bird life (of national repute), rocky reefs and interesting approach combine to make the place unique in the district, giving better reason for its inclusion in this book than its omission.”

That recent colonists like the little egret have made a new home here feels like poetic justice when you consider that Humphrey Head is traditionally associated with a final act of extinction: it’s the spot where the last wolf in England was slain.

In her book, Tales of Old Lancashire, Elizabeth Ashworth tells a romanticised version of the story…

So determined was Sir Edgar Harrington to rid the Cartmel area of this ferocious beast, he offered his niece’s hand in marriage to the man who could slay the wolf. His niece, Adela, held a candle for Sir Edgar’s son, John, and the feelings were reciprocated, but Sir Edgar disapproved of the match. Besides, John was abroad fighting a foreign foe, and had been gone so long, that even Adela had given him up for dead.

Despite her lack of egret feathers, Adela’s beauty was such that many young men vied for her attentions, and wolf hunt was organised to determine who should wed her.

Her most ardent admirer was a local knight called Laybourne, but on the eve of the event, a mysterious stranger appeared on the Cartmel peninsula, riding a fine Arab stallion. The next day, the hunt raged long and hard, and one by one the competitors dropped out except for Laybourne and the stranger, who rode neck and neck. Eventually, they chased the wolf to Humphrey Head, where Laybourne’s horse pulled up at a vast chasm and refused to jump. The stranger’s horse was braver but failed to clear the distance and plunged to its death. The stranger, himself, managed to cling to the crag’s edge and pull himself to safety on Humphrey Head summit. Here, he confronted the wolf on foot and dispatched it with his sword.

When the stranger claimed Adela as his bride, he revealed himself to be none other than Sir Edgar’s missing son, John, and the couple enjoyed a long and happy marriage.

John Harrington is buried in Cartmel Priory. The church’s weather vane is a wolf, but as Ashworth astutely observes, the grave names his wife as Joan, not Adela.

For me, there is another troubling inconsistency in the story. I will admit to being adept in the art of the “man look”. I frequently spend long minutes looking for what is right under my nose, before giving it up as irretrievably lost. However, I’ve been to Humphrey Head before, and if the way to the summit lay over a gaping chasm, too wide for an Arab stallion, I’m sure even I would have noticed. Besides, how did the wolf get across?

The slightly more prosaic version of the story says the wolf was killed by angry villagers, armed with pikes, after the animal attacked a child in the woods.

As Wainwright recommends, we set off from Kent’s Bank Station. Wooden boards permit pedestrians to cross the tracks, and a little white gate leads out on to a concrete parapet that runs parallel to the line. Wainwright’s descriptions of the shenanigans needed to shin the wall and avoid the eye of the station master are no longer required, it seems. The parapet tracks the line for about a third of a mile and stops before the rocky outcrop of Kirkhead End. Here the path drops on to the mudflats and weaves between the rocks. And it’s here we pause to watch the egret.

Kent's Bank Station
Kent’s Bank Station

The Bay fascinates me. Locals call it the watery desert, and it’s an apt description. At low tide, the sands run as far as the eye can see in a beguiling pattern of spiral shapes, carved by wind and water, glittering with the mesmeric shimmer of orphaned puddles and pools. A place of barren beauty and hidden hazards: quicksands proliferate and the tide returns so fast it can outrun a horse.

Humphrey Head Point is the outstretched index finger of the Cartmel Peninsula, and on this side, we look across the Kent Estuary to Arnside Knott. Together with its neighbours, Hampsfell and Whitbarrow Scar, Humphrey Head would once have been part of one long limestone reef, forged over millions of years when this whole area lay below a shallow sea. These vestigial outcrops may lack the lofty drama of Lakeland’s mountains, but they have character aplenty.

Arnside Knott
Arnside Knott

We follow the path through the verdant grass of the salt marsh, leaping streams and scouting for stepping stones in the soggiest sections. By Wyke House farm we turn a corner and join a section of the Cumbrian Coastal Way heading for the foot of Humphrey Head’s gentler wooded eastern side. Just before the Outdoor Centre, we turn right through a kissing gate and fight our way up a narrow footpath, overrun with brambles and nettles, their extravagant growth nurtured by the same warm spring sunshine that has cruelly encouraged us to wear shorts.

Humphrey Head summit
Humphrey Head summit

We join a country lane that leads to the beach, then turn up towards the Outdoor Centre. From here, a path climbs gently beside a fence above the cliffs to the headland’s summit. Stunted hawthorn trees line the route, their trunks bent from years of relentless subservience to the wind. Behind us, over gentle rolling pastures, rise the Coniston Fells, the ominous vanguard of the high ground beyond. Before us is the Bay, a vast wilderness of slowly ebbing tidal waters and exposed silvery sands. Humphrey Head’s abrupt western cliff is a ha-ha, the grassy summit plateau looks to run seamlessly into the sea with no hint of the hidden drop; and a gate appears to open on to the waves.

Humphrey Head summit
Humphrey Head summit
Humphrey Head summit
Humphrey Head summit

Across the bay, the Lancashire coastline is interrupted by a large unnatural rectangle. The Heysham nuclear power plant dwarfs its surroundings. To the west, over the Leven estuary an army of thin white wind turbines occupies the sea beyond the Furness peninsula. One goal, two very different game-plans, separated by about ten miles of sea and a vast ocean of ideology.

Humphrey Head Point
Humphrey Head Point

With the tide running out, we were hoping to make a circular walk—returning via the beach—but a channel of water still laps the foot of the cliff. We descend to the rocks of Humphrey Head point. The water here still looks deep—we can’t see the bottom—and there’s no telling how firm the sand below might be. We take off our shoes and resign ourselves to sitting on the rocks and dipping our feet in the sea before heading back over the headland. A black Labrador is bolder and dives in. When I look over at him, I do a double take. He’s not swimming, he’s standing. The water’s barely up to his waist. I tentatively dip a foot in. It finds the bottom, so I slip off the rock and into the water. It comes halfway up my calf, and the sand is firm.

Humphrey Head cliff face
Humphrey Head cliff face

Laughing at our hesitancy, we paddle back beneath the cliff face toward the beach. As the water clears, it reveals the channel to be something of a marine nursery. Tiny crabs scurry beneath the surface, and a baby fluke, no longer than the tip of my finger, attacks a rag worm nearly twice its size.

Tim crab spotting
Tim crab spotting
Dead crab
Dead crab

Mustard coloured algae cover the rocks, and shrubs and wild flowers shoot from crevices in the crags. As we reach dry sand, a man is telling his grandchildren about the cave in the rock behind them, and how you can clamber all the way through. The boy and girl’s faces light up and they tug at their father’s sleeve. They disappear into an opening in the cliff where mineral strata form eye-catching stripes. Excited shouts and laughter echo from within, and in a matter of minutes, they emerge a hundred yards up the beach.

Fairy Chapel entrance
Fairy Chapel entrance

The big kid in me wants to play too, so I climb over boulders to the cave entrance. It’s a narrow passage known as The Fairy Chapel. Daylight permeates in from the other end, but the width tapers before I reach it, and I’m slightly concerned this might turn out to be a case of Fat Man’s Agony. Would Mountain Rescue come out if I end up wedged firm between the walls? Or would they quote Wainwright at me, “we’re MOUNTAIN RESCUE and ‘not by any exercise of the imagination can Humphrey Head be classed as an outlying fell’”? Fortunately, I prove more svelte than I feared and emerge into the open, where the young lad is demanding of his dad, “AGAIN”.

The Fairy Chapel
The Fairy Chapel

Somewhere here is the site of a holy well. The waters were said to possess healing powers, and lead miners from as far back as Roman times would walk here to drink in the hope that the liquid would flush the toxins from their bodies. In 2003, Phil Lynott (a local landowner, not the late Thin Lizzy frontman) launched Willow, a brand of mineral water bottled from a spring in his nearby field.

Humphrey Head
Humphrey Head

His curiosity was roused when he moved two sick ponies into the paddock and found that each made a remarkable recovery. When Lynott realised that the ponies were drinking from the spring, he had the water analysed and found it contained traces of salicin, a natural anti-inflammatory. Salicin is formed from willow bark and is the natural origin of aspirin. Willow trees were once prevalent, and their remains now form a layer in the earth, through which the water is filtered. Lynott was convinced the water helped him recovery from cancer, and celebrity chef, Clarissa Dickson-Wright, claimed, live on television, that it had cured a benign cyst on her breast and a gungey toe. The company got into trouble with the consumer safety authorities when they went a step further and launched an advertising campaign claiming their product could cure a range of skin complaints such as eczema and psoriasis.

In its heyday, the holy well lay behind a door in the rock. All that remains now is a rusty pipe, but I can’t find it (“man look”, probably).

As the kids lead their dad back to the entrance to the Fairy Chapel, an inscription on a slab of rock catches my eye. It says, “Beware how you on these rocks ascend. Here William Pedder met his end. August 22nd, 1857. Aged 10 years”. It’s a sobering note, like a soulful minor cadence in a feel-good hit of the summer.

We head back past the Outdoor Centre and retrace our steps to Kent’s Bank. From the salt marsh, I cast a goodbye glance at Humphrey Head: a place of endings and beginnings, miracle cures and tragic demises, historic extinctions and exotic new colonists, prettiness and peril; and every bit deserving of the honorary fell status, Wainwright accords it.

Further reading:

The little egret:

https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/wildlife-guides/bird-a-z/little-egret/#f6IlRMpFi3iUhtw5.99

The last wolf

The holy well:

Willow Water

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/working_lunch/rob_on_the_road/2720253.stm

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/miracle-cure-spring-water-to-face-food-safety-investigation-46791.html


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    Fire and Water

    Sunset Over Morecambe Bay, In Snow

    Snow covered Coniston Fells beckon, but a computer glitch and an ill-fated Christmas shopping trip, worthy of Father Ted, rob me of a day on their slopes. As a consolation, I climb Hampsfell to watch the sun set over Morecambe Bay. It turns into one of the most magical fell walks I’ve ever experienced.

    December 9th, 2017 and the snow was falling, clothing the peaks in an alluring blanket of white. From my kitchen window, I can see Dow Crag, and in winter, when the trees are stripped of leaves, I can also make out a little of the Old Man of Coniston’s shoulder. By mid-afternoon they were looking positively Alpine, promising all kinds of winter adventure. It was too late to get out today, but Tuesday would be my birthday, and with uncharacteristic foresight, I’d booked the day off work. I checked the Met Office mountain forecast: sunshine and excellent visibility; and with only two days to go, there was just a chance it might be right.

    Sheep at the foot of Hampsfell
    Across the fields

    I was buoyant. Borderline ecstatic. And then it happened. Or at least it didn’t. Sandy switched on her laptop, and nothing responded. Zilch, nada, not a flicker. I’m unusual in being a software developer who hates computers. It’s nothing personal, I just spend so much of my day immersed in them, I try to avoid them in my spare time. I fumbled for an excuse, but it wasn’t forthcoming, and Sandy was panicking, so I felt compelled to help.

    My wife is a freelance journalist and animal photographer. She had two important photoshoots to process in the coming week, and her laptop is a vital tool. Luckily it was still under guarantee, so I got out my phone and looked up the nearest Apple Dealer (I know nothing about hardware).

    “There’s one in Lancaster”, I announced triumphantly. “They can book you in on Tuesday.” 

    “But I’m at the Westmorland Gazette on Tuesday”, she said, far from consoled. “We’re on a deadline. I’m busy all this week”. Then she added, “Don’t you have the day off on Tuesday?”

    My heart sank faster than a Sunderland supporter’s on the first day of the season; or Sue Lawley’s when Wainwright told her he didn’t much like music, at the start of half an hour of air time she was supposed to fill with his choice of Desert Island Discs.

    “There are some nice shops in Lancaster”, Sandy offered brightly. “You could do some Christmas shopping”.

    It was supposed to be a positive suggestion, but the very thought filled me with dread. I have form, you see. Once in Newcastle, with a few hours to kill, I tried a spot of seasonal gift hunting, unsupervised, but it turns out I’m terrible at it. I just wondered around John Lewis like an automaton, unable to find the way out. When I finally did, it led straight into Fenwicks and the nightmare started again. It was like an episode of Father Ted, except there wasn’t a party of priests in the lingerie department that I could follow. (I know this because I looked). When eventually I escaped into fresh air outside the Grainger Market, I seriously considered buying everyone sausages.

    Tuesday arrives, and The Apple Dealer can’t see me until 11:30, so with that and the drive, and the fruitless Christmas shopping, and wandering around Sainsbury’s like an automaton, I don’t get home until 2:30pm. The sky is an unbroken expanse of blue, and the snow-capped Coniston Fells in the distance look magnificent. But they’re half an hour away—by the time I get there, there’ll only be about an hour of daylight left.

    Determined to salvage something from the remains of the day, I wonder about Hampsfell. Hampsfell is a small hill that separates Cartmel and Grange. A tiddler compared to the Coniston Fells, but it punches above its weight with its rare limestone pavements and panoramic views of both the Lakeland fells and Morecambe Bay. Wainwright suggests it might appeal to the semi-retired fellwalker: “It is a hill small and unpretentious yet endowed with an air of freedom and space that will recall happy days on greater heights. It is a place for looking northwest, indulging memories, and dreaming.”

    I’d be on the summit in time to watch the sun set. Sunset over the bay, on a beautiful snowy day, from a summit made for dreaming—that has to be something special.

    I layer up, pull on my boots, grab gloves, hat, headtorch and microspikes and set off. The magic starts almost immediately I step outside the front door. The snow is little more than a dusting of icing sugar on the surrounding fields, but it’s enough to turn the landscape into a Christmas card. A robin hops about the hedgerow and the spire of Field Broughton church rises from a hollow across the meadows to complete the scene.

    I wander up narrow country lanes and on to a bridleway, then a follow a path across a field to a stand of trees above. Sheep graze on scattered patches of exposed grass, their shaggy fleeces like mounds of driven snow. As I climb higher through Hampsfield allotment, the low orange sun blazes like a fireball through a lattice of branch and twig, a giant bonfire amid the deepening white blanket. Galloways roam the open fell side, their coats a swatch of seasonal colour: black, red, yellow, and cream, matching the silhouettes of the naked trees, the autumn bracken and the winter grass. As I approach the summit, something is happening across the valley…

    Galloways on Hampsfell
    Galloways on Hampsfell

    On top of Hampsfell stands the Hospice, a squat stone tower with an open door and an open fireplace; a gift to travellers from the pastor of Cartmel in 1846, and a testament of thanks to beauty here experienced here daily. As Wainwright astutely observes, “Outside, over the doorway, is an inscription that will be Greek to most visitors.”  Translated from the Greek (for Greek it is), the inscription, “rhododactylos eos”, means “the rosy fingered dawn”. Her cousin, the rosy fingered dusk, is at play now.

    Hampsfell Hospice at sunset
    Hampsfell Hospice at sunset

    North-west over Cartmel valley, beyond a brown swathe of winter woodland, the Coniston Fells rise like a frozen tundra, artic blue in the dimming light; but they are transforming before my eyes—awaking, warming as if softly stage-lit in anticipation of an imminent first act—their chiselled contours now reflect a warm pink glow. Behind them, the sky is a wan, ethereal yellow, sparsely streaked with wisps of mauve.

    Old Man of Coniston
    Old Man of Coniston
    Dow Crag & Old Man of Coniston
    Dow Crag & Old Man of Coniston

    As I turn south and climb between snow softened escarpments to the limestone-paved plateau, black skeletal branches of stunted, windblown hawthorn trees bow in unison toward the Hospice, a dark tower before a horizon of deepening orange.

    Hampsfell Hospice at sunset
    Hampsfell Hospice at sunset

    In the short distance to the tower, the colours shift and blend again as the sky overhead darkens. To the east, over the Kent Estuary, Arnside Knott is little more than a soft Prussian blue suggestion below a strip of sky, pink as oyster shells. The reflective snow bestows a strange ambience. The stone fence posts that guard the Hospice are black shadowy sentinels, chained together to repel the shaggy cows that roam like ancient bison.

    Hampsfell Hospice at sunset
    Hampsfell Hospice at sunset

    This is a landscape so familiar yet altogether new. It’s as if I’ve crossed into a parallel universe—somewhere I may have glimpsed on the cover of a 1970’s prog rock album. Folk tales of a faery kingdom that the unwary traveler may pass into and return a haunted, altered man seem suddenly less fantastical.

    Kent Estuary from Hampsfell at sunset
    Kent Estuary from Hampsfell at sunset
    Sunset in snow on Hampsfell
    Sunset in snow on Hampsfell

    Yet, the real drama is happening to the west, where the orange sky intensifies over Bardsea and Barrow. In the sea beyond the dark peninsula, I can just make out tall thin poles, little more than fine grey pencil lines. Using the zoom on my camera, I discern the blades of the wind turbines. This is the offshore wind farm, Britain’s largest. Or at least it is in the parallel world I’m used to. Here, with imagination uninhibited, they are an encroaching army of Martian fighting machines from H G Wells’ War of the Worlds. And they must have opened fire, because all of a sudden the sky and water alike burst into flame.

    Sunset over Morecambe Bay
    Sunset over Morecambe Bay
    Sunset over Morecambe Bay
    Sunset over Morecambe Bay

    In between, a low bank of cloud, the thick smoke of the conflagration, engulfs the peninsula, forming a soft grey barrier between the incandescent sky and its mirror image in the waters. All that’s left of the land beyond the Leven estuary is a thin black strip of shoreline. And before my eyes, a new civilisation emerges. The formless cloud bank resolves into an acropolis of colossal towers, slate grey but licked with yellow, still fresh from the furnace that rages above and below.

    Morecambe Bay sunset
    Morecambe Bay sunset
    Cloud towers of Bardsea
    Cloud towers of Bardsea

    Beyond the Hospice, the snow covered limestone gives way to snow covered scrub. I climb a stile over a dry stone wall and follow a white path lined with a Mexican wave of wind-bowed hawthorns. The south eastern horizon is salmon pink, below quilted cloud the colour of Herdwick shearlings. Copper rivulets snake across dark sands to reach the silver sea beyond.

    Stunted Hawthorn on Hampsfell
    Stunted Hawthorn on Hampsfell
    Salmon Pink sky over the Kent Estuary
    Salmon Pink sky over the Kent Estuary
    Toward Fell End, Hampsfell
    Toward Fell End, Hampsfell
    Toward Fell End, Hampsfell
    Toward Fell End, Hampsfell

    Slowly, the blaze in the west softens to amber afterglow and becomes a slender strip of pale gold beneath a charcoal sky. The cloud city levitates and starts to disperse, and beneath are pin pricks of light, like tiny candles, from the miniature human conurbations of Barrow, Bardsea, Dalton and Ulverston.

    Sunset over the Leven Estuary
    Sunset over the Leven Estuary

    Sunset over Barrow from Hampsfell
    Sunset over Barrow from Hampsfell

    I’ve been reading the memoirs of Flookburgh fisherman, Jack Manning. He knew these patterns of lights like the back of his hand. They were crucial landmarks when out on the sands, on horse or tractor, scooping shrimp or cockle in the dead of night before the tide’s return.

    As I watch the ever changing light show from the subsidiary summit of Fell End, I’m aware of little puffs of steam rising in the dark. I hear a soft footfall and a snort, and I realise I’m not alone. As my eyes adjust, I discern the shapes of sheep grazing quietly on the slope below.

    Sheep at sundown on Hampsfell
    Sheep at sundown on Hampsfell

    The snow is so reflective I leave my head torch in my rucksack. I return to the wall and find the stile has vanished. I’m momentarily perplexed, but when I retrieve the torch and switch it on, the stile materialises right in front of me. It must be darker than I thought.

    Path to Fell End
    Path to Fell End

    And it’s growing darker by the minute; the torch beam accentuates the gloom, but I can no longer see without it. I pass the Hospice and begin the descent back to Hampsfield Allotment.

    Suddenly, I notice something strange in the darkness up ahead. Two little points of light hover above the path. I can’t think what they could be. I’m not given to superstition but with my imagination so stoked it would be easy to start believing in the supernatural. They look like disembodied eyes and they hold their position at around head height. Try as I might to find a terrestrial explanation, none presents itself.

    When I’m no more than a few yards away, I hear the breathing and see the vapour from the invisible nostrils. Slowly her outline materialises. A big Galloway cow, black as the night. She’s staring intently at me, probably wondering what the approaching ball of light might be. When she realises it’s only me, she loses interest, but doesn’t relinquish the path. I give her wide berth, more from respect than fear. Somehow, I sense no tension here. Nothing threatens the peace of this enchanted landscape on this frozen winter evening.

    Just over half an hour later, I turn they key in my front door. I’m back where I started three hours earlier, yet in some intangible sense, I’m still half a world away.


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