IV. On the Frozen Meres
Day after day the cold increased. The lake-shore was fringed with ice; in the thin sere woods the trodden leaves crackled crisp underfoot. Then one morning the landscape was blotted out with a slow whirl of white, hastened by scarce a breath of wind. It was delightful to climb up to the moor as the white fleece piled up by inches. The larch-wood at a hundred yards was a dim meaningless shadow, yet we discovered unexpected beauties. During the night the snowfall ceased; the moon set as the day broke. A freezing breeze crept over the miles of snow, and, as it met tarn or beck, congealed their surfaces. On the broad lake the ice-sheet thus encouraged spread even at the height of noon, while after the sun set, and while the bright silent stars looked down, the frost realm extended apace.
Next morning the air was clear. Miles upon miles of white mountain-slopes extended along the horizon; woods and fields alike were buried in snow. Everything seemed pure against the steel blue of the ice-bound lake, or the lighter blue out there where the ducks disported in water as yet unapproached by Winter’s fetters. The ice, though in places sound, was still unsafe where the tiny mountain streams poured in. Yet, with caution, we skated on mile after mile, the sound of steel now ringing through the snow-floored woodland rides, now echoing away across the wide area of ice as we ventured further from shore. An island was now in front, crowned with dark spruces save on the north-west corner, where many centuries ago, some Norseman cleared a space for his habitation. The erection had gone long before the earliest histories were written, but the location was proved by the stray scraps of iron which the builder had used to bind the rough timbers together. As we swing along the smooth ice, always keeping outside the narrow snow-covered ribbon, we think of the Norseman’s iron nails, then of the bloomeries (small smelting furnaces) established by these shores centuries later under the supervision of the Abbot of Furness—in days when it was profitable to bring the iron ore to the woods, to be purified with charcoal. The industry seems not yet to be extinct, for as we glide round a rocky naze into a large bay, the faint breeze carries into our faces a pungent burden of wood-smoke. And there ahead are half a dozen eddying columns rising from as many pyres.
Charcoal-burning is still an active industry in several of our old-world countrysides. The coppices are allowed to grow for fifteen years, at the end of which, the chief stems being some four inches thick, they are felled. The woodcutters divide the trunks into short sections, which are peeled of their bark, and laid while still moderately green in cone-shaped piles, hollow to provide for a draught. When the cone is completed, it is thatched with turf, all air being excluded except from the centre, where the fire is kindled. When this has thoroughly got ‘hod,’ as the woodsmen say, the ventilating-shaft is closed.
The fire within now smoulders away, throwing off dense volumes of smoke through the interstices of the sods. Thus, the oven will go on for several days, during which period considerable vigilance is required. At times, fanned by the wind, the buried fire gains power, and, if not duly checked, is apt to burn through the coating of sods and send out a ruddy tongue of flame. This activity causes a chemical change, rendering the contents of the oven valueless as charcoal. To prevent these outbreaks, the charcoal-burner keeps on hand a number of damp sods, which he places as required upon overheated points. The other extreme, preventing sufficient ventilation, is quickly marked by a decreasing spiral of smoke, noting which the burner simply removes a turf or two from the covering of the pile till the fire has regained power and heat.
A call brings the charcoal-burner outside the rough hut of poles and brushwood from which he is watching his fires. In a few minutes our skates are off and we are climbing the steep to him. He says that since our last visit two of his ovens have died out; combustion has ceased, and a quantity of charcoal is fairly won. From this open-fronted hut—he has several, to protect him from changes of the wind—he can see every fire. ‘I’m frightened that one there is going to get into a low [flicker of flame],’ he says as, sod in hand, he goes to the cone in question. The man speaks in a grand native dialect, without pride or apology in his words—a burly man in middle life, tanned and weather-beaten, roughly but warmly dressed and shod. In his face is the good humour of a heart where reigns perennial spring; his voice is full and resonant; his eye beams with health and the contentment of outdoor life.
He is loath to speak of the romance of his own life. ‘Nay, nay,’ he will reiterate, ‘there’s naught new in the woods. Year after year goes, and not an alteration, save that coppices spring and are felled, and men grow older.’ But he can be more easily drawn to speak of Lanty Slee, the last known illicit distiller among the mountains, and how he oft escaped capture; of the many ‘mains’ of cock-fighting still to be seen from the retirement of a charcoal-burner’s hut. The Hermit of the Woods forty years ago was a friend of John’s, and he still treasures an oak staff which that curious character presented him. A broad spiral of black, perhaps ‘done with smoke,’ as Friend John thinks, decorates it, proving that the Hermit was not without knowledge of some secret crafts.
The charcoal-burner is a keen naturalist in his way. It was John who for a number of years held to the statement that the badger frequented our lonelier woods. His observation is now conclusively proved, and to-day he shows us a dell where a plantigrade has been recently afoot. ‘I heard a wild swan, whooping, this morning,’ he adds with marked satisfaction. ‘There’s a stiffish frost astir when they come so low.’ But the charcoal-burner’s craft he will say little of, and what wonder, if he cannot raise enthusiasm on it? For hours during the recent snowfall he was patrolling round his fires, checking this and encouraging that to greater heat. Even now, in his airy tepee of brush, he is at the same moment chilled with the frosty air and warmed with, the fierce heat of the fire whereon a battered black kettle is beginning to boil preparatory to the noonday meal.
During summer, he states, the life is grand. For weeks on end John camps in the woods, a free gipsy. A flitch of bacon, a bag of flour, are provision for a month. If the woodsman needs variety, there are plenty of trout to be caught with a night-line in the nearby streams. It is in late autumn and early winter that the charcoal-burner is most busy. His wreaths of smoke climb upward from the bare spaces once occupied by flourishing woodlands. The march of the seasons in the woods and by the lake is closely noted by John, whose naturalist ear notes which birds trill and which are silent, whose eye sees the coming and going of the migrants. The pipits and the thrushes leave the moors and the bushes, the wagtails the watersides, and in their places, from the far north-east, come the snow-bunting and the fieldfare and various species of duck.
John is now ready to patrol his circle of fires. By the side of the first, however, we pause a moment, for it is laid on the flat crest of a sharp rock-spur. To right and left the slopes are bleak and dismal; the mask of snow cannot hide the scar of the woodcutter, the stumps of sapling oak and hazel and ash. At our feet the lake extends, a long narrow sheet, its head far away in the lap of the snowy mountains. Three more of the charcoal-ovens are on this level. John strides on ahead through the clinging snow, and is attending to the second fire by the time we reach it. Between this and the third we cross a small brook just below a waterfall. John says that the scene from this point was a favourite with the Hermit of the Woods, who on more than one occasion painted it. But we are perhaps more interested in the doings of a tiny dipper which, alarmed at our presence, flirts hither and thither about the pool beneath the fosse. One moment it dives, to reappear right among the frothing, tumbling waters. Next it dances, about a snow-covered stone almost level with the pool, finally, with an impatient trill, it wings its way upstream to where strangers do not pry.
John, like other wood and dale dwellers, cannot understand the greatness of that philosopher (John Ruskin) who for so many years was his neighbour. The musings and wanderings of that master mind were beyond him; yet, if the mind was incomprehensible, I think the man was frequently understood. John tells one story which cannot be too often repeated. One hard winter a labourer, having to provide for a large family, went to the Master of Brantwood to seek some little job till the frost broke. The Professor received the man kindly, and, after giving him a meal, took him to a little flat just above the level of the lake. ‘Dig here,’ he said. The man got tools and commenced work, and for several days he kept on digging. When the hole got too deep for him to throw the soil and stones out, he got a ladder and a bucket, and so kept on, bringing up the loose stuff in driblets. At last, when he had got down some thirty feet, he reached bedrock. He then went up to Brantwood, and reported the circumstance to the Professor, who returned with him to the lake-shore. The great man looked into the dark hole a moment, then turned to the labourer, and said: ‘Very good; fill it up again.’ John, the charcoal-burner, can think of no reason for the Professor’s strange fancy, but he applauds the action, for it kept the poor labourer at work during a long spell of frost, and prevented the poignant misery which ‘out of work’ entails on such a man’s family.
As John concluded his simple story we came to the last of the ovens, and here we parted, the charcoal-burner to return to his vigil-hut on the rocky spur, we to resume our skates for the five miles’ homeward journey.
A year later I was in the neighbourhood of a large and somewhat inaccessible mountain tarn. A spell of dry frost had set in, and as yet no snow had fallen. On the first evening of my sojourn I left my lodgings about six o’clock; it was quite dark in the hollow, and where the trees thronged I had difficulty in keeping on the open road. In ten minutes I had emerged from the lower ground, and was striding along a moorland road, crossing a tongue of high ground which divided upper and lower valleys. The stars shone bright above, the regiment of massive fells bounding the dale was capped with frost-rime almost as pure as snow; here and there, contrast to the swelling, soaring contours, were tumbled rocky bields; a hundred yards beneath my path, at the foot of a steep slope covered with tangled frozen bracken, rattled the stream in its bouldery course. The great gulf of the dale ahead was filled with a gray gloom, which the tiny lamps of heaven could not dispel. My path gradually descended to the level of the stream, fording here and there courses from which the torrents had ebbed. A crash and a tinkle of shivering ice told me when I met these skeletons of former greatness. I had got three miles up the dale, and had banished by exercise the cold from my limbs before I came to my objective. A single stone arch spanned a rock-chasm at the bottom of which a deep pool churned and gurgled. So deep was the dusk reigning here that only when an upspringing jet caught the vagrant starlight could I accurately determine the depth. Here and there, in the recesses of the rocks, the spray had formed huge icicles; one was shaped, as it seemed to me, like the fantastic wraith of an enormous man. From this bridge I had intended to return but ultimately decided, as there was plenty of time, to go forward some little way. I walked sharply—the freezing air permitted no loitering—and, between a couple of big boulders, rounded the corner, and in a few minutes was out in a level hollow.
The scene in front was quite the wildest I have met with: save the stream gurgling over a bed of shingles, there was scarce a sound to be heard. The folded flocks were silent, the ‘low, continuous murmurings’ of the fellside torrents were hushed, the very air was held in a frosty stillness. But the sky—here at last was a clear view to where the primrose of the aurora gleamed and faded and gleamed anew. The whitened mountain-peaks seemed rimmed with a wandering, golden irradiance for a moment; then the hues died away, leaving a chilling aspect before my eyes. Eastward, lo! along the hill-tops ran a line of fire, and the sky above was glowing. Moonrise! Now backward to quarters as smartly as foot can spurn the iron road.
Next morning, skates in hand, we took the direction of the mountain tarn. For nearly two miles our way held up a side-valley, in which were two or three sheep-farms. Here the shepherds were at work carrying huge bundles of hay to their flocks. Now we reached the open moor. The frost-rime lay thick on every blade of grass, and as we climbed higher the air seemed to turn colder. The path was so littered with loose stones that we shortly abandoned it, and struck up the steep slope more directly. In half an hour we stood upon a shelf in the mountainside which commanded a full view of the glen, and of miles of gray-white mountains around it. The worst of the ascent over, we struck across the frozen bogs, and very shortly stood by the mountain tarn. Seen from the beach near its outflow, it was a splendid sheet of ice, without a crack or a flaw anywhere. Its bluish surface seemed to extend a great distance into the lap of some great rocky bluffs. In a few seconds our skates were fixed on; our hands, unspoiled by the false luxury of gloves, were not numbed and nerveless. Despite the cold air circulating about us, we were distinctly warm with the exertions of our brisk climb. How the echoes resounded the ringing sound of steel meeting ice! A buzzard hawk, perched on the tip of a crag five hundred feet above us, took fright and threw itself into the air. For awhile it seemed as though other bird-life was absent. We coasted along cautiously a hundred yards to prove the soundness of the ice; then, as our confidence rose, extended our journeyings, though still keeping on the lower section of the tarn. The only island on this water is a small outcropping patch of rock, without a bush, but the inland home and breeding-place of a family of gulls. We skated out to this and passed around it. So far we had not seen the trace of a skate-track; we were the pioneers here, and, if I knew the dalesmen aright, no other skaters were likely to enjoy this delight.
Fully satisfied as to our security, we now set out to skate right round the sheet of ice, my friend leading. Now and again we passed over areas of Jack Frost’s most delicate tracery in hoar: thin white lines joining the most elaborate little ‘knobs’ of frost-rime, which, examined closely, bore close relation to the beautiful structure of a flower. There was a subdued croaking going on in front; the still air carried sound so well that we skated with the utmost care forward. Both of us hoped to see a raven and were not disappointed. As we swept into a shallow rock-fringed bay the bird rose with rapid wing from his feast of frozen mutton. A dead sheep lay within ten yards of the shore, gnawed and torn by a dozen tribes of mountain-dwellers. Occasionally from a spot like this a winter wanderer may scare a fox, but generally Reynard eats his fill during the hours of darkness and in some snug corner of the rocky hillside above is sleeping. Our run up the shore of the mere was fairly rapid, but I did not expect our view to have changed so completely. We were now in the upper part of the tarn; two jutting crags approached and narrowed its centre. The hillsides were strewn with great blocks of stone, tributes from the huge cliffs overhanging them. A deep narrow glen ran up some way from the head of the tarn, then suddenly ceased as a mountain-front arose. Feeding in the burn were birds—a gaunt heron the chief. The little knot of wild-duck did not take alarm till we had run close enough to admire their gorgeous sheeny plumage and soft contours. At the opening of one bay I halted a few seconds and looked through the clear ice beneath me. An unseen current was moving a tangle of yellow water-weeds and, almost touching them was a large pike. A sharp tap on the ice with my skate sent him sheering out into the deep waters. In shallow dubs I have frequently seen the same thing, but not on large tarns; For some time we had been striking in the direction of a high front of rock which rose sheer from the water. Its front, seared with a vein of brilliant white felspar, had been a landmark to us. Isn’t it curious to stand on a sheet of thin ice and look down into the inky depths? There we could see, for twenty feet, ledge after ledge and slab below slab, but not the foundation of the rock itself. The ice all round had been in splendid condition, and now we simply flew along beneath the frowning scaurs towards the beach we started from.
Arriving here, skates were doffed and we made down the rugged path again to the dale. Our experience had been an enviable one: there had not been a single drawback. The travelling was rugged enough to keep us warm, the skating glorious. When shall we have such another time?