Most notable valleys in the Lake country have their genius loci, as is only natural in a region till quite recent times utterly removed from the world's life. And they are often simple folk whose sorrows or humours have acquired immortality from the very seclusion, the normally unruffled calm of their environment. Mary of Buttermere and her harrowing story, for instance, would long ago have been forgotten in Hampshire. But no one reasonably versed in Lakeland lore ever, I trust, crosses the threshold of the Old Fish Inn without taking off his hat, so to speak, to the memory of that ill-used maiden. Her trials, however, were after all comparative; well-looking barmaids suffer much worse things, and men lose their lives over them in various ways once or twice a year. But the sentiment attaching to the personality of this mountain beauty, whom, like Phyllis, all the shepherd swains adored, and yet further celebrated by such visitors as penetrated to this romantic spot, including the Lake poets, made a stir in the world when the villain was hung as high as Haman. The press rang with it, which meant more in those days than in these, and the "Beauty of Buttermere" appeared in various forms upon the stage of London theatres.
The Old Fish Inn still stands a little way down the meadow from the village, as it stood over a century ago, when the yeoman father of Mary Robinson, the heroine, presided over it, and she herself ministered to the hunger and thirst of his varied guests. The gentlemen visitors no doubt turned her head a little, though Wordsworth, who had evidently taken a social glass there with Coleridge, reminds him how they had both been stricken with the modest mien of this artless daughter of the hills. But one may safely hazard the belief that Wordsworth was more artless in this kind of divination than the most rustic young woman who ever poured out a glass of beer. De Quincey, who also knew her, bears witness to the admiration the two poets had for her, and has a sly hit at their romantic assumption of her ingenuousness.
HEAD OF BUTTERMERE AND HONISTER CRAG
But if Mary broke rustic hearts and held her head a little high, she was at least a young woman of irreproachable character, and it was in 1805 that the distinguished stranger who gave her such fortuitous immortality arrived in Keswick in a handsome turnout and took up his abode at its chief hotel, entering his name as the Honourable Augustus Hope, M.P., a brother by assumption, modestly admitted by the stranger himself, of Lord Hopetown. One must endeavour, if it costs a mental effort, to imagine the aloofness of this country and all such regions in the year of Trafalgar, when one finds a very poor imitation of a fine gentleman posing as the brother of a well-known peer, taking local society with a big S by storm, and the "county" within reach of Keswick tumbling over one another to do him honour. There was a sceptic here and there, to be sure. He overdid his affability, and Coleridge even hints that his grammar was shaky, which nowadays would possibly be a point in his favour. But as he franked his letters, and forgery then meant death, the unbelieving minority were temporarily silenced, and the Honourable Augustus continued to enjoy himself very much indeed. Perhaps so experienced a gentleman knew precisely when to stop, for in due course he betook himself to Buttermere and to the Fish Inn, ostensibly to catch char or trout, but the only record of his sport we have is the capture of the heart, or at any rate the hand—for he wooed her openly and honourably—of his landlord's daughter. What society in the vale of Keswick, a member of whom had even christened a recently arrived son and heir Augustus Hope, particularly matrons with marriageable daughters, thought of the escapade of the Honourable Augustus, history does not say. It has no occasion; we may be quite certain without being told. The happy day was fixed. It arrived, and the smallest church in England tinkled out the marriage peals with its single bell. The Hopetown family were not represented at the wedding for one excellent reason, and the aristocracy of the vale of Keswick for quite another one. The absence of the former was easily explained away to so artless a gathering as was here collected. That of the latter was only natural, and must have provided even a spice of triumph for the victorious Beauty of Buttermere. The honeymoon, of which London with the brotherly welcome of a noble family and the smiles of a Court was to be the culmination, extended very little farther than Keswick, when the minions of the law swooped down upon Augustus and tore him from Mary's arms on a charge of forgery, which proved the least of his many heinous crimes. In brief, the man's name was Hatfield, son of a Devonshire tradesman, and Mary was only the last of many victims, most of them her superiors in station, whom with marvellous skill and cunning this accomplished ruffian had deceived, abandoning them one after another in conditions of distress, and some of them with children. He was hung at Carlisle, and Mary returned to her father's inn and resumed her former position. She had no child and bore no reproach, among her simple neighbours the most fortunate, probably, but the most celebrated of the villain's many victims. She eventually married a farmer from Caldbeck, and her grave may be seen to-day, near by that one distinguished by the curiously sporting tombstone beneath which lies the dust of John Peel of immortal memory.
Crummock is just twice the length of Buttermere, with about the same average width of half a mile. Like the other, it is pressed between the feet of steep mountains, and has the same charm at the open and upper end of silvery strand shelving from meadowy banks, with the same clusters of fir, alder, or gnarled oak grouped gracefully about the grassy shore. Here, too, on still summer days the same crystal water shows far out into the lake the clean, white, gravelly bottom on which it lies. There are two or three boats, moreover, available on Crummock, and it is out on the bosom of the lake that this whole beautiful vale, above and below it, is displayed perhaps to the best advantage. The now remoter heights of Honister and its companions fill the head. The steeps of High Stile and Red Pike dip to the gorge near by, whence issues the hoarse murmur of Scale Force making its sheer leap of a hundred and twenty feet, and spraying with perennial moisture the ferns, mosses, and feathery saplings that cling to its shaggy cliffs. Above the lower heights upon the eastern shores rise the higher fells of Whiteside and Grassmoor, the latter bearing the strange unhealed red scars where its whole front was shaved away a century and a half ago by a tremendous waterspout.
A May morning out on Crummock, the fly rod laid aside in despair for the moment with its capricious little trout, though the compensations forbid so untoward a word; the boat drifting idly with gently gurgling keel upon the faint ripples stirred by the very softest of zephyrs; the distant murmur of the Cocker splashing toward the lake head; the faint dull roar of Scale Force, and, above all, the silent throng of overhanging mountains fairly pealing with the cuckoo's note, is a memory always to be treasured. Another such morning, too, comes back to me, when splashes of brilliant blue lay here and there upon the eastern shore of the lake, disclosing to a nearer view great beds of bluebells at the height of their glory. A moonlight night again, the sequel of the same or another such effulgent day, is before me as, idly trolling for the bigger trout, those prowlers of the night, one felt the awesome black shapes of the mountains piled up on every hand, while the slow, measured stroke of the oar struck molten silver as we crossed and recrossed the moon's shining path.
SCALE FORCE, CRUMMOCK WATER
Stern and wild enough under the shadow of night or beneath stormy skies, Crummock thrusts its gradually narrowing point deep into richer scenes of woody foot-hill, and radiant meadow, overlooked by the picturesquely perched old hostelry of Scale Hill, familiar to generations of Lakeland tourists. And here the Cocker leaps rejoicing and in fuller volume to sparkle down the long, lovely vale of Lorton towards its junction with the Derwent at Wordsworth's birthplace. A mile or so to the westward Loweswater lies bewitchingly in the lap of fells, but overhung upon one bank for its entire length by the opulent foliage of Holm Wood, and lacking the more rugged features which dominate the others, seems to lie somewhat aloof from them in quality as it does in fact.