If, like myself, you prefer enjoying a long excursion upon four legs to enduring it upon two, your host can supply, at a satisfactory rate, ponies well accustomed to the roughest roads in the country. You declare for the equestrian mode of progression: well, say the word, and behold your steed at the door. Being safely and pleasantly mounted, you turn your pony’s tail to the lake, and canter up the road till you come to a group of ancient and picturesque cottages and farm-buildings, called High Waterhead (Conistone Water being bicipital), and then take the road to your left, which passes through amongst these houses, and by another old homestead called 'Boon (vulgo above) Crag, holding on along an occupation road which winds through a considerable portion of Mr Marshall's wooded parks; and, as you jog along, keep a sharp eye to the left,—“ride, as the Spaniard hath it, with your beard on your shoulder,”—and your vigilance will be rewarded with occasional glimpses of the lake and its shores, broken up into a series of lovely fragmentary pictures by the irregular intervention of the scattered or “clumped” timber. You soon begin to descend into the middle of the vale of Yewdale, which Mr Parkinson, the accomplished canon of Manchester and Principal of St. Bees, maintains to be the most beautiful in the lake district, and which is described by Green, the artist, as being “a grand valley lying at the feet of the high mountains on the north of Conistone Water.” As you approach it, you must, if you have eyes and soul, be struck with “the steep, frowning glories” of the mile-long range of lofty cliffs which bound Yewdale on the whole extent of its western side, the otherwise barren aspect of which is finely relieved by thick groves, comprising oak, larch, birch, holly, &c., stretching along the foot of the crags, and also by numerous and various trees flourishing here and there along the face of the steep, in situations “the most inaccessible by shepherds trod,” even up to the highest verge of the precipice, where it makes one giddy to imagine how they have been planted, for they ore not of spontaneous growth, but were all planted by the late Mr Knott.
REMARKABLE IN YEWDALE.
You cross the pellucid Beck of Yewdale by a ricketty wooden bridge, pass through the farm-yard of Low Yewdale, and immediately after gain the high road, which runs along the west side of the valley close under the crags. As you near the head of the vale, be pleased to observe, as you will doubtless be pleased in observing, the sweetly situated farm of High Yewdale, with its long rows of unmercifully clipt yews, looking like magnified chessmen, one of which was recently recommended to my notice by an observant fair friend, as presenting a ludicrous resemblance to a starched puritan of the time of the Commonwealth, attired in round beaver and “cloak of formal cut.” You must here diverge a little from your line of ramble to examine the aged tree which gives its name to the vale, and which some unscrupulous local chronologists stoutly maintain to have been coeval with the deluge. Without feeling myself called upon to establish that fact, I may safely enough assert that it must be of vast antiquity, and it is the largest yew that I have yet fallen in with, those immortalized by Wordsworth as “the pride of Lorton vale,” and the “fraternal four of Borrowdale,” not excepted. I, and two friends, girthed it one summer with three riding-whips knotted together, and found it, at five feet from the ground, to measure 29 feet in circumference. You see that it has an aperture in the northern side of its huge trunk, which, like Mercutio's wound, though “not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door, 'twill serve” to let you go in and creep round between that centre pillar formed of the most internal layers of its wood and the surrounding wall formed of its external layers and bark, a large portion of the intermediate timber having, like the halls of Lord Byron’s fathers, “gone to decay.”
FUTILE FOX-CRAFT.
This wondrous feat being duly accomplished, for your future exaltation, retrace your steps as far as the Shepherds' Bridge, and then, holding to the right, you soon pass through a gate, and come out upon a somewhat stony road winding along between the beck and the foot of Raven Crag, which rises on your right, steep and rugged, to form its multi-peaked crown. That precipitous peak (or pike) immediately above you, was the scene of an event remarkable in the annals of mountain fox-hunting. A poor fox, after an unusually long chase, reached the summit of Raven Crag, closely pursued by only three hounds, the rest of the pack being distanced long before; as a last chance for life, he made directly for the edge of that precipice, purposing, doubtless, to swerve when close to the verge, and thus rid himself of his pursuers by throwing them over: this sagacious expedient was, however, unsuccessful, for, when he reached the edge, his three foes were too near to admit of his effecting the saving turn, and all four were projected from the brow of the cliff, and dashed, out of all semblance of caninity and vulpinity, on the stones not far above your present position.
CHAPTER III.
Weatherlam—Tilberthwaite—The Brathay—Wordsworth's Bridges—Hallgarth—Little Langdale, its Tarn, &c.—Whitewash, pro and con—The Busk and Fell-foot—“Joan’s Ale was New”—Ancient Tumulus—Ascent of Wrynose—The Shire Stones—Source of the Duddon—Wordsworth's Sonnets thereon—Author’s ditto ditto—Traditional Sayings about Old Woods—Their Extent Disputed.
As you wind round the heel of Raven Crag, you obtain a fine view of the Old Man’s stupendous brother, Weatherlam, rearing his massive summit over the circumjacent hills, like a giant amid ordinary mortals. You follow a narrow winding road through the verdant fields and copse-clad hillocks of Holme ground, and soon find yourself in the vale of Tilberthwaite; and “O,” you suspirate, as you roll your eyes around, “what a spot for a honeymoon—'the world forgetting, by the world forgot'—so lovely in its seclusion and so lonely in its loveliness.” The only unpleasant characteristic of Tilberthwaite is an odd, uncomfortable feeling of which, though absurd enough, you cannot entirely divest yourself—an idea of difficulty in getting out of it. It is so encompassed by steep hills and hanging woods, that you involuntarily compare yourself to a cockroach in the bottom of a porridge basin. The name of Tilberthwaite is said to be compounded of Tillbear and thwaite, and to signify an enclosure for the cultivation of bear (pronounced beer), an old name for barley. This word, like many more that are obsolete in England, is still used in Scotland; for instance, it occurs in Tam O'Shanter, where it is said that Cutty Sark—
“Shook baith muckle corn and bear,