The head of this vale does not hold out much promise of beauty, and you feel surprised that any one, were he fifty times a poet, could contrive to make anything readable on such a subject as the dreary uninteresting valley before you. It is indeed a desolate spot, stretching its unrelieved length for two miles from the foot of this hill, with nothing for the eye to exercise itself, or the heart to console itself with, but bare fells, grey crags, screes and boulders, and a stone-vexed rivulet winding its lonely way along the bottom of the dale, but not a sign of life except what may be contained in moss and lichens, with here and there a little fern and grass.
“MIGHTY FORESTS.”
There are many who would persuade you that all these bleak hills and dales were formerly and for centuries covered with dense forests. Mr Wordsworth, in sonnet number two, speaks of “mighty forests” having existed hereabout for thousands of years before archery or hunting became fashionable, and Dan Birkett, of whom more anon, declares that formerly a con (vulgarly called a squirrel), could hop from branch to branch all the way from the top of Wrynose to Millom Castle; the same tradition, I may remark, exists in the same form in other localities; for instance, it is averred that the aforesaid little animal, could, in the olden time, accomplish a similar aerial journey from Wythburn to Keswick, and also from Loweswater to the sea at Moresby. But perhaps the best of the sort is the tradition cherished by the descendants of one of the old Border clans, which asserts that some time before “the good old days of Adam and Eve” a moss trooper might ride in the shade of trees from the head of Annandale to the Solway, about thirty-five miles, and all upon land belonging to the Hallidays.
Take my word for it, the extent, duration, and number of these old forests are very much exaggerated. Let us take these hill sides as an instance. Where are the vestiges of a thick wood existing here for ages? Burnt, you may say!—Yes, but where is the rich loam inevitably produced by copious deposit of decayed vegetable matter WHAT THE SOIL SAYS.on dry situations, or the deep peat-moss that always betokens the former existence of timber in wet localities? Here, to your left, you perceive there has been a small land-slip—examine the soil exposed, and what do you find? Why, about a single inch of the soil created by vegetable growth and decay, just as much as the poor little mosses can make and no more, and a substratum of the tenacious reddish gravel locally called sammel; but no where do we see anything approaching to the thick superstratum of rich vegetable mould always discovered on the sites of primeval forests. No! no! where you cannot find either loam or peat-moss, be assured there has been at no period, however remote, any considerable covering of wood.
CHAPTER IV.
Ulpha—Cockley Beck—The Sunken Graves—Dale-head—“The Stepping Stones”—Hinging House—The Clan Tyson—Anecdotes—T’ Birks Brig—Remarks on Scenery, and Quotations—Seathwaite Beck—Miss Martineau on the Church and Parsonage—Newfield—Entertainment for Man and Beast—Dan Birkett—Walla-barrow Crag—Stoneythwaite—Mr Wordsworth’s Anecdote—Character of Scenery.
As you pursue your rugged way down the vale, you at length come in sight of a group of buildings, which offers to you, as the gibbet did to the castaway mariner, the comforting assurance that you are still a sojourner in a civilised country—a matter on which you were beginning to feel uneasily dubious. It is the onstead of a large sheep farm, well known by the designation of Black Hall, which forms the most northerly portion of the Chapelry of Ulpha—a wild tract of country extending for many lonely miles along the Cumberland side of the Duddon, deriving its outlandish looking appellation from the same royal personage who is said to have accorded the honour of bearing his name, as part of theirs, to the town of Ulverstone and the Lake of Ullswater, the old Saxon Monarch Ulfo or Ulphus (some call him one and some the other), who, for anything that I know to the contrary, was one of the Kings of the Heptarchy. Probably, when I mention this, you will remember that Scott, in the Bridal of Triermain, tells of the Baron’s Page, when sent by his lord to enquire at the Sage of Lyulph’s Tower whether the fair apparition in his dream was “an airy thing” or of the earth earthy—
“He traced the Eamont’s winding way,
Till Ulfo’s lake beneath him lay.”