O'er mine own sweet vale, braving thunder and gale,
I have held close watch and ward.
“And many a change, portentous and strange,
Hath swept o'er this change-loving earth;
Yet here do I stand, and I frown o'er the land
With the aspect I wore at my birth.”
THE PINNACLE.
There! you perceive Shakspere is correct as ever when he says we may find sermons in stones, and I trust you will profit by the Old Man’s homily.
Resuming your clamber, you, by and bye, come out upon the high narrow ridge connecting the Old Man with the fells behind him. It is now all plane sailing, and you soon arrive at the pinnacle, or pillar, or pile of stones upon the mountain’s “very topmost towering height,” which is, according to the best authority, 2,632 feet above the sea.
In the place of this solid erection there stood, a few years ago, an externally similar, though larger pile containing a chamber, which formed a welcome shelter to such shepherds and tourists as happened to be overtaken on the mountain by bad weather. This chambered pile was pulled down by certain officers employed on the trigonometrical survey, or rather by their orders; and, by the bye, I have heard that the labourer who undertook the demolition had five pounds for the job, and earned the THE OLD MAN’S GODFATHERS.satisfactory wages of somewhere near one pound per hour by it. Be this as it may, those gentlemen ought, when they restored the erection, to have made the new equal in all respects to the old one, instead of giving us a pile inferior both in its useful and ornamental attributes. Any erection of this description on a hill-top being locally called a “man,” this is said by certain shallow etymologists to give the Old Man his name, as though a mountain of his respectability would stand unchristened, until somebody, like the “three rosy-cheeked school-boys, the tallest not more than the height of a counsellor’s bag,” in the Laureate's poem on “Perseverance” (I believe), undertook and completed the task of rearing a pile of stones upon his vertex. The Rev. W. Ford, who has written one of the many “Guides to the Lakes,” says there are three piles on the mountain top—“the Old Man, his wife, and son,” thereby inferring that the name of the hill bears some allusion to the featherless biped of similar designation. This is certainly wide of the mark, but there are two reasonable derivations of this mountain’s quaint appellative, and both are probably correct. Some say the name comes from two British or Saxon words Alt, high, and Maen, crag or rocky hill, which pretty well describe the Old Man. Others say that the same Roman soldiery who called their beautiful station at the head of Windermere Amabilis Situs (since degenerated into Ambleside), called this hill Altus Mons, which, by a natural metonomy, gradually became Auld Man, for, be it remembered, the natives of this immediate vicinage, even at the present day, pronounce old in the Scotch fashion.