On Cambrian and Cumbrian Hills: Pilgrimages to Snowdon and Scafell

by Henry S. Salt

The sense of greater friendliness and accessibility of which we are conscious among these hills may be due partly to this cause, still more, perhaps, to the influence of the Lake writers, who have so largely created the sentiment with which the fells are begirt; we feel “at home” there in a degree not known to us either in Wales or in Scotland. It has to be remembered, too, that the Lake District, in contrast to Wales, is a land without a past, the cradle of a fortunate race which has had no troubled record of wars or rumours of wars, but an almost unruffled exemption from “history”; and this, again, may tend to strengthen the feeling of serenity associated with these heights, even in the minds of those who have undergone many buffetings from their storms.

But this feeling must be a modern one, for the earliest visitors, as we have seen, were affected rather by the terrors than the charms of the mountains, so that the very bridle-paths seemed as precipices to them, and we find one old traveller sagely remarking that “there is something unmanly in conceiving a difficulty in traversing a path, which, we were told, the women of the country would ascend on horseback, with their panniers of eggs and butter.”[14] Of all writers, the best qualified, by his love of the mystic and sublime, to give expression to the awe which the fells once inspired, was De Quincey; and in his Memorials of Grasmere he has drawn a highly coloured, yet in spirit very faithful picture of a region rather vaguely apprehended by him, where, as he says, far beyond the “enormous barrier” of his own Easedale, “tower the aspiring heads, usually enveloped in cloud and mist, of Glaramara, Bowfell, and the other fells of Langdale Head and Borrowdale.” And here it may be remarked that though much poetry, of a far-fetched kind, has been written about mountains, the mountains are still waiting for their poet, at close quarters. In Wordsworth’s “Excursion” certain aspects of the fells are wonderfully portrayed, and in Scott’s “Helvellyn,” and that canto of his “Lord of the Isles” where the Coolin Hills are the theme, we have true mountain idylls; but on the whole it has to be confessed that the poets have written about mountains as if they had never set foot on them, but had been content to take the panoramic “views” of them from afar. Even Wordsworth’s prose account of his ascent from Seathwaite “to the top of the ridge, called Ash Course,” makes one suspect that his real acquaintance with the hills was very slight; indeed his corruption of the guide’s pronunciation of “Esk Hause” (the typical name of the central saddle of the Scafell range, at the head of Eskdale) into the absurdity of “Ash Course,” shows that he had but little sympathetic knowledge either of the nomenclature of the hills or of the dialect of the hillsmen.

There is much insight, however, in Wordsworth’s selection of the Sty Head as the pivot of the Scafell group. “From a point between Great Gavel and Scafell,” he says, “a shepherd would not require more than an hour to descend into any one of the principal vales by which he would be surrounded. Yet, though clustered together, every valley has its distinct and separate character.” The truth of this will be owned by every one who has personally studied the district. If we take Scafell Pike, with the Gable and Bowfell, as a single mountain, we have the common centre from which there radiate at least seven important glens—Borrowdale, with its gorgeous colouring and variegated effects of rock and turf, leafage and river; the grave and simple beauty of Buttermere; Ennerdale, wild and primitive, its Pillar Rock rising like a pulpit in the midst; Wastdale, plain to the verge of ugliness, even as an unfurnished room is plain, yet full of the sense of the great heights that wall it round; the solitude of upper Eskdale, with its mighty waterfalls and mountain pools; the more sociable Duddon, and the pastoral greenery of Langdale. Surely nowhere else in Great Britain can we stand on a hill-top with seven such valleys at our feet! As a single starting-point for scaling each and all of these hills, the choice would rest either on Wastdale or on Seathwaite, the little hamlet at the extreme head of Borrowdale, noted as “the rainiest place in England,” which means only that when it rains there it rains with a will; they are so placed that there is hardly a summit in the district that cannot be reached by a strong walker from these points.

Of the four chief groups which the hills of Lakeland assume—Skiddaw to the north, Helvellyn to the east, Grasmoor to the west, and to the south the range of Scafell—the last named is by far the most alluring both to the nature-lover and to the climber, for it is much wilder, rockier and more precipitous than the rest. Looking at a raised or tinted map of the district, we might conceive this rough mountain mass to be a great birdlike figure swooping north-eastward, to dip its beak in Derwentwater; with Glaramara for its down-stretched head and neck, with Great End for its elevated shoulder, from which are extended in sweeping curves to right and left the two superb “wings” of Bowfell and the Gable; with the Pikes as the ruffled plumes of the mighty back, and Scafell as the dark high-spread tail. Such, we may imagine, is the great stone eagle that flies towards the pastures of Borrowdale.

Though devoid, for the most part, of sharp peaks and ridges, and massive rather than graceful in their general form, these Cumbrian Pikes, like the Carnarvonshire Glyders to which in general character they are akin, have the charm of untamed wildness; you may clamber for weeks together over their desert of crags and coves, yet find their wonders inexhaustible. Seamed as they are in many places by deep “ghylls” and gullies, or carved into stark faces of rock, bristling with projecting “pinnacles” and “pillars,” the grandest sight of all they have to show is Mickledore Chasm, the great “door” which some primeval force has flung open between the Pikes and Scafell; and it is only when the range is approached from the east or the west that this vast natural fissure, thoroughfare for the winds of heaven, can be properly seen. The very heart of the mountain is reached when you stand on the ridge of Mickledore, with the cliffs of Scafell towering over you on one side and the Pikes on the other, for from this centre you can look down into Eskdale or Wastdale, or climb to either summit, as you choose; and here, in this huge hollow, is often a witches’ cauldron of the clouds, which come drifting up from either valley according to the whim of the wind, until they meet a contrary current at the top, and are piled up in swirling masses on one side of the ridge, while the other side, as if protected by some invisible curtain, remains cloudless and sunlit.

Next to Mickledore in interest is Piers Gill, the gigantic cleft, shut in by high walls of rock, which zigzags down the north slope of the Pikes opposite the Sty Head, rivalling the Welsh “Twll Du” in savageness and much surpassing it in beauty. Viewing it from the top of the Great Gable, one is reminded of a monstrous serpent—a stone serpent in the clutch of the stone eagle—writhing downwards from the crags of Lingmell; when entered from below, it is found to be the wildest of the many rock-ravines, veritable cañons in miniature, by which these mountains are cloven, as witness the fine Crinkle Gill and Hell Gill on Bowfell, and the famous Dungeon Ghyll, “so foully rent,” on Langdale Pikes.

Turning now to the northern shoulder of the Pikes, the high promontory of Great End, we see around us an almost unbroken continent, with a stony isthmus leading eastward across Esk Pike to Bowfell, so shapely a peak when seen from the Windermere lowlands; and there are few finer walks than to follow these heights for their whole length, passing over Crinkle Crags to the Wrynose Pass, and thence, if time and strength allow, along the Coniston Fells to the Old Man. On the other hand, the leftward wing from Great End, after dipping to the Sty Head, rises steeply again to another chain of summits, the first of which is no less glorious a goal than the crown of the Great Gable.

For, after all, it is neither to Scafell, nor to Bowfell, nor to any lesser fell, that the mountain lover looks, when, after long absence, the well-remembered phalanx of heights—the “tumultuous waste of huge hill-tops,” as Wordsworth so fitly termed them—again unfolds itself to his gaze. He looks to the Great Gable. In so far as the Cumbrian Hills can be singly appraised, the Gable is the summit to which there clings the strongest sentiment, by virtue both of its noble and arresting outline, and of the grand rocks and ridges by which it is so powerfully flanked. Its name is somewhat ill-chosen, perhaps, for the likeness to a gable is hardly to be discovered except from the south; from other quarters the impression is rather that of a great round tower, or dome, a majestic sight when seen from a few miles’ distance, belted with clouds, or looming up in dark relief against an ominous sky. Nor, when one approaches it more closely, is there any sense of disappointment. “It’s a strange place, is Gable,” said my Wastdale shepherd, and such will certainly be the judgment of those who have roamed in all weathers about its shivered and rock-strewn sides. Of the ordinary ascents, the least inspiring is that usually chosen, from the top of the Sty Head Pass; it is far better, if you come from Seathwaite, to follow the little beck, beloved of the water-ousel, which joins the stream that flows from the Sty Head Tarn, and having thus gained the saddle between the Great and the Green Gable, to skirt the northern verge of the mountain overlooking the Ennerdale precipice, till you reach the broad top; or, if Wastdale be your starting-point, you can ascend by a still more fascinating route, up the long grassy ridge known as Gavel Neese.

Close to the cairn, at the top, is the small rock-cistern in which there is a “perennial” remnant of rain-water, idealized by several writers, following Wordsworth, into a pure and celestial lymph. “Even in the driest summer,” says the History of Cumberland (1883), “the sparkling liquid gushes forth from the little fount.” In truth the pool, at its best, is but stagnant and brackish, and owing to the habits of some tourists is now often polluted with bits of food or newspapers; so that no worse punishment need be invoked on those who pen such fictions than that they should themselves be forced to slake their thirst with its waters. There is the less need to romance about this “fount” because the three real streams that have their source on the Gable are peculiarly fresh and sweet; in fact, there is hardly a more charming little torrent than Gable Beck, which goes singing down into Wastdale on the left of the Neese as you ascend.

But the chief glory of the Gable lies in the wild crags on its southern and northern sides. Much as climbers have written of the Great Napes, the huge outstanding stack of cliffs that seems to overhang the traveller between Wastdale and the Sty Head, scanty justice has been done to their strange and terrible beauty, which is enhanced by the fact that the whole front of the mountain from which they project is itself a precarious scree-slide of extreme steepness, so that in looking up to these impending arêtes one surveys them not from a flat base but from a shifty slope inclining at a sharp angle to the vale, and they have thus all the appearance of a greater precipice upstarting fantastically from a lesser one. Their name of “Napes” is aptly bestowed, for they are united with the Gable by a narrow neck, where the green turf, streaked with red undersoil, is in bright contrast to the prevailing grey of the mountain.