On Cambrian and Cumbrian Hills: Pilgrimages to Snowdon and Scafell

by Henry S. Salt

But let it be supposed that verdure of any kind is lacking, and that we stand face to face with an expanse of bare cliff and scree—such as the south face of the Great Gable—the solid cliffs rising above, and the broken screes streaming downward and outward from their base. Here is barrenness indeed, yet a barrenness which, to the lover of such solitudes, is more fruitful than the choicest vineyard or cornfield. For how weird and suggestive is this stationary rock-fall of screes, this stony glacier arrested in its flow, yet retaining in its stillness something of the undulant shape! Viewed from across the glen, it looks like a great “tongue” of rocks lolling out from the mouth of the gorge many hundreds of feet above, and gradually widening in its fall; at closer quarters, it presents itself as a tolerably compact mass of individual boulders, none of any great size, across which it is necessary to pick one’s way with some deftness, because, like Wordsworth’s cloud, it “moveth altogether if it move at all,” and a floundering step may set half the hillside creeping daleward.

It is centuries, no doubt, since these detached stones fell from their holdings, and they are themselves for the most part weather-worn and sun-stained like the parent crags, but they are still occasionally reinforced by new outcasts, when some exposed layer of rock has become disintegrated by winter frosts and rains; and then the story of the latest landslip is written visibly for several years in the paler hue of the screes and in the discordant rift in the escarpment. As a rule, falling stones, so great a danger in the Alps, are rare among our mountains; once or twice in a season, perhaps, you may see, or hear, a big stone go thundering down the hillside when no human agency has been at work.

I refer to human agency, because the mention of falling stones reminds me of the now disused sport of crag-bowling. The rolling of stones down mountain sides, still a recognized method of warfare among hillsmen, has rightly been anathematized in this peaceful country since rock-climbing became popular; but in the old days, when no one went on the crags, it was a harmless and diverting practice. Thus Gilpin, in his travels among the mountains of Cumberland, a hundred and thirty years back, remarked how the native children amused themselves in this manner; and Bingley, describing his ascent of Tryfan some half-century later, observes: “We stood on a mere point, and on each side of us was a precipice more deep than any I had before seen; we united our strength, and rolled down it several huge pieces of rock.” Forty years ago it was common to see guides and tourists assiduously engaged in the sport, the process of which was somewhat as follows. Having first selected a steep “scar,” or a grass slope, with a pool if possible at the foot of it, and having made sure that neither man nor sheep was in the line of fire, the party turned their attention to some “huge stone,” as Wordsworth has it,

Couched on the bald top of an eminence,

and expended such energy as they had to spare in detaching this rock from its station, until it slowly toppled over, gathered fierce speed, went smoking and crashing down the hillside, and buried itself with a wild plunge in the waters. Such was the pastime, a sort of vicarious glissade, and from my own bygone enjoyment of it I have been led to hope that the famous “labours” of Sisyphus, who, according to the old Greek legend, was condemned in Hades to roll a large block up a hill only—only!—to see it roll down again, were not quite so cheerless a form of punishment as poets have feigned. The self-imposed labours of the tobogganist seem to belong to the same class.

But if any reader thinks that so dangerous a game as crag-bowling ought not to receive even this faint retrospective approval, let me add, as a warning, that I know one pilgrim who, for his former indulgence in it, sometimes pays the penalty in dreams. He has loosened, maybe, from its high parapet some monster of a rock, in weight and girth far exceeding any upon which he ever laid waking hands, and no sooner has he launched it on its mad career than he remembers with horror unspeakable that there is a cottage in the glen below—even now he sees its chimneys as the crag goes thundering towards it, and he awakes in remorseful agony at the sickening thud upon the roof.

From the loose screes we turn naturally to the stone walls, where some at least of the scattered blocks have found lodgment and reconstruction. So familiar are these walls to us, and so closely associated with the hillside itself, that they seem to be a natural part of it, as the bridges of the valleys, and one would not willingly miss them from the bare landscape. It is rather surprising, indeed, to find De Quincey speaking of the “sad injury” done to the beauty of a mountainous country by its stone walls; for to some of us the stone wall has a more native charm in such districts than any quickset hedgerow could have: it has often furnished us with a shelter in storm, a shade in heat, a lunching and a siesta-place; we love it, too, as the haunt of our mountain companions, the wheatear and the rock-ousel. The scaling of a seven-foot wall, when the top stones have become insecure, may present some difficulty to the novice, and it is then that he is glad to find one of those convenient loop-holes or rather sheep-holes, through which, after temporarily removing the door-stone, he may insinuatingly worm himself. On some of the lower slopes, especially among the foot-hills near the seacoast, these walls are often of huge girth and solidity, and, being overgrown and intertwined with numberless ivies, mosses, and lichens, have a rare and peculiar beauty; but the increasing use of barbed wire, as an adjunct or substitute for the walls, is yet another sign of the vandalism which in so many ways is working havoc among the hills.

But of all the treasures of the hillside the brightest and purest are its water springs, sources of those many Welsh “afons,” and English “gills” and “becks,” whose beauty might convince the most hardened and sceptical of town-dwellers that the Naiads were something more than a dream. Follow one of these swift mountain rivers, such as the Cumbrian Esk or the Cambrian Llugwy, or better still, perhaps, one of the lesser and more headlong freshets, from its deep pools and rock-basins in the lower valley to its birthplace under the heights, and you will marvel at the prodigality of its charms—so deliciously do the waves come dancing and singing down the slopes in a succession of hidden falls, no two of which are alike, or in an open cascade of white foam, such as often wins for such streams in the Lake District the name of “Sour Milk Gill”; and at last, as the current dwindles, you will trace it to some brimming tarn, or to its high fount in green mosses among the rocks, or will possibly lose it underground, where it may be heard bubbling and gurgling below the stones in its invisible cradle.

These becks, it must be remembered, unlike the turbid snow-fed torrents of Switzerland, are as clear as crystal, so that in calm weather you may see every pebble at the bottom of the pools, and the trout poised with waving fins; but after a heavy rainfall, when the streams are in “spate,” it is often no easy matter to ford them, for then the merest runnels, across which you step to-day without hindrance, may to-morrow be a raging flood. On the other hand, there are times, though much less frequent, when the smaller streamlets are withered up under a spell of summer heat, and their dry channels are useful only as a stone staircase for the climber, who in such seasons may become acquainted, as never before, with the feeling of thirst. I think the sorest temptation I ever underwent, without succumbing to it, was when, on my first visit to Scafell Pike with two fellow undergraduates, on a burning August day, we found a jug of claret-cup left to keep cool, in the spring above Esk Hause, by a party which had trustfully preceded us to the summit. It must have been owing to some morally bracing influence in the high mountain air that that cup was untouched by us: had we been subjected to the same ordeal on the banks of the Cam, it seems but too certain that not one drop could have been spared.

The mountain tarns, in which many of the becks have their origin, lie for the most part in hidden recesses, unsuspected from below, under the crowning heights, and mark the beginning of the last stage in the ascent. It is rather curious that the older school of nature-lovers should have felt themselves disposed to melancholy rather than to joyfulness amid such scenes; even Wordsworth speaks of a “not unpleasing sadness” as naturally induced by the sight of these pools, and surmises that “the prospect of a body of pure water, unattended with groves and other cheerful rural images by which fresh water is usually accompanied, and unable to give furtherance to the meagre vegetation around it, excites a sense of some repulsive power strongly put forth.”[21] Here is a strange relic, in the mind of a great modern poet, of the medieval sense of antagonism between man and nature: we now think rather of these remote tarns as wells of life and healing, to be repaired to by the pilgrim who needs refreshment and comfort in the jostling conflict of mankind.