RIVERS OF LANCASHIRE AND LAKELAND.
A Birthplace of Rivers—The RIBBLE: Ribblehead—Horton-in-Ribblesdale—Survival of Old Traditions—Hellifield—The Hodder—Stonyhurst and its College—The Calder—Burnley—Towneley Hall—Preston—Its Development as a Port. The WYRE: Poulton-le-Fylde. The LUNE: Kirkby Lonsdale—The Greta and the Wenning—Hornby Castle—Lancaster—Morecambe Bay—The Journey from Lancaster to Ulverston in Coaching Days—Shifting Sands. The KENT: Kentmere—Kendal. The GILPIN and the WINSTER. The ROTHAY and the BRATHAY. Grasmere and Wordsworth—Rydal Water—Ambleside—Windermere. Troutbeck. Esthwaite Water. The LEVEN: Newby Bridge—The Estuary. The CRAKE: Coniston Water—Coniston Hall—Brantwood and Mr. Ruskin. The DUDDON: Wordsworth’s Sonnets. The ESK and the IRT: Wastwater. The LIZA: Ennerdale Water. The EHEN: Egremont Castle. The DERWENT: The Vale of St. John—The Greta and Keswick—The View from Castlerigg top—Derwent water.
IN the lonely moorland solitudes guarded by Ingleborough, Whernside, and Pen-y-gent, with outlying fells of almost mountain magnitude, may be traced the birthsprings of many important rivers. They shoot off to every point of the compass, and, gathering in tributary waters from the best of our bold English scenery, are lost in the North Sea as with the Yorkshire Ouse, or in the Irish Sea as with the Ribble, the Lune, and the many minor streams that diversify Morecambe Bay. The whole extent of this corner of the North-West Riding is wild, open country, with diverging dales lost in fading distances: stone walls for leafy hedges, and limitless grazing uplands clothed with the herbage peculiar to unwooded elevations of over two thousand feet. In the blithe springtime, when the tender flush of green proclaims the renewed life-blood of the grass; in the summer prime, when the umbers and greys of prolonged heat are faintly changing the broad faces of the untrodden mountains and silent valleys; and in winter, when all is white with unsullied snow, this expanse of billowy hill and fell has a grandeur all its own. Its features are repeated under a more striking development by-and-by in Lakeland, but this is the crowning point of the great backbone of picturesque highland which, beginning in Derbyshire, defines much of the boundary of Yorkshire and Lancashire.
The RIBBLE is one of the rivers which take their rise from the Ingleborough and Whernside heights. It is a babbling brook as it is seen by the railway traveller at Ribblehead, but the source must be sought in one of the rills that tumble down the shoulders of Wold Fell. The difficulty usually encountered in tracing a mountain-born river to the precise bubble of water that may without hesitation be pronounced its source is intensified here. So much depends upon circumstances in these matters. After a rainless month in summer, the wayfarer would note a waterless country; let the rains descend, or the snows melt, and every hill is silvered by tumbling cascades, the air is musical with the leap of a hundred rivulets. So it is that, for the Ribble’s source, old Craven maps select Gearstones, north-east of Settle; more recent local authorities are divided between Wold Fell and Cam Fell; and for the world at large Ribblehead serves the general purpose of identification.
Photo: A. Horner, Settle.