DAWN, CONISTON
Coniston, the third longest of our Lakes, is perhaps the one most intimately associated with our earliest civilisations. On its placid bosom the Britons plied their coracles; they were keen anglers, and built their settlements near the lake-shore. Next came the Roman legions, to whose credit is placed by some the presence in Lakeland of that toothsome fish, the char. And after them, Norsemen raiding from the seaboard for harvests denied to their semi-frozen home-land, yet after awhile remaining permanent settlers on the soil. They built their boats of timbers from the forests around, and on Peel Island one erected a house, the foundations of which have recently been determined by an antiquarian. After the Norseman, the Saxon. And the char were taken up the fells to dark Gateswater, over which the golden eagle screamed and round which roved bear and wolf. The Normans after a couple of centuries of strife found the land comfortable to dwell in, but no baron ousted the native from his hearth. And the char had been carried further, over the pass beyond the haunt of the wild eagles to where the seafowl scream—lonely Seathwaite tarn. With the Norman came the forest laws and rights to fish the lake. Nets were reserved to the lord of Coningstone, and the Le Flemings became a mighty power in the dale. The monks of Furness Abbey, not many miles distant, afterwards obtained great privileges here—a relic of their times is to be found in the shore woods. Down among the roots of the trees, deep beneath accumulations of leaf-soil, are red metal stains and nodules of iron. Trees were converted into charcoal by the industrious monks, and iron ore brought here to be smelted. A thriving trade was this long after it had reverted to the great families, whom it enabled to prosper during dark times. The ore was conveyed by the lake to the neighbourhood of the “bloomery,” and again was so carried to the waiting panniered ponies. Great rafts of forest trees also floated down with the slow current. All this while Coniston Water had been in unsullied purity. But a century ago copper was found among the fells and mines opened. Refuse ran down in muddy streams, tainting the lake from head to foot. Many fish died, for the shingles on which they had previously spawned were fouled, and, though ripe with ova, they could not perpetuate their kind. The damage was not completed in a season, but in thirty years, just as English law began to protect the finny denizens, the lake had been robbed of a great proportion of its fish. Twenty years more the mines continued to send down poisonous offal. Then the copper veins gave out, pollution ceased, and the fishery gradually improved. A few years ago it was gravely propounded as a fact that the lack of size in the angler’s spoils here was due entirely to the overcrowding of the water by the trout and perch! It is not many places where such an accusation can be brought forward. A large number of visitors annually come for the angling alone; and as they are seen year after year, no doubt they find it worth while from the sporting as well as the scenic point of view.
CHARCOAL-BURNERS, CONISTON LAKE
The lake-head is bounded by a mass of mountains of which the Old Man is the chief. On the east of the water too the hills are lofty, their lowest slopes a mass of coppice and larches, their upper braes wild and desolate. It seems odd to look down from these upland farms, where everything is sterile, on the soft, rich-looking lands of the lake-side.
Coniston Water is hardly less famous for the people who have lived on its shores than is Windermere or even Grasmere. To the challenge of Wordsworth and Coleridge and De Quincey, of Christopher North, Hemans and Arnold, it can reply with Tennyson, Linton, and, greatest and nearest of all, John Ruskin. If Grasmere reveres the ashes of Wordsworth, Coniston holds in no less esteem those of Ruskin—and the memory of the great is so much the more living. Every one almost in Coniston remembers Professor Ruskin, but few folks can recall Wordsworth. However, my concern is less with rival celebrities than with the lake and its natural surroundings.
To know Coniston Water well is to be convinced that one’s pen cannot describe it. The greatest master of English descriptive prose, John Ruskin, after years of residence, left the task undone. Duty, however, dictates that some attempt must be made, and I cannot conceive anything more likely to give a fair idea of the lake and its surroundings than notes on a long summer day spent on its waters.
We breakfasted by candlelight—one of our party was a keen angler and had persuaded us to rising before the midsummer sun. Outside the cottage the air came cool and fresh, laden with the fragrance of the morning—honeysuckles over our porch and new mown hay, wild roses of the hedgerows and sweet flowers of our garden, larch woods and white-wreathed fields. The faint light just shows a sea of mist overhanging the lake, shows patches of cloud wandering among delicate grey-blue crag and mountain. Now we near the lakeside: the deep blue sky becomes dimmed by trailers of vapour. The boat engaged by the angler overnight is here; but, as he speaks of remaining hours in his almost motionless craft, and that is not to our taste, we select another, opening, after much labour, a link in the mooring chain and setting it free. The view when first we are afloat is curious: a bank of mist overhangs the lake; we can see the lower meadows around, but the mountains are invisible. Soon, however, we find the mist sweeping away in the dawn-breeze.
