The English Lakes

by William T. Palmer

NEARING THE TOP OF STYHEAD PASS, WASTDALE

Like our other lakes, Wastwater is most fishable when a faint breeze ruffles its waters—for the benefit of the visitor-angler, the coch y bondhu and Broughton Point are the best general flies, with red hackle during the summer. There is little sport with the char: the lake-bed does not permit netting, and the fish are not present in sufficient numbers to encourage the use of the plumb-line. One of my old acquaintance was wont to walk from Langdale over the mountains to fish here, in the days of the now proscribed lath. Poor old Tom, it needs a vivid imagination to picture thy age-wrung frame climbing steep Rossett Ghyll, to think of thy dim old eyes as alert enough to seek out the path as in semi-darkness thou wandered among bogs and benks, screes and boulders. Still more difficult is it to see thee bending over the lead-weighted board with its twin lines and their droppers of gut, fly, and barb, keen to get the instrument on its journey. In one of the coves where purls down a rivulet, the lath is launched; the faint current carries it outward till the breeze ruffling the lake catches its upturned edge. Twenty yards out, where the lake sheers down to its great depth, fish are lying, taking what food air and stream drift to them. Slowly the lath sails outward, Tom unwinding further line as required. The board is now, thinks Tom, beyond the shoal, and the droppers should be presenting their temptations to the fish. Its movement is therefore checked, and the linesman waits for the fish to bite. Tom’s right hand after a while draws one end of the lath nearer, the breeze catches it and it floats sidewise. To the right is a few yards of water from which Tom has previously taken good fish. In an hour he rises from the shadows, and draws the board slowly to land. At first the lines come steadily enough, and are coiled neatly; then there is greater resistance. The right line jerks about in all directions: here comes a big trout. A faint ruffle breaks from a back fin just beneath the surface, there is a little wimple as the fish sinks down again. Gently, gently Tom draws in line. Now there is a brisk curl quite close to his feet near the rocks, a few splashes, and Tom is handling a half-pounder. So strong was the tackle used for lath-fishing that no delicate precision, little fine “play,” was requisite. Poor old Tom! Hadst thou then a taste for the picturesque, what lovely memories thou must be revelling in now when in age thine eye to outward things grows dim! Nights by lovely mountain tarns, when the northward light made the water glow like steel, when the great ribs of the mountains seemed in their nakedness to support the dome of night. Star-spangled skies, and the soft mists of summer by the lake-shore when everything droned to rest. The adventure Tom remembers best is of Wastwater. A keeper had suspected lathing on the western shore, and secreted himself to watch. Tom came over from Langdale, and near Yewbarrow made ready his lines. The board floating out attracted the keeper’s attention. He was mounted, and rode as fast as he could to cut off the poacher. Tom heard the thud of hooves on the soft grass, threw his lines into the mere, and made up the hillside as fast as he could run. A few score yards the horseman pursued, but the poacher managed to cross a deep but narrow gully which the keeper’s pony could not leap. Then, as Tom quaintly remarks, “He thought he hed hed enew on’t, and turned back to the lake. But I got my lines and board in spite of all. Aye, and there was about twenty pounds of fish on ’em.”

WASTDALEHEAD, WASTWATER

Wastwater—its memories are quite innumerable. On cycle the western shore is not difficult. The road undulates, but its surface is fair. It was a warm afternoon; rain had fallen during the previous night, but bright sunshine and sweeping breeze had dried up the exposed portions of the road, though under the trees it was still muddy. We started from Santon Bridge, a sweet hamlet in the gorge of the Irt, not usually found by those whose faces are toward Wastwater. For a couple of miles the road was up, up, and the hills were long; then down, down, down, and the descents were merry. And the Screes rose loftier in front, and looked more and more broken. Soon the level blue of Wastwater comes in sight over larch-tops. Then, as we pedal into a beech avenue, the full view is lost, but we see a succession of entrancing vistas: narrow shafts of meadow and woodland, of water and upspringing screes, framed in by dainty sprays of copper foliage. Through the tunnel of overhanging boughs is a glimpse of open moor and of distant fell. The road declines and our speed increases. To northward we see almost the full length of the mere; the faint breeze is urging the water to gayest laughter. The Screes, with their rainbow hues of native coal and iron, of green slate and brown conglomerate, are opposite. The afternoon sun is playing about their gullies: in some we see long, thin cascades, but between the cliffs fringing other ravines is a straight, heavy shadow. In there, unseen by the sun, the water jets and sprays in leaden glories; no rainbow dances in the soft white veils; dank, slimy cave-ferns grow in plenty.

Our road now passes into the wild moorland—terrace after terrace of hillocks we wind through, keeping near the lake’s level. The feature in this approach to Wastwater head is Yewbarrow. Seen from other points this seems rather tame, but from here it is impressive, commanding the whole view. The lake is still waving under the influence of the breeze; green, green and gold are the hillsides with grass and bracken. Among the stones the staghorn moss threads, sending up club-like spikes in profusion; every boulder is fringed with parsley fern. Yewbarrow, always changing shape, now appears as if cloven by a chasm from the great mass of mountains, and the name of the chasm is Bowderdale. There is heather by the roadside now, its tufts perfect masses of bloom, and the broom’s yellow glory is not wanting. In half a mile we leave the desolation of rock and grass—here are trees and even a few pieces of hedges, rowan and hawthorn, with a few scrubby oaks. The level plain of Wastdale head appears in front; we coast round guardian Yewbarrow, pass cottage and farm as far as the road serves, then push our machines to the church of the dale. Now the weather changes. The brilliant sunshine suddenly glooms and dies away. I look up to Great Gable, weather oracle of the glen—and am surprised. Half an hour ago a fluffy cloud seemed resting on it, but now a dark mass of vapour, distended with wind and bearded with unshed rain, has taken its place. And over the pass from Ennerdale on the left, and through the gully from Borrowdale on the right, the hosts of storm cloud are boiling. A contrary gust whispers a shrill warning; we seek shelter at once, but with a seething and a roar the storm is upon us, lashing rain-lines in our faces. Fifty yards away the vicar’s house offers shelter—we are not acquaintances, but—— In three minutes we are in his kitchen, looking out toward the glen of Mosedale. At first nothing more is visible than a grey mass of whirling rain, then, for a summer storm is but brief, again the flanks of the nearer fells come in sight. The pall passes rapidly, and the sunshine is pouring over the spine of Yewbarrow before the last rush of rain has streamed down the hospitable window. Ere long, the glen is again rejoicing in sunshine; the grass sparkles with fairy gems, the streaming crags are touched into shields of silver, the hoary crown of Gable seems to brighten as though the new spirit of life below made even it, the monarch, rejoice.

CHAPTER VIII
THE GLORY OF ENNERDALE

Lying beyond the pale of great mountains, and only connected by rugged passes with other sights of Lakeland, the lake of Ennerdale does not attract many tourists. The approach to it, otherwise than by mountain road, is circuitous; the traveller, coming by ordinary routes from the outside world, is carried across a great ironworking district, where every stream runs red mud, and where black smeltery smoke hangs low. Yet Ennerdale in its own peculiar fashion is beautiful.

In my early days the lake seemed connected, in my mind, with stories of pirates and privateers—Paul Jones hovered on the coast near by till a gale drove him and his cursing hordes out to sea—and as more intimate knowledge came to me I still found Ennerdale connected with illicit seafaring. Smugglers—and my ancestors are reputed to have been among the most active of these—landed cargoes in the coves about St. Bees Head. From there goods were sent northward by the coast to Carlisle and the Border, and eastward over the fells to Penrith, Kendal, and distant towns and villages of the Pennine. The first route was early closed, but that over the passes baffled the revenue officers for years. The head of Ennerdale was quite out of the world then. The smugglers built rough caches to store their loads in wild weather, and even engineered with skill a path over Great Gable in the direction of Borrowdale. To-day this green band is known as Moses’s Sledgate. Moses, however, was not a smuggler, but an illicit distiller who, after the decline of the finer art, reared his “worm” in the wilderness.