The English Lakes

by William T. Palmer

“Div ye mean ther’s nae land here?” said the Cumbrian, sweeping his hand toward jagged crag, sleeping lake, and boulder-strewn field. “Why, man, ther’s that mich land here that it hes to be piled togither, one farm on top o’ t’other. Why, man, ther’s eneu’ land to mak’ fifty farms i’ Benkle Crag theer.”

“Aye,” assented the Devonian grimly, “and enough waste water to till the lot there,” pointing to the shimmering lake.

The wild moorland above the lake is one of the few remaining English breeding-places of the dotterel. This is a migrant of the plover type from high latitudes; odd pairs are apt to stay all summer, and to rear broods. The nest is increasingly rare: for collectors will give long prices for a complete clutch of eggs, and the native shoots the bird on sight, for no more successful lure for trout exists than a fly made from the underwing of a dotterel. I have declined £5 offered to disclose the whereabouts of a nest. Once I undertook to show a naturalist a nest, but though I had marked the place ever so carefully I failed to give him “the sight of a lifetime.” There are great difficulties in the way of a non-resident again finding, in a maze of benks and boulders, ghylls and riggings, so small an object as a dotterel’s nest. Other summer birds of the mountains are the ring-ouzel, a white-throated blackbird, the peregrine, the kestrel, and the sparrow-hawk. The bittern no longer booms in the upper glens or by the lake; hen-harriers and their kindred are also gone. But the wailing of the curlew still rings in our ears, the plover is never at rest, and the sinister “dowk” or carrion crow gorges on every dead carcase on the uplands. Of lesser birds, by every rill you see the pretty dipper in his uniform of brown and white, and less often the bright metallic sheen of the kingfisher. Winter brings the fieldfare and redwing to the mountain valleys, with now and then a flock of snow buntings. On the lake too come the pochard and the golden eyed ducks from the frozen North, with rarer species such as the sheldrake, the wigeon, and the shoveller.

CHAPTER XI
BUTTERMERE

Buttermere is Crummock’s sister-lake, divided only by half a mile of level, swampish meadows. Doubtless, in early ages, the twain formed one long water, reaching from the foot of Fleetwith eight miles to the hill at Scale. In size the upper lake is much the smaller: even more than Crummock it is a mountain mere. The fells rising from its shores are among the lofty ones of the Lake Country: Red Pike and High Stile with their back views into Ennerdale, Robinson and Hindscarth facing the vale of Derwent and far-away Skiddaw, and Brandreth hiding behind Fleetwith. Buttermere is a solitary place: the presence of the hamlet, the sheep-farms, the small, dark woodlands, and the one mansion on a head driven out by the activities of a fell beck, almost accentuate its loneliness, for the bare pikes of mountain dwarf them almost away. It is the coach-road which brings the idea of modern life and relationships here. It runs close to the lake, and every day in summer and autumn a procession of vehicles passes along just before the luncheon hour. From Keswick they have started—coach, char-a-banc, wagonette, or more lordly landau, wheeled into lovely Borrowdale to the merry crack of the whip and gleesome blast of horn; with a long pull, they have been hauled up steep Honister Hause, with a brake-wrenching plunge they have safely negotiated the narrow shingle-shelf called a road. Timorous passengers have shrunk in terror as they gazed at awful depths below, but now all nerves compose themselves as the hooves rattle on the hard, undulating road by the lake-side. After a suitable rest the horses will draw the crowd away over Newlands Hause, where out of the green hillsides a road has been delved, to Keswick, and our dale and lake will forget disturbance till to-morrow. The eternal silence of a mountain-land will fall around and render rapturous evening and night and blithesome morning. To drive from Keswick to Buttermere and return is no mean item in a tourist’s day; it is a noble day’s work for horses, and only good ones can endure frequent journeys over these rugged passes. Even the “easier” slope of Honister is sufficient to “break many a horse’s heart.”

HEAD OF BUTTERMERE

The villaget of Buttermere was apparently unknown to Roman, Saxon, and the building tribes of old; its only historic building is the lowly public-house where the Maid of Buttermere dwelt. Mary was the belle of the glen in good King George’s day—a blithesome Cumberland lass, bonny enough to charm a yeoman’s eye, wealthy enough in a modest way to bring his love and hand. But she was not for the dalesmen or the shepherds of the mountains. Her fate was ripe when one day a post-chaise brought to the little inn a grand gentleman from Keswick. His dress was fine, his looks noble, he had plenty of money. He gave himself out to be Colonel Hopetown, son of a peer and otherwise highly connected. Soon the guest condescended to woo the Beauty, and ere a short summer passed they were married. A few weeks later the “colonel” was arrested on a charge of forgery—“franking” letters with his “relative’s” name to pass the Post Office—and was proved to be the son of menial parents. Many other and viler frauds had he practised after leaving the South Country, but these he was never called to book for on this earth. Forgery was a crime involving death under the merciless penal code of those days, and the impostor duly suffered at Carlisle. Mary of Buttermere, so forcibly parted from her husband, did not repine him long, but married a neighbouring farmer and lived to a good old age. The small chapelry of Buttermere was, some time previous to the happenings mentioned, held by one of Wordsworth’s heroes, “Wonderful Walker,” the curate of Duddonside Seathwaite, whose life-story of labour and frugality was once so well known and esteemed. How he lived several years in his office here is almost a “wonder” in itself, for Buttermere allowed its priest no more than “whittle-gate” and twenty shillings yearly. (Some accounts aver that the remuneration was “clog-shoes, harden-sark, whittle-gate, and guse-gate”—that is, a pair of shoes clogged or iron-shod, a coarse shirt once a year, free living at each parishioner’s house for a certain number of days, and the right to pasture a goose or geese on the common.) Either scale would not be too luxurious for even a successor of the Apostles, bound to forswear the lusts of the flesh and the pride of life. The person who held Newlands chapel in the time of George II. was a tailor, a clogger and butterpat maker, and the Mungrisdale priest had £6 0s. 9d. a year. Such cures were often held by unordained persons—hedge-parsons with a vengeance.

The day I first came to Buttermere forms one of my fairest memories. Starting before midnight on the opposite edge of Lakeland, at daybreak I stood on Dunmail raise; by breakfast-time I reached Keswick; then I went up Skiddaw by way of Latrigg, descending by the same route—the only one I then knew of on that shoulder of the mountain; at noon I was on Newlands Hause, plodding on cheerily. Hot and grimed with dust, my eyes bleared with sweat and the glare, I wonder if I looked so disreputable, so much of a tramp, as I felt. A stripling of seventeen, not stoutly built, poor in dress and pocket (I left home with 1s. 9½d. and returned with but 3d. less), carrying on my back a satchel with food for my day, to be eaten in the open air and washed down with water; there would be little jauntiness of face or body or stride, I trow, after that forty-eight miles’ tramp. And this was not the end of the journey. Buttermere was only the Mecca, the turning-point, of my walk; after passing it I turned up rugged Honister for Borrowdale, and then by the Stake pass to Langdale, and so home. Perhaps it were unmannerly to boast, but eighty-five miles of road, mountain, glen, and pass, in twenty-five and a half hours, is not a feat of my every-day. As I entered the valley that day the clouds closed down, shutting off the beating sunrays and throwing a light, refreshing shower. Like the mountain daisies, the wanderer for a full minute raised a rejoicing face to the cooling raindrops. Then, like the sky, he felt a trouble. “Nay, nay, it’s nobbut cestin’ a shooer,” said an aged shepherd, and my heart was comforted. Not long before I had walked thirty miles through pouring rain, and found it no light matter. Like a soft slab of slate the lake stretched from the fringe of treetops before to the stony, scrubby hillside opposite. Save where coots and water-hens played by the sedges and rooty river-mouths, the surface was calm, the light rain merged into the water without splash or circle. The hillsides round Buttermere are furrowed into ravines, dark and gaping they split the festive green swathes of summer-tide. And down these hollows dash lively rivulets playing hide-and-seek, mazily threading through shadow of alder and rowan, by groves of flowering hawthorns, now lost in the depths of a ghyll, now spouting in lively haste over a ledge curtained with fern and bracken.