“My crown,” cried he, “bear it away; never let the Saxon flaunt it.”
THIRLMERE AND HELVELLYN
A few stalwarts took the charmed treasure from his hands, and with a furious onslaught made the attackers give way. Step by step they fought their way up the ghyll of Dunmail’s beck—broke through all resistance on the open fell, and aided by a dense cloud evaded their pursuers. Two hours later the faithful few met by Grisedale tarn, and consigned the crown to its depths—“till Dunmail come again to lead us.” And every year the warriors come back, draw up the charmed circlet from the depths of the wild mountain tarn, and carry it with them over Seat Sandal to where their king is sleeping his age-long sleep. They knock with his spear on the topmost stone of the cairn, and from its heart comes a voice, “Not yet; not yet; wait awhile, my warriors.”
The road now turns down the pass, a long, swinging slope where the steadying brake is necessary. To northward show the storm-washed sides of Helvellyn, with new rents staring like fresh-turned loam in the sunshine. A blue peak of Skiddaw is holding, as though unwilling to part with, a fleecy cloud, and here sweep into sight Raven Crag with its precipitous front, and the laughing summits of Armboth, one by one. Our cycles are gaining speed; we reach a corner, the top of a steep pitch,—there before us is a sudden view of Thirlmere, with Saddleback rising in rugged majesty behind. The open water is ruffled with breezelets, but every sheltered cove shines level blue. The pace becomes faster; the long curves are turned at ever-increasing speed. On either side are wide grass slopes, cut up by stony gullies. We are still above the zone of trees, if we except the fringes of rowan, the solitary hawthorns. Now across a bridge, spanning a wilderness of rubble where after heavy rain a flood roars and even throws veils of spray on to the road. A straight descent, and below we view the gardens and trees, white-walled inn, and grey church at Wythburn. Now, instead of allowing the machines full way to race in fifty seconds down the half-mile incline, we approach more leisurely, for halfway down the steep the road we are to take turns off at a tangent. Out of a clump of tall sycamores an old farm emerges; this is the Post Office, far removed from neighbouring houses! To the right Helvellyn is now in fuller sight, furrowed with watercourses, jagged with scaurs, with the sunshine dancing on the brackens and warming up the sober green stretches of grass. The dale is desolate and barren, yet a portion is known as the City, in memory possibly of a settlement of Britons in its stony waste.
The great gap of Wythburn Head will afford a pleasant ramble to any one who has the time. There is no towering crag, no huge cataract, no narrow, yawning ravine, but an infinite variety of the sweetest brook scenery. Only a few hundred yards from the road is a small basin of water, entirely hedged by slabs of stone, ten feet deep, and so clear that the least pebble on the floor can be seen—a place scoured by floods as clean of sand and soil as though Nature were the most expert of housemaids. On the bottom, in their season, the chrysalides of the Mayfly crawl—how wonderfully protected they are by their stick-like shape and their coats of sand! most realistically they imitate a piece of rotting twig as they lie in a chink of the pool-bed.
Another sweet corner I remember well. It is a dream of beauties in miniature. The down-pouring rivulet divides round a boulder, throwing two pearly cascades into the gloomy pool a fathom below. Round this pool the rocks rise sharply, crowned with foxgloves, heath and bog-violet, with a single stem of fly-orchis, with ivy and a cluster of the grass of Parnassus; more ivy wreathes around the roots of the trees, and long beards of moss drip with the outpourings of secret springs. Overhead, the alder, the rowan, and a few spindly self-grown ashes flourish, with a bush of glorious wild roses wilting loose petals into the slow-moving, bubbling circle. Ferns cluster among the tree-stems and on haphazard ledges, parsley and oak, the broad buckler and others, together with hardy bracken and other ubiquitous plants of the uplands. In a hole there a wren has built her nest, a thrush homes in the thickest holly, while the hawthorns are inhabited by a colony of hedge-sparrows and titmice. It is an active corner in bird-life if you have time to see it and your patience exceeds that of the busy midges.
The road has a slight incline which carries the cycle along with small exertion. The fences, as is customary in tourist Lake Country, are partly wall, topped with wire rail—a plan which allows the journeyer by road fully to enjoy the scenery. Tall, moss-grown walls and dense hedges are a feature of unfashionable Lakeland, but, pretty as they undoubtedly are, they sadly narrow the wanderer’s vision. The lake is now close by, stretching into the reedy level meadows. One curious feature is a now useless bridge, raising its hog-back in the mere. Wee looks the white-walled inn across the glen, with the great mountain range almost overhanging it. The fellside above us is bristling with crags, some splintered and hanging as though a breath of wind would hurl a shower of stone down upon us; others rise in flawless tiers, grandly immovable, impervious to the forces of Nature. And beneath them is the dainty, dancing harebell, the jocund foxglove, the sweet blooming heather, and many a starry mountain flower. Few trees are in sight; round an abandoned farm is a lonely cluster of sycamores; gulls are screaming and paddling in what was once pasture-land. Bare and stern is the last back-glance ere our way curves into a passage cut through the rocks. Then, suddenly—is this a new land, a new Thirlmere? The transformation is sudden and complete. To northward, many a mile, stretches a narrow lake, basking in the afternoon sun. Dense coppice and green larches clothe the slopes rising from the water; there is no indication of farms, of humanity.
The lake is quite close, we gaze down a terrace of rock at its shining mass. A knoll crowned with tough, short oaks is almost cut out from the land; a faint swell breaks entirely round a rock on which heather is in bloom. In the bay some wild ducks are feeding; Thirlmere in the quiet of winter is a grand haunt of migrants from ice-covered Northern seas. The lake is at its widest here; right opposite is the sham castle which Manchester erected over the pipe which draws, through ninety miles of mountain and meadow, the waters of Thirlmere. It is a pretentious battlemented horror of red sandstone at present, an insult to the shade of dour and grey Helvellyn. But perhaps time, and ivy, will soften the harshness, dull the too vivid colours, and the ugliness of to-day may be the beauty of a not-far-off to-morrow. On the road swings, ever softly on the incline, making the cycle run easier, and we pass through aisles of tall larch, beneath the shadow of sheering crags.
For a mile or so we pass through avenues of larch woods with broken crags ever shouldering against the roadside; then we come to Launchy Ghyll, the most extensive break in the mountain wall this side the lake. Not far from the ghyll, yet some little climb above the road, is the flat-topped boulder called the Justice Stone. It has been a famous landmark. It is suggested that its first use was in the plague years when the folks of Keswick laid money here to exchange with pedlars for goods from the outside world. Up to a century ago the shepherds of the neighbouring valleys used to meet at this place and exchange straying sheep. The climb up to the Stone gives splendid views of the lake and its surroundings, of Helvellyn range from Seat Sandal to Clough Head, of three-piked Saddleback, and of Skiddaw.