Armboth House is the next feature: the haunt of the grisliest set of phantoms the Lake Country holds. For once a year, on All Hallowe’en, it is said, the ghosts of the Lake Country, the fugitive spirits whose bodies were destroyed in unavenged crime, come here. I would not like to be present at their banquet, for they are, according to Harriet Martineau, an unpleasant lot. Bodies without heads, the skulls of Calgarth with no bodies, a phantom arm which possesses no other member, and many a weird shape beside. But they are a moral lot—victims and not sinners. Does the wild shriek in which ere dawning ends their banquet mean that to the spirit eyes has come a revelation of their wrongers in torment? But I forget: no man can hear that cry and live. Yet people will not believe the straight-forward story of the Armboth ghosts, of windows lit up with corpse-lights, of clankings of chains in corridors, of eternal shriekings which cannot be traced, as though murder was being done in some secret chamber. But why has this house been compelled to be a ghosts’ haunt? I have never heard a word against its reputation, ancient or modern. Perhaps it is most central for the guests to the ghost supper.
From Armboth a road turns over the moors for Watendlath and Borrowdale. It is a breezy moorland walk ending in a beautiful glen.
The road leaves the woodlands, and we cycle for some distance in full view of the water. The land is fertile meadow; a welcome change from the sterile wastes. A wood clothes the further shore; the hillside in front is known as the Benn, its summit stands well out from the fellside to which, if you trouble to climb so high, you find it is attached by a narrow spine of rock. Up here the Britons of old had a fort impregnable to assault. Now we reach the embankment, which has enlarged the bounds of the mere. It rises to a great height above the waters at present, but the engineers say that by a trifling amount of work the lake would rise sufficiently for a man, leaning over the parapet, to wash his hands in it. A road runs the width of the bank, giving a view up the sheening waters to far-off Dunmail. It is a pretty picture this—a succession of bluffs, some bare and stern, others clothed in clinging scrub of oak and ash, clustering with larch.
The return road winds round the hill into Legburthwaite, faces Helvellyn as though seeking a passage to its stone-strewn head, then turns sharply over a rise, and we are by Thirlmere again. The first view is exceedingly pretty. Neither sham castle nor embankment is visible, and you need not remember that the mere is semi-artificial. The fells of Armboth face one like a wall, broken here and there by a narrow ravine. On the fell you find the dip where Harrop tarn, beloved of wild fowl, is lying; you trace its rivulet threading down toward its long home in the lake. For a long mile we cycle along a terrace road high above the water, with Helvellyn rising to invisible heights to the left.
The next point of interest is Wythburn, its little church and inn across the way known over the wide world. Wordsworth describes his “Waggoner” making a journey past here at midnight, and halting at the Cherry-tree (now a farm), a public-house on the disused lower road where a merrynight was in progress. Coleridge has given his tribute to the little house of God, and other equally famous names occur to one, who have not disdained to ponder on the simplicity here. Wythburn was once among the smallest of English churches, but an addition has been made to the chancel since those days. In a batch of notes collected from aged dalesmen many years ago I have the following story concerning Wythburn.
The rector, after forty-six years’ constant and punctual work, caught a chill which, as the week wore on, prostrated him. On Sunday morning his wife persuaded him to send word to the clerk to take service as far as possible and then dismiss the congregation. Ten o’clock came and a quarter past, when the single bell should have tolled to assemble the congregation. But to the concern of the invalid its welcoming clatter did not ring out. To appease him his wife hurried to the church, half a mile away, to ascertain the cause. She found the clerk scrambling up the moss-grown roof with a newly twisted straw rope which had to be fixed ere the bell could be rung. A wild goat (there were wild goats on Helvellyn then as on the Coniston fells now) had during the week descended from the fell where keep was scant, had leapt on to the low roof, and, nimbly stepping along the ridge tiles, had found something eatable in the bell rope.
In another fellside the thatch of the church was once eaten by sheep. Services were not held in the building during winter; that was a particularly hard season, and a snowstorm had scattered the flocks ere they could be brought down. At still another fellside church a sudden jerk of the rope was apt to cause the bell to vacate the steeple, and with a rumble and a thud it would land in the adjacent field. Something was wrong with the swivel, but the yeoman who acted as bell-ringer did not know how to repair it. When the bell had finished its journey he would carry it back to its old position, and trust to luck for its remaining there awhile. But the parish clerk was a character, a class of himself in the dales, and on theological topics his voice carried little less weight than that of the parson. He was an independent fellow as a rule, and even the visit, once in a lifetime, of a bishop could not induce him to vary the methods which had descended to him through half a dozen generations.
CHAPTER XV
HAWESWATER AND THE BIRDS
In touring, extremes in conveyances and men meet—or perhaps, in these days of petrol, avoid one another. As the motor begins to monopolise the main roads, the true pedestrian is driven to the byways and field-paths. Gone for us seems the pleasure of swinging steadily, easily, over the hard turnpike; instead, we trudge in narrow, rutted lanes. Where, ten years ago, we watched the great events of the dale—the funerals, the weddings, the infants carried to church—now we must acquire a love for the everyday repose of Nature, else the Cult of the Hobnail knows us no more. Green hedges, grass-pitted roadways, ferns and flowers, birds and beasts of the wilder sort, must afford us food for observation and contemplation. Deeper and still deeper into the unknown countrysides have we to pierce, to taste again the keen delights of old.
