ULLSWATER, FROM GOWBARROW PARK
A sultry June morn

I was disappointed this first time I reached Howtown to find that the road did not follow the lake shore. Instead it curves backward over the ridge between Hallin fell and wall-like High Street. This is a bit of bleak road when the Helm wind is tearing up the lake, but the meadows around the wyke are so snug that tents are not seldom there until November. Hardy campers these! Martindale is a really odd corner—I think it got its distinctive atmosphere under the forest laws of Rufus; for except a new bridge and maybe half a dozen red-painted carts, everything has the indefiniteness of hoary age. Perhaps it is a knowledge of its old-world fauna which makes me place Martindale so far remote in the ages. The road passes the church; the growing greyness of this makes its exact year of erection difficult to fix. The clergyman in charge for long had the smallest direct revenue in the diocese of Carlisle, and the benefice was often awaiting acceptance. Nowadays, however, the three pounds yearly is greatly improved upon.

ULLSWATER: SILVER BAY

Past Sandwick there is a return to the mountain track winding in bracken and cevin. Then for miles, now a hundred feet up the hillside, now at its level, the lake is skirted. There is a succession of fine views, near and distant: of the steamer slipping through the deep blue water within stone’s throw of the crags, for the lake-bed falls in a precipice here; of sheep climbing and grazing on the shelving hillside, and timorously rushing off at our approach; of the swell when a breeze lifts it along, bursting green on the boulders and throwing shimmering spray into the air; of birches in their summer radiance; of thin green shadows of ghylls where rivulets are slipping down to the lake through piles of moss; of the bramble, and the fox-glove and the heather; of the juniper, the rowan, and the bilberry; of green Glencoin, and mine-torn Glenridding; of thorny Gowbarrow; of the hilltops embosoming Matterdale and its quaint old church, where the sacramental wine was long kept in a wooden keg, and where many a dalesman was baptized “of riper years,” opportunity not serving to traverse the weary miles from home when he was an infant. One dweller at least in remote Martindale (whose chapel was then unused for want of a cleric), can tell of his “kursennin’” here. He was a big lad when the family party were rowed across Ullswater and clomb the brow by Aira Force. The little church he remembers well, especially he noted a big bass fiddle hung on the wall near the font. Fifty years or so later he revisited the place and pointed out where the fiddle had hung on that memorable day. One of the fiddlers left his instrument here between services, out of the way of the lads. The village orchestra was a feature in old dales churches—we were far behind other parts in adopting the harmonium or the organ. At one place the parson’s wife used to lead the singing on a concertina—not very many years ago.

Rounding the fell corner, there is a glorious view of Helvellyn and Fairfield, empurpled with scree, rifted with ravines, solid, smooth crags sheering skyward, often aloof from the bulk of the mountain. A ragged line etched against the sunny green fell shows the Striding Edge’s top, that other ruggedness ending with a sharp peak is Swirrel Edge with Catchedecam. Between these two, and beneath the wide breast of Helvellyn is that romantic rock-basin where lies Red Tarn, the most notable and highly elevated of our mountain waters. Trout caught here are remarkably thick in the shoulder. Our ancient writers make the char also occupant, but no one living has, so far as I know, ever seen one there. As the water is deep, attempts were made half a century ago to introduce that fish; but whether ova, fry, or fullgrown fish were turned in, their enemies accounted for them so well that not one was observed again. An ancient friend of mine—an angler and poacher of wide repute in the old lath-fishing days—once told me a wonderful story—“aye, an’ I’ve caught ’em mesel’, up to a poond weight”—of a unique race of fish dwelling in the fringe of the mist at Red tarn. He called them the silver trout. Their scales were silvery, their fins small, their flesh dainty. Only in the deepest pools beyond the reach of a shore rod were they found; to the lath with its trailing baits alone they fell. I have from other sources heard a similar story, but no one lights upon the silver trout in these days. Old Tom was quite unlettered; it is unlikely that he ever heard that old books asserted that the skelly or gwyniad, as well as the char, was to be found here.

In peak and frowning crag, in shadowy slack and deep cove, Helvellyn extends far to westward, finally breaking away at the sun-filled hollow of Grisedale. Westward again, the debacle, an amazing tangle of mountains, some throwing a mossy green shoulder into view, others jagged precipices or walls of scree—Fairfield and Cofa Pike, St. Sunday’s Crag and Hartsop Dodd, Red Screes, Kirkstone, and many another. But to describe yard by yard the opening view were tedious indeed; when one has climbed almost every moor and mountain within sight, and walked in many of the coves and valleys, one is apt to have much to say which must be familiar to all who know the Lake Country by repute.

ULLSWATER: THE SILVER STRAND
Afterglow

There is little of history in the Patterdale of to-day; the inrush of tourists has caused the old-style cottages and farms to be renovated almost out of existence. Bay windows and upper floors take the place of bottle-glass casements and the old camp bedsteads which stood in recesses of the one long room, and, by their great size, formed really chambers within a chamber. To see Ullswater fully we must be upon it. A boat is secured and we float down the Goldrill, river of pretty name and raging furies of floods, under the bridge. Hereabouts another rivulet joins us, to-day in quiescent a mood as ours; but it has trilled down steep Seat Sandal, eddied in dark Grisedale tarn over the crown of Dunmail, burst in mad career down the dale of the Wild Swine (Grisedale), losing pace in the level meadows, and now in a murmur it glides through the laced alder shade to fall in here. The united currents send us out on to the lake itself, carrying us clear of the wide tangle of grasses growing in the silt the floods carried from Kirkstone and Helvellyn. This upper basin of Ullswater is where the great lake trout was last to be found. Though it is several years since an undeniable example, with hooked underjaw, was caught, the existence of the fish was no myth. Legend makes too much of its size, asserting that fish sixty pounds in weight were landed. At flood time the great trout, states Clarke, writing about a century and a half ago, ascend the Goldrill, as also in autumn at the time for spawning. This in his day gave rise to the sport of spearing, to join in which, he observes that gentlemen came from great distances. The redds, a series of sand-bottomed pools, were visited at night; a torch showed where the fish lay, and the sportsman, armed with a three-pronged spear, kept striking as long as a big trout was within his reach. The ordinary lake trout to-day hasten into the river when a flood is due, after there has been heavy rain on the fells. As our boat is pulled from the shore, the grand panorama of mountains begins to show; the bluffs behind the village dotted with white hawthorn, and the flat lands by the river are not yet dwarfed by more mighty forms. Place fell is the most commanding sight, two thousand feet of rock rising in unbroken slope from the water’s edge. A level tongue of land is now quite close by. The whitened current pouring through acres of silt is silent testimony of mining activity. This stream has its little tragedy. Once the char inhabited Ullswater, and spawned in Glenridding beck. When the mines began to be worked many breeding char were poisoned by pollution. Others to save themselves did not shed their spawn, but returned to the lake. A few afterwards left their ova on the shallows and among the water grasses, but the following seasons the females held back their spawn altogether. The stock of char became rapidly depleted, and for years there has been no trace of the kind in the lake.