The English Lakes

by William T. Palmer

BROUGHAM CASTLE, PENRITH

Although the lower portions of the lake, toward Pooley, do not come into this brief survey, they are far from unlovely, though to most the beauties do not begin till Hallin fell is abreast and wild Gowbarrow. The eastern reaches are more domesticate—green swelling hills and wide woodlands, with many-acred spaces of smooth pasture. To the south of the lake’s outlet is Swarth fell, a haunt of straight-necked foxes (I have been at their chase from far-off Kentmere), and to the north is Dunmallet, another of those curious “teeth” found among our lake mountains.

My finest experience of Ullswater was on a summer evening. Our boat, to quiet pulling, stole out into the upper lake. The sun was nearly down to Fairfield. When about opposite Silver Bay oars were taken in—their solemn steady chunking sound seemed to mar the harmony of even. A few men and women were wandering the paths by the mouth of Glenridding, but no one was afloat. Away over the horizon, behind the fells, thunder is still echoing. An hour ago raindrops dimpled the lake’s surface; the air was dark and brooding, every few seconds a vivid flash of lightning rent the gloom, and blast after blast of heaven’s trumpet seemed to shake the mountains to their deep-set foundations. After storm, calm—and refreshment and peace at eventide. From westward pour the generous, kindly beams of light, pouring out new life to rain-dashed fields and woodlands, giving new songs and glorious to the birds. What a glory of colouring mantles field and fell and forest. Though a wide gate is cleared for the sun in its latest hour, dense clouds are still overhead, and the north-east is ink-black. The sun touches the topmost ridge of Fairfield with living fire, and just beneath is a deep fold of violet vapour. Place fell is glorious with purple light, its riven ghylls mysterious with a deeper tinge. Along the craggy face of Helvellyn a soft veil of mist is rolling: from hollow Grisedale come cloudy wreaths and streams which bathe the mountain-top ere they dissolve in the amber even. Around us Ullswater spreads, blue as the bluest of our summer skies; its ripples, like frolicking children, rejoice in careless mirth. Now the sun hides behind the turmoil of mountain-tops, and we are in a vale of glorious shadow. The faint lake-current and the soft-moving breeze drift us ever down the mere: we are past Glenridding, the climbing shadow has risen far up Place fell. Above, all is clear and golden; a sharp line passing along the hillside marks off the zone of light. The sheep are wandering upward as the day retires; from the summits they will greet the first gleams of to-morrow. The dusk gathers in every hollow; night is softly, reluctantly, drawing in. Still the drama of sunset ebbs tardily on the rocky heights; a wee wafer of cloud, the last of its tribe it seems, is drawing away from the flaming west. As it curls and rolls its course up the sky, its brilliance fades to crimson, to thin purple, and, as a grey lock, it fades out of sight at the zenith. Boats are now astir on our Ullswater: hardly can there live a man, or woman, so dead to the beauties of Nature as to willingly stay indoors on such an eventide. So time passes: we drift beneath the bulk of Place fell, then the oars are put out and in the shade we steal along. Grey-blue are the heights behind Glencoin, all the glory has gone from the western sky. The clouds have crept out of the north, and streaks of pulsing night-glow come up in their stead. Brown the woods on the hillside above us, and a silence of sleep reigns supreme. A rill falling into the lake rattles pleasantly; the soft whistle of an otter, the wing-beat of a bird hawking the night moths, the sudden splash as a trout falls from its leap into mid-air, break pleasantly on the ear.

Look above: the mountains shoulder to great frowning heights, but the marvel of all is the sky. There seems no firmament, no bound to the ranging eye. Only the gate of heaven itself seems withdrawn from vision. Star-drift, in soft luminous puffs, besprinkles the great violet dome: planet and fixed star, great and small, dust over the immeasurable width with ten million sparkling lights. On most nights it is the stars that seem so far away, but to-night, by quiet Ullswater, they discover themselves as milestones near us on the way to that distant blue curtain which is the nearer boundary of heaven itself. More comprehensible is the element beneath us, where over plunging depths are mirrored the twinkling stars. There again the light is a veil to a mystery, but not a boundless one. For we know what manner of things lie beneath the waters: their pits have been plumbed and their secrets discovered. There is a flush of pale primrose in the east: the moonrise. How the the frail light glows! We turn the corner of Hallin fell toward Howtown ere the full orb at last rolls into sight. In a few minutes the fells are radiant with the peaceful beams, and a broad track of silver leaps down the bay.

CHAPTER XVII
MOUNTAIN TARNS

Perhaps it were more correct to say “minor waters,” for some are hardly within the pale of the mountains. There are, on fell and in dale, above thirty of these tarns, and, as the lakes vary in type of charm, so do these. Their variety, moreover, is even more bewildering than that of the lakes. In the latter’s wide landscapes, no matter what the circumstances of weather or season, one cannot mistake Windermere for Ullswater, Derwentwater for Wastwater. The tarns are, however, entirely different. I think particularly of three views of Angle tarn, under Bowfell, so distinct in what a poet would call their emotions, that memory will hardly recognise the three as having but one geographical position. Scarcely daybreak, we had passed the summit of Bowfell into Ewer Gap. We could see hardly five yards in front, and ere long our leader, though well accustomed to the fell under most circumstances, confessed that he was astray. But on we plodded: “We’ll get somewhere,” though that might be over the crags into Eskdale or headlong down the precipices into Langstrath. At last, when the others began to descend a dangerous slope, the bottom of which could not be seen for boiling mist, I commanded a halt. In a minute or two the mist was torn aside by the morning breeze,—chill, raw, and damp it was even after the fold of night-cloud,—and there “blae as wad,” as we of the dales say, was Angle tarn sheer beneath. Solitary, within a weirdly uptossed land, its shoals seen through a veil of blue water, its depths showing in greater quality of cobalt. We were perched on the front of a lofty rock: a dozen yards forward might have ended in an accident. I am not likely to forget that scene: grey dawn, the brisk breeze, the mist scurrying out of the riven crags around, the eerie feeling of desolation—we were in touch with the soul of Nature at her moment of uprising. Again I saw the tarn at daybreak. We had climbed in the velvety July darkness up the rough penance of Rossett ghyll. The small expanse of water looked violet cool in the growing light; it was calm, and austere with the austerity of a virgin Alpine pool it seemed to me. A soft greyness which the most marvellous steel engraving cannot picture draped all things made, till the great sun leapt over Helvellyn and hurled day on to a land of dreamy repose. Again I came that way when the August sun beat down, and the great barrier of mountains seemed to tremble and to swim in heat-haze. The waters laving the harsh crags were a deep pitiless blue. One felt that the hard blaze had driven all sense of coolness from them. The grass drooped on the fellsides, parsley fern and mountain moss suspended life and made patches of dusty brown, the crags were grey with drought. Not a tree in sight, not a line of shadow save right up there, almost at the mountain-top, a refreshing triangle of darkness, “the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.” One’s inmost soul felt the harshness of that day, and that by it the land was robbed of much fairness.

ANGLE TARN, ESK HAUSE

And what romantic situations are occupied by some of our tarns. There is Red tarn, above which towers the upper rampart of Helvellyn. To right is Striding Edge, to left the narrow ridge of Catchedecam. How fine a gloom does the old mountain throw at sunset over this beauteous spot! There is Stye Head tarn, abode of horror, the gloom and beauty of which so impressed Ruskin. The romance of this tarn is heightened when one is privileged to visit it by moonlight. How the great rock-billows, greyly seen, overtower the tiny gully! How man with all his petty conceits falters in the presence of the greatness of Nature’s majesty! One side the pass is impenetrable darkness; across, the light accentuates every ruggedness; streaks from the skyline show where the rivers fall from parent heights. “I felt that I could take out a half-penny and crawl out of sight under it,” said a very unimpressionable person to me after such an experience. “The loneliness crushed my voice, my mind, and, as it seemed to me, my stature. I would have hidden from the scorn of all things made.”