A MISTY MORNING, NEWBY BRIDGE, WINDERMERE

THE ENGLISH LAKES
PAINTED BY A. HEATON COOPER • DESCRIBED BY W^M. T. PALMER • PUBLISHED BY ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK • LONDON • MCMVIII

AGENTS IN AMERICA
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
64 & 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK

First Edition July, 1905
Second Edition October, 1908

CONTENTS

PAGE CHAPTER I [INTRODUCTION] 1 CHAPTER II [BY STEAM YACHT ON WINDERMERE] 9 CHAPTER III [BY WORDSWORTH’S ROTHAY] 30 CHAPTER IV [RYDAL AND GRASMERE] 36 CHAPTER V [ESTHWAITE WATER AND OLD HAWKSHEAD] 49 CHAPTER VI [CONISTON WATER] 60 CHAPTER VII [THE MOODS OF WASTWATER] 79 CHAPTER VIII [THE GLORY OF ENNERDALE] 98 CHAPTER IX [BY SOFT LOWESWATER] 106 CHAPTER X [CRUMMOCK WATER] 116 CHAPTER XI [BUTTERMERE] 124 CHAPTER XII [THE CHARMS OF DERWENTWATER] 137 CHAPTER XIII [BASSENTHWAITE] 156 CHAPTER XIV [THIRLMERE FROM THE MAIN ROAD] 165 CHAPTER XV [HAWESWATER AND THE BIRDS] 178 CHAPTER XVI [ULLSWATER, HOME OF BEAUTY] 185 CHAPTER XVII [MOUNTAIN TARNS] 203

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

[1. A Misty Morning, Newby Bridge, Windermere] Frontispiece FACING PAGE [2. Furness Abbey in the Vale of Nightshade] 4 [3. Windermere from Wansfell (sunset)] 8 [4. Swan Inn, Newby Bridge, Windermere] 12 [5. Near the Ferry, Windermere: Skating by Moonlight] 16 [6. The Old Ferry, Windermere] 20 [7. Old Laburnums at Newby Bridge, Windermere] 24 [8. Windermere and Langdale Pikes, from Lowwood] 28 [9. A Glimpse of Grasmere (evening sun)] 30 [10. Wild Hyacinths] 32 [11. Dungeon Ghyll Force, Langdale] 34 [12. Dove Cottage, Grasmere] 36 [13. Skelwith Force, Langdale] 40 [14. Sunset, Rydal Water] 42 [15. Grasmere Church] 46 [16. Esthwaite Water: Apple Blossom] 50 [17. An Old Street in Hawkshead] 52 [18. Sheep-Shearing, Esthwaite Hall Farm] 56 [19. Dawn, Coniston] 60 [20. Charcoal-Burners, Coniston Lake] 62 [21. Brantwood, Coniston Lake: Char-fishing] 64 [22. Coniston Village: the Old Butcher’s shop] 66 [23. Moonlight and Lamplight, Coniston] 68 [24. An Old Inn Kitchen, Coniston] 70 [25. The Shepherd, Yewdale, Coniston] 72 [26. Stepping-Stones, Seathwaite] 74 [27. Winter Sunshine, Coniston] 76 [28. Daffodils by the Banks of the Silvery Duddon] 78 [29. A Fell Fox-hunt, Head of Eskdale and Scawfell] 80 [30. Wastwater, from Strands] 82 [31. Wastwater and Scawfell] 84 [32. Wastdalehead and Great Gable (towards evening in autumn)] 86 [33. Wastwater Screes] 88 [34. Wastdalehead Church] 90 [35. Nearing the top of Styhead Pass, Wastdale] 92 [36. Wastdalehead, Wastwater] 94 [37. Ennerdale Lake at Sunset] 98 [38. The Pillar Rock of Ennerdale] 100 [39. Loweswater] 106 [40. The Old Post Office, Loweswater] 108 [41. Crummock Water, from Scale Hill] 116 [42. Crummock Water and Buttermere] 120 [43. Head of Buttermere] 124 [44. Honister Pass and Buttermere] 128 [45. The Borrowdale Yews (evening)] 132 [46. Lodore and Derwentwater (a summer’s morn)] 136 [47. Derwentwater, from Castle Head (a bright morning)] 138 [48. By the Shores of Derwentwater] 142 [49. Grange in Borrowdale (early morning)] 144 [50. Crosthwaite Church, Keswick] 148 [51. Druid Circle, near Keswick (moonlight)] 150 [52. Falcon Crag, Derwentwater] 152 [53. The Vale of St. John, near Keswick] 154 [54. Derwentwater and Bassenthwaite Lake, from High Lodore] 156 [55. Bassenthwaite Lake (a breezy morn)] 160 [56. Bassenthwaite Lake and Skiddaw] 162 [57. Raven Crag, Thirlmere] 166 [58. Thirlmere and Helvellyn] 168 [59. Haweswater] 178 [60. Shap Abbey] 182 [61. Ullswater, from Gowbarrow Park (a sultry June morn)] 186 [62. Ullswater, Silver Bay] 188 [63. Ullswater: the Silver Strand (afterglow)] 190 [64. Hazy Twilight, Head of Ullswater] 192 [65. A Mountain Path, Sandwick, Ullswater] 194 [66. Brougham Castle, Penrith] 198 [67. Angle Tarn, Esk Hause] 204 [68. Dalegarth Force, Eskdale] 206 [69. Blea Tarn and Langdale Pikes] 210 [70. A Sudden Shower, Blea Tarn] 212 [71. Kirkstone Pass and Brothers’ Water] 214 [72. Stepping-stones, Far Easedale, Grasmere] 216 [73. Little Langdale Tarn] 218 [74. Elterwater and Langdale Pikes] 220 [75. Seathwaite Tarn, Duddon Valley] 222

The Illustrations in this volume have been engraved and printed in England
by the Hentschel Colourtype Ltd.

THE ENGLISH LAKES

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION

The present book, it must be understood, treats the English Lakes rather apart from various other elements comprised in what is known as the Lake District. There is so much to say of the waters and their immediate surroundings that no space has remained to describe mountain, pass, and tarn in the manner their beauties merit. Other limits to the book are due to the writer’s promiscuity of taste. I am interested in most things—antiquities, fauna, flora, sports, geology, entomology, and the like; but in not one of these subjects have I that erudite knowledge which might render my work of profit. This book is written to interest those who love out-of-doors without claiming any particular study there. Of the paintings—I can only commend them to notice. In my humblest manner I assert that only an artist who feels the beauty of his environment thoroughly could produce work so stamped with the innate character of our Lakeland.

Of the history of the English Lakes little need be said. We are in a backwater, so to speak, of events; only the outer edges of great affairs have touched us. The mountains have been the last home of the invaded after their defeat in the field and their banishment from the accessible level lands. Druidical, and perhaps more ancient, remains are plentiful, along with relics of Roman, Norseman, and Saxon; but these at best only evidence sparse occupation. So far as history shows, no really great campaign has been fought out in our wilds—the battlefield of Dunmail (and only legend fixes that) is almost the only extensive one within the heart of the fell country. Great religious changes—the Dissolution of Monasteries, the Reformation, the rise of Nonconformity—have been far more striking in their results than ever were the fortunes of war. The mountains of Lakeland and Scotland stand blue on a common horizon, and the alarms and reprisals of Border feud were not unknown. But the hardy warriors from nor’ward did not often risk operations here, where conditions were so unfavourable to their feverish but unsustained method of warfare. The Civil War brought strife between the squires, but no great action was fought, yet in outlying districts the name of Cromwell is not forgotten in weird tale. Though the land of the Lakes has been free from war in the sense of great happenings, it has been far from a peaceful country.

Our lakes are fifteen in number, ranging from the lordly Windermere and Ullswater, ten and a half and nine miles long respectively, to Loweswater and Rydalmere, which hardly exceed the larger tarns in area. Our mountain ranges contain the most elevated ground in England—Scawfell Pike, Scawfell, Helvellyn, and Skiddaw being over three thousand feet in height, and several others approaching that level. About thirty minor waters are scattered over the area known as the Lake District; but I must not make a guidebook of my volume.

My story of the Lakes will be told in the manner it has discovered itself to me. I do not claim originality of method, nor will my reader find much savouring of literary symmetry and style within these covers. My wanderings cover a long series of years, and my recollections are as disconnected as they well can be. I have kept no diary of things seen, and scarcely regret the omission. There is no pile of data to confuse me; trivial impressions have passed away, leaving a harvest of perfect pictures to describe. And if I fail in putting these to paper, my attempt has at least been sincere.

Much has been written of the dalesmen. Some writers deprecate everything we have, from our mountains, the faces of which they hardly know and the mysteries of which they have never dreamt of, down to our social customs, which often they have neither witnessed nor studied. To these nothing need be said, but to our over-laudatory friends I must say that “to gild the lily” is not kind. Dalesman though I am, our faults are quite visible to me, and “don’t pinch us” for them. I meet the dalesman on equal terms. With him at “dipping” eve I have slept, star-embowered, on the open fells. Many curious yarns of the uplands are believed only by the wandering tourist: inner lore of the mountain life is reserved for the home-sanctum. Where, in my wandering story, I feel myself competent to introduce the men of the land, the pictures are as faithful as I can make them. They have a store of stories, yet unprinted, in the wilder glens: stories of weird things, of splendid heroisms among the flocks and fells.

We have two classes of tourists: “The Strenuous Life” and “The Lotos Eaters,” I divide them by their tastes. Others call them “Visitors,” “Tourists” and “Trippers.” The first they adore—they take a “cottage furnished” perhaps, and anyway are profitable in a staid, comfortable manner; the second they tolerate—he is a man of hotels and boarding houses, here to-day, and to-morrow “away ower t’fell,” but, by reason of his plenty, worthy attention; the third they despise; many seem to think that the day-visitor ought to be put down—by violence preferably.

To revert to my own division of our visitors, I feel that my tastes join me in both types. I like the peaceful vales and lakes where the “lotos-eaters” idle the summer hours away, and perhaps the detailed descriptions of so many days of ease may incline the reader to believe that I care nothing for the fells. But I love the breezy uplands, the miles of free moor, the peaks and the crags.

FURNESS ABBEY IN THE VALE OF NIGHTSHADE

A few words about accommodation and routes of travel are unavoidable. There are huge hotels with fashionable prices, smaller ones that are as comfortable or more so, at a fifth of the cost, and boarding houses in large numbers. But sometimes in August there are more tourists than can be comfortably put up even in our village-towns. However, the Lake District is small, and, if Ambleside be thought full, there is Grasmere not far away and Bowness within five miles. All three places are unlikely to suffer from excess of visitors at the same time. Of the remoter dales let me tell you a story. Two young men wandered into a certain dale-head where there are but two homes for tourists. At the first they asked for a couple of rooms. “We haven’t one to spare.” The way had dealt hardly with them, and at the second they moderated their request to “two rooms, but if quite necessary we don’t mind sharing one.”

“Why, bless thee, my lad,” said outspoken old Mother, “ther’s three to ivvery bed, an’ two to ivvery table awreddy. But mappen I can put you up in t’ barn with them others.” The barn across the yard had been pressed into service as a bedroom; but at the prospect these townsmen shivered, thanked the good lady, and walked wearily towards the dale-foot three miles off (where the excess of tourists was still great, though not so marked). The moral is, if you intend to make any place a centre for your journeys engage a room there, but—I was just preparing for repose when a knock came to my door. “Hello,” I answered. “Please, sir, there’s another lady just come in, and will you give up your bedroom for her?” I slept in less comfortable quarters that night, with half a score others who, by chivalry or improvidence, were without rooms.

Three railway systems touch the Lake District. The London and North-Western runs up one side with its main line, and casts a branch from Oxenholme to Windermere, which is a very popular way to reach the Lakes. From its terminus regular lines of coaches run to Coniston, Ullswater, and Keswick, as well as to Bowness, Ambleside, and Grasmere. A new company is putting on more motor-cars to cope with the traffic between the terminus and Ambleside and Grasmere. The main London and North-Western line at Shap is near Haweswater, an area growing in renown among tourists. At Penrith it is near Ullswater, and regular coaches connect with the steamers there. A company has exploited motor-traffic from Penrith to Patterdale, partly for passengers, partly to carry the output of the Glenridding lead mines.

The Furness Railway is the railway of the Lake District. From Carnforth, where it connects with the London and North-Western main line and with the northern arm of the Midland Railway, it sweeps round Morecambe bay to Ulverston. Here it throws branch the first to connect the steam-yachts on Windermere with the outer world. By means of these tourists are poured into Bowness and Ambleside in great numbers. A line of coaches connect Ulverston with the foot of Coniston Lake. The main Furness line passes through warrior Barrow to the Duddon, where branch the second goes off winding through the hills to Coniston. From Coniston there is coach connection with all parts of the Lake Country. The main line has not yet, however, finished with the Lakes. It crosses the Duddon and swerves round the foot of Black Combe to Millom of the hematite beds, then away through a beautiful district between the fells and the sea to Ravenglass and to Seascale, where a good road leads up to Wastwater. At Sellafield another branch is thrown through Egremont, within a few miles of Ennerdale Lake. The London and North-Western comes on to the scene again here, a branch bearing southward from Carlisle and tapping a district rich in iron ore, but fringed with lovely valleys.

The Lake Country is also served by the Cockermouth, Keswick, and Penrith line, as important for the north as the Furness line is to the south. It connects the London and North-Western at Penrith with the Furness at Whitehaven, passing by Derwentwater and Bassenthwaite. At Threlkeld it is nearest Thirlmere, at Troutbeck it is nearest Ullswater, while from Cockermouth the tourist may easily reach Loweswater, Crummock, and Buttermere.

The North-Eastern and Midland Railways both come into Penrith, which is an important junction for the Lakes, and an interesting town in itself.

It is not my intention to give any space to a description of the internal traffic of the country—it is plentiful and good.

WINDERMERE FROM WANSFELL
Sunset

CHAPTER II
BY STEAM YACHT ON WINDERMERE

From its foot at Newby Bridge to the circling beach at Waterhead, Windermere, the largest of our Lakes, is full of interest. Not a bay on either bank fails in variety of scene, while from mid-lake the surroundings are ever changing. The ideal way to see Windermere is from a small boat; the journey, coasting every bay and yet not losing the broader views of mid-water, should not take less than two long summer days. Of course few can spare so much time to the pleasant task. By steamer in a short afternoon and at a moderate expense it is possible to make the tour of the lake. The visitor, however, can taste some of the pleasures of the ideal if he spare an evening for boating. From Bowness steer past the corner of Belle Isle; then as you near the Furness shore, turn right or left as fancy directs, coasting under larch-hung bluffs toward the Ferry, with Belle Isle on the left, or passing alder-fringed meadows past Rawlinson’s Nab for Wray. The Furness shore is rather the more diverse, and your rowing there at the close of day does not disturb the many anglers who frequent Millerground. From Lakeside the boat can be turned in any direction. Many wish to see the Leven leaving the lake: it is but a half-mile away. Paddling quietly beneath Gummers Howe is delightful; but the person with a taste for detail in light and shadow may decide that the opposite shore, with its view of the fell across the clear water, has even more charm.

By steamer the great majority see Windermere. The boats are large, and, though at some hours crowded, fairly often carry quite a few passengers. At mid-afternoon I have sailed from Bowness to Ambleside, a solitary passenger,—and that during the height of the touring season. From the deck of the steamer as it lies berthed at Lakeside there is a glorious view. The steep side of Gummers Howe, green in summer with bracken, golden with the young tendrils in spring, and in autumn russet with fading glory, rises opposite. Like a wide river the lake winds further and still further as your eyes turn toward the mountains. Yes, there they are, blue with distance—sharp peaks limning strongly against the sunlit sky. At present the lake is still as a mirror; drippings from the oars of passing boats make little glittering ripples. But though the views are so beauteous, it is well for a contemplative person to sit near the gangway and watch the throng which the latest train has brought from the outside world. There are two tall ladies, evidently school ma’ams, with much luggage and the power of looking after it without fuss; the stout old gentleman there has come this many years for a sojourn by the shore of Windermere. I don’t know his name, but his portly person is frequently seen on board the steamers. ’Cute chap that, say the lakemen; he has a season ticket and takes out full value. Now there is a quiet whirring of the screw; the captain, a white-bearded man with many years’ service on the lake, sounds the whistle for the last time, and the echo dies away among the hazels and coppices around. The water, with a quiet churning sound, parts in front of the boat and we are well away. Don’t look back, unless it be to catch a glimpse of where lake finally narrows into river.

The boat speeds past one or two wooded islets: in spring the undergrowth is blue with wild hyacinths. The afternoon sunlight glints upward from the calm water as from a mirror. By Finsthwaite the woods are rich green. Of cultivated land we see but little: here a cornfield between woods and lake; there, evenly hoed patches of turnips and potatoes, or more often meadows where rich grass is mantled in the white and yellow of ox-eyes and buttercups. Peeping between green bowers of sycamore and ash are one or two farmsteadings. Old and weathered, built of blue-grey stone, they harmonise well with their surroundings. Do our eyes, accustomed to these from birth, feel in this hoariness of theirs a rare beauty which is purely imaginary? We almost hate the sight of a modern-built villa, trim without, healthy and comfortable within. I make no pretension to the artistic temperament: subordinate the villa to its surroundings, and I am content; but stick a horror of brick and red tiles in all its nakedness on a commanding hillside, or right on the edge of a beautiful mere, and the wanderer is above human whose temper is not tried at the sight. Pretty bungalows, for occasional occupation, are springing up on the shores of Windermere; they are welcome, be the woodlands around them sere or green.

SWAN INN, NEWBY BRIDGE, WINDERMERE

When not watching the glorious picture unfolding as the steamer passes bay and creek, headland and rocky cove, there is to me much interest in observing other people on the boat. For the deck of a Windermere lake yacht has often as cosmopolitan a load as a cheap emigrant or “special tour” steamer. True, there is little distinction of nationality in dress; but the voices are often without disguise. Frenchmen, Swiss, and Germans are not unusual, while Americans are frequent. Here let me defend our friends from across the Atlantic. They are seldom the loud, almost vulgar critics of our lake scenery they are popularly supposed to be. Most of our visitors are readers of Wordsworth, of Ruskin, and our other poets in prose and verse, and know what to expect. A Yale man I once accompanied from Windermere to Keswick stated: “It is the breathlessness of Lakeland which surprises me. Here there is a memory of De Quincey or Coleridge: next moment there is a story of Christopher North. I lift mine eyes suddenly from the pastoral scenes of Wordsworth to the blue skies and mountains of Ruskin. Your country-side is breathless with lore: America has no place to compare it with.” I am not a “hail-fellow” person, preferring to be seen, not heard, and as the boat glides along I silently piece together, from external evidence, the little stories of my co-passengers. To-day there is a young man pacing the boat amidships. He is no chance visitor, I judge, by the anxious way he keeps looking ahead. There is some point he evidently does not wish to miss. Presently I hear a movement of his arm: he has drawn out his handkerchief and is waving it. Every eye turns to find out where he is signalling. In a moment we catch an answering flutter: there is a lady in white blouse and dark skirt on the shingles beneath the wood. Something in the message heartens our fellow-passenger; a load of anxiety has left him. Again and again he signals—ever there is an answer. Then a lithe dark figure springs into a path from the shore, and runs out of sight among the bushes. A child is hastening to give some one the news that the desired steamer is passing. Now, from the front of a bungalow, hardly to be seen for larches, another signal begins to jerk. Our passenger answers this also till the yacht sweeps out of the bay.

The promontory of Storrs now pushes out, and here the steamer will stop. The call of the syren, like an enormous flute, rings full and sonorous over the water, and dies in tuneful cadences, each softer and more sweet, through the green ghylls and swelling hills. The road to the pier runs close to the lake: a cyclist is rushing along vieing our boat in speed. The signaller has seen him, and smiles. In a minute we are past the narrow stone embankment with its small summer-house, and are purring alongside the newer wooden pier. The cyclist speeds into sight through an avenue of trees, and dismounts close by. The gangway is thrown aboard—the signaller is the first ashore. The cyclist exchanges a word, and they walk from view together. A story of joy and peace and love is maybe working itself out before us, and the whole while, seated on the opposite seat, a lady has been gloating over the theatricalities of miserable “life” as depicted by Marie Corelli. Better advised is the one who patrols the deck with a volume of the best carefully tucked under his arm. That book will be digested presently when lamps are lit and night like a velvet pall descends over lake and mountain.

Storrs Hall—now an hotel—was occupied a century ago by Mr. Bolton, who, a man of literary tastes, thought noble friendships a boon. He communed with Wordsworth, North, Sir Walter Scott, De Quincey, and many others who were attracted to that great coterie of genius. In these days the poetry of the Lakes school is often sneered at. The men with their simple tastes and pleasures are despised, but, leaving their work aside, never in history has a group of men so able, so high-minded, so far in advance of their day and generation, been so intimately associated. They had their weaknesses, their vices, but conducted their worst hours without impairing the morality of their surroundings. Their influence was wholly for good, wholly for an upward trend of thought.

As the Swift threads through the reefs above Storrs, we enter a new reach of the lake. In front Belle Isle’s tree-shaded level seems to close the water; to our left is the Ferry; on the right green fields and filmy woods, with, beyond and above, the mountains clustering round the vale of Troutbeck. A faint blue ruffle travels along the lake toward us, a catspaw of wind that sends a yacht which, sail-slack, had been drifting, bowing and dancing through the water. At the landing-stage our steamer has to wait till the tank-like cable-boat has completed its journey. Down the hill opposite comes the road from Kendal to Hawkshead, and about this point, from time immemorial, the lake has been crossed. Various sorts of craft have been used: in the time of the Lake poets the conveyance was a large and almost flat-bottomed boat, pulled along by sweeps. Christopher North was wont, on a Saturday morning, to come down from Elleray to steer the market-folk across. On one of these occasions he noticed a flurry in the water, as of a struggling fish. The boat’s course was diverted, and a landing-net used. Two pike, each of about six pounds weight, had been fighting. The victor had seized his antagonist by the head and endeavoured to swallow him whole. But, as an American has sagely commented, “he had bit off more than he could chew.” When North’s landing-net lifted the pair, his jaws were still locked round the victim’s shoulders, though the biter had drowned. Though badly mauled, the other fish was still feebly alive. In his fishing reminiscences of the Borders Sir Walter Scott told a similar story. Near the Tweed one day, seeing a commotion on its banks, he asked a laddie what the matter was. “I dinna ken exactly,” was the reply, “but there’s a muckle fush wi’ twa tails i’ t’ watter.” Anglers—and more veracious folk—have similar stories to tell. The version I have given above of Christopher North’s experience is not, I am aware, the accepted one: it was given me, several years ago, by a dales dweller, one of whose parents had witnessed the incident. There are legends to tell of this Ferry. The most sinister is of an awful voice which on wild nights began to peal across the turmoil—“Boat!” Once a bold ferryman answered the call, put off his boat and rowed into the storm and darkness. Half an hour later he returned, with boat swamping and without a passenger. The boatman’s face was ashen with terror; he was dumb. Next day he died. Stories there were of demons carrying off their spoils of witched souls, and even the bodies of dead saints, across the lake. No boatman, after this incident, could be prevailed to put off in darkness, so a priest was summoned from the Holy Holme. With bell and book he raised the skulking demon—at midday there was the voice of storm in the air, though, mindful of the call of the Master on Galilee, the water fell calm. Voices argued with the priest, whose cross planted firmly by the edge of the lake was surrounded by terror-struck lakemen. At the end of a long altercation the demon released from thrall the soul of the boatman, and craved for mercy. For its peace, the priest laid the evil thing in the depths of Claife, there to remain until “dryshod men walk on Winander, and trot their ponies through the solid crags.”

NEAR THE FERRY, WINDERMERE: SKATING BY MOONLIGHT

At least once the ferryboat has been wrecked: the records of Hawkshead Church show that a wedding party was drowned, about a dozen lives in all being lost. The tank-like servant of the cable now against the shingles has shown sea-like jauntiness. One Whit Saturday morning, when laden with strength and beauty going to Kendal hirings, she broke both hawsers and at a majestic pace drifted down the lake. In half an hour she touched one of the islands, from which her passengers were shortly taken off. In these times of watertight compartments, there is little chance of a disaster occurring.

The hotel in front of which our Swift is floating presents a gay appearance on yacht-racing days. The lawns are occupied by a well-dressed throng, and a small but excellent band plays appropriate music. The line of red-flagged buoys marks start and finish: some of the races are round the lake, about twenty miles; others are fought out in the northern or southern basins only. The needs of the racing have developed a special type of boat. The quest for speed dictates no great displacement of water, therefore the craft are built shallow; but the frequent and violent squalls of wind from the mountains make some stability and weight essential to prevent capsize. Windermere yachts carry heavier keels than is usual to their sail area, and there are other minor variations between them and sea-going or conventional river and lake boats. With a good breeze the yachts are very fast: they are handy too, frequently “going about” in narrow quarters. At times, when the air is dead calm, a race may degenerate into a drifting match: the lakemen say that on one occasion the yachts were over ten hours in covering as many miles. The locally developed design is eminently suited to its work. Mr. Fife, the great draughtsman, some years ago built a yacht on the Clyde for this lake. He came to see it compete, but the local boats quickly showed their superiority over the new design.

The engines are now re-starting, and our steamer cleaves toward Curwens’, or Belle Isle, which for long has seemed to close the way. Now, however, narrow channels open to both right and left. The yacht bears right away past two small holmes. One of these, a cluster of trees and a level sward, is ofttimes used for kennels for the puppies of the Windermere harrier pack. Here they are quite at liberty and yet out of mischief, a remarkable circumstance in a puppy’s career. Often I have laid on the oars to watch the little hounds romping and playing, under the blinking superintendence of an elder. Then their game would stop, and a pell-mell of puppydom charge to the shingles and bay its infantile delight. Belle Isle is the only island of Windermere on which a house is now standing. In the long ago a branch of the Philipsons of Calgarth held it. During the Civil War this family was Royalist. One, a major in the king’s Northern army, was shut up in Carlisle by the Roundheads; another was here beleaguered. For several weeks the men of the Parliament tried to carry the island by storm, but failed. The major had been apprised of his brother’s peril, and immediately the siege of the Border city was raised he came south with a troop and dispersed the Roundheads. Now to the daring Robert came the hope of reprisals. The island was fully relieved at Sunday dawn; three hours later Royalist horsemen were on their way to Kendal. Colonel Briggs, the Cromwellian commander, attended divine service regularly. Robert accordingly made straight into Kendal Church. Though the building was crowded, he galloped through the tall doorway and up the aisle. Sword in hand he rode to where his antagonist usually sat, but Briggs was not at church. The townsfolk rose, and Robert was forced to gallop down the other aisle to prevent being overwhelmed by numbers. The doorway to the right is lower than the central: Robert’s head struck the arch, and he was thrown. His steel helmet received most of the concussion, and Robin was on his feet again in a moment. One townsman caught his horse; the saddle girth had broken when the rider had been hurled backward. Robert instantly threw the saddle across his charger’s back and leapt into it. Suddenly and cruelly spurred, the horse reared up and jerked the rein from its detainer’s hand, while the intruder clove him to the chin. Without further interruption, the Cavaliers rode back to their island fortress.

The steamer has been bearing us through the narrow channel to Bowness Bay. The scene here is usually a busy and a pretty one. The public fore-shore is narrow, and rowboats are crowded toward it. The steamer-pier and two long jetties make the narrowness still more emphatic. But Bowness Bay, with the Old England hotel to our left, looks perfect. Beyond the short promenade, laid out in trees and terrace-gardens, the ground rises to rocky Biskey Howe, whence is a glorious view of the lake. Quite close at hand is Windermere parish church, with some stained glass removed here from Cartmel Priory at the Dissolution. The walls were at one time decorated with texts, but the Lutherans rebelled against these and hid them beneath ignoble whitewash. But what the sixteenth century despised, the twentieth reveres, and the old Scripture paintings have been carefully restored. The village of Bowness presents little noteworthy except its attention to visitors: its reputation in this respect is thoroughly justified.

THE OLD FERRY, WINDERMERE

If you take a walk ashore, the various boatmen will embarrass you with offers of craft. “Fishing tackle? oh, I’ll lend you that with pleasure, and bait too.” Now this is all very well for the disciple of Walton who insists on having a competent person on board to select the fishing-ground. But the average man may be fairly warned by the following note: “Hired a boat for the day and set out to fish with six rods, plenty of bait, and a hopeful word of success from the boatman. We cast our lines right and left, back and front, but not a fish did we see. Whether the fish or the bait were enchanted we could not say, but concluded that the lines were lent to make people believe they could catch fish.” In answer I had to point out (my complainant knew sea and a quiet variety of river fishing well) that, under a blazing June sun, perch and trout were not likely to feed. There are times when the fishing is good—out of the tourist season mainly. Some anglers regularly come to Windermere for sport; but these swallows do not make a summer, and Windermere is far from being an angler’s paradise yet. The lapsus linguæ of the boatmen is perhaps excusable: others delude in less satisfactory fashion.

Turning again to the bay, with its view of Belle Isle, and the blue mountains peering over the bluffs of Furness, it strikes every visitor that the landing-place is exceedingly cramped. Thousands use the boats; were the rival proprietors less good-natured traffic would be impossible. Perennially there is a movement afoot to acquire additional frontage for the public use, but as perennially it fails. In the Diamond Jubilee year, many thought that an acquirement was coming at last. Negotiations were opened for land to the south of the bay, but the Vicar of Windermere could not meet the promoters.

Aboard the Swift again, we are borne into the upper basin. On Lady Holme was once a chapel, served by the monks of Segden Abbey, one of the Scotch monasteries. They were in possession so early as 1355, and till the Dissolution maintained two priests here. There is, in some old descriptions, a legend that one of these priests, to mortify his flesh, caused himself to be chained in the crag above Rawlinson’s Nab, and there he remained for thirty years or so, before death released him. Sweet in early May are the islets here with lily of the valley: at any time it is pleasant to land on them, for they are dry, their brakes are not tangled—an ideal place for a quiet afternoon. As the steamer goes on, the scene grows in grandeur. Over a vast plain of water the distant mountains seem to hang. There are misty indications of level meadows and woodlands next the water, but the charm lies in the craggy, shaggy braes and the uprising summits. The woods continue—larch! larch! planted in harsh geometrical lines on the Furness side; the opposite, though really covered with villas, presents a happy, confused forest of oak and ash, sycamore, elm, beech, interspersed with hollies and great patches of underwood. The white foam of hawthorn flecks these hills in early summer; later, patches of gorse, in wild, unconsidered corners, brighten up the heavy green. Then come the heather and the heather bell, empurpling the higher ground; till September’s chilly nights turn the leafage to glories of gold and crimson, the brackens to red and russet. We are now opposite Millerground; the lake near shore is shallow and tempting to the angler.

The hill jutting out above there is Orrest Head—the viewpoint of the Lake County. I have no wish to disparage other of our views: each has its merits. From Orrest you look up and down the river-lake, Winandermere, winding through a long valley. Round the head of its hollow are rugged masses of mountain, cut into by narrow glens and ghylls. The basins of Langdale, of Grasmere, with their tarns and lakes, are hidden in a maze of wildering rocks. Right opposite, the Furness fells, ridge beyond ridge, till, a grand barrier, Coniston Old Man heaves skyward, give no indication of two lakes and wide valleys embosomed beneath. There are two circumstances under which they who climb Orrest are especially well repaid: on a calm June morning, when the lake like a mirror reflects every detail of the hills, when the ruffle of a passing boat or steamer dies away on the dead calm; the other time is when light clouds are drifting across the sky and you can see dappled areas floating over water and wood and fell. There is little to choose between these and when the sun sinks in a bank of vapour behind the Langdale Pikes. Instantly a crimson light filters across the upper basin, picking out bay and islet in a halo of brilliance. For half an hour it becomes more glorious, then to purple and to grey the light declines. Yet, again, climb Orrest when thick snow covers the earth. The scene is awe-inspiring: if in moonlight, you see the terror and majesty of winter; in sunshine the air is filled with chill radiance, and the scene invites you not to despond but to work or play with a will. But this is not of the steam yacht and the lakeside.

Opposite us, with its big round chimneys, is Calgarth, the mansion of the Philipsons. There is nothing now to distinguish it from the Calvegarth it originally was. If the place was ever fortified, all traces of such, save its thick walls, have disappeared. The house has the reputation of being haunted, for the misdeeds of a Naboth. Desiring land in the possession of an old couple, he had them convicted for theft. The old woman, who had occult power, pronounced seven curses against the Philipsons. The couple were duly hung at Appleby, but their skulls came home to Calgarth ere morning light. And at Calgarth they have remained, though men have calcined them with lime, cast them into the lake, and buried them on the mountains. Horrible sounds were heard, groanings and shriekings and wild lament, after any tampering with the uncanny things; so, to prevent further trouble, they were built into the wall—and few now believe in their existence. There are other mysteries hereabout too. When grievous trouble is at hand, a spectral white horse passes over the lake from shore to shore. And occasionally the wanderer’s eye is caught by a faint iris on the water, rivalling in its clear tinges the very rainbow. Both phenomena are said to be well vouched for, which, I presume, has made it not essential for the present writer to witness them.

OLD LABURNUMS AT NEWBY BRIDGE, WINDERMERE

Above Calgarth is the great glen of Troutbeck, where many illustrious personages, from Hugh Bird, a giant of Henry III.’s time, downward, have lived. Hogarth, the weird painter of sordid life, was born here, and at one time the sign of the old Mortal Man inn was held to be his work: a very free drawing it was, of a burly man with vermilion nose, confronted by a thin, white-visaged stranger, with the couplets:

“Oh, Mortal Man, who lives on bread,

How came thy nose to be so red?”

“Thou silly ass, that art so pale,

It is with drinking Birkett’s ale.”

Till within the last half-century Troutbeck was a ’statesman dale, but few of the yeomen are now left. They were not noted fighters, like the men to northward, but in self-defence they manned a fort which an obscure generation had built in Thresthwaite Cove at the head of the valley. The last time was in 1745, when a small band of Scotch rebels were sent back “wi’ a flee in ther lugs.” The grey mansion in the park was built by Bishop Watson, of Llandaff. Westmorland-born, he loved his homeland, and during a forty years’ reign he ruled his bishopric from thence. There is but one mention in his Life and Letters of his going to Wales. Yet he preached strongly to those of his clergy who were absent too much from their livings!

The most prominent building now in sight is Wray Castle. This is not old. In one of his interesting colloquies on angling and things in general, Dr. John Davy, in a book published shortly after the building was completed, remarks:

“Wray Castle is altogether a modern building, and erected by its present proprietor and inhabitant, who has too much knowledge of sanitary conditions to surround himself with stagnant water, making an enemy to health where there is no fear of neighbouring hostility. As to the structure itself we need not criticise it; it is well placed, and at a distance may well pass for what you supposed it to be” (a moated stronghold), “and have the desired effect on the uninformed mind and the careless eye.”

Now the steamer approaches Lowwood, and the coppices of Wansfell sheer up in feathery grandeur as we sail inshore. The view from the hotel attracted Ruskin on his first visit as a child of ten, and in his rhyming diary he speaks of his impatience to be at the windows enjoying the glorious view. The lake is here at its widest and deepest; from shore to shore the distance is considerably over a mile, with a depth approaching two hundred feet. The boats out on the water are fishing for char with the cumbrous implement known as the plumb-line. Char feed at varying depths; to-day the shoal may be within ten feet of the surface, to-morrow near a hundred feet lower. The instrument used is made up of a long central line heavily weighted, to which tiers of smaller lines are attached at intervals. By this means the fish are tempted at all levels, but the implement is for the professional rather than the amateur. The tiers of hooks and baits are sure to foul one another if not dexterously handled.

As the steam yacht gets under way again, Dove Nest, once the abode of Mrs. Hemans, is seen peering through the woods climbing Wansfell. The poetess ever fondly remembered her sojourn here, and the friends she made among the Lakeland poets. Some of the finest contemporary appreciations, both of personalities and work, came from her pen.

Passing Hen Holme, a spine of rock sticking out into the lake—how the waves from the screw lash and dash against its ledges!—the yacht carries us into open lake again. What a panorama of mountains!

Wansfell rises to the right; beyond is the gap of the pass and Kirkstone fell. Red Screes presents its tamer slope, and looks not half so commanding as less lofty Scandale Pike. The long ridge of Fairfield, its ghylls raw with floods and winter storms, comes next, standing above Rydal park. Along this group, a century ago, wild red deer used to range; there was a herd on the Ullswater fells, as now, and also in the wildernesses about Eskdale and Ennerdale. The long slope bending downward to Nab Scar is Great Rigg. You can see only the head of the precipitous Scar, for the bracken-covered heights of Loughrigg climb to the skyline. At square with our course are the Langdale Pikes, their strange knotty summits showing up finely. Great Gable peeps from beyond Borrowdale; Great End, Scawfell Pike, and Scawfell glance through gaps in the rugged chain stretching from Bowfell to Wrynose pass. The country beneath these is the famous Langdales, land of tarns and ghylls, crags and screes. From Wetherlam westward is the Coniston range, haunt of the raven and other wild birds. The head of Windermere is particularly glorious: fir-crowned Fisher Crag sets off the levels where Brathay and Rothay sloom into the lake. The sharp spire of St. Katharine’s, according to Mrs. Hemans, was foundationed for a square tower. Ambleside creeps in rows and terraces up Wansfell, but the grey stone is harmonious and the red ridge-tiles at this distance invisible. To the left Fox Howe stands on its sentry-hill; the views from its lawns are fine: to northward into the heart of the mountains, and the wild forest of Rydal; southerly, green lowland and the silvern mass of Windermere right down to where islands close the view. The level next the river-mouth was at one time a Roman camp, but nothing to prove its name has yet been discovered. Medals and coins are sometimes, after heavy floods, cast up out of the mere. The Rothay was diverted somewhat by the camp builders, that the rectangle they favoured might be preserved. The camp was doubtless used as a caravansery for the traffic between Brougham on the Eamont and the seaport of Ravenglass. Both places are, if mountain roads have not altered for the worse, a good day’s journey away: one over the lofty passes of Wrynose and Hard Knott, the other over the elevated road along High Street. Cultivation has robbed the earthwork of distinctness, but enough remains to show dimly its angles and extent.

WINDERMERE AND LANGDALE PIKES, FROM LOWWOOD

Now the quiet rumble of the screw stops; the yacht sails smoothly and accurately to her berth. Outside the pier a concourse of conveyances is in waiting, and we see our fellow passengers melt away by common ’bus or lordly pair to their respective destinations. The water here is crowded with craft, but there is not the terrible congestion we saw at Bowness bay. A long curve of shingle is open to the public, and forms a favourite promenade.

CHAPTER III
BY WORDSWORTH’S ROTHAY

Even during the height of summer there are dull days sometimes, when dense clouds simply stifle the dales in gloom. This is the more tantalising when one is at Ambleside in the midst of the beauties of Lakeland.

But after two o’clock the day became perceptibly brighter; Loughrigg discovered itself opposite our window, a kindly precipice of damp grey crags rearing through a forest of dwarf oaks and clinging ash, green plumed larches and verdant undergrowth, its long crest crowned with patches of heather and wide, quivering wastes of bracken. There is little to interest us in Ambleside: the sun is bursting his cloudy bonds, and we chafe at streets and houses! Out, then, on the Rydal road, past the old moss-grown mill and the bridge-house Ruskin sketched in his youth, past the Knoll where Harriet Martineau lived. Now we rejoice to see a riven cloud turn to gleaming silver at its edges, and through the gap a shaft of light strikes down to earth. It is lost! No, there it is again, kissing the rugged crest of Nab Scar, and hovering along its flank. The clouds above whirl together, and the welcome gleam is cut off. But the upper heavens are overpent with sunshine; glance after glance of glory dances down and melts away on Loughrigg fell. For half an hour gloom and coming sunshine wage unequal warfare, then the clouds to westward break up their solid phalanx, and wider and more frequent are the wheeling spokes of light. Here one blazons a scree-drifted hillside, there one peers and glances into a rocky ghyll. Broad streams of radiance flow into unseen abysms beyond the nearer mountain curtain, a flash of refreshing brilliance lights up acres of rugged scrub.

A GLIMPSE OF GRASMERE
Evening sun

By the rivulet we see the usual patient angler. Men there are so entranced in seeking to lure the trout, that they brave rain or shine indifferently. Under the hazels, when booming gusts clash walls of rain against mountain and bosky meadow, they still angle on; under the hazels you find them when from a sky of staring blue the sun beats down on a drought-struck land. This brook from happy, lonely Scandale holds many a small brown trout; its bed is bright and shingly, with clean swirling pools and glinting, tinkling rapids. The road now enters Rydal park; miles of rough land stretch toward the lofty ridge from which a cloud is drifting slowly. The sun has now the victory, pouring a flood of joyous light on a scene of unparalleled beauty, and this fleecy, crawling monster is the rearguard of departed gloom.

Near a fir-crowned hillock we see a picturesque group of mountain ponies. The Le Flemings of the Hall have ever been upholders of these useful little animals, going to great trouble and expense to improve the breed. The well-selected Rydal stallions are admired in the dales for miles around. The farmers are not keen to part with their best stock, so the standard, though not yet entirely satisfactory, is creeping upward. Rydal beck hurries beneath the bridge, bank-full, its tiny surges shaking the plumy water-grass, whipping the too-pendant branches. The Rothay, close to our left, is a greater volume, but calmer, clear and shining where the sunlight dapples through the wych-elms, darkling in deep pools in the dense oak shade. The stream carries flakes of foam, and from ahead we hear the water purling down a rocky channel.

A few yards on, at Pelter bridge, a cross-road passes under Loughrigg. Looking up-stream, from the parapet, it is a lovely confusion: the beck, overhung with tall sycamores, ashes, and oaks, is split into tiny currents, each babbling its merry way down through a maze of boulders. Some of these are crowned with grass, over which in due season dangle the dainty blue harebell, the yellow-irised oxeyes, the crimson-spiked foxglove, or the blue-orbed sundew. In the margins goldilocks show dark tufts of leaves; when these are in bloom, the waterside is gay with brilliant yellow. Some of the river-stones are decked with moss—the gurgling, dashing streamlet occasionally tosses a tiny jet of spray to gem the glossy crowns. After a long spell of drought Rothay shrinks almost from view in this labyrinth of pool, wee cascade, and calmer channel. The riverside is almost too beautiful to lift the eyes from, but a sharp crag of Loughrigg sheers against a rosy cloud of eventide to our left, and on our right the great green mass of Nab Scar almost overhangs the cottage in front.

WILD HYACINTHS

A cottage by Rothay! Wordsworth’s Rothay! In far-off climes and dusty, choking cities many pause in their eternal soul-grinding struggle and think of such sweet retirements, even when the scene is merely a figment conjured up by the poet’s craft. To such as know Rothay from its source in the craggy fells to slooming Winander, the feeling of envy is more acute. It is a glorious stretch of country, alike calm and beautiful, stormy and forbidding; in spring tinged with delicate green, in summer wreathed in blossom of pink and white and blue; in autumn shot with crimson and gold of dying leafage; in winter grey and dank with rain, or garmented in dazzling snow. But the cottage!—clung with the bines of creepers and eaved with glossy ivy; the lowly little cot where the tallest hollyhock peeps in at the chamber window; the old-fashioned garden laid out in neat beds of showy or sweet-scented flowers, with gay gladioli spikes of puce and white, and fuchsias red and outbending, with balsam and balm and the sweetest thyme; the rockery with green caressing films of parsley fern, the smooth tongues of scolopendrium, and the broad palmated fronds and upstanding brown “flowers” of the royal fern, with the wiry, graceful forms of oak and more robust-looking holly ferns; the wall-garden where white rocket, yellow musk, and a few hardy plants flourish, with rare mosses garnishing their fountains of bloom, and the half-wild turmoil of king-cups and “cross-buns” in the miniature pool of the Rothay. But the cottage!—with twisty oaken beams in the ceil of the parlour, with dark recesses and low windows, with a wide fireplace, to which, when winter’s roar and rain and snow run riot without, the chairs can be drawn and the many-houred evening drift away in happy talk and song and merriment. “Plain living and high thinking”—one could almost realise the ideal in such a home, where the fare is the humble, wholesome product of our mountain land; where thin haver-bread, tough, sweet cheese, and warm, pure milk might form the staple food; a home where the spinning-wheel might awaken from silence and dusty limbo, and give a perfect employment; where linen and wool might be worked up to thread and yarn in quiet hours. Such a prospect is fair beyond words, but few of us will ever dwell—save in our roseate dreams, by day or night—in a cottage by Wordsworth’s Rothay.

After a time spent beneath the trees and by the gushing waters, where viewpoints ever more fair allure us from one coign to another, we return to the road, here avenued by giant beeches. The western light touches a moving cloud, the damp, coppery leaves below catch the glow and throw it in a myriad little sparkles from twig to branch, and from branch to smooth bole. What is there in Nature more glorious than a group of well-grown trees?

DUNGEON GHYLL FORCE, LANGDALE

Wordsworth’s connection with the hamlet of Rydal is well known. In his pretty cottage on the hill he lived a life apart from the dalesfolk, watching the seasons come and go over the beautiful glen. Through the little knot of houses, we shortly approach the mere. Right up to Silver Howe the basin is brimmed with light; mountain and wood and lake are at “the pride of day.” Evening, sweet and slow, is dropping nearer, its first sign the grey-blue mist hovering beyond the bordering hills. The crag on which the Laureate of the Fells often sat commands a good view of the lake, and of a huge gash in Loughrigg, whence comes the sound of tinkling slate, where the quarry thunders ring. This of course was not so prominent in Wordsworth’s day. The cottage at Nab where Hartley Coleridge lived, loved by the dalesman (as his master was almost shunned), comes next: here De Quincey afterwards resided some opium-cursed years. We wander by the reedy mere, noting the islet on which not so long ago herons used to nest among the tangled trees, then take the road again for home.

CHAPTER IV
RYDAL AND GRASMERE

It is unfortunate that so many see Lakeland from its main ways only. They realise its narrow bounds, but cannot justly appreciate its rare beauties. For a week or two such travel our macadam roads; they climb the most frequented mountains, visit ghylls and tarns and waterfalls, wander by the favourite lakes: then away they pass, believing doubtless that Lakeland offers nothing further. Could they but come again, and discover our wealth of bypaths! Why I, a native of and dweller upon the soil, have spent the leisure of a dozen years and more in exploring without wearying, and know that many corners remain unvisited. To those who have seen Lakeland in hurried guise, I would say come again, avoid the sights noted in prose and verse, go elsewhere where you will, and at the end you may feel, with me, that less-known scenes make the “cream” look not unlike the watery dregs of the milk-pail.

DOVE COTTAGE, GRASMERE

On a cloudy morning we came to Rydal and turned up the road to Wordsworth’s home in old age. At Rydal Mount he produced some of his most characteristic poetry—short pieces such as “The Clouds” and “The Mountain Echo”; at Dove Cottage “The Excursion” and “The Prelude” were penned. In Wordsworth’s day the road in the glen did not send up an almost ceaseless clatter, and seldom did the steam plume by Waterhead pier meet his sight. The poet had an aversion to the larch-tree, an exotic then being planted extensively in the dales, and did not care much for steam and the work of the engineer. The trees in stiff lines and squares make hideous the mountain slopes to-day; but see them growing in romantic irregularity, as by Thirlmere, and you will believe that Wordsworth might have conceded a beauty to the larch. And there are things more hideous than steam—for instance, the petrol motor. Rydal Mount is not a museum: its grounds are kept private. It is a simple dales dwelling in design—round chimneys, lead-glazed windows, grey walls without, low-ceiled, raftered rooms within: its well-planned gardens are the only characteristic to mark it from many other abode of “the bettermer mak” of yeoman folk. Enthusiasts often run up from the road to peep over its shrubs and gate, but most tourists go heedlessly by this retreat of the aged poet. From the garden where the poet composed his verses—“bumming and booing to hissel,” says one who recollects him clearly: “bum—bum—bum—bum, and at every bum he maid a step forrit, mebbe six or sebben steps; then roond he wad whirrel and gang back—bum, bum, bum,—happen just as many times. It didn’t matter to him whether he wor in his ane garden or on t’ fell or on t’ roo-ad,”—there is a grand view. Down the glen to the lake, darkling under the massed clouds, over the woods of Rydal and a corner of the mere, Loughrigg and, dimly seen through rolling mists, Crinkle Crags and Bowfell. Would that a gleam of sunshine would kindle the grey and brown and dull red of dale and fellside to silver and russet, crimson and gold! For it is late September, and the glory of autumn is about us.

I have read many “interviews” with the aged Wordsworth. Some writers have seen him in idealism; others in a matter-of-fact light. A third class, bent on decrying his worth, have conjured up overheated visions of an uncultivated, unmannered man, calling to question his genius, his mode of living, his person. But some humble scribe, long before the poet was removed by death, penned the following. He had no difficulty in reaching the Laureate; a request at the door of Rydal Mount for a short interview was answered by the poet himself. “He took me by the hand in a way that did me good. There was welcome in his words and looks as well as in the shake of his hand, and in less than five minutes he was taking me round his fairy dwelling-place and pointing out to me the most striking objects of the beautiful and glowing scenes around. He was rather tall and thin, with a countenance somewhat pale, and more thoughtful than joyous. Simple and courteous in his demeanour, and frank in his remarks, he made me feel at ease. He was just the man that I had imagined him to be from reading his ‘Excursion.’” The same writer, looking into an ivied and moss-grown unused quarry near White Moss, expressed his pleasure at the sight. “Sir,” was the poet’s response, “all might find these secluded temples of beauty, but all will not give themselves the trouble to seek them.” The path which cuts along the breast of Nab Scar turns to the left just above the poet’s home, between it and Hart Head, name reminiscent of days when its holder was forester on Rydal fells to Le Flemings of old. Looking ahead, we see a rough road climbing up to as wild a piece of fell land as we have. It is another haunt of the shepherd, a land bleak and wild—the ravines of Rydal Head and the great crags of Fairfield, fit home for wild red deer. Fit home too for the half-wild, little Herdwick, that atom of sturdiness fit to live in a land of storm. Two months hence there will be a day of days in wild Rydal, when the shepherds clear their heafs of the flocks. The work begins ere daybreak, and lasts sometimes into the night following. The sheep dogs, obedient to the calls of their masters, range the whole fellsides very completely, driving down the sheep as they are detected in ghyll or by bog. The work is arduous for both men and dogs, the exact equivalent of the work in miles and altitude ascended being often tremendous.

Our way, however, is smoother, easier than this. We skirt the grounds of Rydal Mount: from a higher bank we look over its round chimneys on to the green glen below, on to Windermere, the river-lake, winding away between bluffs bronzed with fading foliage, to be lost at last in the heart of them; we look along the rocky edge of Loughrigg, where the dying bracken shows the approach of autumn. We are walking in a forest of stumpy oak-trees, the twisted heads of which speak eloquently of the power of the winter gales on this exposed fell-end: below us, with its long, narrow, wooded islet almost dividing it into two portions, is Rydalmere. From the outlet in Rothay to swampish White Moss it is in full sight, and of a kindlier hue than was chill Winander, which a corner of Loughrigg has now shut from sight. The breaking mass of cloud over Langdale Pikes is letting in the full day. On the road beneath, even thus early, the mad race of vehicles has begun. No one seems to be able to go slowly by Rydalmere, save the lumbering carrier’s cart. Once all the ordinary passenger traffic of the country was carried on these slow conveyances—I can see a merit in the method now. The coaches sweep you along at a fast trot; one gasps at new things that are gone ere he comprehends their beauty. And now we have motor-traffic, a series of giant ’buses followed by so many pillars of dust as though they held out the rallying signals for a world of traffic; these excel all in soul-destroying haste.

SKELWITH FORCE, LANGDALE

Our path clears the woodlands; there is now an uninterrupted view of the lake. Above the farmstead where De Quincey and Hartley Coleridge lived, the folks are busy making hay. In our glens this, the only harvest, is of great importance: unless it is well secured the supplies of winter forage for the flocks are scant and often much suffering is caused. The flocks are kept on the lowlands till late May, so that the crop is not sufficiently grown to be cut until late August and sometimes September. At that period the weather is so apt to be unsettled that, when once the grass is mown, almost superhuman efforts have to be made to house it. A few hours lost may mean that the farmer has to watch his crop soaking and wasting for a fortnight or more. My Southron reader will hardly believe that not infrequently whole fields of hay cannot be gathered in and are utterly lost on account of foul weather; in wet 1903, the acres of Lakeland meadows which yielded no crops for this reason, to the writer’s knowledge numbered thousands; and instances of carting the hay on sunny days in November, December, and even January were woefully frequent.

A little way ahead the path passes into a wilder scene. The woods close in from below; above, the brackens sway over a maze of broken, downthrown stones. The foot of the cliff is not many feet above, a block of limestone broken into by narrow spits of grass and bleached tongues of scree. Among the rocks a few sheep are feeding; as we approach they rush away, picking their way accurately and neatly over the debris at a great pace. Hereabouts on a winter’s morning you may be fortunate enough to surprise a fox, blinking and slinking away to some deep hold in the mountain after a night’s marauding. Every score yards gives a fresh view, a new angle of vision to the glen, the lake, and Loughrigg scattered o’er with purple waste of stones. Here we come to White Moss of the three roads, from which Dr. Arnold took his famous political allegory. That way twisting up through the boulders, climbing steeply and ruggedly over the top of the hill, well-nigh impossible to wheeled traffic, was his Old Corruption. Here another route swings up the hill, on a level keel certainly, but it climbs a great height and is far from easy—that was his Bit-by-bit Reform. Along a bold terrace a third road sweeps; it surveys the knot in front, passes the foot of Old Corruption with a puzzled glance as to what manner of man prefers such tortuous ways, comes to Bit-by-bit Reform and has half a mind to go that way, then remembers its destiny to carry traffic without labour or danger, and curves into the pass, avoiding the knot altogether—Radical Reform—scotching the hill of Privilege and Abuse. The cottage on the hillside is the home of our most noted trail-hound trainer, Steve Walker. A word as to his craft is not amiss as we near Grasmere, the home of fell-head sports. True lovers of the hound genus, the dalesmen are not content to let them slip out of sight in the summer, so have evolved a mimic fox-chase with a scent of aniseed. The course is laid round a rough daleside, the hounds loosed. It would be impossible for the fleetest horse to live long with them over such terrific ground. A circuit of six miles is often covered in little over the half hour. To train the hounds to so great pace is a recognised craft, and Steve often has half a dozen hounds in his hands for different owners. It is not an unusual sight to see three of his charges running neck and neck for the blue riband of the sport at Grasmere. The training is severe; pace is required and also strength and staying power. The food given is plain and strong; several hours each day are devoted to outdoor exercise. The trainer with his leash of hounds is a frequent sight on the Lake Country byways. Twice or thrice a week the hounds are put over a short trial course and their progress noted with care. The sport has a fascination for the dalesman-born, and I must not dwell too much upon it.

SUNSET, RYDAL WATER

Grasmere Lake will shortly be visible over the tree-tops, but we seek a more striking approach. Therefore, sinking the hillside, we cross White Moss, down to the footbridge spanning the prattling Rothay. It is an angler’s path we tread; this length of water should be famous, for white-headed rodsmen tell legends of mighty trout, up to twenty pounds weight, which used to come from Windermere and Rydalmere to spawn upon the beaches here. Shortly the wood is cleared, the sunlight is touching Helm Crag in steady blaze; it comes forward to Silver Howe, and in a few seconds the rushing rivulet by our side is sending out myriad sparkles of glory. The sky has cleared, and there is prospect of a fairer day. The lake of Grasmere lies in a perfect basin, and, though its sweet retirement is somewhat marred by too many buildings, yet the glen for a greater part of the year remains a pleasant nook. From the shingle we stand upon, the head of the Rothay ravine, there is a beautiful view. In front, Silver Howe, to its right Helm Crag, then Steel fell, the gap of Dunmail, Seat Sandal and the stony backs of Rydal fells; beneath them are many lower hills, cut into by tiny level glens and narrow watercourses. But this sunny autumn morn the eye takes in the atmosphere of the scene even more than its component features. Thus the peaks soaring into the gleaming air become less important than the glorious woods at their feet. Autumn’s gorgeous art is vivid on fell and wood and meadow. The beauty of the scene lies in Nature’s harmonious blendings, and one feels that only the poet’s imagery can describe the scene. Silver Howe is pictured in two-thirds the width of Grasmere; at our feet a feathery cloudlet sails in a second sky. So clear, so perfect, the counterfeit that even the charming mystery of height remains. The summit curving against autumnal blue, the purple crags, the screes, here grey, there blue, there a finer tinge where rock, grass, and heather meet, the turgid flood of colour where the bracken is dying, the solid green of the larch woods, the softer plumes of birch, the fiery oaks, the fading green meadows, are all in this peaceful mirror.

There is a chunking of oars, and shortly across our range of vision there swings a small boat; it grounds a few yards away, a boat from the hotel carrying a visitor to the Loughrigg side. We hail the boatman, and in a few seconds have hired him to take us out on to the lake awhile. What a splendid picture the glen makes from the island! The village church towers above a knot of grey buildings across the meadows; the hills around all seem to be higher; the feast of colour is even finer than that seen from the foot of the lake. Above the eastern shore the woods, a paradise of varied tints, lit up by the bright sun, rise to the Wishing Gate. Then back again we are rowed. There are plenty of brackens here to give a flush to the hillside, but we avoid their tangle. Among the boulders the hardy sheep are grazing; no other animal could nibble and thrive on the short, slippery grass of the uplands. As we turn, the lake seems to have narrowed; really more of the level valley is in sight, and the mountains are discovering themselves in their true magnitude. When Red Bank is reached, the view is at its widest; over the gap of Dunmail is seen a blue portion of Skiddaw forest. As a dalesman, it must be confessed that I am somewhat impatient with our “show” scenes; they tell me few stories, arouse few reminiscences. It is on a foxhunt that my memory pauses, when we streamed off over the rough slopes toward Silver Howe—a grey day of winter, not a morning in full autumn. One sees but little of the lake in descending to Grasmere village, just outside which is Pavement End, reminiscent of our “Sports.” Here for at least thirty years was held our great athletic festival—the “Derby of the Dales.” Here were seen our fell runners, our pole leapers, our trail hounds, our wrestlers in the true mountain style. The course of the old fell race was up the rough hillside, “that precipice,” as our Southron friends call it. Had I space I would say much on this topic; the sports are held on another field now, and—shades of the past, you giant athletes of Cumbria!—the race is now run on less difficult ground across the glen.

At Grasmere, beneath the yews of the kirk-garth, the poet Wordsworth is buried. Rothay murmurs near by. The church is not yet “restored,” and remains simple as in the days of Wordsworth. There is a pretty custom here (and in other dales) known as “the rush-bearing.” Many years ago our chapels were not floored with timber, the earth was merely pressed hard by the use of generations. Damp struck up on wet days, and chill in winter, which rendered worship uncomfortable. Rushes were therefore strewn on the floor at the approach of winter. Time went on, the earthen floor was superseded: instead of the old gathering of rushes for use a festival has been inaugurated. The children of the glen weave rushes into crosses and bouquets, go in procession to the church and lay their offerings by the altar there.

GRASMERE CHURCH

Grasmere is in itself without especial charm to the visitor. It is too busy to grow beautiful; romance has stayed away, commercialism reigns, and I for one do not care a fig for the place outside its connection with the poet, with its great possession, his grave and its grey-towered church. But Grasmere as a centre for rambles is unparalleled.

My last glimpse of Grasmere was in wintry weather, and from the Wishing Gate. No snow had fallen; the frost-rime covered the valley with white, though the southern facets of the uplands, on which the sun had spent its feeble power, were stiff bronze. The lake was partly frozen, the westering light gleamed on ice and the dark patches of water here and there. The woods, last seen glorious with autumn tints, were now sere and thin. The silence was divine: no rumbling car passed on the road beneath, no sound of voice broke the spell. And bending over the frosted bars of the gate I wished Grasmere’s peace and content—and mine own. Turning away at length to pass over to sweet Rydal Water,—oh! banished was the dream from my mind, for a house new-built on the moor-edge peeps curious eyes through the plantations at the sacred corner of the Wishing Gate. Truly it is a commanding site; perhaps the owner is proud of a choice which gives him views of Grasmere and Rydal, Loughrigg and the Wishing Gate—I cannot justly rail at him, but my unreason wishes his dwelling far hence. From the ridge, with the level sunbeams around you, leaving the hollows veiled in misty blue, you look down upon Rydalmere. Skimmed over with ice, except where busy rills keep open a few yards’ space, its levels steely hard, with a few skaters gliding among its islets, with brown coppice and white fields rising around, with the towering front of Nab Scar frowning at the softer slacks of Loughrigg, Rydal was a sight to remember. But its glory was all forgotten as I noticed the frost flowers in the roadside—are Nature’s largest or her smallest forms the loveliest? Is the spreading landscape as full of beauty as the flowers formed by frost rime round a casual sod in the wayside? I know not, nor care.

CHAPTER V
ESTHWAITE WATER AND OLD HAWKSHEAD

If, after a complete survey of our Lakes, one is asked which could be spared, there is little doubt that often Esthwaite Water would be the one selected: so uncharacteristic is it, so unlike the rest of the country. It is a lowland mere strayed into a district of crag and brae and foaming rivulet. I don’t wish to agree with such an opinion, for Esthwaite has its real beauties.

Esthwaite mere certainly possesses no bold scenery; its shores are regular, its bays sweep in smooth curves among the meadows. No ridges of rock jut into its waters, its shores are smooth and shingly. Esthwaite is the weediest, reediest of our Lakes, and at places absolutely the quietest, though a great main road runs close beside. But the vale of Esthwaite, with its old village of Hawkshead, is worth of notice. In no other case is there so much to be said about the locality and so little about the lake. High Furness has ever been wild and retired. After Domesday it was given to the Baron of Kendal as a chase for deer—possibly because the country was uninhabitable at that time. Then great Furness Abbey arose, and obtained a wide right over this country-side. The Old Hall at Hawkshead was the home of the monks when they came to collect their tithes and harvests. With the fall of the monastery the Sandys family leapt to ascendancy. One Sandys in King Edward VI.’s time became Archbishop of York, and used his interest to procure a market, by royal charter, for the town, which thereupon began to flourish considerably. This Sandys also gave the old grammar school its foundation. The church on the hillside, standing like a watchtower above the grey roofs, owes much to the Sandys’s beneficence, but its interior is to the casual observer somewhat dull. Its register, giving a list of Burials in Woollen, is very complete, that curious old law passed to aid the woollen industry being rigidly observed for long in these parts.

ESTHWAITE WATER: APPLE BLOSSOM

To deal with present-day Hawkshead, there is the old church on high, its God’s acre now spreading from the narrow promontory on to the swelling hillside behind, the grammar school where Wordsworth was educated, and many an old house built in a fashion now long abandoned. There are curious nooks here and there, particularly near the church. One house, built with its upper story protruding on stone pillars to form a sort of penthouse, tells that here in happier days the “garn” or yarn was displayed, within the hum of the busy spinning-wheels, to the intending purchaser. To picture Hawkshead in its prime of two centuries ago is not easy. Though land was plentiful and even lay waste, the rigours of manorial law made it impossible to spread out environs on the sumptuous scale we are accustomed to to-day, so the little community was herded into the least possible space. Houses were built as near together as possible, with narrow entries not two yards wide passing between the squares; the main street was hardly broad enough to enable a coach to be driven along without fear of fouling some outstanding wall. Sunlight and fresh air were strangers, sanitary arrangements were nil, roadways, of natural earth, had a powerful range of suction assimilating sooner or later the masses of garbage thrown from door and window. Within the houses, ceilings were low: a tall man could not stand erect in the loftiest chamber. Stairways and passages were troublesome things to build, said our forefathers; so, when building the penthouse over the shop, many left the upper portion open, to form a ladder-reached balcony from which the sleeping apartments could be attained. What the huge rounded chimneys were intended for is almost a puzzle. The open fires, with that immense draught at work, could hardly throw off much heat, and firelight was an illuminant not favoured by our forefathers. All cooking was done in pans hanging over the burning fuel. One real attribute the spacious chimney had, and has. Across its throat, from bars, could hang whole sheep to be cured by “smoking.” Hung mutton, from a chamber fed with smoke of wood or peat, is hardly unknown even now in our wilder dales. The roofs without were slated with thin slabs of soft stone, locally quarried, for the hard grey slate was not discovered for the purpose then. Down the streets and across them at various places babbled tiny streams which, in their courses from the hills, alighted on the town. To pass these in time of flood, footbridges were provided for men, but how the great coaches managed to drive across their deep channels is a mystery. Looked at from a distance then, even more than now, Hawkshead would look like a grey blotch in the landscape. Though its population was more than at present, the old town was hardly half the width of the present one. One must have walked through streets with huddled houses on either hand awhile, then at once and completely have emerged into God’s country. The houses were close, mouldy, filthy erections, and the ignorance of the people was so great that these were preferred. The idea that anything could be more healthy than those fœtid rooms, poisonous smells, and filthy drinking-water!

AN OLD STREET IN HAWKSHEAD

In those days, too, hundreds of acres near the lake were swampy and almost impassable: there are many items in the accounts of the old town for maintenance of causeways across. The river was spanned by a wooden bridge, at first for foot passengers only, while the pack-ponies with merchandise ventured the ford. The vale of Esthwaite sweeps quietly down from the rugged hillocks behind Outgate in a wide sweep to the water’s head. The only building of historic merit outside the town is the Old Hall, now being used as an ignoble barn or granary. The walls remaining have been part of the gatehouse; tremendously thick are they, with narrow stairs climbing inside solid columns of stone, and with a fine fourteenth century fireplace in the upper room. The vale of Esthwaite has no story of war: the Scottish raiders never penetrated so far aside into the mountain land, and successive invasions by Romans, Picts, Norsemen, Saxon, and Norman have been without memorable strife, and hardly a legend of such actions remains. Near the head of the lake is the pool known as Priest’s Pot. No streams enter it, none leave, but the oozy ground around carries into it a sufficiency of water. It might, from the name, once have been used as a fish stew; though such a thing is unlikely, for the monks would have more convenient waters. In the Priest’s Pot was for years a floating islet, but there is now pointed out a bunch of sallows on a tuft of mossy grass against the edge of the pool, which has grown part of the mainland. The locals say that the Priest’s Pot is the measure of a certain dead-and-gone parish priest’s appetite for strong ale. Not a hundred yards from the Priest’s Pot is the meeting-house at Colthouse, founded in the early days of Quakerism. In Claife are one or two notable farmhouses, but nothing possessing a story. One of the grey farms on the other side of the glen was for centuries the home of the Sandys.

There are boats available on Esthwaite mere, but the fishing is strictly preserved. For a shilling fee a day you are permitted to take coarse fish only. Pike are plentiful enough at some places, and many a trimmer is set in defiance of regulations. A summer afternoon spent on Esthwaite is a memory of some charm. We pushed off from the shingle near the ruined boathouse, and were soon well away. Then we pulled down to where a streamlet purls into the lake, and at the mouth of this lines were put over for perch, as bait for pike. But no tackle for sinking the baits had been provided, and our flighty thoughts turn meanwhile to the wealth of water-lilies and flowering grasses in a bay just below. So long as open water remained it was easy enough to put the boat along; but in a tangle of stems, when every pull at the oars means fouling and pulling plants up by the roots, it is hard work. The water-lily, with its heart of bright gold and ivory petals lying just awash the clear peaty water, is a queen of flowers. Beyond a profusion of these, tall, straight grasses rise like a brake over the boat, brown flower tufts crowning the straight green stems, a background of meadow tinged white and red and blue with flowers, and a coppice wood glorious with fox-gloves and wild Canterbury bells. The faint sweetness rising from land and water too is a memory to treasure. As we float idly along there is a variety of bird life to notice: the king-fisher and the dipper busy on the shingles and threading the narrow ghylls of the rivulets: further down we pass a heron, standing poised and still in the shallow. Time was when the heron was more plentiful in the Lake Country than to-day; the heronry on the shore of this water, as that of Rydal, has been tenantless for many a year. A few pairs still resort to the firs near Whitestock Hall for breeding, but the only great heronry left is at Dallam Tower, some leagues away. Yet from the hills above Esthwaite you may, during winter, watch the birds rise when evening is falling, and flight away toward their great haunt and home. The woods fringing the lower part of the lake are used for the preserving of the “wild” duck. The sedges are haunted with these, and also with coot and waterhens. Sit still awhile and they will come into sight. Truly to the patient man nature is free with stories and secrets. In ten minutes the shyest brood of ducklings may paddle fearlessly within fifty feet of you, and often birds are daring enough to dive under and about your craft. But keep still! The first movement sends the whole company fluttering into the sedges, and they will be long in coming out again. The water is split into a hundred little wakes as the birds dash along, half flying, half swimming, in terror. In winter perhaps finer things are to be seen. Attracted by the plenty of their kind, ducks from northward, mallard, wigeon, whistlers, come circling down to Esthwaite: wild geese whistle about the dark waters, and the clanging of swans resounds during hard weather from the air above, where in triangular packs they breast southward, or from the lake, where in wary little groups they feed near the other birds. But it is a hard winter that brings swans to Esthwaite. The country about this lake-foot is the only real haunt of the badger in the Lake Country. A gamekeeper of my acquaintance says he has often traced the badger’s prints in snow-time, from his domain at Grisedale to the earth near Esthwaite Lodge. The badger does not provide regular sport for the dalesmen, but only a few seasons since a pack of foxhounds ran a hot scent into a well-known borran here. Terriers were slipped and “found” within. As the “fox” would not bolt, it was decided to dig him out. The fight had rapidly shifted far into the ground, so an attack was delivered on the rear of the piled stones. Ere long a dalesman, outstretched in the narrow tunnel, espied a moving of earth ahead. “Hold hard!” he cried, “this is no fox.” Terriers were still at work, and sounds of their barking with an occasional animal cry came from within. In five minutes Brother Brock prepared to bolt, but a sack was ready for his reception, and as he came with a rush he was caught. Not he alone, but also one of the terriers who still held on to his rear.

SHEEP-SHEARING, ESTHWAITE HALL FARM

Our boat is now pulled up the Sawrey shore: to northward great fells shoulder the sky, and as the wavelets rumble beneath I think of the boy-life of Wordsworth. He was educated under the lee of the old church here, and in this vale began that deep study and appreciation of nature which shows itself in his poetry. Wordsworth is at home with nature: he speaks of birds, of animals of the covert-side, of flowers and trees, and the ever-changing glory of the skies and seasons, in far more convincing manner than of the people he dwelt long years among. In his school days it was customary to adjourn school of a Shrove Tuesday that cock-fighting might be practised. With spurs of sharp steel fastened to their natural weapons, the selected birds fought in pairs, till one was cut down and disabled. The sport was cruel, for the pluck and tenacity of the birds made the contests more often to the death. The winner of the “main,” or rather its owner, was hailed captain of the school till another champion gained victory. Wordsworth ever writes with fondness of his boyish days—of riding across the fells, of skating on this mere, of nutting and bird-nesting expeditions to the unchanging, yet ever-changing woods around. There is no story of his school days save that told in his own work; but he admirably portrays the shy lad he was, his comrades, and his successive schoolmasters.

Here, floating across the water level with ourselves, is a swan: how graceful its progress, how white the half-lifted wings as it keeps pace! Calm idyllic beauty is its charm, and the charm of Esthwaite mere.

One scene characteristic of Lakeland comes before us at the outskirts of the little town. It is the country carrier, a lusty, embrowned, genial man, and his large covered cart within which in picturesque (but safe) confusion are the parcels from a larger town to our vale. Storm or calm, rain, shine, or snow, so regular that events are timed by his appearances, passes the carrier along the roads of this land where are no railways. An old farmer, selling some sheep to a dealer, asked when he would take away his purchase.

“Will it do if I come about the seventh of next month?”

“Oh aye,” but the old man looked puzzled. After the dealer had taken his leave, a reflective voice sounded from the ingle-nook.

“T’ seventh o’ next month! That’ll be——” and for awhile the old farmer counted on his fingers, but without satisfaction to himself.

“That’ll be t’ Tuesday after t’ carrier comes, father,” announced a matron who was washing dishes at the far end of the room.

“Aye,” responded the old man promptly, “that’ll be three weeks to-morn; t’ sheep’ll be ready.”

This is not an extraordinary thing to hear in our dales where the list of “inevitables” is: Rent-day, Candlemas (February 2nd, when all accounts are rendered), and t’ Carrier.

The carrier’s life is an arduous one, yet we have whole families who succeed one another in it without a break. Our oldest “carrier” family is to be traced in manor-rolls far into the pack-horse days. The halting of the railway on the confines of Lakeland has preserved, and indeed given impetus to, his craft. He is a necessity to dales-life, but now he is perhaps doomed to totally disappear. The new traffic companies are hoping to send their motors, humming and throbbing, with loads of parcels into the villages and over the passes. As a rule our carrier is a genial soul—he knows the gossip of a hundred miles of road. “We can neither stir dish nor spoon,” complain the daleswomen (who are keenest to hear his news and give notes of their neighbours), “wi’out the carrier hearin’ on it.”

CHAPTER VI
CONISTON WATER

On a sultry afternoon, the wanderer over High Cross from Hawkshead suddenly sees a gulf beneath, a delectable vision of waters, the ancient Thurston mere; a lake of shining silver, chased with darker lines and patches as faint catspaws play here and there, with calm pools irradiating the sunlight like clusters of diamonds, the glow fining down to a distant wisp of blue threading between hills and woods. The setting is lovely as the gem: fertile, swelling farmlands, with here and there a white-walled home peering through its curtain of sycamore, the venerable grey church behind its yews, and the village straggling around its God’s acre. Often so ethereal seems the beauty and repose that one fears that tree-shaded bays, white beaches, and spreading reaches dotted with a shimmering sail or two, will yet dissolve in the disappointment of a mirage. For the road one walks is a dusty ribbon over a parched moor, the grouse cluck drowsily in the heather, the rabbits lop lazily into the furze—the larks alone sing briskly, for they have climbed to fuller life in the highest heavens, far from the slumbrous world around us; the mountains afar off swim in haze, their scarry sides uncertain seem, but down there is the fruitful valley of the lake, with dancing rills, fields of green corn, and its flowery meadows ready for the mower. Such is the delightful picture unrolled as a hundred yards are passed, then a corner of the hills shuts it from view.

DAWN, CONISTON

Coniston, the third longest of our Lakes, is perhaps the one most intimately associated with our earliest civilisations. On its placid bosom the Britons plied their coracles; they were keen anglers, and built their settlements near the lake-shore. Next came the Roman legions, to whose credit is placed by some the presence in Lakeland of that toothsome fish, the char. And after them, Norsemen raiding from the seaboard for harvests denied to their semi-frozen home-land, yet after awhile remaining permanent settlers on the soil. They built their boats of timbers from the forests around, and on Peel Island one erected a house, the foundations of which have recently been determined by an antiquarian. After the Norseman, the Saxon. And the char were taken up the fells to dark Gateswater, over which the golden eagle screamed and round which roved bear and wolf. The Normans after a couple of centuries of strife found the land comfortable to dwell in, but no baron ousted the native from his hearth. And the char had been carried further, over the pass beyond the haunt of the wild eagles to where the seafowl scream—lonely Seathwaite tarn. With the Norman came the forest laws and rights to fish the lake. Nets were reserved to the lord of Coningstone, and the Le Flemings became a mighty power in the dale. The monks of Furness Abbey, not many miles distant, afterwards obtained great privileges here—a relic of their times is to be found in the shore woods. Down among the roots of the trees, deep beneath accumulations of leaf-soil, are red metal stains and nodules of iron. Trees were converted into charcoal by the industrious monks, and iron ore brought here to be smelted. A thriving trade was this long after it had reverted to the great families, whom it enabled to prosper during dark times. The ore was conveyed by the lake to the neighbourhood of the “bloomery,” and again was so carried to the waiting panniered ponies. Great rafts of forest trees also floated down with the slow current. All this while Coniston Water had been in unsullied purity. But a century ago copper was found among the fells and mines opened. Refuse ran down in muddy streams, tainting the lake from head to foot. Many fish died, for the shingles on which they had previously spawned were fouled, and, though ripe with ova, they could not perpetuate their kind. The damage was not completed in a season, but in thirty years, just as English law began to protect the finny denizens, the lake had been robbed of a great proportion of its fish. Twenty years more the mines continued to send down poisonous offal. Then the copper veins gave out, pollution ceased, and the fishery gradually improved. A few years ago it was gravely propounded as a fact that the lack of size in the angler’s spoils here was due entirely to the overcrowding of the water by the trout and perch! It is not many places where such an accusation can be brought forward. A large number of visitors annually come for the angling alone; and as they are seen year after year, no doubt they find it worth while from the sporting as well as the scenic point of view.

CHARCOAL-BURNERS, CONISTON LAKE

The lake-head is bounded by a mass of mountains of which the Old Man is the chief. On the east of the water too the hills are lofty, their lowest slopes a mass of coppice and larches, their upper braes wild and desolate. It seems odd to look down from these upland farms, where everything is sterile, on the soft, rich-looking lands of the lake-side.

Coniston Water is hardly less famous for the people who have lived on its shores than is Windermere or even Grasmere. To the challenge of Wordsworth and Coleridge and De Quincey, of Christopher North, Hemans and Arnold, it can reply with Tennyson, Linton, and, greatest and nearest of all, John Ruskin. If Grasmere reveres the ashes of Wordsworth, Coniston holds in no less esteem those of Ruskin—and the memory of the great is so much the more living. Every one almost in Coniston remembers Professor Ruskin, but few folks can recall Wordsworth. However, my concern is less with rival celebrities than with the lake and its natural surroundings.

To know Coniston Water well is to be convinced that one’s pen cannot describe it. The greatest master of English descriptive prose, John Ruskin, after years of residence, left the task undone. Duty, however, dictates that some attempt must be made, and I cannot conceive anything more likely to give a fair idea of the lake and its surroundings than notes on a long summer day spent on its waters.

We breakfasted by candlelight—one of our party was a keen angler and had persuaded us to rising before the midsummer sun. Outside the cottage the air came cool and fresh, laden with the fragrance of the morning—honeysuckles over our porch and new mown hay, wild roses of the hedgerows and sweet flowers of our garden, larch woods and white-wreathed fields. The faint light just shows a sea of mist overhanging the lake, shows patches of cloud wandering among delicate grey-blue crag and mountain. Now we near the lakeside: the deep blue sky becomes dimmed by trailers of vapour. The boat engaged by the angler overnight is here; but, as he speaks of remaining hours in his almost motionless craft, and that is not to our taste, we select another, opening, after much labour, a link in the mooring chain and setting it free. The view when first we are afloat is curious: a bank of mist overhangs the lake; we can see the lower meadows around, but the mountains are invisible. Soon, however, we find the mist sweeping away in the dawn-breeze.

BRANTWOOD, CONISTON LAKE: CHAR-FISHING

Day is at hand, the dark hour of the morning watch is ending. One by one the stars fade away: a dark shadow passes up the sky from eastward, and the horizon there is being fringed with kindlier light. A cloud floating high above flushes from pearly grey to pink at its edges, to purple in its densest plume, and, as it floats nearer the day, to crimson, to red, and to glistening gold. And now we rest on the oars to watch the coming of the sun to the mountain tops. The fuller light has revealed a glorious scene: the horizon is a rugged sea of summits, lands of rocky steeps with torrents gushing down—Helvellyn and Seat Sandal, the Pikes and Fairfield, with, nearer at hand, Wetherlam, the Carrs, and Old Man himself. Shortly the coming sunshine touches one after another of these giants: Fairfield’s huge gashes where the foxes dwell secure are picked out in gloom and light before day bends to awake the Old Man from his rest. It is interesting to watch the band of sunshine gradually descend his stony, riven flanks. At first only the cairn has the glow; then shortly, a hundred feet below, shadow divides from light. So day breaks among the mountains. Purple shadows still remain in the hollows, the dark green of woodlands is softly dusked: on Coniston Water it is light, though the sun’s rays still linger aloft. “Come on,” grunts the angler at this juncture—the scene to him is beauteous, no doubt, but for his art most valuable minutes are wasting away. We heed him not, and shortly his oars rattle as he pulls for the bay in which the trout should be on the feed. Awhile we feast our eyes on sunlit mountains and shadowy glens, then our oars are plied to take us further down the lake. Quite close to the shore is the Old Hall, once the home of the great Le Fleming family, but now merely a picturesque farmhouse. To Sir Daniel of that family was due the peaceful succession in the three north-western counties of Charles II. after the Interregnum. In Oliver’s day his house at Rydal was almost demolished by soldiers seeking a hidden treasure. To me Sir Daniel is more interesting as the first man to attempt to solve the life-history of the char of our lakes. In few particulars only are we able to improve his observations to-day. The char is the most mysterious as it is the most beautiful of British fishes. Though for three hundred years “silver” and “gilt” char have been noted, no close observer will say there are two varieties of the fish. Sir Daniel suggested that the two divisions spawn at different periods—November and February respectively—but the information then and now hardly justified the idea. During the midsummer months char are bottom feeders; in April and early May, and again towards the close of the fishing season, they occasionally come near the surface, and odd captures are made with the fly. Char average about nine inches in length and three-quarters of a pound in weight. A two-pound char is a great event among the lakemen. Potted char is quite a Lakeland delicacy, and commands high prices. In former times each inn had its stew into which the fish netted or plumbed were placed till a demand for them came along. West, touring over a century ago, mentions particularly the stews at Waterhead Inn, Coniston, and the Ferry, Windermere, as holding great numbers of char. Char pie was once a favourite dish too; in the Le Fleming house-keeping accounts, dating back nearly three hundred years, mentions are made of the large number of fish so used up. Char pie of those days is said to have been so full of spices that the flavour of the fish was neutralised out of existence. In the papers preserved at Holker Hall, a noble duke orders fish for a char pie to be sent to London without loss of time—in December, when the char would be spawning and far from toothsome!

CONISTON VILLAGE: THE OLD BUTCHER’S SHOP

Now the light is falling in a wider riband; it has touched the top of Yewdale crags, the scarred Mines valley is brimming with radiance. How uneven that line where shadow meets sunshine! Still lower bends the light; it is now only minutes before the lake will be flooded in glory. The heights round Torver are in the realm of sunshine, but the larches of Brantwood side are green and unkindled. Not a breath of air disturbs the flat calm. Over the eastern hills the great round sun rolls into sight. Everything is transformed. The subdued grey light is expelled by shimmering gold, green hills and fields alike are suffused with a living blaze. A boat pulled out from the pier near the Old Hall is followed by a wake of pale gold, the oars drip diamonds, the curl of parting waters is like a crystal-crowned sapphire.

To see Coniston Water by broad daylight nothing is better than Felix Hammel’s handsome craft, though the commander will cheerfully admit that we, in our pulling boat, had the best of it at dawn. The Gondola’s landing-stage is in the shade of some mighty oaks, an old cottage astride a shallow waiting-room with a jetty running out a few yards into the lake. The craft is of strange shape; at the stern, where the engines are placed, the draught is a yard and a half, but at bow—“There are few places on Coniston Lake,” says Mr. Hammel, “where I could not put the prow into the green fields while the stern was in deep water,” which, incidentally, shows the paucity of shallows. Mr. Hammel is fond of the engines which drive his taper-keeled craft along. “Fourteen horse-power, yet they drive the boat through the wildest gales betwixt April and September. I have sailed here for twenty-five years, and we have lost time but once. That was the wildest gale that ever smote this water. It blew from sou’-west, and there was a pretty lively water going. Not big rollers, but nasty short things that broke and shook themselves out into a cross-sea that would have made a pulling boat a mighty risky thing to be in. But the Gondola ran within five minutes of normal—the five and a half miles from here to Lake Bank we reckon to do in thirty-five minutes. That wild day it took forty. Only two days in my experience has the steamer not run. During the wet summer of 1903 the lake was so full that for two days the landing-stage was under water, and never a passenger got within two hundred yards of us.”

“I suppose you did a bit of fishing out of your windows those two days,” I commented. Mr. Hammel is an angler—as keen as ever.

MOONLIGHT AND LAMPLIGHT, CONISTON

“Hardly out of the windows, though of course I did do a bit.”

By this time the hands of the clock nearly point to starting-time; passengers are rapidly coming on board, and to hurry up laggards Mr. Hammel sends a flute-like note booming and swelling from the syren. Now there is a quiet rumble as the engines start, a purling of water beneath the stern, and the Gondola backs out into the lake. Tent Lodge, where Tennyson once dwelt, is almost opposite—a square sturdy house standing on a narrow green bank just above the water. The little landing-stage looks decidedly picturesque now; our craft pauses as though regretting to leave so happy a scene, then again the thrumming begins and we are swung round toward the foot of the lake. Far away two green banks contract till the water seems to end: Fir Island narrows the curving lake there. Brantwood is a pretty house beneath the fell, the views from its windows are splendid. Here Ruskin came to spend his latter days, in a house which had been occupied by Linton, the famous wood-engraver. The homelikeness of Brantwood is to me its chief charm: once a dweller in it, no mortal can, I should think, be so dead to natural beauties as not often to picture it, when far away, in memory’s freshest pigments. The eyes of all on board are turned to Brantwood—Mr. Hammel is speaking of it to a bevy of interested young ladies, the other lakemen are pointing it out to those near them; but, seated on the knife-like ridge of iron where his stokehole joins the deck, the engineer is looking intently at the greasy jacket of his boiler! Instantly his posture captures my attention. What meant that strange position? Were we in danger of an explosion? The engineer’s back was eloquent of intent inspection, even of alertness. Nothing happened, however, and as none of the lakemen seemed apprehensive I did not allow that rapt gaze to spoil my pleasure further.

“Brantwood?” says Mr. Hammel, “and Ruskin? Well, of course I knew the Professor well. He wasn’t a man to laugh and talk much, though. For five-and-twenty years I have done odd repairs to Mr. Severn’s yacht at Brantwood, and I often met the old gentleman thereabouts. Mr. Ruskin did not like scrow [upset], I remember, and every year the family used to go down to Lake Bank Hotel till spring cleaning was over. Mr. Ruskin went with them, of course. Mr. Severn used to hire the Gondola, and we ran in to the landing-stage to take servants and luggage on board. Now you know Mr. Ruskin didn’t like our boat at all—I believe he used to write a bit bitter about it; but I remember once (it was in the seventies) when we drew it to the stage, that Mr. Ruskin stood there with Mrs. Severn and the family. I was surprised and some pleased, I can tell you, when he came on board. He went all over the boat, into every corner while we were steaming down, looked at the engines a long while and asked a lot of sharp questions about them—he knew a fair bit about machinery in spite of his old-fashioned ways and ideas. Then when we were nearing Lake Bank he came out of the saloon there, and as he passed me, said with a nice smile, ‘I may like steam after all.’”

AN OLD INN KITCHEN, CONISTON

“Do you remember any others of the big men who lived about here,” I ask my friend.

“Oh yes: there was Mr. Tennyson lived across at Tent Lodge awhile, and in the seventies we had Carlyle here at the Waterhead Hotel two or three weeks. He used to have the steamer nearly every morning for a cruise around. He was a pleasant man to do with, but quiet. They used to say to me that Carlyle never laughed, and Mr. Ruskin but rarely, but I know different. One evening when Carlyle was here, I was across at Brantwood doing some repair to Mr. Severn’s yacht that was drawn up on the slip. While I was working away, down from the house came Mr. Ruskin and Carlyle and sat down on a pile of rough stones beside the slip. I didn’t take much heed of what they were talking about, for I was thrang [busy]; but I remember well that I was surprised to hear a big burst of laughing. I looked up—it was Mr. Ruskin, and before my eyes were fairly clapt on him Carlyle roared out quite as long and loud as he. Then they sat there full a quarter of an hour, talking quite merry, and every now and then there was a crack of laughing as made your heart feel glad.”

At this Mr. Hammel steps away and takes charge of the wheel of the steamer. There is little need of fine steering, for the water is deep and free from reefs.

We move along the crowded promenade deck to get a better view of the grand mountains clustering around. Like a sheet of blue the water stretches far away to meet the multi-shaded greens beneath High Cross. Yewdale crags are prominent, but the soaring ridges culminating in Old Man’s pointed top fill the eye most. Now the eastern shore is crowded with regiments of larches, growing where once the old monks burnt charcoal for their bloomeries by the beckside. On the right is Torver Common where never a wall is to be seen, and the lake-shore is fringed with rocks. Fir Island, a mass of Scotch firs or stone pines, anchored to a narrow rib of rock, has been passed, and now seems like a promontory of green. The woods on the mainland look delightful in this pleasant air, but the stiff lines of their planting is rather an eyesore. The coppice woods next succeed, in wide acres climbing to the skyline. These are allowed to grow fifteen years, then, when the saplings are about six inches thick, all are felled. The best wood is sent down to the mines to use as props; the other portions, after being peeled (for even in these days of chemical tanning bark of ash and oak and sycamore is still put on the market), are placed in neat circular piles in the centre of which a fire is laid. Then by a covering of wet turf the air is excluded. The fire has been sufficiently kindled not to be put out by the short supply of air, and it smoulders away for weeks. Much charcoal burning is done in the winter, and a pleasant scene it is to find on a snow-clad day lines of smoke rising from the barrenness where once was woodland, men moving round the conical patches from which internal heat has melted the white covering, the rough huts, the incipient flicker which has to be immediately quenched else the whole oven of charcoal be spoiled, the thinning smoke which threatens a dead fire there, to which the woodmen hasten to encourage the hidden blaze.

THE SHEPHERD, YEWDALE, CONISTON

Peel Island, alluded to before, is the place when in the time of the Sagas a Norseman dwelt, and a daring man he was to live on so low a rib of rock. In a wild gale the water, lashing its rocky sides, will throw spray right over it. In relief the islet is mitred; two rock ledges face the lake, leaving between a grassy depression some feet in depth. Our old Norseman built walls across this gap, then with poles and twigs from the shore-woods made a roof, and thereby obtained a home sufficient in its humble way to provide shelter in the wildest weather. In spring the glen of the islet is a mass of blue—with wild hyacinths. The lake is now becoming riverine in character, its banks are nearing rapidly, a picnic party seated on the rock-set shore wave and call merrily to the passing craft. The water is still as a pond, the reflections only broken in the wake of the passing steamer. And thus we come to Lake Bank, the end of the lake for steamer purposes, and the point to which coaches drive from Greenodd and Ulverston. It is a change for a good walker to get ashore here, and by the Brantwood shore return—a walk of some eight miles.

At first the road leads down by the rushing Crake, then crosses. The traveller passes through tall-hedged lanes, past old-world farms nestling against sheering hillsides. Once there is a beautiful glimpse—a vista of lake, Fir Island in foreground, and far away the rising fells. Just as the walker feels that Brantwood must be at hand, the woods open a little; here is a point jutting out into the lake to which he can easily pass, a shelf of shingle, overgrown with wych elms and sallows, but from it is a marvellous view. Not too far for detail to be dimmed is Coniston Hall, the church and the village, Mines valley and Yewdale crags, Old Man, Wetherlam and a number of giant hills. In autumn particularly the play of light and shade among the woodlands is glorious. The road passes within a few yards of Brantwood. If the wanderer has time to spare let him leave the road by one of the paths he sees up the hillside. There is little danger of any one complaining of trespass if you should light upon a worn path that is not public. Rising some two hundred feet up you are above coppice woods, and come among the heather, enjoying an excellent view of the lake and its surroundings. How peaceful such a place at sunset! Once I watched the sun set in a haze of blood red: the lake turned like frozen gore beneath my eyes, the hillsides mantled in crimson, the outstanding spurs of rock were wreathed in fire, a purple shadow gradually gathered in the hollows. Then, through a ravishing succession of tints, the scene melted away till I was looking down on a lake with moonlight shimmering on it, edged by blue, rocky mountains.

STEPPING-STONES, SEATHWAITE

One scene more and I have finished. It is of mid-winter—and night. Day was dying ere we left the village; with a parting glish at the snow-covered church tower, the sun left the lower glen. Now the hills were pointed with fire; from the lake a blue vapour rose as the air chilled, to join the helm of feathery smoke gradually spreading from the village. The glen was snowbound indeed; from hedges and plantations came the rustle of slipping snow; a partial thaw after the snowfall passed gave us the roads fairly clear. There were many slippery places, but to the careful and robust there was pleasure in the prospect of a walk. Large flocks of sheep are crowded into the fields lying near the farms we pass; there a weary shepherd is still at work. On the higher farms the shelter of the plantations will have been courted; down here a huge rib of rock lies athwart the wind, and the fields have been but little swept by the storm. Almost the most arduous of a shepherd’s trials is after a long snowstorm. His flock have to be mustered; if the snow has drifted at all a band of ewes are sure to be beneath it, and these have to be got out. Then comes the problem of hand-feeding perhaps a thousand. Hay and roots may be brought by sleigh, but the labour of distribution is great. The soft snow clings so tenaciously to the grass beneath that to walk a hundred yards in the fields is too hard work for any pleasure-seeker. The sheep are nosing down to the hidden grass: even in the hardest weather they forage well for themselves, though the gap between “feed” and “appetite” is often very wide. The lake looks blue and cold under its veil of soft vapour; a skin of ice is forming. There is a loud crack and a rattling echo passes along the frozen surface. Eerie it is so to hear the ice “stretching”: the frostier the night the louder and more frequent the reports. (In 1895 I was on Windermere after dark—it was a moonless night—and the loud and long continued roars which spread about the ice were almost alarming.) Soon we are in the byroad for Tarn Hows. The trees meet overhead, and if it were not for the white flashes of snow between them the way would be bad to find. The road is slippery, and time and again we have to leave the metalled part for the snow-banks to get on at all. The sounds heard in the woods on a frosty night are interesting. A faint rustle in the undergrowth as a small bird hops from one twig to another, a faint rumble and a sissing of snow as a rabbit bolts away, the thud of falling pieces of snow from the branches, the crackling of twigs as the frost nips harder, the blundering rush of a large bird through the curtain of branches, followed by a mimic snowstorm of dislodged particles; from darksome glades, the melancholy hoot of the wood owl and the shriekings of the barn owl, then from far away floats the chime proclaiming the hour, the cadence dying in sweet confusion over the tapering larches.

WINTER SUNSHINE, CONISTON

So far the way has been steep and the footing uncertain; now, however, we rise above the woods to the open hillside. The angle of ascent is less difficult and the snow firm to the tread. Our path forms a terrace above Yewdale. Beneath is a glen cumbered with snow; above, a sky liberally dusted with stars large and small, the gentle light from which is sufficient to kindle the jewels on the frosted snow. The air is chill, but our blood is too warm for us to be more than barely conscious of it. From a corner of the track we have an excellent view backward. The lake is still hidden in its curtain of mist, the dark woods of Brantwood side climb sharply into the white desolations. Coniston Old Man over the way—how truly near it looks!—is gilded by a new light; the moon is rising and the light spreads over summit and upper snowfield, over crag and bield and lower slack of white, finally touching with crystal the fields and houses in the deep dingles around. From one point we look over a wilderness of snow to other dales, but the expected mountain heads are hidden in pearly cloud. The tarn is covered with ice, and some time we spend sliding. Then to return, but first of all notice that grey moving blotch on the shoulder of Wetherlam. The glasses show a family of wild goats. Villagers of Coniston tell of a herd of over thirty observed not many seasons ago, while groups of over a dozen occasionally tempt the keen gunster out on to the chilly wastes.

The goats, I am told, were introduced about a century ago in order to prevent fell-sheep frequenting dangerous cliffs—for a goat is safe where a sheep will turn giddy, and, falling, be dashed to pieces. By nature the sheep is divided from the goat, and will not browse the same pasture. For long it was a custom of the quarrymen of Tilberthwaite to assemble on Good Friday morning, and attempt to hunt the goats haunting the fell near by. But though a kid or so, weaker than the rest, might be taken, I never heard that much success accompanied these chases. The goats from Coniston fells wander in search of toothsome grass to beyond the Duddon, and there is record of an exciting hunt among the rocks of Wallabarrow for a wandering goat. In winter only do these animals approach civilisation; their usual haunts are the crags above sequestered glens. The snow crunches under our feet, and we speedily come down to where we again catch view of Coniston Water. Now it is clear of mist, the whitened fields, blotched with woods, limned with hedges, are in sharp contrast to the grey ice, and to the glittering unfrozen water in mid-lake. A glory almost approaching that of day spreads over the scene: the queen of the heavens is indeed “walking in brightness” here.

DAFFODILS BY THE BANKS OF THE SILVERY DUDDON

CHAPTER VII
THE MOODS OF WASTWATER

I never think of Wastwater without recalling some exciting hours—Wastwater surrounded by crag-set mountains and wide bouldery moorlands where foxes rule wild and strong. Under Tommie Dobson, that genius among fell-land huntsmen, a pack of wiry hounds has been raised in the bordering dales. In pursuit ruthless, untiring, determined; a chase from dawn to night, over country bristling with difficulties, is no unusual thing to them. Screes, miles of frittering mountain rampart, Yewbarrow, ridged like a Napoleon’s hat, Scawfells, impending over great piles of fragments, Gable; about these are benks and earths and borrans innumerable. Never a season do they fail the hunt; never do they fail for redskins to plunder flock and poultry roost. Then the wilds to Ennerdale—I had climbed the slope of Gable before the meet at dawn on a spring day, the crisp air became full of music—what finer sounds than those from a foxhound’s throat!—the turf was springy and dry, the sky flecked with high-sailing clouds. To climb the rocky terraces was delightful; to hunt—the exhilaration needs experience, it is beyond my words to describe. No pink coat was in the knot of men below; and a follower on horseback is seldom seen at a meet by Wastwater. Hounds unkennelled as they left the short lane from the inn, and soon above the babble of eager questers rose the clear peal of a true find. To one line gathered the pack, and away! Not often does Reynard give so good a chance. Over the tall drystone walls surged the hounds, at first in a compact bunch, then, as pace began to tell, dribbling out into a line. Out of the fields, and into the intakes of Mosedale; and ever higher rose the note of the chase, ever smarter the gliding forward of the clan. A check! From Gable’s lofty flank I saw hounds halt at a dark grey patch of stones, circle it almost in silence. Reynard has gone aground; the huntsmen and the fleeter followers come up. The scent drew the pack in and out, over wall and beck, through dead bracken and crackling heather, three or four good miles, but the huntsman, judging the true route, reached the borran in less than a mile. The hounds called away, terriers are put “in” and possibly will have Reynard out ere long. Nowhere but in the fells are terriers really used after foxes—nowhere else, the dalesmen proudly say, are dogs capable of doing such work. After a considerable delay two white dots stray out on to the dark grey stones—Reynard has been killed in the dark recesses.

A FELL FOX-HUNT, HEAD OF ESKDALE AND SCAWFELL

The sun is now high, the cloud flecks are gone, the air has become warm. Long ago foxes ceased to be afoot, and hours of careful work by huntsman and hounds may be necessary to find another fair scent. But even the pattern of all wiliness, like the human votaries at his shrine, sometimes overreaches himself. After a tedious march it is refreshing to hear hounds speak to a piping line. Reynard, lying out in a pile of boulders, has heard the coming pack. He steals away—too late, for a keen-sighted dalesman has viewed him away. Ten minutes of frenzied rushing, and the fox is reached. Ruby in the van seizes him, and over go both at the impact. The hound, aged but plucky, loses his grip and Reynard is free again; down the scree, in the very access of terror, the redskin flies, but with a couple of bounds Chorister has him fast. The iron jaws crunch into the fox’s spine, and though together they roll near twenty yards the grip never falters. There is no “worry” at the death; the hounds, now that their enemy is dead, take little further notice of him. Ofttimes the death is compassed a mile away from the nearest follower, but occasionally a fair number view the finish. And to do this you may have to come pell mell down some rotten “rake.” We saw hounds stream over a patch of snow on a near-by hill: a dalesman pointed out Reynard dead beat a hundred yards in front. “The Gate,” called some one, “who’s going down?” Six of us rushed for the head of that precipitous scree-shoot. The angle of descent was terrible, but, hunting mad, we leapt and slid, stumbled and jolted down. A thousand feet plumb drop, with a hail of loose stones roaring behind us. The rake-foot was narrow, between perpendicular rocks, and in single file we raced down. No one tried to halt; if it were thought of, the gathering pelt of stones decided in favour of forward. Shades of Silver Howe! In the madness of the guide-race you never saw the like of this. But after five minutes of real, tearing life—oh! it’s good to have lived through such a time!—we were running down the smoother grass. The hounds were probably quite close by—running mute for the death—and across the roaring, flooded beck within a score yards came the fox. We halted in silence—back up, tongue lolling, moving stiffly and with evident pain, he was the scourge of the fells, but a respected foe at that. Thrice had he been chased far, now came for him the end. Two outstripping hounds shot across a cove which was bank-high in snow, leapt at him, and all was over.

Wastwater, its bed hewn and filled by Almighty power in the beginning to contrast the silvern temporalities of a level mere with the solid, silent, rugged eternities of rock around. There is always some pleasure to the hale of body and mind in climbing from Wastwater, whether by pony-track, mountain-path, or dangerous puzzle route up the cliffs. In early October I had to cross to Wastwater from Keswick. In the golden glory of afternoon we passed up Borrowdale. One side the glen sloomed in dying bronze of bracken, the other was grey with nude birches below, chocolate with heather above. We left the main road and passed into the desolate mountain land. As the sun declined, clouds, at first mackerel but now dull and heavy with rain and night, floated majestically from behind the western mountains. Shortly in a low cloud cornice Gable’s head was buried, and billow after billow of mist possessed the higher ground: at Rosthwaite the glow of day, here the portents of night and foul weather. “Fraternal Three” and the old wad-mine took but a moment’s attention, then away, up the narrow dell.

WASTWATER, FROM STRANDS

Night fast closed round. Our last look back barely showed the curve of Borrowdale. Gillercombe, scored by tremendous ravines, presided over a scene of almost indescribable wildness. The wind roared and boomed above, the steady drift of fine rain was in our faces. Hoarsely down its rugged bed the beck sang in accord. Grey light and dashing water, with gloom intense above and a rain-sodden world below, our path uncertain, picked out by boulders. Bogs of sphagnum, sponged a foot high with water, runnels where in summer are hollows filled with wee splinters, the rills all shouting becks, and the becks flooding torrents. Our boots full of water, wet to the thigh, we still squelched on. In a while we came to a narrow footbridge, and crossed the chief torrent. “Where is the path?” I knew not, nor cared. Swinging bogs were all about; a grisly light crept through the clouds in front: that showed the pass-head, and was my guide. Now, we stood within twenty yards of Stye Head Tarn—what a scene! Half invisible, a patch of wind-spurned waters, dark mountains sweeping upward, cloven by black ghylls, whitish beards of cloud stealthily moving along and hiding the higher ground in ghostly embrace. The sounds—the tongues of many waters, and the night wind weirding among crags and crannies. Ten minutes more, our path in a long curve swept down the rock-shelves toward the dale. What a gulf of gloom, the waterfalls roaring and possessing the night! Take care, take care, the way is full of stumbling-blocks, of pitfalls; to the right is steep rock, to the left a precipice. Over it—crane your neck and see if foothold is visible beneath. Such is Stye Head Pass at night.

WASTWATER AND SCAWFELL

We reach the scree where the route is safer, but at the zig-zags more than once overshoot the path. The clouds apparently are densest near the mountains, for beyond the rock-girt valley some brighter clouds render darkness almost visible. There is a dream of a grey Wastwater, a mirage of something not chaos beyond. A spark of light shows where the hotel lies, but it is far away. Some twenty minutes from the pass-head we find grass beneath our feet. Looking backward, there is a walpurgis of grey shadow and black night. Now the path is easier and we walk more rapidly, though frequently stumbles remind us that the path is far from smooth. The light—from hospitable windows—is nearing perceptibly. Now, in front, is a darker mass—the yew-trees crowding round a tiny House of God, shielding it by their tough green limbs from the storms. We were walking quietly in the narrow lane thinking of the gloom on all things made, when a white shadow beyond that of the dale-church arrested us. What is it? Memory hasted back a week to that most terrible disaster in the annals of Lakeland rock-climbing—the accident on the Scawfell Pillar. Four fine young men were killed, and three are laid here. A heap of white flowers, like a pall of mountain snow, masks the grave. Sadly impressive is the scene; the white wilting flowers represent fitly the brief human span of life—to-day we are, to-morrow we are not, thus is the will of God: the dense green yew-trees symbolise death, the time-long end of man. But look higher, I felt—around. “O death, where is thy sting?” for, though the mists of night bewilder, great rock-ribs are rising upward, higher, ever higher, till earth and heaven meet. And the yew of death will moulder by the kirkgarth, but the mountains must stand fast to prove eternity—immeasurable, infinite.

Wastwater, its shores treeless and forlorn, its waters rippling against their shingly bays, with mountains beyond and around, curtains of rock and ribbons of scree. In the cool days of spring the mountains are delightful, but sometimes there is a sudden revulsion to winter. A shade sweeps from nor’east, and behold a squall plastering all with snow, a gale shrieking around, and the temperature tumbling to zero. Such mischances apart, the bracing air makes a new creature of one after the fogs of winter, and you simply stroll up the ascents. So much has been written of the mountain-climbing around Wastwater that to infuse romance, to say any new thing, is difficult. Steep ghylls there are to ascend, loose bands of scree to pass, bogs varying in depth according to weather. Here a rushing rivulet to ford, there, winding beneath crazy rock fragments, the path hangs on the brink of a deep ravine; collar work up five hundred feet of slippery grass, and splendid poising exercise over beds of boulders. When winter holds sway and a white garb hides the bloom of meadows and hillsides, Wastwater is a very home of loneliness. Its surface is no home for the wildfowl from northward: a wastewater it is to them and not worth a minute of the foody, oozy sands of Irt and Esk, seven miles away. Loneliness and silence. When the babel of the flock in the intakes ceases to the ear, the absence of all sound will depress the liveliest soul. The air, chill and cutting, goes soundlessly by; the lake broods in leaden, stirless gloom. There is no sound of tinkling rivulets; the raven’s croak, the curlew’s wild shriek, are no longer heard; the plover, the heron, and the birds of the hedgerow have flown to less sombre regions. When the stars are mirrored in the steely blue water and the moon throws shafts of glory across the mountain barrier, the silence is more crushing. One side the dale is in shadow; frost spangles give to the other an ethereal, unreal illume. Gable and the Scawfells are snowbound where on ledge and scree snow can lie; the rocks, through which, from the mountain’s heart, hidden springs are driven, are sheathed with ice. Day after day, the deadness of living nature seems to increase; day after day, the unknowable mysteries of the mountains seem to deepen. The loudest voice seems hushed; the most fervid imagination is consciously dwarfed. Then the weather changes; the air turns raw and damp, and day seemingly forgets Wastwater. Silent, implacable, falls the rain. Down almost to the water trail the ragged cloud-beards—they choke day from the low land. Up the mountains—he is a hardy wight who dares to be there. Half-molten snowdrifts, torrents roaring, cascading from unseen above to invisible below, gouts of water cleaving through the mistwreaths. But seldom does such a wanderer brave the elements long. Turgid torrents and close-enwrapping fogs charm no one. Indoors the fires burn bright; save for a brief space about noon, when a sickly lightening proclaims day’s climax and glory, the lamps are hardly out. To the gloom of the clouded sky is added the great shadows of close-hemming mountains; there are houses among the fells on which for three months of the year the sun never shines.

WASTDALEHEAD AND GREAT GABLE
Towards evening in autumn

Wastwater, and the Screes. Three miles of buttresses crumbling down in fan-shaped beds of ruin. It is grand to pace the opposite shore and watch the play of light and shade on the rugged mountainside. Streaked with rich brown are some of the yawning gullies: up there are stores of ruddle or native iron. Soft and soluble as mud, the substance once had a value as providing an indelible mark for sheep. The shepherd lads from distant dales came here to collect it—for a premium of sixpence per pound from their masters. On the brink and halfway down the face of the shivery rocks are the little veins of ruddle found. A steady step and a firm nerve had the lads who dared such labour, for a misstep might split their foothold to pieces and throw them far down the ravines. We are told that many lives were lost in the pursuit of ruddle: compared with it, modern rock-climbing, with the skilfully used safeguards, is safe, though of course far more arduous. The climber of to-day chooses a sound crag for his work: the ruddle-gatherer could only work among the loosest, craziest ground.

The best way to see the Screes is to take a boat and row close to them. High above your head, a great rampart of rock, scored since the world began with the cabalistic record of frost and storm, hides the sky. Somewhere betwixt the crags and lake, following the smoothest route, is a rough path. In and out of parks of huge boulders (many, geologists say, still sliding downwards at speeds varying from slothful inches to a bustling six feet per annum), the track threads, affording a grand though tiring walk. After frost there is danger in approaching some of the crags. Huge breasts of stone are so finely hung that the ice wedging their crannies rends them as surely as gunpowder. There have been some tremendous rockfalls in the Screes. A century ago one of the sights of Wastwater was a lofty fragment to which an uncouth imagination gave the name of Wilson’s Horse. For long the vicinity had been shunned: pieces of rock were for ever disintegrating from the mass. Then, after a winter grim with frost and snow, came the final catastrophe. At dead of night was heard the roar of falling rock, and at daybreak the Horse had disappeared. Judging from the splintery gulf whence the Horse fell, “What a splash it must have made!” interjected one as we scrambled about the place. It is said that a twenty-foot wave passed north and south after the rock struck the water.

WASTWATER SCREES

Wastwater, the home of many shepherds. As you scramble their flocks are ever around you. And from among desolate-looking rocks, between beds of lichened boulders, they obtain sustenance. There is a tuft of grass just by that patch of parsley fern; a little fringe of soft green nestles beneath that boulder; a skin of living verdure finds root where the scree lies fine as dust. For these wisps of grass the hardy Herdwicks assiduously search, and on such meagre fare they thrive. Our sheep are small in size compared with those of the lowlands but more robust, and so intelligent that no dweller in the mountain-land can understand that cant phrase “a silly sheep.” There are other animals with far less resource or real initiative when faced by danger. The life of the mountain shepherd possesses little of Arcadian joy and pastoral romance. The stress of winter when storm sweeps down from the Gable and the air is riotous with snow, the terrible “clash” at lambing-time when the weather turns wet for weeks, militate against such idylls as are fancied in brighter lands. So ruthless is fact in its war with poetic vapourings that even the glories of the shepherd’s summer do not remain. Instead of the shepherd piping and watching the sheep with lambs by their sides streaming over green swelling hills, in the English mountain-land it is the season of the detested maggot. This cruel pest burrows through wool and skin into the living flesh beneath and devours that. It is almost too sickening to recall the piteous scenes of visible spines and ribs from which the flesh has been denuded; of sheep still living in the most awful agony. Nearly the worst characteristic of this terrible visitation is that a sheep when attacked generally turns recluse and wanders as far as possible from its fellows. Thus, when the shepherd should theoretically be at ease, he is really, ointment pot in hand, climbing about the roughest parts of his holding. Once, when wandering near Wastwater, I met a shepherd.

“Been salving?” I queried.

“Nay, been trying to find some to salve. I’ve a mind they’re somewhere in these ghylls, but I can’t come at ’em.”

“How many do you reckon there’ll be?”

“Mappen sebben or eight. I’m going to try this beck course.”

“Yes, do,” I said: “I think there’s a few up above.”

WASTDALEHEAD CHURCH
The smallest in the district—perhaps in England

Then I explained that from across the mere I had noticed a few white dots, and had entered into remarks thereon with one who through field glasses was scanning the great hillside. He could scarce believe that the small grey masses cluthering in the ghyll were sheep. “They’re far too still.” I admitted the mournful fact, also that they were much above the zone of grass, but added that they were “smitten by wicks.” The shepherd assured that this was the very ghyll, up we went. It was not long before we came to the lowest—I dare not say animal. So weak and emaciated was the living organism from ravages of the terrible maggot that the shepherd immediately kicked out its brain. “Can’t save it,” he muttered through set teeth. The next was not so far gone. The shepherd, with deft hands, cut away the clotted wool and speedily the cleansing ointment was at work. The plunging and baa-ing of the sheep showed that the cure was a “smarty” one. One by one the other sheep were found and remedies applied, so that the shepherd went back to the farm at rest.

Wastwater, haunt of the char and the botling, the latter a mysterious fish. Now and again he turned up, and his appearance spread dread through the country-side—what had not happened when last this hermit fish came ashore? Fever and agues were by some said to follow his occurrence, or trouble about heafage rights. But progressive science scared him from existence (the botling was ever a male) with his little hoard of lore. The fish was taken at the fall of the year in the little becks and among spawning trout. He was a powerful fellow, differing chiefly from his associates in greater size and thickness, and in the manner in which his under jaw turned up and was hooked. In weight the botling ranged from four to twelve pounds. One killed by leister, or fish spear, was so thick that its girth was in excess of its length by four inches. In colour and marking the botling resembled the ordinary lake trout, the brown spots on its back being only proportionately larger. Probably it was only a local variation of Salmo ferox (the great lake trout); it might possibly have been a hybrid fish. At any rate, here the argument must be left: for half a century the botling has not been heard of—his train of woe, however, has not been so considerate.

NEARING THE TOP OF STYHEAD PASS, WASTDALE

Like our other lakes, Wastwater is most fishable when a faint breeze ruffles its waters—for the benefit of the visitor-angler, the coch y bondhu and Broughton Point are the best general flies, with red hackle during the summer. There is little sport with the char: the lake-bed does not permit netting, and the fish are not present in sufficient numbers to encourage the use of the plumb-line. One of my old acquaintance was wont to walk from Langdale over the mountains to fish here, in the days of the now proscribed lath. Poor old Tom, it needs a vivid imagination to picture thy age-wrung frame climbing steep Rossett Ghyll, to think of thy dim old eyes as alert enough to seek out the path as in semi-darkness thou wandered among bogs and benks, screes and boulders. Still more difficult is it to see thee bending over the lead-weighted board with its twin lines and their droppers of gut, fly, and barb, keen to get the instrument on its journey. In one of the coves where purls down a rivulet, the lath is launched; the faint current carries it outward till the breeze ruffling the lake catches its upturned edge. Twenty yards out, where the lake sheers down to its great depth, fish are lying, taking what food air and stream drift to them. Slowly the lath sails outward, Tom unwinding further line as required. The board is now, thinks Tom, beyond the shoal, and the droppers should be presenting their temptations to the fish. Its movement is therefore checked, and the linesman waits for the fish to bite. Tom’s right hand after a while draws one end of the lath nearer, the breeze catches it and it floats sidewise. To the right is a few yards of water from which Tom has previously taken good fish. In an hour he rises from the shadows, and draws the board slowly to land. At first the lines come steadily enough, and are coiled neatly; then there is greater resistance. The right line jerks about in all directions: here comes a big trout. A faint ruffle breaks from a back fin just beneath the surface, there is a little wimple as the fish sinks down again. Gently, gently Tom draws in line. Now there is a brisk curl quite close to his feet near the rocks, a few splashes, and Tom is handling a half-pounder. So strong was the tackle used for lath-fishing that no delicate precision, little fine “play,” was requisite. Poor old Tom! Hadst thou then a taste for the picturesque, what lovely memories thou must be revelling in now when in age thine eye to outward things grows dim! Nights by lovely mountain tarns, when the northward light made the water glow like steel, when the great ribs of the mountains seemed in their nakedness to support the dome of night. Star-spangled skies, and the soft mists of summer by the lake-shore when everything droned to rest. The adventure Tom remembers best is of Wastwater. A keeper had suspected lathing on the western shore, and secreted himself to watch. Tom came over from Langdale, and near Yewbarrow made ready his lines. The board floating out attracted the keeper’s attention. He was mounted, and rode as fast as he could to cut off the poacher. Tom heard the thud of hooves on the soft grass, threw his lines into the mere, and made up the hillside as fast as he could run. A few score yards the horseman pursued, but the poacher managed to cross a deep but narrow gully which the keeper’s pony could not leap. Then, as Tom quaintly remarks, “He thought he hed hed enew on’t, and turned back to the lake. But I got my lines and board in spite of all. Aye, and there was about twenty pounds of fish on ’em.”

WASTDALEHEAD, WASTWATER

Wastwater—its memories are quite innumerable. On cycle the western shore is not difficult. The road undulates, but its surface is fair. It was a warm afternoon; rain had fallen during the previous night, but bright sunshine and sweeping breeze had dried up the exposed portions of the road, though under the trees it was still muddy. We started from Santon Bridge, a sweet hamlet in the gorge of the Irt, not usually found by those whose faces are toward Wastwater. For a couple of miles the road was up, up, and the hills were long; then down, down, down, and the descents were merry. And the Screes rose loftier in front, and looked more and more broken. Soon the level blue of Wastwater comes in sight over larch-tops. Then, as we pedal into a beech avenue, the full view is lost, but we see a succession of entrancing vistas: narrow shafts of meadow and woodland, of water and upspringing screes, framed in by dainty sprays of copper foliage. Through the tunnel of overhanging boughs is a glimpse of open moor and of distant fell. The road declines and our speed increases. To northward we see almost the full length of the mere; the faint breeze is urging the water to gayest laughter. The Screes, with their rainbow hues of native coal and iron, of green slate and brown conglomerate, are opposite. The afternoon sun is playing about their gullies: in some we see long, thin cascades, but between the cliffs fringing other ravines is a straight, heavy shadow. In there, unseen by the sun, the water jets and sprays in leaden glories; no rainbow dances in the soft white veils; dank, slimy cave-ferns grow in plenty.

Our road now passes into the wild moorland—terrace after terrace of hillocks we wind through, keeping near the lake’s level. The feature in this approach to Wastwater head is Yewbarrow. Seen from other points this seems rather tame, but from here it is impressive, commanding the whole view. The lake is still waving under the influence of the breeze; green, green and gold are the hillsides with grass and bracken. Among the stones the staghorn moss threads, sending up club-like spikes in profusion; every boulder is fringed with parsley fern. Yewbarrow, always changing shape, now appears as if cloven by a chasm from the great mass of mountains, and the name of the chasm is Bowderdale. There is heather by the roadside now, its tufts perfect masses of bloom, and the broom’s yellow glory is not wanting. In half a mile we leave the desolation of rock and grass—here are trees and even a few pieces of hedges, rowan and hawthorn, with a few scrubby oaks. The level plain of Wastdale head appears in front; we coast round guardian Yewbarrow, pass cottage and farm as far as the road serves, then push our machines to the church of the dale. Now the weather changes. The brilliant sunshine suddenly glooms and dies away. I look up to Great Gable, weather oracle of the glen—and am surprised. Half an hour ago a fluffy cloud seemed resting on it, but now a dark mass of vapour, distended with wind and bearded with unshed rain, has taken its place. And over the pass from Ennerdale on the left, and through the gully from Borrowdale on the right, the hosts of storm cloud are boiling. A contrary gust whispers a shrill warning; we seek shelter at once, but with a seething and a roar the storm is upon us, lashing rain-lines in our faces. Fifty yards away the vicar’s house offers shelter—we are not acquaintances, but—— In three minutes we are in his kitchen, looking out toward the glen of Mosedale. At first nothing more is visible than a grey mass of whirling rain, then, for a summer storm is but brief, again the flanks of the nearer fells come in sight. The pall passes rapidly, and the sunshine is pouring over the spine of Yewbarrow before the last rush of rain has streamed down the hospitable window. Ere long, the glen is again rejoicing in sunshine; the grass sparkles with fairy gems, the streaming crags are touched into shields of silver, the hoary crown of Gable seems to brighten as though the new spirit of life below made even it, the monarch, rejoice.

CHAPTER VIII
THE GLORY OF ENNERDALE

Lying beyond the pale of great mountains, and only connected by rugged passes with other sights of Lakeland, the lake of Ennerdale does not attract many tourists. The approach to it, otherwise than by mountain road, is circuitous; the traveller, coming by ordinary routes from the outside world, is carried across a great ironworking district, where every stream runs red mud, and where black smeltery smoke hangs low. Yet Ennerdale in its own peculiar fashion is beautiful.

In my early days the lake seemed connected, in my mind, with stories of pirates and privateers—Paul Jones hovered on the coast near by till a gale drove him and his cursing hordes out to sea—and as more intimate knowledge came to me I still found Ennerdale connected with illicit seafaring. Smugglers—and my ancestors are reputed to have been among the most active of these—landed cargoes in the coves about St. Bees Head. From there goods were sent northward by the coast to Carlisle and the Border, and eastward over the fells to Penrith, Kendal, and distant towns and villages of the Pennine. The first route was early closed, but that over the passes baffled the revenue officers for years. The head of Ennerdale was quite out of the world then. The smugglers built rough caches to store their loads in wild weather, and even engineered with skill a path over Great Gable in the direction of Borrowdale. To-day this green band is known as Moses’s Sledgate. Moses, however, was not a smuggler, but an illicit distiller who, after the decline of the finer art, reared his “worm” in the wilderness.

ENNERDALE LAKE AT SUNSET

A long climb over grassy open common brings the cyclist from Egremont to Ennerdale bridge: that irregular knot of houses, with its moss-veiled church, was in the past a mountain metropolis. Wordsworth’s poem, “The Brothers,” centres in this churchyard of the dale. As the poet thought out his theme, through his mind there must have passed memories of that grand, encircling chain of mountains, rugged Revelin, precipiced Pillar, and scree-strewn Iron Crag, with many more. Only in one real particular was the licence poetic indulged, for there were gravestones here, modest indeed, flat among smothering grasses or fringing the boundary walls.

Perhaps not at Ennerdale, but in equally remote districts, the church was used by smugglers. Under the rush-laid floor, cellars were dug to contain kegs of liquor, the miserably paid parsons conniving, often acting as selling agents. Church attendance would doubtless arouse more enthusiasm among grown men in days when the spent bottle could be exchanged after service for a full one, and there were “lashings” to drink beside. In one place where the parson could not be brought to see his “duty,” the kirkgarth was often tenanted by most eerie “corpse lights,” and had to be shunned accordingly by all honest folks and preventive men. Those “in the know,” however—and they were many—knew that brandy and rum would be plentiful next day, for a new supply of liquor had been hid in a raised vault, from which the parish clerk drew it as need arose.

From Ennerdale bridge the road climbs a couple of miles to the lake: in fact it somewhat overclimbs, for when at last the mere is viewed the wanderer is about three hundred feet too high, and has to descend by a very steep route to the Anglers Inn. That first glimpse is splendid: for half a mile back the hedgerows have prevented the eyes from wandering far, then suddenly bursts the glory. The waters deep beneath follow the mood of the day; laugh and sparkle when the sun shines and a warm breeze whispers; well gloomy and leaden when a host of clouds presses the mountains and shadows the lake-basin; swoon tender and soft when evening’s purple vapour drifts through passes and over summits, to collect in a pool in the valley beneath; surge and heave in breakers when a gale sweeps through the air; brood silent and sombre and still as a slab of jet when winter clothes the sky with deepest blue and the steeps with majesty of white.

THE PILLAR ROCK OF ENNERDALE

I prefer a boat for exploring the beauties of Ennerdale Water within and without, for the road to Gillerthwaite is rough, and the path by Anglers Crag not without some difficulty. Ennerdale within is represented by some fine trout and by an occasional char. On this lake the char in early autumn will come to the lure of a red ant. These insects at this season develop feeble wings; they haunt the sandy soil near the lake and are for ever essaying flights. A slight breeze is enough to sweep whole crowds of them over the water; they fly to the end of their strength, fall into the lake and are snapped up by the fish which lie in wait near the surface. In winter the char resort to the main stream entering the lake, for the purpose of spawning. For many years a certain part of the beck was known as the Char Dub, for in it, in numbers sufficient to render the bottom invisible, the shoals of fish lay. At the present day, however, the diminished char elect to spawn on a shingle further up the stream.

For its trout-fishing Ennerdale is justly noted: there can be little finer sport than trolling here, the boat moving slowly on, the waves lap-a-lap against its timbers. When the attention is taken from the water, what a fine panorama of steep and rocky mountains!

Maytime among the mountains—a day of soft creeping shadows and warm sunlight, the firmament white with lofty clouds, though here and there a wide rag of blue shows between. The boat welts away from the pier; clack, clack, fall the oars on to their pins, a moment later, to a rumble and a churn of water, the rower falls to work. Local men do not use the rowlock and the feathering oar; a rigid pin is fitted on the side of the boat upon which a perforation in the oarshaft slots. The contrivance has undoubted advantages to anglers, as the oars do not need to be lifted inboard when not in use; secure on their pins they can trail through the water. But why all lake boats should be so fitted is beyond comprehension, for the superiority of the rowlock and the feathering oar is palpable: a boat can be pulled faster and more easily, and in moments of danger—which on a day of sudden squalls are frequent—are not less reliable.

As our boat slips away, the upper lake, a field of splendid blue, comes in sight. In mid-lake a tuft of rock claims attention—the boat glides to it over the faint ripples. It proves indeed to be a cluster of loose fragments, pushed up from the lake-floor to be a resting-place for the birds of land and water. So piled are the stones that it seems impossible human hands have not been busy in the midst of this waste of waters. Anglers and others have proved by crude methods that the protrusion is the crest of a sheer column of rock, or rocks as the case may be. If the figures confidently given are approximately correct, when, if ever, Ennerdale runs dry, an inaccessible pinnacle will be found to puzzle our rock gymnasts. Herons alight here to meditate and digest their toll of troutlets; and swift warriors of the air, buzzard, peregrine, and more humble sparrow-hawk, hover down to the islet-rock to rest and plan anew their forays. When afloat on Ennerdale the mountains, with infinite variety of shadow and gleam, rock and grass and downpouring water, demand most of my attention. I seldom look to the lake’s outlet: it is a comparatively flat scene if your boat is past the rugged slopes of Revelin. A long larch-wood fringes the shore—its monotonous blob of green in strong contrast to the livelier fellside dabbed with creamy, blooming hawthorns. Next to it, over a knot of buildings, rises an unsightly shaft of brick, belonging to a long-disused thread mill. The effect of rectangular wood and cylindrical chimney is dreary, stupid; it apes a modernity which here, in God’s wilderness, is at least unpicturesque.

Our vigorous friend at the oars has meanwhile brought us close to Anglers Crag. The bottom of the lake remains invisible, though the boat’s nose grates against the sheering rock; looking over the side, through the clear water, the slabs drop lower and lower till gathering gloom hides them from sight. The “crag” above, though steep, is quite climbable; it is worth while going ashore to scramble for ten minutes. The boat accordingly turns into a narrow bay where we may land on a beach of shelving shingle. The bank above is plenteously strewed with slabs of rock, though the “crag” is to our right. Up the hillside we find our view rapidly extending to westward, though the mountains still hem us in on all other sides. Shortly the sea is visible beyond smoky West Cumberland. The forms of shipping can be made out, sailing the channels through the shoals of Solway. And farther away still, if the day be clear, the hills of Scotland rise in an undulating line of blue. St. Bees Head is the only feature in a comparatively regular shore: a mass of sandstone, it sheers up four hundred feet above the strand. Here, on its very crest, once was a monastery, the lands of which were won by a miracle. St. Bega and her zealots landed hereabouts and found the people worshippers of strange Norse gods, unwilling to hear the new gospel and impatient for the visitors to be gone.

“Your God is almighty!” sneered the chief, “I will give you all the land in my domain that to-morrow bears snow. Your God is almighty; and you need nothing from humans—ask Him, then, for snow.”

The morrow was Midsummer Day; at early morn the folks of the country rose to find a mantle of cold, glistering white covering nearly all the land betwixt mountain and sea. The chief’s jest was, so runs the tale, carried out in full, and through war and peace the monks held to their inheritance till smooth King Henry divided their lands to others.

Down we come to the lake edge again, to raid the haunt of coot and heron—both birds not rare on Ennerdale Lake, the quietude of which is just perfect. Our boat floats in as wild and savage a scene as is to be made by mere and fell. The Char Dub is visited, the huge mass of Pillar Crag noted at as near a point as possible. Now, coasting barren fields above which the skylarks are trilling, and by shores decked with star-primroses, we return from the wilderness to the forest lands of oak and ash and alder.

Ennerdale Lake, though less visited than the other waters, is in its way as beauteous as they.

CHAPTER IX
BY SOFT LOWESWATER

Close enfolded in the lap of mountains, Loweswater is seldom seen by the casual tourist. At Scale Hill, a rugged ravine with a white river dashing down, is pointed as the direction in which it lies. At the sight of that crag-set hillside the cyclist turns regretfully and, down the good Lorton road, speeds away for Cockermouth or Keswick. Yet if the writer were compelled to seek another home among the Lakes, after Rothay’s magic glen he would select Loweswater. And there are others who would do likewise, who year after year come to the little secluded lake for holiday. For tell it not loudly, its trouting is the best in the Lake Country. The angling is not public, but it is possible to obtain permission for a week’s pleasure. The trout rule large for our northern waters, fish of over three pounds being landed every season.

LOWESWATER

As mentioned already, the lake is hidden in the flank of Mellbreak, the front of which sheds scree and occasional boulders into Crummock. For ages the dell was a stronghold of the ’statesmen who lived on their own holdings, but as hard times came the mischievous jointure system caused one small estate after another to come into the market. Lucky the monied in that dark era: the farmers grew despondent as their obligations increased. After centuries of abstemity rum and whisky began to be relished, with dire results. Wool which for long had stood at a good price fell rapidly to almost a nominal figure. Desperate farmers did not market their “clips” for several seasons in the hope that times would mend. But old stock was finally sold at whatever price offered. The vast imports from the new Australian colonies in the middle of last century thus completed the destruction which the Repeal of the Corn Laws began. Some who do not wish to see a return to Protectionism point out patches cumbered with heather where wheat was cultivated in those days of inflated prices. To force up prices that such wastes might become profitable, they say, would not benefit the farmer, the shepherd, or the dalesman now, as it did not in the past. The opponents to this view point with equal confidence to the days when the ’statesman was firm on his own soil, living and working at profit enough to pay out the jointures placed on him in his father’s anxiety to “do fair by his own.” A change, they sigh, might bring back those happy days. I take no side, save to say that the highest tariff imaginable cannot bring back the worthy, faulty ’statesman families. They are gone for ever. Strangers dwell within their gates, and till their fields.

There are no great houses round Loweswater, no castle was ever built in this domain of peace. The ancient farms, with their guardian yews, speak of gone days. I never see the twin trees by a farmstead with the inevitable box edge from gate to door without thinking of the old custom of setting a bowl of box in the porch of the house where a corpse was lying. Every one who visited was expected to take a sprig. Box grows slowly—the hedge planted by a man is hardly seen at maturity by his great-grandson; the Cumbrian peasant custom must have been an effectual reminder to all of man’s narrow span on earth.

To me Loweswater is a great reminder of olden days. No glaring hotel, no road traversed by hooting motor-cars or rattling coaches. A man can sit far up the slope of Mellbreak, look down on placid water and quiet vale, and allow his mind to ramble back fifty or a hundred years. He can re-picture the old glen and its society. First the priest. His church was small, his stipend ditto. As he was the head of society, christening babies, marrying the grown, and burying the dead, so the schoolmaster was generally the opposite. He was ordinarily despised, whereas the parson sometimes was revered. During the week the vicar was a farmer among farmers; he had a tithe of wool, could have sheep free on the heafs above the enclosures, which his parishioners had to look after. He took tithe of the sheaves at harvest, and of every kind of produce. The greater part of the schoolmaster’s remuneration was in the shape of victuals: he went “whittle-gate” by turns to the home of his pupils, living a week here, a week there. He was scrivener and will-maker to the parish where the priest did not take that office. He taught but few subjects: reading, writing, little arithmetic. But sometimes there was Latin and Greek and Hebrew for the really studious, as behind ale-soaked clothes, and in a fuddled brain, a schoolmaster might possess real classical knowledge. On the other hand, men who had had accidents at other callings, or were too worthless for manual labour, drifted into the teaching profession. Knowing only the merest rudiments and careless of learning more, they could not benefit the children, and were often a fearful example for them.

THE OLD POST OFFICE, LOWESWATER

One of the main amusements of old dales-life in winter was dancing, either at merry nights, or at what were called “dancing classes.” To provide the music for these lived a class of wandering minstrels. What lives they led! I well remember poor old Tim, the last of these to come within my sight. He came to our knot of houses just as dusk was falling. He carried his fiddle in a green bag, and as he neared, took out the instrument and tuned a single string. Then his old voice trolled out, “Home, sweet home,” in faltering accents as he walked back and forward. Ages ago minstrels played by the hearths of the great, and sang the legends of golden renown: here Tim, tottering, his fiddle almost in ruins, his voice quavering over the well-known words, trying to get from poor cottagers enough to buy drink, or a night’s lodging. Poor Tim! His story was sad. He had money left him when he was a hard-working shoemaker nearly thirty years of age. To that time his only solace had been in music. The legacy turned his head, and in a short six months he was ruined. The little shop where he had mended boots was in the hands of the bailiffs, his wife and children were on the road with him. For awhile they travelled together, then the children were rescued by relatives—the poor wife dragged along alone in the wake of the drunken fiddler. At last too she faded away, died by a snow-covered roadside, and Tim went down to the bed-rock of despair. “I want no money, give me ale.” Fiddling here, and singing there till his voice gave way, he wandered a score years. Many tried to rescue him; once his little shop was restored him and for a whole summer he stuck to his “last.” But with dark nights, music was required at the inn, and he was tempted again. He trailed himself across from one merrymaking to another. He lived as he might; he slept as he could. And the morning before I saw him a farmer walking on the top of his hay-mow stepped on something that cracked. “Dash thee! thoo’s brokken my fiddle, and I’ll hae to play at t’ Ploo to-neet.” As he felt old age and death creeping on him, he wandered away from the country-side which was his home, and put miles of flat country between him and the mountains before the final call.

Another person who knew much of the dale in the old time would be the dumb fortune-teller. Persons without the power of speech were always credited in Cumbria with divination. The fortune-tellers were the most respectable of vagabonds: they worked satisfactorily and were well paid. No gloomy forecast was ever to my knowledge delivered. I have seen many of their hieroglyphs, some in picture-writing, promising untold good to the person who had consulted them. But the gipsies were, and are, another matter. The pedlar, too, was a well-known figure; with his pack on back he would go from farm to farm, selling all sorts of little tempting things.

To come to the lake at last. It is one of our smaller meres, and the quietest. It lies in a land of meadows, but lofty hillsides rise above its glen. No boats are kept for public use, but a visitor can usually arrange a loan with some farmer. Loweswater is not a lake to exhaust in one afternoon: the cunning ones lodge by the week at the clean, comfortable farms, enjoying the plain fare of rural Cumberland with a delight bred of open air and keen exercise. The rod is hardly ever from the waters, except for a siesta at midday—and not then if the day be overcast, with a warm breeze kissing the water and enticing broods of new insects from the depths. There are no char in Loweswater, though attempts have been made at introduction: probably the water is hardly deep enough to suit it.

To row out on a warm summer night and to fish here from midnight to dawn is a splendid experience. Though along the northern ridges a pale night-glow glimmers and fades, and the stars like diamonds glitter in the light blue above, down on the level waters everything is gloom. The man resting on his oars is a dark shadow: your companion’s “kent” face, though he has turned toward the light, is a patch of featureless grey. To see your fly it must be held high enough to come between your eyes and the narrow swathe of light on the horizon. Your boat drifts through the prattling wavelets slowly, slowly. Then along the line comes the expected tremor: a fish at last. No use trying to play him—get him to the surface: your tackle is strong enough to take some risks. Your rod responds to its struggles, yet you cannot guess where the trout is. Perhaps it may rush to the top and set up a faint wimple that catches the night light. In a few minutes, however, the fish is tired out and you draw it alongside. The largest of trout are nocturnal feeders, and the angler is occasionally delighted by very heavy fish. Persons unaccustomed to night on the water assert that the silence is almost appalling: save for the ripples against the timbers there is no sound. To me, however, there is pleasure in that far-off whistle of an otter; in the churrs and twitters, hoots and shrieks, of night birds. There is a romance in gloom of which garish day knows nothing. The fairy world visits you again, and you witness gay revels in the starlight.

The lake to the angler, the hillside and the meadows to the wanderer, are the charms of the vale. He who is not satisfied with the softly trawling boat, the midge-worried hour of non-success, can ramble in the woods and fields, with their glories of sedge and iris and cloying meadow-sweet, and up the rivulets dancing down shadowy ghylls. Climb the shoulder of Mellbreak, sit down every five minutes and look around. By this method a full enjoyment of the peaceful vale will be obtained. Notice the nearest things—the rose beetles: your friend down below in the green old boat will be sighing for such a one as that just turned over; and that crushing mass of parsley fern which, though the whole hillside is open to it, sticks close by that grey, weathered stone. The lake is now quite small below, a mere dot shows you the lazily floating boat: think scornfully now of the angler and his petty work. Look beyond, the great moors rolling toward St. Bees, the hills fining down to the North Cumberland plain, the Derwent here and there gleaming between banks of living green. Criffel and the Dumfries-shire hills, across the Solway. A patch of smoke shows the cathedral city of Carlisle, and you feel a pity for the workers under that pall. They think they see the sun shine, but you in a purer air rejoice in a more life-giving light than that pale gleam they praise. The bracken too is here, unfolding its last tendrils, and away goes a single red grouse with a mighty whirr and a squauking “Go back!”

A sound of human and canine voices comes now to the ear; and turning an outstanding rock, we come immediately to a busy scene. It is a sheep-washing; to the clamour of dogs, and the whistling and shouting of shepherds, are added the bleatings of two thousand sheep. One drove is on the hillside above marshalled by a pair of collies, another is below, threading an almost unseen track toward some distant holding. A shepherd is in charge of these, his dogs scouting to right and left. No straggler can bolt into the confusion of sheep in the little glen. Here a dam has been built just below a rudely piled fold. The sheep are driven into an outer court, then drafted into a small inner space. From this they are thrown into the water, which has been collecting since yesterday (so meagre is the stream), where men standing waist deep catch them. Holding the sheep’s head above water these quickly pass hands back and forward over the fleece, raising it so that water penetrates to the under-wool. This done to satisfaction the sheep are allowed to swim out. When one flock has been washed, it is sent to the portion of unfenced hillside from which it came. The scene is one of bustle; the work is arduous too, some of the men have been collecting and driving down their flocks since early dawn. Shortly after the washing, comes the day of “clipping,” when the fleece is removed, but the days of great “clippings” are past. Wool becomes ripe at different periods; and instead of treating the flock on a certain day only, the shepherd now shears as fast as fleeces are ready.

Standing above the washing pool we look down on the little animated patch—the struggling ewes, the water turgid with “dip,” the skilful men in water and on land, the ’cute collies watching their master’s flock and allowing no stranger to enter it. Beyond the dry stones of the river-bed, in a vista bounded by the steep sides of the gully, we see the lake in all its beauty. Woods, fields, diminished with distance, yet seem but over the brink of the chasm there.

Now from heather and bracken we return to green pastures and to the little ivied farmhouse, with old-fashioned doorway and chimney, which is our temporary home. All is peace around: the rookery is hardly heard across the intervening fields; the raven, in the blue above, scarce in all its wheels and hovers sends down one menacing croak. The day is spent, and up the western sky spreads a suffuse of crimson, flecked with wisps of cloud; at last night draws on, softly, bluely, creeping into the hollows of the hills and into the deeper shadows; the radiant lake dies from crimson to grey, and then, to the clatter of rowlocks, our boat comes home to the grassy pier.

CHAPTER X
CRUMMOCK WATER

Two chief routes bring you easily to Crummock Water—the first to Scale Hill at its foot, the other to its head, over Newlands Hause. From northward, as you approach, the hills on either side the vale of Lorton rise to higher flights, to greater ruggedness. At Scale Hill there is a sudden glimpse up the lake, a silvery level stretching far into the mountain land. Your way has wound round a great tumulus of rock and larch and oak which chokes the vale, to bring you so quickly to this lovely view.

CRUMMOCK WATER, FROM SCALE HILL

Wild and stern is Crummock. All is particularly gloomy and forlorn on an afternoon threatening snow. The hillsides start up grey and stark and desolate. The only sounds you hear are the occasional yelp of a sheep dog in the fields near by and the sulky croak of a raven, a black spot up there where a grim cloud is hovering, shutting out the life of day, and sending the weather-wise sheep cluthering to sheltered spots by ghyll and fence. Suddenly the grey firmament above drops on to the hilltops and smothers them. Then snow begins to flutter, first in single flakes, then in a small shower which grimes the nearer fields and paths. Finally the storm giant asserts himself and a continuous shadow of white falls around. That far-off mist-wall which showed the head of the vale is shut off; only a few yards of grey lake trembling and tossing into little waves as the north wind harries it. At such a time it is well to seek shelter, for the gale may be wild and strong as day dies, and the snow fall in winding sheets. Rather, then, turn indoors and listen to stories of stress—the shepherd can tell you of peril faced for the sake of his flock; the postman, of danger in his daily round: men as wild and strong and devoted in their way as pioneer-heroes in a cannibal land, and as deserving to furnish matter for stories of renown. Through rain and shine, when torrents brawl havoc, rending bridges like straws, when drifts hide even the tall tree tops,—

“The service admits not a ‘but’ or an ‘if’”

and the gritty postman, by one device or another, wins through with his mails to solitary farm or wild moorland hamlet. And they live long, despite their hardships, as witness one who, after a day’s wrestle with the unbanded elements, was asked how he fared.

“Why, man, it’s wild on t’ top. I tried to git ower t’ moor, but I couldn’t. I gat to that lile [little] black planting, hooivver, aboot halfway, and I rested a bit. Then I said to mesel, I said, ‘Noo, Wat, thoo’s faced it four and fifty year, thoo sureli isn’t gaen to gie in noo.’ And at that I set tull again, and I gat ower; but it was hard wark, mindst ta.”

By calm hearth the dalesmen tell their stories; the gale rumbles against the house, and the windows tinkle to the driving of snowflakes. By morning the storm has passed, the ground is deep in snow, sky and hilltops are clear, stars still shine down on a scene of quietness and savage peace. Soon dawn-beams fire the east, and the summits are touched with rose. With full day the greyness clinging to the mountain flanks disappears, revealing riven glens and beetling crags. A boat is being launched for an expedition to seek what wild fowl may during the storm have taken refuge on the lake, and on it we go. On the open water the cold is terrible; pulling with might and main would hardly relieve the numbness of hands and feet, but our game is wary and any incautious rattle of oars would send them beyond reach. For half an hour we put up with the discomfort, then find that the boat is leaking badly and that a baler has to be used freely to keep the floors from floating. We ask to be put ashore!

On the road, walking is less difficult than we had imagined. At one place is quite a hundred yards of wind-swept path, but at a gateway the soft snow is piled deep. It is hard work passing even occasional drifts where you wade waist-deep for yards. At places the road between cliff and lake is so blocked that we climb along the open hillside. Now from an outstanding crag above the road we have a view of the lake and its surroundings. The water lies in a huge trough, bounded by immense walls of mountain, hardly ever falling far enough back to allow an alluvial meadow to slip between. Mellbreak! What a mighty mass! White are the wide fans of scree, but black and frowning the tiers of precipice. Above in a grand sweep comes the head of the mighty monarch, from which the sunshine is striking a thousand frost spangles. The sky is deep blue overhead. Hark to the croaking of the ravens; they seem to have found some carrion—perhaps a dead sheep—in yonder ghyll, and down they come, one, two, three, in all six, a crowd for these unsociable birds. Some of the ghylls are choked with snow, but others show black, rocky rents in the snowfields. Particularly I look for the great ravine down which comes Scale Force, the highest of our waterfalls. Once I climbed that gorge on a moonlit night in winter. Never to be forgotten that scene! An opal sky streaming with faint beams of aurora, tall crags closing the chasms, the fern-like alders limned against the starry glow above, the water rolling in pearly waves over the rock-edge toward me, then falling through an unseen zone to trouble the darkling pool at my feet.

Part of our homeward route lies through woodlands, where we watch a busy squirrel visiting its cache of nuts, and where, among the snow-laden branches, scores of little birds flit and twitter. Once we hear a buzzard mewing high above, and a sparrow-hawk’s raucous voice, but neither bird is seen.

Crummock in midsummer is a dream of delight. Once lately, on a warm summer evening, I cycled up its shore from Scale Hill. The road is rather gritty and loose of surface, but quite ridable. The sun was dipping toward the mountain ridges, pouring a flood of glorious light into the valley. From the lake came the chunk-unk of oars; two heavy-laden boats were being pulled toward the foot of the lake, and soon a clear young voice rippled across the water to us the charming strains of “Killarney.” What a sublime scene! Lofty Mellbreak sheering from the water’s edge, Grassmoor and many another craggy giant sweeping up to invisible heights above us, the golden green of new bracken, the purple bloom of heather, here and there an emerald patch of larches. To me there is infinite change in a view over a wide lake. Those huge, irregular phantoms are the shadows of a cloud above: they sweep across the lake, then dull the mountainside; drop away into some deep glen, pass on to dim far-away summits ere they slide over the horizon. The emotions of the heavens are reflected in God’s mirror beneath. Should a thunderstorm gather, then the lake is cast in gloom, sable ripples heave and fall. To the roaring of heaven’s artillery and the blinding flare of lightning, the fury approaches, passes, and the water wimples and rejoices in the falling curtains of rain. After storm, how noble and sweet that restful bosom! With fresh sunlight the land renews life and hope. The down-bent harebell rises again to dance in the gentle airs that play about; the heather casts off its gleaming pearls—down the sinewy fronds of bracken runs a tribute to the thin soil. Birds burst forth in wild chorus: the throstle and the blackbird make the rowaned ghylls resound; wagtails, wrens, linnets, each pipe their tuneful parts. To these from on high joins in the ringing of the skylark—a wild song of defiance to the storm, of thanks for coming calm to the Most High. And the lake, ruffled with passing breezes, seems to rejoice as well. There is a fragrance of earth and air and land after a summer storm on Crummock Water.

CRUMMOCK WATER AND BUTTERMERE

Away across the lake, by the bouldery ness the torrent of Scale has driven into the mere, are two islets, and from one a smudge of smoke is travelling lazily. What more delightful than to have a foretaste of the joy of picnicing there? The road now inclines from the water, and we climb toward the village of Buttermere where a new series of views awaits.

Perhaps fewer people live by Crummock than by any other lake: the fells hem it in too closely for farms to be settled. There is much shepherding on the commons, where flocks wander unchecked over wide areas. It was in a scene similar to this that a touring Devonian ventured to tell his Cumberland host that he did not think much of this sort of country, for, he explained:

“Down in Devonshire we have land, we can grow apples, and we have green meadows.”

“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.

HONISTER PASS AND BUTTERMERE

It is a rare pleasure to be at Buttermere after a series of rain-storms. From the rockrib wherefrom the church commands its little flock, you look into a great amphitheatre of crag-set mountains. Beneath the eye is the water; it seems to be palpitating with movement from the rich riot its tributaries are hurling down the steeps. See how it wimples beneath the farther shore—through a wide rent in the lake-bed untold gallons of water are being forced upward from the heart of the earth; that flat circle in mid-lake against which the creeping catspaw of wind in vain forces its feeble ripples shows another fountain swelling up in quiet power. The steep hillsides are seamed with threads of white; Sour Milk ghyll, in a shimmering veil, sways from skyline to lake-shore. Where often a hermit stream hides and glides behind crest of rock, beneath screen of bracken, now is all tearing, jumping, spreading fosse. Every fold in the hillside casts down its bounding cascade; there is nothing in the air so loud as this turmoil of waters, this joy-song of deeps bursting from dark prisons in bog and crag. Already, we are warned, the paths to Wastdale and Ennerdale are impassable; the floods are out at Gatescarth. Climbing would be a questionable pleasure to-day; “beck-dodging” is far more suitable. At first our road is dry, washed free from dust by the heavy rain; through wide culverts the floods rumble beneath. The wider becks are bridged: look up this tree-hung gullet and see how the waters wilder down. Not in waves do they come, but in great gush after great gush, green and white. How they crash against unseen rocks, throwing feathers of spray at every shock, till the stream shooting beneath the arch seems but a flying mass of airy, tortured foam! There comes the sprite, the winged spirit of the day, robed in brown and white—the dipper, our mountain water-crow. How it chirrups and revels in the tumult! how it flirts its tiny wings and dives through some curling gout of spray! how it scolds the volume roaring through the darkened tunnel beneath the road, causing it, O highly important fairy, to flight up like a mere blackbird, among the dripping plumes of larch!

“Boat ahoy!” we shout anon, and our friend afloat a field’s breadth away waves answer; in a minute the boat is grinding the gravel, and we are almost down the soaking field to reach it.

“What, tired of fishing?” we ask. He is a desperate keen one with the rod as a rule, yet his tackle is packed up.

“No,” he grumbles, “can’t catch anything.”

“Now I did think to-day would suit you. Good spates in the becks, a light breeze, and plenty of cool clouds,” I marvel.

“Now look here,” protested the angler wearily, “it’s no good talking like that. The floor of this lake is leaking upwards as though the steam was escaping by a thousand cracks in the ceiling of the nether regions and being condensed into Buttermere. Why, man, the lake bottom’s that lively that the trout and the char, the big pike down to the tiny minnow, are all having a job to hold the water at all. I bet every minute they’re expecting a geyser that’ll blow the whole lot of ’em over Red Pike to Ennerdale.”

When an angler relapses into this mood he is hopeless to cheer, so we silently respect his sorrows. Perhaps into that vigorous pulling he will throw some of his despondency. Now Fleetwith, flanked by the precipice of Honister, is frowning at us over the low fields. To the right, against a background of watery clouds, is limned rugged Scarf Gap; the path to it is white with rushing waters. The rocks everywhere glimmer with oozing springs: down Honister pass a wide torrent is foaming, attracting to it many a milky force from Robinson and Fleetwith-side. The scraggy stone-pines by the lake-head give a characteristic finish to this scene of sodden brae and spouting rill. Save for the sycamores round the farm of Gatesgarth, there is hardly a tree for shelter; the aspect is bleak and storm-riven. The boat is run on to the shingles beneath the Scotch firs that we may land. Not far away is the main road; we pass up the hillside beyond it. In the recess beneath Fleetwith we are conscious of a flood indeed. Much of the stony level is swamped; with difficulty the sheep have been brought from danger, and are flocked near the farmstead. The torrents rushing in at the head of the mere can be traced, first by white horses, then by dark, level-flowing currents, far down the lake. From this height we again feel that the great water is rocking in its cradle of mountains. The furrows of incoming rills give the peculiar idea of ever-changing level to the water. I have never yet seen the whole level to Scale under water—one lake of eight miles instead of two smaller ones—but viewed from these heights it must be a noble sight indeed. Our boat pushed into the in-dashing beck, rapidly rides to halfway down the lake, thence by carefully avoiding unfavourable currents we easily make our landing-place.

To my mind, the valley is hardly less interesting when a thick winter mist glooms it, when, for all you can see, there is no difference between Honister top, the crest of Robinson, and the stony fields round Gatescarth. Under such circumstances it is well to be afloat an hour, and allow impressions to establish themselves in your mind. Twenty yards out you lose the land: the boat glides along in a grey circle of moving fogbeards and rippling waters. Save for the sounds from bow and rowlock you are in a dead silence. Shortly, however, the ear catches faint echoes: the croak of the raven, the skirl of the curlew, ranging in clear upper air, with now and then the attenuated bleat or low or crow from the farmlands. In mid-lake there are few sounds of water-birds, though at an odd time a coot, traversing the width, may show, a scared patch of brown and white, inside your zone of vision. The lake-birds are cuttering softly close inshore, finding the curtain of cloud an effective cloak for feeding. An hour of boating thus, in gloom and rowk, will form an experience not to be forgotten.

THE BORROWDALE YEWS
Evening

The fishing of Buttermere is now in a few hands: sportsmen have leased the mere and devoted much attention to its re-stocking. The result is that few anglers outside this coterie come here, though on an occasional day the mountain becks are worthy attention. Most visitors here are active enough to relish rambles over the fells, and there are many routes to select from. Away from the narrow band of meadow-land touching the lake, there are few obstacles to free-and-easy wanderings. Sheep walks are divided by wire fences, but these are fairly negotiable, by climbing over at the “posts” or squeezing between the running strands where slackest. Stout folks find the latter the preferable method. To make the circuit of the glen of the lake is a fairly big task, but it can be divided into three moderate courses. You start by crossing the meadows and climbing Scale Force brow, then, left-handed, along Red Pike and High Stile (over bog and bracken, across ghyll and up steep, with a glimpse into Ennerdale here, a peep through Newlands at Derwentdale there, and always the moor in sight, with a clean, sweet breeze and, if the day be clear, a wedge of blue sea on the horizon), finally descending into Scarf Gap, the home of mists, where an easy return path ends course one. From Scarf Gap, into the back-o’-beyont country behind Haystacks, and to Brandreth with its legs into Buttermere, Ennerdale and Borrowdale, always keeping to the right, and ending the course over Fleetwith to Honister Hause. From Brandreth it is easy to pass over Green Gable to Great Gable, and so to gain Wastwater. Honister pass-head is the scene of a legendary battle between Britons and Picts, or between Angles and Scots—history hardly decides which. One party had been a-foraying in Borrowdale and hoped to withdraw over this pass with their spoil; their pursuers, however, cut them off and, after a wild resistance, recovered the cattle. From Honister Hause—it is a wild place of rocks and screes and untamable streams—the final stage carries the wanderer over Dale Head to Hindscarth, whence he descends by Robinson to Buttermere or to Newlands Hause.

Every one walks up Honister as a matter of course. What is it like on a bright July day, when the beating heat is tempered by a smart breeze? Every rambler should live with eyes open to nature; to-day will repay him his interest. Up in the brilliant blue ravens and hawks are hovering, crows and rooks are ever passing over the glen. From one wood to another the wild pigeon wings rapidly, the blackbirds in the hedges are busy at their nestage duties. Take note of the flowers, O man with seeing eyes. In the pastures are great purple spikes of loose-strife, amid the white waves of ox-eyes; round by the lake are belts of blue lobelia. The air is full of the scent of meadow-sweet, the honey-suckle here and there throws trailers, adorned with creamy bloom, along the hedges, and in great clusters blow the wild roses. Up the shady beck-courses you might find the blue forget-me-not and the still bluer birdlime, and in the mossy springs the violet-shaped butterwort. Butterflies and dragon-flies, softer moths and gaudy beetles, are attracted by the multi-flavoured feast spread about.

Now we come to Gatescarth, the largest sheep-farm within many a mile. A noted breeder of mountain sheep lives here, one who has done much to improve our semi-wild Herdwicks—much honour to him. The farmlands, even in the glorious to-day, look harsh and bare, though the soft, short sward is of the greenest. In winter there is often severe stress here; at times the shepherds are called upon to collect, in a day of storm, the flocks from far-off crags and ghylls. Long hours are spent battling the elements, collecting the unwilling sheep, and bringing them down. The wanderer here on a stormy winter night is not unlikely to see a light patrolling far up the hillsides—one of the belated shepherds patiently driving his sheep down from the danger of flood and drift and gale. The white cross which is attracting the eye, O inquirer, is erected to the memory of a young lady accidentally killed at that spot: “In the midst of life we are in death,” is carved on it. The incident is one to make every mountaineer pause and think. It was an everyday risk, alas! The lady descending a steep slope held her alpenstock straight in front of her; the point struck the ground, but the lady slipped, her chin caught on the butt of the stick and, such was the force of the fall, her neck was dislocated, causing immediate death. Such an accident is possible a score times in every day’s walk here. Now the great crag of Honister is frowning by our very side. Around its base the rambler will find broad tracts of alpine ladies’ mantle, while forked spleenwort and many a rare plant besides are among the screes and shelving rocks. Among the grass and boulders near our path are long fantastic growths of stagshorn moss, with more alpine ladies’ mantle, with wild thyme, the precious eyebright and yellow tormentil lifting their lovely heads in the desolate wilderness. Now we reach the passhead: Honister is the wildest of our passes, the place where the great thews of Nature are least hid. But the slate quarries make Honister less desirable to some eyes; great confusions of debris, railroads sweeping up into the bowels of the great crags; for nowadays men do not work here, as they did in Wordsworth’s time, hanging down the cliff in frail basket-chairs tapping and blasting the surface rock, nor do they carry down the slate on handsledges as they did two score years or so ago. The mining is more scientific—more reliance is placed on machinery than on men. The new railroad, carrying slates to Seatollar has improved one thing at any rate—there is far less of that penetrating screaming of brakes than when the loaded carts descended the pass-road. On a calm day the racket could be heard for miles.

LODORE AND DERWENTWATER
A summer’s morn

CHAPTER XII
THE CHARMS OF DERWENTWATER

Proud Cumberland ranks Derwentwater as queen of the English Lakes; but I was born south of Dunmail raise, and feel at liberty to worship at other altars. To see the lake at its best one needs be afoot long before the coaches and motors appear. A road smothered in dust clouds, an atmosphere quivering with clatter, the fumes of petrol and the general unpleasantness of heavy traffic, detract from the most imperious beauty. At daybreak the town is almost silent: sweet mountain air has descended to dissipate the closeness of midnight; the songs of larks and throstles are wafted into the medley of houses and streets from the fields and woods; the murmur of flowing Greta is pleasant indeed. On Friars Crag you may meet an early visitor, and at the landings a boatman is cleaning up. As you stand there, in a pleasant but undeniable way the waters call. “A boat, sir? Certainly. Will you wait till I’ve finished here?” And you watch the man haste on his scrubbing and polishing. In two minutes he scrambles on to the pier, selects oars and cushions, sees you safe in your place, and gives a push off.

As yet no other boat is astir: you have the wide expanse to yourself. From Friars Crag scores of people in the summer watch the sun set. And at the close of a clear day the scene is glorious, even sublime. Around a hundred peaks, ranging from noble Skiddaw to humble Swineside and Catbells, the shafts of light fall and ebb. Here in the rift between two summits is a stretch of purple, there a patch of rosy light fades on a scree-seamed brae. If the sun sets in a flurry of crimson cloud the spectators will hardly take their eyes from the lake: the reflections of the sky are so charming, so magnificent. No painter could match the evanescent changes, the kindlings of the sky, the soft portrayal of each living flame on the shimmering water, the green gloom of overhanging mountains. What boots it if the fiery splendour is a presage of rain when so splendid a pageant is the forecast? To your left is rocky Derwent Isle. Fountains Abbey held it, before the Dissolution of Monasteries, as Vicars Isle; it has had half a dozen names since. Secluded, a fringe of trees hiding its narrow lawn, a house stands here which for sheer romantic situation would be hard to beat in the Lake Country or wide England. I would sit in an upper room there, on a day of April squalls. First in the grey nor’-east I would see the storm clouds gather darkly behind the cone of Skiddaw.

DERWENTWATER, FROM CASTLE HEAD
A bright morning

Derwentwater is lap-lapping merrily against the stony beaches beyond the green sward, every wave wearing a sunlit crown. The great hollows of the mountain range are now filled with battling vapour; from right and left round lower summits they move to desperate attack—dun curls of skirmishers in front, heavy phalanxes of infantry grey behind. Down the air comes a whisper of riot and war, and with soundless impact we see the two hordes meet, shock, and mingle. Jagged as with unseen artillery, the battle sways from end to end; then, like a bolt of Jove, over brawny Skiddaw hurls a deluge of rain-sodden grey, the strife ceases, a sharp, steady line of mists cuts off the seen from the unseen. Now a grey shadow steals over the land, the bubbling life is chilled from the waters, and they rattle black and harsh against the cobble-stones. But on Grange fell the russet bracken is bathed in ephemeral sunshine. The shadow in the air grows darker, the distance is obscured with the grime of rain. The nearer hills, the fields, the town, are blotted out ere the full fury of the squall shakes our window and shrieks among the island trees. Like crest of cruelly spurred horse, the waves toss high, the mad gusts catch the rising gouts, wrench them clear into the air and hustle them along to crash in resounding sheets far up the shore. No boat was, we recollect with pleasure, visible before the squall descended: it would go hard with such a one just now. One experience of a squall on a mountain lake is enough for the most daring. I remember my baptism in such manner vividly. The yacht had but one sail spread to the breeze, but maniac Boreas caught it, pinned us down while water poured into the well, wrenched and screamed and worried at the mast and gear till that went overboard with a crash, then, with a final paroxysm, spun the hulk round and passed away over a waste of churning, creaming waters. More comfortable to face the gale with thin glass in front than to fare like that. The trees bend like switches, but the gloom is now rising from north-east. In a minute a flood of sunlight is pouring down, waking to brilliance the flooded lawn, and making sparkle the drop-decked boughs. Look into the wake of the retiring storm. The lake is still leaping white and racing along; a dim film hides the crags above Grange: now it passes, so quickly as almost to make one start at the rapid change. It would be dowly living at Derwent Isle when fog dark and drear hid lake and town: one might feel lonesome when the blizzards whistled and fumbled against window and door, and the waves crashed without the snug retreat. But how joyous this morning, when the sun is aloft and day has risen refreshed from the bath of night and is newly beginning a pageant of song and life and changing colour!

Further up the lake is Lord’s Isle, where once lived the Earls of Derwentwater. On the attainder and execution of the last of the title the mansion fell into ruins: some of its stone was used in building Keswick market-hall. The last earl was much loved in Cumberland; he was staunch to the Stuarts, as were most Northern gentry, and intrigued widely to bring about their return. When the first Pretender landed, bringing such sorry allies and little promise beyond, the earl foresaw that insurrection would be useless and dangerous to the participants. He argued that, although the Stuart was in Scotland, no rebellion need be attempted in the North of England until the party there were better prepared. In the secret council the earl was held little better than a traitor; at home his wife accused him of cowardice, demanding his sword and horse that a Derwentwater, though a woman, might take the accustomed place in the battle for King James. The earl was no coward: he took the mocked sword from his wife, and cast himself into the turmoil of rebellion. It is history that the rising was crushed with ease, and that as a ringleader the earl was beheaded on Tower Hill. Powerful men at court sued unavailingly for the young noble’s pardon. Money was lavished on the king’s favourites in vain. To raise funds the countess came north to the island-home; the Cumbrians, incensed at her forcing the Earl into the plot to save his honour at her hands, gave her a chilly reception. Legend luridly asserts that her horses were stolen while she was on the island, and that she and her servants were threatened. At dead of night a boat was rowed to near Lodore, where the lady landed and escaped by way of the fells to Penrith and the south. With her she carried a large quantity of jewels, which were offered to save the young husband’s head. The ravine by which the countess climbed to the open moors is pointed out as Lady’s Rake. If it were my province here to examine the story in detail, I would find that it was hardly to escape the Derwentwater tenants that the lady left in such haste. She was, for her share in the late rebellion, marked for arrest, or at least observation, by the Hanoverian authorities.

Seven islands dot Derwentwater: on no other mere are islands the feature we see here. Instead of snags of rock sticking up from deep water, with trees keeping precarious hold in clefts and crannies, these are level, well-wooded places, standing behind ample shallows.

Having passed Lord’s Island, with its sorrowful story of a life risked and lost for a banished prince, Lodore is the next point. Every one knows by repute Southey’s poem-de-force describing the terrific rush of its waters. After heavy rain the old poet’s description can be tested—at the expense of a wetting. Down a wide stair from the moorland, bristling with crags and boulders and outstanding seams, come the waters—their frolic can often be heard at Keswick, though Greta is charging, headlong, noisily down its rugged course. The moment you enter the gully—should you desire to see the heart of its beauty—you are swathed in spray; never in flood-time can you see more than a few yards ahead; your eyes film with moisture; the air to your lungs is choky with mist; the day is gloomed with spindrift. You see a white front of water hurtling down from invisibility: it eddies at your side, then drops away in gathering water-smoke. Nothing can you hear at such a time but continuous liquid thunder. Say the luxurious, there is then but little to see except the watery path you are climbing? Once I climbed this ravine at flood-time. As I passed into the zone of water-smoke, there were blurred visions of tumbling cascades, shadows of huge rocks dimly seen across the ravine, dripping branches of shrubs and plants among the streaming rocks. Then, what a transformation! A flash of sunlight swept into the hollow way. An atmosphere of shifting jewels of rainbow hue above, around; strings and clusters of pearls and diamonds dripping down reddish crags veined and barred with gold and silver; grasses poising delicate racemes of turquoise; mosses adorned with tiaras of ethereal beauty, ruffles of ivory spray caressing the currents of rich emerald. The brief glow faded, and all became grey and black and dull green again. For a glimpse of another such fairyland I would face stress much wilder than greets one in the gap of Lodore.

BY THE SHORES OF DERWENTWATER

Another ravine in the cliff near by possesses a beautiful waterfall, but Barrow Cascade is on private ground and the free rambler can hardly be brought to see it. The head of Derwentwater is so grown with weed that a path has to be cut to allow boats to reach Lodore landings. Near here the once wonderful Floating Island anchors. A mat of vegetable fibre lying on the lake-bed at times becomes inflated with natural gas and rises to the surface. In 1864 a second floating isle put in an appearance, and during that dry summer it seemed likely that many acres of adjoining lake-floor would follow suit. Floating Island shares fell to tremendous discount and have never recovered. The Derwent here enters the lake by two channels through ooze and tangled water-grass. Few lakes have so extensive shoals as Derwentwater: for acres hereabout you may look over the boat’s side through some feet of clear, amber water at the growing reeds, white spathes piercing the mud, green stems, and hasty leaves unfolding ere they reach the upper air, or thin waving threads linking a tuft of foliage on the surface with unseen roots beneath; all kinds of pond-life creeping and swimming about. Where the lake-bed lies fallow the eye rests on soft levels of mud, with a passing host of minnows, a red-necked perch, or even a trout or pike. Here and there rock-spines pierce the level floor, or perchance a bank of pebbles, large and small, set in smooth mosaic, blood-red of granite picked out with sea-blue slate, grey pebbles of volcanic ash intermingled with knobs of salmon sandstone, and conglomerate of every colour and shape. Watch the sunlines creeping and chasing and quivering as little ripples undulate the lake’s surface.

GRANGE IN BORROWDALE
Early morning