Walking in the Lake District

CHAPTER I

STEPPING WESTWARDS

Shap to Mardale—Mardale to Patterdale—From Patterdale by Helvellyn to Grasmere—The Vale of Rydal, Red Bank and Langdale—Native Architecture.

SHAP TO MARDALE

SOME enter the district by motor, which does the district a disservice; you yourself will doubtless come by train. In the latter case you may come by the old Furness line along the Furness coast, and through the limestone to one of the western valleys—Dunnerdale, Eskdale, Wasdale or Ennerdale; or you may come by the main L.M.S. from Lancaster to Penrith. Here, between Lancaster and Penrith, there are three choices. One takes you by the line from Penrith to Cockermouth, where various stations serve your purpose: Troutbeck puts you near Ullswater, Keswick puts you in Borrowdale, Bassenthwaite in the fells round Grisedale Pike, and Cockermouth in the vale of Lorton, near Crummock Water and Buttermere. The second choice is by the branch line from Oxenholme to Windermere, from which those who wish (per impossibile) to stay in Ambleside can take an easy motor bus for the four miles; or you can go forward by the same bus to Grasmere, from which likewise escape is easy, and at many or most times desirable; or from Ambleside there is a motor bus, all too frequent, up Langdale. Your third choice by the L.M.S., which we commend, brings you out of your express at Carnforth or Penrith, puts you in a stopping train, and sets you down at Shap, one of the highest stations in England, on a wayside platform, and from here you walk. It is on this walk we shall now take you, westwards for several days across the whole district, to Ennerdale. It is a good way into the country, and a fine way through it; you begin with the unsophisticated; on the way you have the whole lay-out of the fells before you, and for your last night you sleep in glory, facing up Ennerdale to the Pillar. After that you can go to Butter-mere and the Gable; to Borrowdale; to the Scafell group; and to the western valleys, which are the best of all.

Shap, Shap Abbey, Haweswater, Mardale; High Street, Patterdale; Helvellyn, Grasmere, Red Bank, Elterwater, Langdale; the Wrynose, the Hardknott, Eskdale; then Wasdale, Mosedale, Pillar Fell, and lastly, Ennerdale. That is the line from east to west. You can suit the length of each day’s walk to your legs and the weather: there is no lack of a place to sleep at—farms, inns and the occasionally professional lodging-house. If you wish, you can sleep your first night at the Greyhound at Shap—an old coaching inn on a famous road—or at other lodgings or inns in the village. You can then hear, and see, the trains thunder down from Shap Summit (1000 feet) towards Carlisle, in the darkness. Or you can walk from Shap Village by Swindale to Mardale, over the first fells, in a good half-day; but you had better not hurry this piece, as you will like Swindale, and will want time on the ridge which looks across Mardale to the long spurs coming down from High Street on to Haweswater.

On leaving Shap station, turn right up the North Road and walk through the long village for about a mile, to cross-roads with a signpost: here turn left for Bampton, which is the village at the foot of Haweswater; but leave this road in a few hundred yards, and take a lane on the left to the hamlet of Keld. At Keld you come on to the one inch coloured contour map, Shap having been just off it to the east. Keld is on the Lowther, a tributary of the Eden. Cross the Lowther by a wooden bridge and make your way down the far bank (the left) to Shap Abbey, a long half-mile. The stream is here running on the junction of the limestone, to the right, with the volcanic rock (left), furrowing its way, as streams do, along the line of weakness. The slight depression of the valley, with sycamores and the view of the abbey tower, before long, is our first touch of open Westmoreland; and if you drink out of the side springs you will get, as often hereabouts, a sound flavour of sulphuretted hydrogen and iron and the medicinal stuff sold for good money at Shap Wells—these last, or their neighbouring hotel and trees, you saw on the left from the train, a mile south of the summit.

The abbey is a 12th century foundation of the White Canons; the surviving 15th century west tower is now the most considerable part of the building, the rest of it having gone to make the very picturesque and opulent farm-house, which abuts on the abbey, and other buildings up and down the valley. The abbey is not considerable if your standard is Furness Abbey, or even Calder Abbey, the other two in the district; but it is well worth the slight divergence to reach it, for the whole setting of the place puts you in key with the lonely fell ahead, and gives an undertone of human memories. The abbey lies, like Furness and Calder, in a shallow stream-bottom—sheltered both from wind and from the view of neighbours.

Turning your back on it, you walk west—there is, by the way, no food between Shap and Mardale. Keep some south in your bearing and walk on 982.¹ In a few minutes you cross the turf bank—and you see others—which was the bottom of a monkish hedge or fence: then, rather surprisingly, cross an aggressive concrete-surfaced road. The writ of Manchester runs hereabouts, and motor lorries go from the granite quarries at Shap Summit (on your left along the road) to Bampton (right) and Burn Banks, a village which gives you sore eyes, built for constructing the dam at the foot of Haweswater: the work is nearing completion and the tunnel for the pipe line has now been driven from the head of the lake into Sleddale. Crossing the road you go on westwards and southwards: there is, and has been, no track (though there is one from Keld itself); the ground bumps up and down and brings you to the lip of Swindale in about three-quarters of an hour from the abbey; the fell—low and rather flat volcanic rock with a few knobby bits of crag and proper samples of peat—has been unexhilarating, but now that you have Swindale at your feet you are repaid; they call it ‘Swindle’, for the ‘dale’ in suffix is always clipped, as in Mard’l, Borrowd’l. With luck you will have struck the top of the ridge just where a long cart track from Rosgill slants down the east side of the dale to its bottom. Swindale—in the middle ages swine gave their name to it—has all the character of the country: it is a steep, green-sided trough, looking much deeper than it is, because its sides are so sheer, arid going up at its head (out of sight so far, on the left) to a really grand corrie. There are higher daleheads than this one, with higher crag, but they do not give a better example of the grandeur which comes from scale. The stream draining the eastern branch of the dalehead comes down steeply from a ‘hanging’ valley—an upland valley which was the private home of some glacier—below which the stream cascades down, to the level of what once was the main glacier of the valley, towards the farm of Swindale Head.

Where you struck the cart-track from Rosgill, and first looked down into Swindale, you saw below you the farm of Swindale Foot (map): it lies on the opposite side of the beck, and the green ‘brackins’ drop down steeply on every side. Go down now by the track southwards; just before you are level with the next farm (marked as ch. for ‘church’ in map) your track closes in to the beck, and you may cross either by a bridge or by stepping stones. The great boulders which make stepping stones generally show a gap to-day—a spate clears one out, and landlord or tenant does not replace it, but for the rest of time lets the postman jump: in the old days ‘walling’—all the art of shifting stones from the fell-side for walls and stepping stones and ‘hog-holes’ and little bridges—was so cheap that immense labours were done for little cash: to-day they call the wage of the agricultural labourer, the most skilled and versatile of all the craftsmen, high, and will not pay it, and so a good many comforts for the native, bent on his own lawful occasions of trade or marriage or burial, are falling away.

By the farm on the far bank was a school and church in one tiny building, which is divided amidships. You prayed at one end and learnt your R’s at the other. To-day, what with the Burnham Scale and the lack of parsons, you must trapse to Rosgill (three miles and more down dale) to do either. But even in the palmy days, if it was a funeral you were, you had to be carried, strapped on horseback, over the ‘corpse-road’ which ran from Mardale by Swindale to Shap churchyard; and the track over the top, joining the dales—itself too now sinking into the peat—is not the only one in the lake country which was first laid down as a proper track in order to make the last journey easier. Another is the (comparative) high road from Wasdale to Eskdale church at Boot; for, until rock climbing on Scafell grew frequent, Wasdale church had no need of consecrated ground, and if, in a good old age, you did die, you were carried by Burnmoor Tarn and Whillan Beck for your burial, to Eskdale.

From Swindale’s little derelict church and school (the public-house, that other member of the great trinity of state institutions, is lacking) do not follow straight up the dale—the river is on your left now—to Swindale Head farm, but fork up to the right: you can make steeply up, bearing half right, and near the summit of the ridge which is above you, join on to the track (the ‘corpse-road’) which starts up from Swindale Head farm itself: of course you can do the full two sides of the triangle if you prefer. The valley and the hedge banks are very pleasant—foxgloves and hazel nuts both trying to succeed at once in August—and the majesty of the dalehead increases as you climb higher, and is full of glory.

It is three miles, and peaty miles, to Mardale Head (and no lodging), going S.W. But when you are up the slope, and among the hummocks, unless you want the benefit of the track down into Mardale (and it is what stationers call ‘ruled feint’ until the drop begins, and you have Hob Gill on your left), I counsel you to walk west with a spice of north in it, so as to come out above Guerness Wood and see the water of the lake below you; and if you drop down through the wood—it is a thin one—bearing rather to the right than the left, you will have a piece of fine walking up the lake, head on to its sources in the dale; at any time and place to walk down a lake is to put the whole fineness of its setting, the mountains from which it had its birth, behind your back and out of sight.

When you sight Haweswater—you will have some heather and rock and bracken first, and work for the ankles, unless you have made for Hob Gill—choose a seat and look westwards. (You will not, by the way, if you are wise, have begun to go down a valley bottom beginning above ‘1250’ on the map: if you have, and if you continue, you will come out a mile below the foot of the lake and will have more and better walking than you intended.)

Opposite you, as you sit, is High Street—a long ridge on a N.-S. line. Along it ran the Roman road (the ‘street’) from Carlisle to Ambleside, Eskdale and Raven-glass: we shall pick up this road at Fell Foot in Little Langdale, and ourselves travel by it into Eskdale. Not far from where we now are, if you were to cross the High Street ridge south-westwards, you could still trace the old road where it drops obliquely off Thornthwaite Crag into the Windermere Troutbeck. High Street seen from the west, its further side, is nothing; nor is Helvellyn’s long ridge, next beyond it towards the centre and on the same axis; but seen from the east, both these ridges have a grand aspect, with great spurs of crag shooting down into Mardale and into Patterdale. Many see High Street and Helvellyn only in the distant views which are had from Scafell or the west fells; and this is one reason why we would walk you into Cumberland by Westmoreland, from the east, for you ought to see the real glory of these two ranges.

You are above, or in and out of, the wood over the lake. To your right, Measand Beck, which comes from another hanging valley, has pushed its delta half across the lake: Manchester will raise the lake, but the odds are that Measand Beck will also raise its delta, and will beat Manchester (and Salford too) at its own game. Left from this is the big opening of Whelter Beck; then Randale and Riggindale, and the two mighty arms of rock which run into Mardale head from Kidsty Pike (the sharpest point on these tops) and from High Street summit (2663). The shadows and starkness of these thrusting ridges are thrilling in the afternoon sunlight, or, when seen from below, in mist. These, and the circle of fells at the valley head—Branstree, Harter Fell and Mardale Ill Bell—make a great climax to the lake as one comes up it: there is no more solemn lake than Haweswater.

Down through the wood you may strike a clear track; and shortly before the lake itself, you will reach the new road, which Manchester has cut along the fell side from the foot of Haweswater; it runs above the future water level, right away to the point where the Gatescarth pass drops into the head of Mardale—for the water will back up to near this point. Church, farms and inn, all good and well loved, are all gone, sacked by Manchester: you may neither lodge, drink nor pray, only curse. The old road, on the west or further shore of Haweswater, will also drown, and in compensation a foot-path has been made on that side along a higher contour: but this new motor road on the east side, parapetted and dyked and drained and dammed, and with the concrete work of its posts not mixed to a properly inconspicuous colour, is a real disaster, an engineer’s vulgarism. Time will mellow it, and the laboured miles of masonry will tone under the weather to something less bare and ceremonious, but the road remains a misfortune—an irremediable line, a piece of desperate and level slicing, gouged across nature’s own gradual curves. The last mile of this road, from Mardale Green to the actual dalehead, is sheer wickedness, an otiose parade ground for those who sit in cars and wax fat; it is evil, conspicuous and imperishable. One is glad to think how much interest, and for how long, the ratepayers are paying on the money borrowed to build it. And for a time they decided not even to have the water!¹

ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ, ὁ δὲ χρῠσος αἰθóμενον πῠρ.

We believe it was a great transatlantic editor of Pindar, who, looking down Mardale, made this version: ‘Water may be necessary, but gold in the hands of a public authority means a ruddy conflagration.’

However, if you climb over the wire fence from Guerness Wood on to the road, a mile down the lake, you are then looking from the road and not at it. For a bed you can now only turn right, down the lake, to or past Manchester’s invasive ‘Haweswater Hotel’—Gibraltar on Haweswater—to the inns and farms at Bampton, a pleasant place. As you walk, the lake below and fells across it are an anodyne, and the rising water has not yet got into the beer, as G. K. Chesterton hoped that it would not. But if, before dark, you explore where that unrivalled little church once stood (Illustration I)—not Wasdale nor Wythburn, both famous, quite equalled it—you will curse again, and with that embattled road glowering down on you will breathe a silent prayer that what England thinks to-day, Manchester will think to-morrow.

You will not look for ‘architecture’ in our Illustration. Lakeland churches, those native buildings which rival one another in minuteness, have their power from the very absence of a style—and in part, at Wasdale as once in Mardale, from their likeness to a lakeland hay-barn, with a girdle of trees so set as to shelter the barn from rain when its door stands open. Nothing projects or exclaims, on the outside of these small churches; from above, you cannot see the church at all, only its yews. But if you look down from Latrigg or Wansfell Pike on Keswick or Ambleside, you do see a church; you see not a lakeland church, but a style, the antimacassar style. The Gothic revival screams under Wansfell Pike like a naughty child. But in Mardale Green God was worshipped in a silent simplicity, and soon this little church will see the very ground work buried under deep waters and will keep only ‘their fallen day about her.’

If you have time that evening, walk up the track from Mardale Green to the foot of the Gatescarth pass, (this comes over from Long Sleddale); then, when the slope begins, call a halt and cross the stream to your right, coming back along the opposite (W.) side of Mardale Head, by a track which runs uphill at a slant (with the empty farm of Brackenhowe below you), till you are on an outer shoulder of the ridge which comes from Rough Crag: at the top level of this path, you look over finely into Riggindale. From here go across the mouth of Riggindale, past its ruined farm house, following the new foot-path (p. 8) made by Manchester: this takes you well up the fell side, then past the quadrangularities of Burn Banks and so to Bampton and a bed.

If you want to reach Mardale by a less remote approach than from Shap, use the Windermere train and get out at Burneside. From here, dodge round by lanes to Garnett Bridge, which is three miles’ walk and holds the entrance to Long Sleddale. Garnett Bridge is a place where a man could happily sit and smoke—for the Sprint makes a refreshing splash there in its rocky bottom—but the five long miles of very Long Sleddale, and an hour more up to the head of the Gatescarth, need some walking on your first day with a rucksack. Moreover, it is (or was) not certain whether, if you feel tired, they will put you up at Sadgill, the last farm up the dale before the rise to the pass: if you arrived late and might get benighted on the pass, and looked rather amateurish, they would then put you up ad misericordiam, or such was my experience; this may be so no longer. Long Sleddale is a real Cumbrian dale—a long trough, though an unusually straight one, with good steep sides and crinkled rocky tops above them, all full of colour and surprises. There are two roads up Sleddale, ‘old style’ and ‘moderate reform’, and you can veer about between them. The miles covered, from Burneside to Mardale Head, are in themselves a finer walk than that over the rather bleak fell from Shap to Swindale; but you miss Swindale, so peaceful and so finely proportioned, and you come down on Mardale from the top, and so see it all wrong ways on, and this is a great loss. And to the foot of the lake or Bampton, now your nearest lodging, gives a long extra pull from Mardale Head. If you do use this approach, stop a day or two by Bampton or Heltondale (farmhouse), do the round of the lake at ease and explore the valleys under High Street: they are worth it. There is a fine walk (heavy going on the up-grade) by Measand Beck—here you have a splendid retrospect of Mardale Head—over Weather Hill to Howtown; at Howtown there is a comfortable hotel, or you can tap the Ullswater steamer. Fusedale is very good, and its neighbours, Boardale and Bannerdale, still better. There are farms at the foot of these dales which will put you up, and this is a fine walking centre, well tucked away, for a stay of a day or two. But our own route lies by High Street to Patterdale starting from the foot of the lake.

MARDALE TO PATTERDALE

For High Street ridge next day, if you have time to spare, go out of Mardale past Bleawater, to Mardale Ill Bell and Thornthwaite Crag: this gives you, on the summit, the southward facing views down Windermere, before you turn N. to go along the High Street ridge for Patterdale. If, however, you mean to cross Helvellyn as well as High Street in the day, you had better take one of two more direct ways (due westward) on to the ridge of High Street.

One takes you to Kidsty Pike. Follow the foot-path above the W. shore of the lake into the mouth of Riggindale: turn up this dale to the ‘foot-bridge’ by 800 in the 1 in. map. The track on the map is plain to follow: half right up on to Kidsty Howes, then W. along to Kidsty Pike, which is the prominent part of the Mardale (or northern) half of the ridge of High Street. It is a sharp climb up from Riggindale, a rocky top to the Pike and a fine view. The other route, a very fine one, takes you up the dale half a mile further, then along the ridge and east shoulder of Rough Crag: the beginning is stiff and exhilarating and you climb straight up the nose, going steadily W. to 1733 and 2062. The rocky arm along which you go is one which you looked at when you came from Swindale to the edge of Mardale: there are great views downwards on either side of it, as you climb westwards. Your summit is at 2663 (‘High Street’), an immense plateau with a stone wall running N. and S.—an invaluable guide, like the wire fence on Pillar, in misty weather. These walls on the backs and ridges of the fells are the sheep’s watershed: here Mardale’s sheep flow down eastwards, Patterdale’s to the west; and the sheep is a docile creature, so does not jump walls except when frightened. There are, however, many gaps to-day in these long boundary walls, as said above, and a good many strays have to be sorted out and ‘returned to sender’ at the shepherds’ meetings held in the dales. There would be more strays in this age of tumbling walls, were not all Herdwick sheep (Illustrations V & XVI) highly domestic: they stick fast to the fell where they were ‘heaved’,¹ never moving far; their creed is ‘places not persons’, their dog’s being the opposite, and when they are shifted to winter keep in the coastward pastures, a ‘hog’ will come miles back sometimes, quite unaccompanied, to its own home brew of bog and grass.

The longer and richer way goes up Mardale Head to the dividing point of the Gatescarth route and the Nan Bield. On reaching this, do not follow the Nan Bield path, but cross to the right, by a foot-bridge over the Mardale Beck, and then turn left, by a made path which runs up to the outflow of Bleawater: the stream from this tarn is on your left throughout, as you climb. The tarn, itself made by being ponded up behind the moraine heap of a glacier, has been captured by Manchester, in an uninjurious victory; hence came the track up to the outflow of the tarn, and the mild dam, and an oddly incongruous call-box on the way, where you telephone for something to put in the water. The tarn, which is of some size, is finely backed and ringed about by steep-sided fells. High Street runs north and south ahead of you. Leave the tarn on your right (no track now) and as you pass round it, climb up obliquely to the left, a little south of west, through some very inspiriting crag—the first scramble of this kind you have had as yet. When you top the ridge, you are between 2718 and Mardale Ill Bell (Ill, pronounced Eel, means steep or savage). Avoid going too far south-west, if in mist, or you may cross the col and begin dropping into Kentdale; if it is misty, and you keep continuously to the plain west by your compass (you brought one from home?), without any south in your bearing, then you cannot do otherwise than strike the north and south sheep wall above referred to, and are safe; turn left for Thornthwaite Crag, right (N.) for Kidsty Pike and the way to Patterdale.

Visit Thornthwaite Crag (you cross the wall to reach it) for the fine view to the south; the view meanwhile to the west needs no showman to make you look at it. On Thornthwaite is a conspicuous ‘man’ (a cairn, that is) built pillar fashion; it is no less of a land mark from below, from Troutbeck, the green valley at your feet which runs to Windermere; the Roman road comes up from it to meet you; over to your left is the Kent valley. Windermere is seen all but full length; beyond it, and to its right, the lower fells towards Coniston and down to the coast line—rolling seas of heather in August; these are the Silurian rocks, lower pitched and inclining gently. Bolder in outline, and much higher, the Old Man of Coniston and his brothers of the volcanic rock are due south-west from your stance. North from them come Harter Fell (Eskdale), the Crinkles, Bowfell, Scafell and Scafell Pikes and then the Gable—Bowfell with conical top, Gable with a towering, pre-eminent hump, a mountain of the primeval giants. The view of these west fells is the glory of the High Street walk, and of Helvellyn even more. Looking now nearer in and further to the north, you see the Helvellyn range, Fairfield first of it: but all this is seen better as you walk northwards. To the east are the Pennines—which I leave to my brother of Yorkshire.

On the north, Grey Crag, the continuation of the ridge you stand on, parts two valleys, much as Thornthwaite Crag itself parts two valleys; and when you are on High Street itself, and can look down on to Hayeswater, you will also open up the dales which run into Patterdale from the parallel north-south range of Helvellyn.

Go back now to the wall and move along it northwards. You will find traces of the Roman road, left of the wall. On a fine day it is a puzzle which side of the wall to walk on; but there may be a decisive east wind, or equally decisive rain coming in from the west; so that in spite of its height and upstanding courses, it is a good wall after all, taking the bad days and the good together. As you go, you will see where the other routes come up from Mardale—the first from Rough Crag, and the second by Kidsty Pike. The flat top of what is called High Street par excellence (or faute de mieux, for it lacks both name and contour) leads you to expect a dull view of itself from Scafell; and you will find that you were right; the peak of Ill Bell behind you, southwards, (not Mardale Ill Bell), is the only significance in that long sheep walk on which you are now embarked. Pull up at the Straits of Riggindale, with its exposed rock, and take a look east, perhaps under mist to sunlight and green fields in Mardale. At Knott (2423) on no account drop down left, to the foot of Hayeswater; it is the common way, but I will take you a better one. Your friendly wall comes from Rest Dod (map): use it now as a guide, though not as master. Going N.W., walk for the col between Rampsgill and Hayeswater Gill, aiming at Rest Dod; then go just round the north side of the summit of Rest Dod. There is some heavy grass here, but no more. You will soon get views down Rampsgill and Bannerdale, and these are nearly as thrilling as the left-hand views of all the valleys running into Patterdale. From the north of Rest Dod turn left and join the track (map) which has been running from Knott (but on the Hayeswater side) to Satura Crag; to clear Satura Crag, swing a bit more left than you expected, pick up the track, and