In travelling from Ambleside to Keswick, after passing Wythburn Chapel,
the high road winds by the base of Helvellyn and the margin of the Lake
of Thirlmere, or Leatheswater, which latter it afterwards leaves by a
very steep ascent, exhibiting, in all their grandeur, the Fells of
Borrowdale. Arrived at the top of this ascent, a very exquisite
landscape presents itself below, extending over the Vale of
Legberthwaite; or, more euphoniously and modernly, the Vale of St.
John's.
In the midst of this valley is a fantastic pile of rocks, which, from
their resemblance to the walls and towers of a dilapidated and time-worn
fortress, are known as the Castle Rock. Hutchinson, in his _Excursion to
the Lakes_, describes this singular scene with much poetic feeling. "We
now gained the Vale of St. John's," he says, "a very narrow dell, hemmed
in by mountains, through which a small brook makes many meanderings,
washing little enclosures of grass-ground, which stretch up the rising
of the hills. In the widest part of the dale you are struck with the
appearance of an ancient ruined castle, which seems to stand upon the
summit of a little mount, the mountains around forming an amphitheatre.
This massive bulwark shows a front of various towers, and makes an
awful, rude, and Gothic appearance, with its lofty turrets and ragged
battlements; we traced the galleries, the bending arches, the
buttresses. The greatest antiquity stands characterised in its
architecture; the inhabitants near it assert it is an antediluvian
structure.
"The traveller's curiosity is roused, and he prepares to make a nearer
approach, when that curiosity is put upon the rack by his being assured
that, if he advances, certain genii who govern the place, by virtue of
their supernatural art and necromancy, will strip it of all its
beauties, and, by enchantment, transform the magic walls. The vale seems
adapted for the habitation of such beings; its gloomy recesses and
retirements look like haunts of evil spirits. There was no delusion in
the report; we were soon convinced of its truth; for this piece of
antiquity, so venerable and noble in its aspect, as we drew near changed
its figure and proved no other than a shaken massive pile of rocks,
which stand in the midst of this little vale, disunited from the
adjoining mountains, and have so much the real form and resemblance of a
castle, that they bear the name of the Castle Rocks of St. John."
"The inhabitants to this day," says Mackay, "believe these rocks to be
an antediluvian structure, and assert that the traveller, whose
curiosity is aroused, will find it impossible to approach them, as the
guardian genii of the place transform the walls and battlements into
naked rocks when any one draws near." Nothing, in the whole range of
mythological fable, could be more beautiful than this popular
superstition, which ascribes the disappearance of "the castle," on a
near approach, to supernatural agency. Frigid philosophy would say,
these fragments of rock, when viewed from afar, bear strong resemblance
to an old fortress; but on approaching nearer the illusion vanishes, and
they are found to be a shapeless mass of stone. Poetry clothes this fact
in beautiful imagery; she warns the intruder to survey the structure at
a distance; for should he have the temerity to advance upon it, the
incensed genii of the place will, by spells "of power to cheat the eye
with blear illusion," transform its fair proportions into a mis-shapen
pile of rocks. This pleasing fiction emanated from the same poetical
spirit that wrought, in the elder days of Greece, the splendid fable of
Aurora, in her saffron-coloured robe, opening the gates of the morning
to the chariot of the sun.
The genius of Sir Walter Scott has rendered the beautiful Vale of St.
John classic ground, by having selected it for the principal scene of
his "Bridal of Triermain." This is purely a tale of chivalry of Arthur's
days, when midnight fairies danced the maze; and it is at the fantastic
Castle Rock that Sir Walter represents King Arthur's amorous dalliance
with its fairy inhabitants in their halls of enchantment, when he was on
his way to Carlisle. Our limits will not admit the whole of "The Bridal
of Triermain." We give, however, such portions as will sufficiently
connect the thread of the narrative, in which it will be observed that
Sir Roland de Vaux, the Baron of Tremain, is introduced. This branch of
Vaux, with its collateral alliances, is now represented by the family of
Braddyl, of Conishead Priory, near Furness Abbey.