_THIRLMERE FROM THE MAIN ROAD_
The fact that Thirlmere is the reservoir for the drinking water of
Manchester renders it somewhat unapproachable. Main roads encircle the
lake at no great distance, but the whole watershed--Dunmail,
Helvellyn-side, and Armboth--has been purchased on behalf of the city,
and at hardly any point can one reach the lake-shore without breaking
some bylaw. There is, I believe, only one boat allowed on its surface,
strictly for the surveyors responsible for the embankment, etc. Though
the lake was restocked after its conversion and large trout are now
fairly plentiful, angling is hardly permitted.
The city of course has a perfect right to seclude the lake if by so
doing they prevent impurity in its waters, and after all it is somewhat
of a satisfaction to feel that a few square miles of Lakeland are
tolerably certain of escaping the builder and the miner. The mines of
Helvellyn are now likely to remain closed for our generation.
Old Thirlmere, like a winding river, connected a series of wider pools;
at its narrowest point, near Armboth, it was spanned by stone bridges.
Now, by judicious embankment, its area has been doubled, yet there still
remains a very definite river-lake. I think Thirlmere a place of beauty,
though I do not forget viewing, from mid-lake (this pleasure was
illicit, of course), those harsh lines through the trees and along the
hillsides behind which the new roads are cunningly contrived. However,
when you are on Armboth road the disagreeable "line" does not trouble;
instead you admire a beautifully engineered way through the mountains,
giving entrancing glimpses up narrow ghylls, vertical peeps into pretty
bays, with the grand contours of Helvellyn ever present either through a
film of leafage or more clearly between the groups of trees.
Most of us see Thirlmere from the coach or from our cycles. Though the
scenery is so fair, there is no escape from the wheeled procession. The
quiet retirement of the old bridle-road is vanished. From Grasmere the
head of the lake is about half a dozen miles distant, to Keswick it is
not much more than four from its foot. From the former the approach is
up the pass of Dunmail.
[Illustration: RAVEN CRAG, THIRLMERE]
And this is the scene which meets the eye after you have toiled up the
long slope. Behind is the bold and curious-shaped summit of Helm Crag,
sage Asphodel, the Witch crooning over her hell-kail. Far off is
Loughrigg fell with larch woods clustering up its sides, and the lake of
Grasmere so dull with green reflections that a quick eye is necessary to
distinguish it from its surroundings. Rising from your side is Seat
Sandal, a host of carrion crows wheeling round its rugged knots; Steel
Fell rises opposite, flecked with wandering sheep. The sky is bright
blue, with soft white clouds lazily drawing their way across the narrow
gulf. In wide patches the sunshine seems to drift about the landscape,
picking out a green benk here, throwing a shadow over the crags there
into some deep ravine. The scene at the head of the pass is of extreme
wildness. The hillsides are scattered with scree, the uneven bottoms
with boulders of every shape and size. The cairn of Dunmail, last king
of Pictish Cumbria slain in battle with Edgar the Saxon, is here, a
formless pile of stones. There is a legend concerning this spot.
The crown of Dunmail was charmed, giving to its wearer a succession in
his kingdom. Therefore King Edgar of the Saxons coveted it above all
things. When Dunmail came to the throne of the mountain-lands a wizard
in Gilsland Forest held a master-charm to defeat the purpose of his
crown. He Dunmail slew. The magician was able to make himself invisible
save at cock crow, and to destroy him the hero braved a cordon of wild
wolves at night. At the first peep o' dawn he entered the cave where the
wizard was lying. Leaping to his feet the magician called out, "Where
river runs north or south with the storm" ere Dunmail's sword silenced
him for ever. The story came to the ear of the Saxon, who after much
inquiry of his priests found that an incomplete curse, though powerful
against Dunmail, could scarcely harm another holder of the crown. Spies
were accordingly sent into Cumbria to find where a battle could be
fought on land favourable to the magician's words. On Dunmail raise, in
times of storm even in unromantic to-day, the torrent sets north or
south in capricious fashion. The spies found the place, found also
fell-land chiefs who were persuaded to become secret allies of the
Saxon. The campaign began. Dunmail moved his army south to meet the
invader, and they joined battle on this pass. For long hours the fight
was with the Cumbrians; the Saxons were driven down the hill again and
again. As his foremost tribes became exhausted, Dunmail retired and
called on his reserves--they were mainly the ones favouring the Southern
king. On they came, spreading in well-armed lines from side to side of
the hollow way, but instead of opening to let the weary warriors through
they delivered an attack on them. Surprised, the army reeled back, and
their rear was attacked with redoubled violence by the Saxons. The loyal
ranks were forced to stand back-to-back round their king; assailed by
superior masses they fell rapidly, and ere long the brave chief was shot
down by a traitor of his own bodyguard.
"My crown," cried he, "bear it away; never let the Saxon flaunt it."
[Illustration: THIRLMERE AND HELVELLYN]
A few stalwarts took the charmed treasure from his hands, and with a
furious onslaught made the attackers give way. Step by step they fought
their way up the ghyll of Dunmail's beck--broke through all resistance
on the open fell, and aided by a dense cloud evaded their pursuers. Two
hours later the faithful few met by Grisedale tarn, and consigned the
crown to its depths--"till Dunmail come again to lead us." And every
year the warriors come back, draw up the charmed circlet from the depths
of the wild mountain tarn, and carry it with them over Seat Sandal to
where their king is sleeping his age-long sleep. They knock with his
spear on the topmost stone of the cairn, and from its heart comes a
voice, "Not yet; not yet; wait awhile, my warriors."
The road now turns down the pass, a long, swinging slope where the
steadying brake is necessary. To northward show the storm-washed sides
of Helvellyn, with new rents staring like fresh-turned loam in the
sunshine. A blue peak of Skiddaw is holding, as though unwilling to part
with, a fleecy cloud, and here sweep into sight Raven Crag with its
precipitous front, and the laughing summits of Armboth, one by one. Our
cycles are gaining speed; we reach a corner, the top of a steep
pitch,--there before us is a sudden view of Thirlmere, with Saddleback
rising in rugged majesty behind. The open water is ruffled with
breezelets, but every sheltered cove shines level blue. The pace becomes
faster; the long curves are turned at ever-increasing speed. On either
side are wide grass slopes, cut up by stony gullies. We are still above
the zone of trees, if we except the fringes of rowan, the solitary
hawthorns. Now across a bridge, spanning a wilderness of rubble where
after heavy rain a flood roars and even throws veils of spray on to the
road. A straight descent, and below we view the gardens and trees,
white-walled inn, and grey church at Wythburn. Now, instead of allowing
the machines full way to race in fifty seconds down the half-mile
incline, we approach more leisurely, for halfway down the steep the road
we are to take turns off at a tangent. Out of a clump of tall sycamores
an old farm emerges; this is the Post Office, far removed from
neighbouring houses! To the right Helvellyn is now in fuller sight,
furrowed with watercourses, jagged with scaurs, with the sunshine
dancing on the brackens and warming up the sober green stretches of
grass. The dale is desolate and barren, yet a portion is known as the
City, in memory possibly of a settlement of Britons in its stony waste.
The great gap of Wythburn Head will afford a pleasant ramble to any one
who has the time. There is no towering crag, no huge cataract, no
narrow, yawning ravine, but an infinite variety of the sweetest brook
scenery. Only a few hundred yards from the road is a small basin of
water, entirely hedged by slabs of stone, ten feet deep, and so clear
that the least pebble on the floor can be seen--a place scoured by
floods as clean of sand and soil as though Nature were the most expert
of housemaids. On the bottom, in their season, the chrysalides of the
Mayfly crawl--how wonderfully protected they are by their stick-like
shape and their coats of sand! most realistically they imitate a piece
of rotting twig as they lie in a chink of the pool-bed.
Another sweet corner I remember well. It is a dream of beauties in
miniature. The down-pouring rivulet divides round a boulder, throwing
two pearly cascades into the gloomy pool a fathom below. Round this pool
the rocks rise sharply, crowned with foxgloves, heath and bog-violet,
with a single stem of fly-orchis, with ivy and a cluster of the grass of
Parnassus; more ivy wreathes around the roots of the trees, and long
beards of moss drip with the outpourings of secret springs. Overhead,
the alder, the rowan, and a few spindly self-grown ashes flourish, with
a bush of glorious wild roses wilting loose petals into the slow-moving,
bubbling circle. Ferns cluster among the tree-stems and on haphazard
ledges, parsley and oak, the broad buckler and others, together with
hardy bracken and other ubiquitous plants of the uplands. In a hole
there a wren has built her nest, a thrush homes in the thickest holly,
while the hawthorns are inhabited by a colony of hedge-sparrows and
titmice. It is an active corner in bird-life if you have time to see it
and your patience exceeds that of the busy midges.
The road has a slight incline which carries the cycle along with small
exertion. The fences, as is customary in tourist Lake Country, are
partly wall, topped with wire rail--a plan which allows the journeyer by
road fully to enjoy the scenery. Tall, moss-grown walls and dense hedges
are a feature of unfashionable Lakeland, but, pretty as they undoubtedly
are, they sadly narrow the wanderer's vision. The lake is now close by,
stretching into the reedy level meadows. One curious feature is a now
useless bridge, raising its hog-back in the mere. Wee looks the
white-walled inn across the glen, with the great mountain range almost
overhanging it. The fellside above us is bristling with crags, some
splintered and hanging as though a breath of wind would hurl a shower of
stone down upon us; others rise in flawless tiers, grandly immovable,
impervious to the forces of Nature. And beneath them is the dainty,
dancing harebell, the jocund foxglove, the sweet blooming heather, and
many a starry mountain flower. Few trees are in sight; round an
abandoned farm is a lonely cluster of sycamores; gulls are screaming and
paddling in what was once pasture-land. Bare and stern is the last
back-glance ere our way curves into a passage cut through the rocks.
Then, suddenly--is this a new land, a new Thirlmere? The transformation
is sudden and complete. To northward, many a mile, stretches a narrow
lake, basking in the afternoon sun. Dense coppice and green larches
clothe the slopes rising from the water; there is no indication of
farms, of humanity.
The lake is quite close, we gaze down a terrace of rock at its shining
mass. A knoll crowned with tough, short oaks is almost cut out from the
land; a faint swell breaks entirely round a rock on which heather is in
bloom. In the bay some wild ducks are feeding; Thirlmere in the quiet of
winter is a grand haunt of migrants from ice-covered Northern seas. The
lake is at its widest here; right opposite is the sham castle which
Manchester erected over the pipe which draws, through ninety miles of
mountain and meadow, the waters of Thirlmere. It is a pretentious
battlemented horror of red sandstone at present, an insult to the shade
of dour and grey Helvellyn. But perhaps time, and ivy, will soften the
harshness, dull the too vivid colours, and the ugliness of to-day may be
the beauty of a not-far-off to-morrow. On the road swings, ever softly
on the incline, making the cycle run easier, and we pass through aisles
of tall larch, beneath the shadow of sheering crags.
For a mile or so we pass through avenues of larch woods with broken
crags ever shouldering against the roadside; then we come to Launchy
Ghyll, the most extensive break in the mountain wall this side the lake.
Not far from the ghyll, yet some little climb above the road, is the
flat-topped boulder called the Justice Stone. It has been a famous
landmark. It is suggested that its first use was in the plague years
when the folks of Keswick laid money here to exchange with pedlars for
goods from the outside world. Up to a century ago the shepherds of the
neighbouring valleys used to meet at this place and exchange straying
sheep. The climb up to the Stone gives splendid views of the lake and
its surroundings, of Helvellyn range from Seat Sandal to Clough Head, of
three-piked Saddleback, and of Skiddaw.
Armboth House is the next feature: the haunt of the grisliest set of
phantoms the Lake Country holds. For once a year, on All Hallowe'en, it
is said, the ghosts of the Lake Country, the fugitive spirits whose
bodies were destroyed in unavenged crime, come here. I would not like to
be present at their banquet, for they are, according to Harriet
Martineau, an unpleasant lot. Bodies without heads, the skulls of
Calgarth with no bodies, a phantom arm which possesses no other member,
and many a weird shape beside. But they are a moral lot--victims and not
sinners. Does the wild shriek in which ere dawning ends their banquet
mean that to the spirit eyes has come a revelation of their wrongers in
torment? But I forget: no man can hear that cry and live. Yet people
will not believe the straight-forward story of the Armboth ghosts, of
windows lit up with corpse-lights, of clankings of chains in corridors,
of eternal shriekings which cannot be traced, as though murder was being
done in some secret chamber. But why has this house been compelled to be
a ghosts' haunt? I have never heard a word against its reputation,
ancient or modern. Perhaps it is most central for the guests to the
ghost supper.
From Armboth a road turns over the moors for Watendlath and Borrowdale.
It is a breezy moorland walk ending in a beautiful glen.
The road leaves the woodlands, and we cycle for some distance in full
view of the water. The land is fertile meadow; a welcome change from the
sterile wastes. A wood clothes the further shore; the hillside in front
is known as the Benn, its summit stands well out from the fellside to
which, if you trouble to climb so high, you find it is attached by a
narrow spine of rock. Up here the Britons of old had a fort impregnable
to assault. Now we reach the embankment, which has enlarged the bounds
of the mere. It rises to a great height above the waters at present, but
the engineers say that by a trifling amount of work the lake would rise
sufficiently for a man, leaning over the parapet, to wash his hands in
it. A road runs the width of the bank, giving a view up the sheening
waters to far-off Dunmail. It is a pretty picture this--a succession of
bluffs, some bare and stern, others clothed in clinging scrub of oak and
ash, clustering with larch.
The return road winds round the hill into Legburthwaite, faces Helvellyn
as though seeking a passage to its stone-strewn head, then turns sharply
over a rise, and we are by Thirlmere again. The first view is
exceedingly pretty. Neither sham castle nor embankment is visible, and
you need not remember that the mere is semi-artificial. The fells of
Armboth face one like a wall, broken here and there by a narrow ravine.
On the fell you find the dip where Harrop tarn, beloved of wild fowl, is
lying; you trace its rivulet threading down toward its long home in the
lake. For a long mile we cycle along a terrace road high above the
water, with Helvellyn rising to invisible heights to the left.
The next point of interest is Wythburn, its little church and inn across
the way known over the wide world. Wordsworth describes his "Waggoner"
making a journey past here at midnight, and halting at the Cherry-tree
(now a farm), a public-house on the disused lower road where a
merrynight was in progress. Coleridge has given his tribute to the
little house of God, and other equally famous names occur to one, who
have not disdained to ponder on the simplicity here. Wythburn was once
among the smallest of English churches, but an addition has been made to
the chancel since those days. In a batch of notes collected from aged
dalesmen many years ago I have the following story concerning Wythburn.
The rector, after forty-six years' constant and punctual work, caught a
chill which, as the week wore on, prostrated him. On Sunday morning his
wife persuaded him to send word to the clerk to take service as far as
possible and then dismiss the congregation. Ten o'clock came and a
quarter past, when the single bell should have tolled to assemble the
congregation. But to the concern of the invalid its welcoming clatter
did not ring out. To appease him his wife hurried to the church, half a
mile away, to ascertain the cause. She found the clerk scrambling up the
moss-grown roof with a newly twisted straw rope which had to be fixed
ere the bell could be rung. A wild goat (there were wild goats on
Helvellyn then as on the Coniston fells now) had during the week
descended from the fell where keep was scant, had leapt on to the low
roof, and, nimbly stepping along the ridge tiles, had found something
eatable in the bell rope.
In another fellside the thatch of the church was once eaten by sheep.
Services were not held in the building during winter; that was a
particularly hard season, and a snowstorm had scattered the flocks ere
they could be brought down. At still another fellside church a sudden
jerk of the rope was apt to cause the bell to vacate the steeple, and
with a rumble and a thud it would land in the adjacent field. Something
was wrong with the swivel, but the yeoman who acted as bell-ringer did
not know how to repair it. When the bell had finished its journey he
would carry it back to its old position, and trust to luck for its
remaining there awhile. But the parish clerk was a character, a class of
himself in the dales, and on theological topics his voice carried little
less weight than that of the parson. He was an independent fellow as a
rule, and even the visit, once in a lifetime, of a bishop could not
induce him to vary the methods which had descended to him through half a
dozen generations.