The English Lakes

The memory of one of these spectacles on Hayswater, but a mile or so distant, is suggested by the little hamlet of Low Hartsop at the mouth of a lateral glen that comes in just where the valley widens somewhat, bringing with it Hayswater beck to join the Goldrill, which last has run through Brotherswater. Hartsop Hall is a plain, rugged old manor house overhung with trees on the Kirkstone shore of the lake, long the abode of sheep farmers, but possessed of the inconvenient disability of a public right-of-way through the centre, now presumably lapsed.

But till a few years ago a venerable champion of popular rights, or perhaps merely a humorist with plenty of spare time, used to make an annual pilgrimage here, and walk in at the front door and out at the back without any ceremony.

Low Hartshope itself is a group of some half-dozen mellow and mossy homesteads, planted irregularly above the beck at any time within the last five centuries. Fine old trees of sycamore, ash, and oak spread a protecting mantle of foliage over this snug and ancient haunt of dalesmen – a little patch of leafy opulence between the stern walls of fell that rise sharply on either hand. One or two houses of the group, representing, one might fancy, the proportionate decline of population in the dales, are falling or have long ago fallen into ruins. Moss and ferns, stone-crop and saxifrage, have seized alike upon both the abandoned and the fallen, upon the sagging flagstone roof which covers neither more nor less of the exposed weather-stained oak rafters than it did ten years ago, upon the fallen stones of a more completed ruin slowly sinking into the ground. Here may be seen, too, the deep, oldfashioned spinning galleries thrust out from the upper story and covered by an extension of the roof, invaluable not merely for the summer air, but for the lack of winter daylight in those massive, low-browed, small-windowed fortresses where the thrifty dalesmen dwelt. Wordsworth has celebrated a pretty old tradition that the spindles ran truer after the sheep had mounted the hill for their night's rest.

Now beneath the starry skyCrouch the widely scattered sheep,Ply the pleasant labour, ply,For the spindle while they sleepRuns with motion smooth and fine,Gathering up a trustier line.

A mile or so up the glen, the higher part a steep climb, down which a beck comes leaping in successive cataracts over black rocks feathered with fern and rowan trees, lies entrenched between mountain walls which rise some fifteen hundred feet above its three sides, the lonely lake of Hayswater. Scarce a mile in length and narrow in proportion, the scene is one in fair weather of delightful and impressive solitude, in wild weather awesome to a degree bordering on the uncanny. The mountain ridges all round are grey, stern, and rugged, while their green, rock-strewn lower slopes fall for the most part sharply to the water's edge. There is nowhere even a suggestion of humanity, but a rude boat half full of water chained to a rock. So lonely a sheet of water of this size, and thus nobly encompassed about and shut off from the world, there is not in all Lakeland. On a tempestuous May day some two years since the writer, underrating the measure of ferocity that the extra elevation of a thousand feet adds to a storm, found himself a solitary angler, beside these gloomy shores, amid as fine a prospect of the kind as the somberer side of one's soul might wish for. The south-west gale had found its way over the screes of the High Street ridge that closes the head of the narrow valley of which Kidsty and Grey Crag form the sides. Enraged apparently by opposition, it was coming down the full length of the lake in intermittent bursts of rain-laden fury that made even keeping one's feet no simple matter, and life altogether for the moment a moderate sort of entertainment. The fact that in the brief pauses, while the storm drew fresh breath, I could just keep my flies on the water in the shelter of rocky points, and at the same time not unprofitably, must be quoted in explanation of what might otherwise seem a quite superfluous attendance at such a dismal pandemonium of the elements. But these fortuitous encounters with nature in her most savage mood, and in her grimmest haunts, are among the memories that for myself I would ill spare, and none the less so because they so often belong to the unexpected and the unsought.

The upper and more rugged half of the valley walls on this sombre occasion opened and shut in veils of scudding mist, while their steep green flanks, littered with black crags fallen in long ages past from above, made a fitting frame for the white hissing waters that filled the long and stormy trough. But the crowning feature of this particular scene was at the foot of the lake, where it draws to a narrow point between high rocky banks, and the out-going beck leaps towards the gorge below through a gap in a stone dyke which otherwise closes the entrance. For into this funnel the storm seemed to concentrate its fury, lashing the waters after the fashion of a helm wind high into the air, and hurling them far down into the ravine below.

But I do not wish to keep the reader out in the wind and rain for the whole of our sojourn in Patterdale, and I should be an ingrate indeed to do so, for in many visits to this delightful haven in the Lake country I am only too rejoiced to remember that sunshine has far outbalanced cloud. And under such conditions the three miles of verdant vale from Hartsop to Ullswater, by way of the hamlet and church of Patterdale (named from St. Patrick) to Glenridding on the lake shore, is as characteristic and charming a pastoral valley as there is in all the Lake country. Cottages and homesteads, with their sheltering tufts of foliage, have still even this much-visited country almost to themselves, as they had it a century ago. The Goldrill, now a lusty stream, curves and sparkles from farm to farm. The bordering fields terminate in pleasant strips of woodland, or in bosky knolls of fern and rock, while far above upon either side rise steep and high the everlasting hills. And crowding round the head of Ullswater, which now spreads wide its bright island-studded waters and ends the vale, are mountains piled up everywhere. Place Fell and Birk Fell, lifting their untamed steeps of crag and scree sheer up from the water along four miles of the eastern shore, give that exceptional touch of wildness to the great lake which, together with the fine grouping of Helvellyn and her satellites upon the other side, justifies in the opinion of many its claim to pre-eminence among its sisters. For myself, I frankly admit that the head of Ullswater, and, for choice, a lodgment upon the Glenridding shore near the edge of the lake, holds me more tenaciously when I get there than any part of Lakeland.

There was once a king in Patterdale. His name was Mounsey, and he died in 1792, and the Gentleman's Magazine for that year in its obituary tells us all about him, facts confirmed, if such were necessary, by local tradition. This was in the days of the "statesmen", before outsiders came in and bought property and broke in upon the old Lakeland democracy. Patterdale Hall has now this long time been a large country house with a large estate attached to it. In the modest original homestead, however, reigned the Mounseys, who from time immemorial had been regarded as "kings" of the dale before the reign of the undesirable and eccentric monarch who proved to be the last but one of them.

This John Mounsey had an income of ₤800 a year, and the chief efforts of his life, which lasted over ninety years, were directed to keeping his expenses down to £30. In short, he was a miser of the most unabashed type. He was endowed with immense physical strength, of which, unlike his money, he grudged no expenditure in the pursuit of the over-mastering passion of his life. He rowed his own slate and timber down the lake to market, and toiled all day at the hardest manual tasks. When compelled to visit Penrith or elsewhere on business, he slept in neighbouring barns to save a hotel bill. He had his stockings shod with leather, and always wore wooden shoes. He is reported on one occasion, while riding by the lake, to have dismounted, stripped, and dived into it after an old stocking that caught his eye. Rather than buy a respectable suit for funerals, markets, and the like, he used to force the loan of them from his tenants, who were also under agreement to furnish him with so many free meals a year. Ever fearful of being robbed, he used to secrete his money in walls and holes in the ground, a practice which occasioned many exhilarating hunts for treasure-trove among the idle. His last luxury was putting out to the lowest tender the drawing of his will. The Patterdale schoolmaster, with a bid of ten-pence, obtained the contract. His son, however, closed the dynasty with honour, when the forbear of the present owner bought the royal domain and a good deal more beside, and planted those beautiful wild woods along the western margin of Ullswater that are the delight of every visitor, and above all of those for whom mountain and lake offer too strenuous adventure.

Various glens of infinite beauty wind up to the heart and shoulders of Helvellyn and Fairfield, which mountains display to the people of Ullswater by far their finest qualities. Across the lake a fine solitude of moor and fell, rising to 2600 feet, spreads far away eastward to Shap, including Martindale, Boredale, Mardale, and the High Street range, which carries the old Roman road to Carlisle (whence comes its name, Ystrad) along its summit. The wild red deer still roam over this wilderness as far as the shores of Ullswater, while as regards foxes they are almost too plentiful everywhere. Nor is there any part of England, no not Leicestershire, though in far different fashion, where they fill a bigger place in the public eye. Of the four or five packs of foxhounds hunted and followed on foot over the fells of Lakeland, one kennelled at Ullswater is among the most notable, if only for its famous huntsman. Every soul in Lakeland as far east as Crossfell, and every frequenter of Ullswater, knows "Joe Bowman", who has just now completed thirty years of such severe service as hunting a pack of fell hounds on foot means. The mantle of John Peel (who hunted a lower country, however, and rode to his hounds) has almost fallen upon him. His stalwart form may even be seen, like that of John Peel's, outside the cover of hunting songs in the windows of Carlisle music shops. If the songs are not sung like the others round the world, the memory of their subject will live among the dalesmen, I'll warrant, to their children's children. For hunting here is actually, not theoretically, democratic. When hounds throw off soon after daylight on a mountain side, and hunt a slow drag for an hour or two till they move their fox, and the field have to follow on foot as best they may, there is not much scope for the dashing and the decorative side of the chase. The fell farmers are all devoted followers, are on familiar terms with all the foxes, their domestic arrangements, and their families, and their probable line of action when pursued. They mostly know the hounds, and can recall their fathers and their mothers and their grandparents, and are steeped in hound lore. The very children about the head of Ullswater know many of the "dogs" personally, and have played with them as puppies. For they are mostly "walked" on the surrounding farms in summer, and when they play truant, which is pretty often, and come trotting through the village after a hunt upon their own account, it is quaint to hear them affectionately invoked by name from window or doorstep as familiar public characters. The necessity for keeping down the foxes gives, of course, an extra zest to the chase in these mountains. There being nothing to prevent and much to stimulate it in this country of late lambs, hunting is carried on vigorously till the middle of May; April, as a matter of fact, being for many reasons irrelevant here the most active month, and the best for seeing the sport. It is glorious, indeed, on an early spring morning to be perched, let us say, on one of the lower shoulders of Helvellyn, with the joyous crash of hounds upon a warming scent echoing from cliff to cliff.

But let us turn to gentler themes, noting for a moment Stybarrow, the foot of which is the subject of our artist's skill. There is very little of the Border foray tradition in the heart of the Lake country. It was obviously unprofitable as well as risky to the aggressor. But a body of Scots did once, at least, make a dash on Patterdale and on Stybarrow, which is in a sense its gateway, and met their fate. If the eastern shore of the upper half of Ullswater is inspiring from its solitary grandeur of overhanging mountain, its feathered cliffs and promontories, its indented rocky coves, its western shore holds one's affections by its gentler and more sylvan beauties. For after the picturesque confusion of mossy crag and forest glade around Stybarrow, beneath which the lake lies deep and dark, the two large demesnes – "chases" would best describe them – of Glencoin and Gowbarrow slope gently down from the back-lying mountains to the curving shore. Here are pleasant silvery strands overhung with tall sycamores and oaks; there are rocky shores fringed with hazel and alder, where the crystal waters of this most pellucid of large lakes breaks sonorously when a gale is blowing. The little becks come tumbling in too over the sloping meadows from the fells – that of Glencoin of familiar name, and that of Aira of greater fame for its waterfall, whose hoarse voice can be heard on still evenings on the lake, and for the legend embodied in Wordsworth's well-known poem. Here, too, behind the long grassy promontory with pebbly shore that roughly marks the entry to this upper and more beautiful four miles of lake, is Lyulph's tower. Not a very ancient fabric, to be sure, but marking the site of that shadowy keep where dwelt the sleep-walking, love-lorn maiden, who perished in the pool below Aira Force in the arms of her errant knight, as he arrived only just in time to drag her expiring to the shore.

List ye who pass by Lyulph's towerAt eve how softly thenDoth Aira Force, that torrent hoarse,Speak from the woody glen.

BASSENTHWAITE AND DERWENTWATER

What was the great Parnassus' self to theeMount Skiddaw? In his natural sovereigntyOur British hill is fairer far; he shroudsHis double front among Atlantic clouds,And pours forth streams more sweet than Castally.– Wordsworth.

Mercifully it is not our province here to pass a pious opinion on the comparative beauties of Ullswater and Derwentwater. It is tolerably certain that the one which held you the longer and the most often in its welcome toils would have your verdict. The lake of Ulpho is a thought wilder and grander and withal less accessible. Save on occasions, it wears generally a more isolated and aloof demeanour. The other, too, is much smaller and quite differently formed; its length, three miles and odd, being little more than twice its breadth, but picturesquely indented, and virtually surrounded by mountainous heights. Keswick town almost adjoins, though nowhere trenching, on its lower end, and behind Keswick the great cone of Skiddaw fills the north. Though of no distinction in itself, not a country town in all England is so felicitously placed. Within five minutes' walk of its extremity its fortunate burghers can pace the shores of Derwentwater, or, better still, the fir-clad promontory of Friars Crag, and look straight up the mountain-bordered lake to the yet sterner heights looming at its farther end, known as the Jaws of Borrowdale. Behind and to the north Skiddaw, as related, joining hands to the eastward with more precipitous Blencathara, otherwise Saddleback, lifts its shapely bulk. Through a fair green vale between, the Derwent, joined by Keswick's own bewitching stream, the Greta, urges a bold and rapid course to Bassenthwaite, which completes the picture two miles below. Though not geographically central, Keswick is nevertheless an admirable base from whence to adventure the Lake country for such as trust to wheels of any kind, and have no great length of time at their disposal. The genius loci of Keswick is of course Southey, and the plain red house where that kind-hearted and industrious poet and brilliant essayist lived for most of his life still stands above the Greta. Different in every personal characteristic, as De Quincey their mutual friend so lucidly sets forth, was Southey from Wordsworth, his successor in the Laureateship. The one, elegant, reserved, modest, fastidious, business-like, a methodical and indefatigable worker, but essentially a man of books; the other, sprawly, almost uncouth in minor habits, self-centred to the verge of arrogancy in social intercourse. Southey at Keswick earned by the Quarterly and other sources a quite substantial income, out of which he maintained not merely his own family, but for long that of poor S. T. Coleridge, whose haphazard existence consisted very largely of a succession of extended visits to generous and admiring friends. Wordsworth, on the other hand, ridiculed by most of the critics, made very little out of his poems till quite late in life. But for once in a way Providence, as represented by pounds sterling, seemed to recognize a dreamy genius, with no capacity for earning bread and butter, and showered upon him from all sides legacies, annuities, and sinecures that made him probably a richer man than Southey, even apart from his belated earnings.

A striking picture, too, is this ancient church of St. Kentigern planted in the level vale – the Derwent chanting in its rocky bed upon the one hand, and Skiddaw lifting its three thousand feet upon the other, with Bassenthwaite opening not far below its broad and shining breast. Fate has laid the bones of many a man and woman of some modest fame in their day beneath the heaving turf of this picturesque crowded graveyard, caught unawares, some of them, while temporary sojourners in a country, whose beauty drew hither two or three generations of pilgrims, before facilities of transport made the achievement the simple one it is for us. Within the church, however, a monument to John Radcliffe, the second Earl of Derwentwater, father of that ill-fated young man who lost his head and the vast estates of the family in the 'Fifteen, husband, too, of Charles the Second's daughter by the Duchess of Cleveland, strikes an earlier and more genuinely local note. The original nest of the Radcliffes was on Lord's Island, one of those near the foot of the lake, and its foundations may still be traced; but they acquired their chief consequence through wealthy Northumbrian heiresses. The Keswick property remained with them till the confiscation; but it is with the ruined towers of Dilston, near Hexham, rather than the land of their origin and their title that the memory of the Radcliffes will be chiefly associated. So one must not linger here over the story, rather a pathetic one, in fact, how the young peer of 1715, admirable in every relation of life, with youth, a happy marriage, and an immense property all to his credit, was drawn into the rising against his better judgment, to become its chief victim. Forced by a train of circumstances and by an almost morbid sense of honour, as a near relative of the exiled house, to join the ill-concerted scheme, in which he had not even been consulted, since his name only was wanted, his fate was a hard one, and he was duly mourned on both the Western and the Eastern march.

"O Derwentwater's a bonny lord,Fu' yellow is his hair,And glinting is his hawky 'eeWi' kind love dwalling there."

Another historical character intimately associated with the Keswick country was that "Shepherd Lord" celebrated by Wordsworth. This was the only surviving son of the Black Clifford, whom, in the ruthless feuds of The Roses, his mother, dreading the vengeance which might pursue the son of such a father, sent to be reared as a shepherd's son on the slopes of Saddleback. Nor till he was thirty did he emerge from this humble role to take his place as a peer of the realm, to marry twice, and to acquit himself reasonably well when called to public duties from the seclusion of Borden Tower, still standing on the Yorkshire moors above the Wharfe, where he lived a studious life. Indeed he marched to Flodden Field, which must have irked such a peaceful soul, one might fancy, not a little.

It is at the head of Derwentwater that the Lodore beck makes that sonorous descent into the vale, which, by a famous poet's frolic, as it were, achieved a notoriety it only merits in a wet season. The mouth of Borrowdale, however, down which the Derwent hurls its beautiful limpid streams through resounding gorges to an ultimately peaceful journey to the lake, is a place to linger in, not merely to admire in passing, and two well-known hotels of old standing are evidence that the public are of that opinion. If the heights of Borrowdale make an inspiring background for the lake, as viewed from the Keswick end, Skiddaw, as seen from Borrowdale, serves as noble a purpose. Then there is that long array of heights right across the lake, and those behind them, spreading away to Buttermere.

The view from Skiddaw is well worth the long but easy climb. Derwentwater and Bassenthwaite, linked by the silver coil of the river in the green vale, make a perfect foreground to a prospect which, like that of Helvellyn, covers not only the whole of Lakeland, but the sea coast and much more beyond. Skiddaw, however, stands sentinel, as it were, at this northern gateway into the Lake country, and looks right over Cumberland, with Carlisle in the centre of the picture, the Solway gleaming beyond, and behind that again the dim rolling forms of the Scottish hills. We have nothing to do with Carlisle, or the Eden, or Solway Moss, with Eskdale or Liddesdale, or any of this classic Borderland here laid open to the view. But one may be pardoned, when perched thus in fancy upon Skiddaw's aerial cone, for a brief reflection of how different was the past and how strangely different the associations of this rugged romantic Lake country with its simple, uneventful peasant story, quite obscured what there is of it by its more recent literary associations, from that classic soil of Border story spreading to the northward. "Happy is the land", says the old saw, "that has no history"; and no part of England has so little, in the ordinary sense of the word, as that which one looks back upon from the top of Skiddaw. None, upon the other hand, has more than that once blood-stained region, now spreading so fair and green and fertile to the dim hills of Scotland, which share its stirring tale.

Immediately below and behind the mountain Skiddaw forest spreads – an unusual sight in Lakeland – its heather-clad undulations, and beyond and all around it is the green up-lying country, where John Peel of immortal memory hunted those no less immortal hounds. A majority of persons, I am quite sure, still think he is a mythical person, the burden of a fancy song, a legendary hero. But, on the contrary, he lived down yonder in Caldbeck, and only died in 1854. You may see his tombstone at any time with his obituary, and a hound, whip, and spur carved on its face in the village churchyard. Plenty of people still living remember him well. The late Sir Wilfrid Lawson, whose home, and that of his forbears, is easily visible from here, knew him well, and in his youth had hunted with him. The last time I was at Caldbeck, ten years ago, two of his daughters, old married ladies, were still alive in the neighbourhood, and I spent several hours myself in company with his nephew, who, when a boy, used to help him with his hounds. Peel was, in fact, a well-to-do yeoman who kept a small pack of hounds, which he hunted when and where he pleased for his own entertainment, and, incidentally, for that of a few of his neighbours, one of whom, Woodcock Graves, the whilom owner of a bobbin mill and his most constant companion, wrote the song, never dreaming of it as more than a passing joke. Afterwards, when Graves, having failed in business, went to Tasmania, where he died in the 'Seventies, Mr. Metcalf, of the Carlisle publishing house, arranged the song, which fortuitously caught on in Cumbrian hunting circles, and has now gone round the world. Graves has told us all about the writing of it – tossed hastily off one evening in Peel's little house at Caldbeck, which anyone may see to-day. The village is full of his relatives and connections, and I have no doubt that the famous sportsman spoke an archaic and forcible Cumbrian, that strangers who can understand the ordinary fell farmer or peasant of to-day without difficulty would make mighty little of. At any rate, his nephew Robert did! Peel was not a fell hunter of the Ullswater pattern, but worked altogether a lower country and rode to his hounds. He was an exact contemporary of the lake poets, this other lion, and there is a spice of humour in the thought! "When he wasn't huntin'," remarked his venerable relative to me, in a heartfelt, reminiscent sort of tone, "he was aye drinkin'." His view holloa, though said by those who remember him to have been the most tremendous and piercing ever let out of mortal throat, obviously never penetrated the barrier of Skiddaw and Saddleback and reached the ears of the Lake poets "in the morning".