Category: Lake District
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Easedale: Where William Paced and Dorothy Wrote
Another photo from Monday’s climb up Helm Crag. Looking down Easedale, you see more than a rugged Cumbrian landscape. You see a living library. To the left, Helm Crag rises as what Dorothy Wordsworth called “a Being by itself” in 1801. Its summit bristles with famous rock formations: the “Lion and the Lamb,” the “Astrologer,”…
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A Brief Moment of Sun, Raven Crag
Raven Crag catches a rare shaft of sunlight, and frankly it has earned it. This brooding giant overlooks the foot of Thirlmere Reservoir and has been stopping writers in their tracks for generations. They have called it everything from “vertical white walls” and a “chiselled face furred with conifer” to a “gigantic round tower” that…
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“A Natural Convulsion”
Helm Crag holds a unique distinction. It is the only Lake District fell that Wainwright openly admitted to never actually reaching the top of. He gave up on the final scramble needed to stand on the true summit — the northwestern pinnacle. For a man who climbed everything, that is quite an admission. The summit…
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The Wild Boar of Westmorland
Imagine standing here eight centuries ago in this small tributary of Kentmere. The place feels still now, but once it was no quiet backwater. Here, a family’s fate hung by a thread, and the stakes were as high as the fells around you. At the heart of it stands Richard Gilpin, said to have killed…
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The Maid of Buttermere
Back home now, back on my own patch, yet the pull of the Lakes refuses to loosen its grip. I cannot leave without telling the tale of the Maid of Buttermere, a story that has clung to the valley like the morning mist on the fells. It is an eighteenth-century mix of beauty, trickery, and…
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Burtness Comb: A Watch Lost and a Frozen River
Burtness Comb hangs above Buttermere like a great green amphitheatre, tucked between High Stile and High Crag. I once picked my way down it during the Lake District Mountain Trial in 1978. Somewhere on that bracken-choked slope, there may still be an orange-faced Omega watch, a twenty-first birthday gift, quietly keeping time for no one.…
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Crummock Water And its Tombolo
On the west shore of Crummock Water sits a small oddity that likes to keep a low profile. It is said to be the only example of its kind in the Lake District, which is no small boast for a strip of stones. This feature is a “tombolo”, a gravel beach about 50 metres long…
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The Slow Making of Buttermere and Crummock Water
That flat sweep of rich green pasture is not there by chance. It sits on the land bridge between Buttermere and Crummock Water, quietly doing the job of keeping the two lakes apart. It was built by a geological feature known as a fan-delta, courtesy of the steady graft of Mill Beck. Long before maps…
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Aitkin Knott and Keskadale
A sweeping, high-angle view drops into Keskadale, better known as the Newlands Valley, seen from the brown, heathered spine of Ard Crags. At the end of the ridge sits the small knoll of Aitken Knott. Here Earl Ackin, a leading Norse-Cumbrian lord and brother of Earl Boethar, was buried, set high above the land where…
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Goldrill Beck Set Free
Mist and drizzle soften the view over upper Patterdale, where Brotherswater draws the eye and Goldrill Beck winds its way across the valley floor. Not long ago this river was forced into a rigid eighteenth-century channel, cut straight alongside the A592 at the edge of the wood beneath Hartsop above How. The result was a…