Category: Buttermere
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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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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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Gatesgarth Bridge
A wet day in the Lakes and a trip up to Dale Head didn’t produce anything photogenic. Gatesgarth Bridge at the bottom of Honistor Pass on the Buttermere side reminds me of an earlier visit. October 2008 and I was sitting in my VW Polo at almost the same spot watching the water in Gatesgarthdale…
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Buttermere Valley
It started off as a bike ride around Rosedale on the North York Moors. Then my young scion suggested a day trip to Lakes instead. So that’s how I ended up climbing Honister Pass and the first time in the Lakes without going on the fells.