THE LAKE COIfflTBY BY E. LYNN LINTON WITH A MAP AND ONE HUNDRED ILLUSTRATIONS DRAWN AND ENOHATED BY W. J. LINTON LONDON: SMITH, ELDER AND CO., 05, CORNHILL 1804 Df) 47O L,L CONTENTS C11APTEE PAGE PREFACE ix Early History xiii I. Wiiidermere 1 II. Walks about Ambleside 18 III. From Ambleside to Keswick 36 IV. Keswick and Derwentwater 48 V. The Keswick Walks 65 VI. Blencatlira, Skiddaw, and Bassenthwaite 85 VII. Ullswater IX. Helvellyu and Fairfield 143 X. Langdale and the Stake 158 XI. The Tarns 171 XII. Buttennere, Crummock, and Lowes Waters 183 XIII. Wastwater and Scawfell 201 XIV. Calder Abbey, Egremont, and Eunerdale 817 8GS718 CONTENTS. (iiArrr.il i V.K XV. St. Hi-es and the Sra Coast '-Ml XVI. I'n the Duddon 345 \\ II. Collision and ILawkshead -<>1 XVIII. FuriK'ss Al)lx v and (lie Sands.... -27? APPENDICES PAGE J. Provincialisms of the Lake District ^05 II. The Botany of the Lake District 318 III. The Geology of the Lake District 336 IV. Table of Mountains, Lakes, and Waterfalls 342 V. Table of Rainfall 346 INDKX . :(17 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Derwent and Bassenthwaite Waters, from Asliness Bridge Frontispiece From Esk Hawse Title-page Bird's-eye Primrose ii Criffel, Skiddaw, and Helvellyn Tops iv lloadside, Crummock Water viii Oak Fern xii Initial W xiii Common Maiden-Hair Spleenwort xl Windermere, from above Low Wood 1 Professor Wilson's House, Elleray 4 Barked Tree 8 Troutbeck Bridge 8 Windermere, from near Dove's Nest 11 Coming Storm 10 Windermere, from Troutbeck Road 1? Head of Stockghyll Force IB Sweden Bridge 22 Top of Kirkstone Pass 2.~> gg Tarn 28 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE The Roman Station at Ambleside Bronze Ornament to Roman Sword-hilt Rydal Water, from Scandale Side ;tfl Upper Force, Rydal Park Wordsworth's House, Rydal Mount 38 Grasmere, from Loughrigg Side 41 Thirhnere, from the Foot A 40 Derwentwater, from Castlehead 48 Derwentwater, from Sir John Woodford's Grounds 57 Roman Pot 00 Crosthwaite Church 01 Borrowdale and Glaramara 05 Castle Crag in Borrowdale facing 07 TheBowder Stone 08 Lodore 73 Watendlath Bridge 77 The Druid Circle 79 Bassenthwaite Water, from Faw Park Woods 85 Razor Edge and Scales Tarn 87 Mill Race in Brundholm Woods 91 Skiddaw, from near Portinscale 93 Long Side, Skiddaw 97 Ullswater, from Sharrow Bay 98 Ullswater, from Gowbarrow Park faciny 101 Ara, above the Force 104 Deepdale Head Ill Ullswater, from Glencoin 121 Small Water 122 Hawes Water i:)l Long Stile 135 1 Lives Water HO \i LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE Angle Tarn, by High Street 142 Fail-field Top 143 Swirrel Edge 144 Striding Edge 145 From Helvellyn Top, looking over Striding Edge facing 149 Fairfield Ridges 152 The Two Edges, from below 157 Langdale Pikes 158 Thrang Crag Quarry Mouth 162 Dungeon Ghyll 165 Gimmer Crag 170 Stickle Tarn, looking over Langdale 171 Angle Tarn, under Bowfell 176 Sprinkling Tarn 178 High House Tarn 17!) Sty Head Tarn 182 Crummock and Buttermere, from Lowfell 183 The Vale of Lorton 186 Scale Force 191 Honister, from Crummock Water 193 Honister Quarries Sled Roads and Quarryman's Sled 197 Scawfell and "NVastwater 201 Sty Head Pass 204 Wastdale Church 206 Borrowdale Head 208 Scawfell Ascent (different Aspects) 209, 210 The Screes 215 Colder Abbey 217 Ennerdale Water 225 The Isle of Man, from St. Bees 230 FleswickBay 231 vii LIST OF TLIA'STHATIONS. PAGE C'.nulu'. from St. Bees > \ I l-';ills of the Duddon, above Scatlnviiitr '.'I"' Wordsworth's Stepping Stones -">'- From Duddon Bridge vM'.n Coniston Old Man, from Brantwood ^('.] Coniston Water, from the Head ^7(i Furness Abbey T ^77 . ->."i Sunset across the Sands .)> Si-a\vfi'll Miin : :>!M Buttermere 817 Grass of Parnassus and Fringed Water Lily :S.T> Geological Section 337 Graptolites 337 Ice-worn Rock, Anibleside 341 Moraine, Little Langdale 341 Colith Force .SI.") l!;i in Clouds.... :; ir, PREFACE IT is long since any book was written descriptive of the Lake Country. Green, and West, and Mrs. Radcliffe, and others of the Picturesque School, gave their absurdly exaggerated accounts of what they saw and perilled in these " inhospitable regions," as it was then the fashion to call them ; but when the reaction against romanticism set in, and people had learnt for themselves that the ascent of Blencathra could be made without a fit of apoplexy and the necessity of blood-letting midway that Borrowdale had nothing maniacal in it, and that Newlands was rather lonesome but not in the least degree terrifying then all this idealistic writing was at a discount, and only guide-books containing useful road-side informa- tion were asked for. Now that these have served their turn, it seemed to my husband and myself that a pleasant book could be made by treating the Lake Country with the love and knowledge artistic and local belonging of right to natives and old inhabitants. We hope that what we have done will bear out our design. Though a faithful description of scenes and places, it is not a tour made up of personal adventures ; neither is it a hand-book, telling what inns to go to and how much to pay for breakfast and dinner ; nor yet an exhaustive monograph, for which we should have needed thrice the time and space ix b PREFACE. afforded ; but it is merely a Book on the Lakes, giving such of the general and local history as fell in with our plan and what we thought would interest the reader, while doing our best to worthily illustrate and describe the most beautiful places both those popularly known, and those which only the residents ever find out. It is indeed a " Love-book " which we give to the world, in the earnest desire for others to share in our experiences, and to receive the same joy and healthy excitement as we ourselves have had. I wish to express now my most grateful thanks to Thomas Wright, Esq., M.A., F.R.S. F.S.A., &c., for an amount of kindly help, rare even in the literary world where there is so much genuine kindness. He took infinite pains to render my Early History free from faults, and he did this with a fulness and frankness of generosity that enhanced even the value of his scientific aid. To Edward Hull, Esq., F.G.S., &c., I would also add my best thanks for relieving me of the responsibility of the geological chapter, to the great improvement of the work, which has gained so much by his accurate knowledge. Of the engravings I cannot speak, as can be easily understood, because of the relations between the artist and myself; I may however say that all the sketches were made expressly for this work during our rambles, and that they have the merit of absolute fidelity ; for the rest, they will speak for themselves more eloquently than the most florid praises could. The Botanical notices and the Glossary I think will be found to be fuller and more correct than any yet published ; and I have only to lament the want of authority in the comparative tables of lakes and waterfalls, which want however I had no possible means of supplying. E. LYNN LINTON. Diuntu-ood, Conixttni . September, 1864. THE LAKE COUNTRY THE LAKE COUNTRY EARLY HISTORY HEN Imperial Rome held Britain as one of her outlying pos- sessions, she had a troublesome set of subjects in the Brigantes, 1 those northern " people of the heights," whose province, 2 in- cluding among others our modern Lancashire, "Westmoreland, and Cumberland, formed part of the larger and later division of Maxima Caesariensis, and of the still later Saxon kingdom of Deira. Those early northern Britons were a wild race, and gave their conquerors no little trouble. They subsisted chiefly by hunting, like most savages, abjuring fish " of which they had a prodigious plenty," and holding hares, geese, and poultry in a kind of religious abhorrence perhaps the more industrious of them keeping cattle, 3 like 1 Geoffrey of Monmoutli, in the time of Henry II., and Holinshed after him, say that the first Britons were descended from Brutus, or Bruto, son or descendant of ^Eneas, who settled here 1108 B.C. or 2855 A.M. Camden, indignant at the Romans for their aboriginal theory, " as if mankind first sprung up out of the earth like mushrooms," makes Gomer. the eldest son of Japhet, whose posterity became the Gomeri, or Gauls, our great ancestor. The Cambrian Register says that Brigantes is from Beg, a summit, hence Brigantwys. the People of the Summits; and Ridpath, that it is from the goddess Briganta, whose statue was found in Scotland. " The interior of the island northward was occupied by the Brigantes, who held the extensive districts, difficult of approach on account of their moun- tains and woods, extending from the Humber and the Mersey to the present borders of Scotland. This extensive tribe appears to have included many smaller ones. Two of these are called by Richard of Cirencester, the Voluntii and the Sestuntii, the former in the west of Lancashire, the latter in Westmoreland and Cumberland. The Jugantes and the Cangi of Tacitus, on the borders of the Irish Sea, are also understood to have belonged to, or been dependent upon, this tribe. The Brigantes are believed to have been the original inhabitants of the island, who had been driven nortliAvard by successive invasions and settlements, and they appear to have been the least civilized tribe of South Britain." The Celt, the Roman, and the Saxon. By THOMAS WRIGHT. 2 " Beyond the boundary which Ostorius had formed by his line of forts, the interior of the island was inhabited by tribes who were fiercer and less civilized than the southern nations. The chief of these was the great tribe of the Brigantes, extending through the mountainous and wooded districts from the borders of Lincolnshire, through Yorkshire. Lancashire, Westmoreland, Cumberland, and Northumberland." Ibid. 3 Numbers were found in the capital of Cassivellaunus. xiii THE LAKE COUNTRY. the old Novsv dalesmen. Their clothing was the skins of heasts, according to some ; according to others, their habit of body was brute nakedness stained with woad for a warlike effect ; their dwellings 4 were " among the pillars of the forest, enclosed with interwoven branches," whence they came out in fierce hordes to harass their invaders ; their government was monarchical in form but independent in individual practice; their religion druidical " furies for gods," said their masters, thinking of Diana and Venus, Minerva and the beneficent Ceres human sacrifices for propitiation, and eternal trans- migration of souls for their only hope beyond the grave; their morality was lax read by the more complex social polity of the Latins, but they were faithful to their law such as it was, and indeed notably obedient to all laws, by which they had a due measure of self-government preserved ; they wore long hair both on the head and upper lip; and they ate a certain fruit of the size of a bean (Cesar's " chara ") which allayed both hunger and thirst. 5 This portrait of the fierce Britains, with every repulsive feature heightened in the Brigantes, is not a very inviting one ; being, in fact, simply that of unmitigated savages before civilization has developed or history 6 ennobled 4 Caesar says, ' a town among the Britons is nothing more than a thick wood fortified with a ditch and rampart, to serve as a place of retreat against the incursions of their enemies." 5 This was probahly the root of the Orobits tuberosus, or Tuberous bitter vetch, the I.eath peaseling," which Sir William Hooker says the Highlanders eat to this day, and call Cormeille, and which the Hollanders roast or boil like a chestnut ; the analogue to which is the coca of the South Americans. 8 " The Britons of Cumbria," says Palgrave, " occupy a tolerably large space on the map. but a very small one in history ; their annals have entirely perished, and nothing authentic remains concerning them. Romance has more. In Cumbria, Merlin prophesied and Arthur held his court. These, and such like fantastic personages Roderic the Magnificent, and Peridur, Prince of Sunshine are, however, of importance in one point of view, showing that from the Ribble to the Clyde existed a dense population of Britons, even in the tenth century inhabiting the greater part of the western coast. Dunbritton now Dumbarton, or Alduyd, Clyde was the residence of the Cumbrian kings, whose kingdom extended nearly to our modern Leeds, but the Saxons drove them continually further back, conquering at a very early period Carlisle, which Egfrith of Northumbria bestowed upon the See of Liiidisfarn. He extended his conquests to Furness. After the reduction of Alcluyd by Egbert (680 to 756), the Britons were governed by Scottish princes, who probably acquired their rights by inter- marriage with a British princess. The Cumbrian Britons gradually melted away into the xiv EARLY HISTORY. them : whether true or not is another matter. But indeed it is needful to take, with a very large "grain," accounts of things and people so unlike the ordinary home experience which was the only standard whereby Imperial Eome could measure values. Rome got many good things out of her Britons, Brigantes and others. Breastplates of British pearls (baccae conchae, " shell-berries," as Carndeu calls them), which Caesar dedicated to Venus Genitrix; ship-loads of chalk, wicker baskets, tin, lead, iron, and other metals ; corn (the Gauls must have starved in 360 had not Julian, then commanding the Roman army in Gaul, fed them with British wheat) ; coal (as Wright has shown, there being coal enough left in the old Roman homes to make many a good- sized fire); fierce dogs of noble breed and glorious aspect; soldiers 7 good for foreign service ; the spectacle of Caractacus bound, but more royally free than his captors ; the noble womanhood of Boadicea as a lesson to the perfumed Julias and soft-eyed Messalinas of the imperial city ; and the fair- haired slaves of later years, who gave a Pope occasion for two moderate puns, and to St. Augustine a mission ; with such gifts as these our little island of Albion 8 was of no mean value to the queen and mistress of the world. What she left would occupy too large a space in these pages. But though we cannot speak of all the Roman legacies to England, we can of surrounding population, j r et probably not till a very recent period. The Welsh even were enumerated by David the Lion among his subjects, and the laws or usages of the Brits or Britons continued to Edward I., 1124-53, when he summoned the representatives of Scotland to attend his parliament at Westminster. In some secluded districts the language is thought to have lingered to the Reformation. Pendragon Castle reminds the traveller of the fabled Uther ; and Skiddaw and Helvellyn (he might have added Blencathra, Glaramara, the Glenderamakin, the Glenderaterra, and Walla Crag), retain their original names, as the sepulchral moimments of a race which has passed away." NOTE to GILES'S Translation of Geoffrey of Moninouth. 7 According to the Notitia, the fourth ala of Britons was stationed in Egypt. The lircnty-sixth cohort of Britons occurs in Armenia. A body of the "Invincible Younger Britons " was stationed in Spain ; and one of the " Elder Britons " in Illyricum. The Younger British Slingers, (exculcatores)" are found among the Palatine auxiliaries. Other bodies of Britons are found in Gaul, Italy, and other countries. The Celt, the Roman, and the S viand, in Yorkshire. At Shap Thorn were once some beautiful Druidical remains large granite stones, which were recklessly blasted, and taken away for any kind of use the neighhours might wish to put them to for boring into millstones, or building foundations. Would make beautiful chimney-pieces," say Nicholson and Burn. The rough little hamlet of Wet Sleddale where the popular belief is that it always rains, as perhaps it does hud an uncomfortable half hour in 1300, when the bishop commanded the rural dean and various vicars of the various churches to excommunicate the people for violently breaking inio the house and gninge of tin: Abbot of Heap. At High Mass, when the greatest numbers would he a>scmhled, candles were to be lighted, and bells rung, and with bell, hook, and ciindle. all the misdoers were to be excommunicated, which method would surely catch some among the congregation, even though they did. as Fuller said of the moss troopers, " conic to church as seldome as the 29th of February comes into the kalendar." xxxiv EARLY HISTORY. years ago, declared it was, with manners too gross to be witnessed, living too coarse to be endured, "a country full of infertile places, which the northern Englishmen call moors," 35 a climate unbearable because of its severity, and prejudices too dense for the hope of enlightenment, present or to come. Since 1752, when a bill was obtained for making a road from Burton, through Kendal and Shap, to Eamont Bridge (never, until the rebellion of 1715, when there was good fighting between the two parties in these northern wilds, had government thought of highways here at all) ; since 1774, when the first stage-coach, the Fly, was put on the road, to run between London and Glasgow, over Stanemore ; since the first mail was set on the Kendal and Shap road in 1786; since those times, and even since periods much nearer to our own, what an immeasur- able change of manners and customs, and habits and thoughts, has taken place. Grand hotels, first-class lodging-houses, sumptuous fare, and fashion- able clothing, assimilate the rugged land of the hill and fell to the most fashionable watering-place within the reach of London. "Nubila West- moreland Saxosa et misera poor land," said a rhyming collegian with more love of luxury than of beauty in his young head ; but none save the veriest Cockney, who calls Hampstead " a wild place," would echo his opinion now ; while the doubt, gravely expressed so late as 1814, whether Bishop Watson's new plantations of oak and elm and sycamore, and other fair-growing forest trees at Calgarth, would ever survive the inclemency of the seasons, and whether hardy fir and larch were not the only trees that would thrive in this bleak valley of the Winandermere at all, reads strangely now, under the shadow of woods, luxuriant beyond ordinary course. Yet even old Fuller could see no charm in this, one of the loveliest and choicest spots of God's dear earth. Speaking of " Westmorland," he says, " Here is cold comfort from Nature, but somewhat of Warmth from Industry. That the Land is barren is God's Pleasure, the People painfull, their Praise. . . . Though sterile by general rule, it is fruitfull by some few exceptions, having some pleasant Vales. . . . much of Eden (running clean through it) yet little of Delight ! " If Fuller had written in 1864, when nature was better understood and more intelligently loved, he would 35 Speed's Theatre, representing the exact geography of 1670. XXXV e 2 TIIK LAKE COUNTRY. have given a different verdict a verdict as loving and as full of apprecia- tion as our own ! Brave and bonny Cumberland, wedged 36 up against the frontier line of Scotland, had even more to do with the Border service than her more southward sister. Her whole life was centered in the struggle for ever going on between herself and those wild moss troopers and rievers across the Border; and all her energies were needed to keep them in anything like check. Once, led by Kobert de Brus, they came trooping down as far as Furness, firing and slaying and lifting all before them ; and once again they swept like a cloud of locusts through the land, till they halted at the Abbey of Holme Cultram, which they plundered, when they departed, replenished, with sacrilege as well as murder on their souls. To Gilsland and Penrith was but a short day's raid, and a frequent ; to Derwent Fells and Alston Moor almost as frequent ; Inglewood Forest they made their constant hunting-ground ; and once (the Earl of Douglas heading the raid) they swarmed down upon Penrith in fair time, and lifted a king's ransom as their reward. So that poor Cumberland had enough to do to hold her own, and found the defence of industry by valour a hard and heavy lesson. The result being a larger amount of individualism, 37 and less attention to rules and law than with most English counties. Kumbraland, as she is called in the old map to Thorkelin's Fragments or Caerleylshire, from the capital Caerleyl, in certain other old writers was never famous for amenity of manners, but never infamous for cowardice or M Speed says, " The forme of this countie is long and narrow, pointing wedge-like into tin south, which part is altogether pictured with copped hills, and therefore hath the name of Copland. The middle is more level and better inhabited, yielding sufficient for the sustenance of man ; but the north is wild and solitairie, and combed with hilles, as Co]>In! is. The air is piercing, and of a sharp temperature, and would be more biting, were it not that these high hilles brake off the northern stormes and cold falling snowes. Notwith- standing, rich is this province, and with great varieties of commodities is replenished; the hilles, though rough, yet smile upon their beholders, spread with sheep and cattle, the vallies stored \\itli ^rasse and come sufficiente, the sea affordeth great store of fish, and the land is overspread with great varietie of fowl." 37 This is seen, as one example, in the immense variety of landed tenures in use among the Cumbrians, until a little more uniformity was introduced by Act 12 Charles II. that is. by the Commonwealth; but even now there is diversity enough, and a great deal of local law and usage afloat. By the way, Blackstone says that copyholders are only villeins improved. xxxvi EAKLY HIST011Y. want of manhood. Even in the time of the Heptarchy she seems to have been rather a self-annexing province of Northumberland, governed by her own people and in her own way, than a conquered county held by force or fear. Else how do we hear of the kings of the county ? and what is the meaning of the story of poor Dunmail ? and the grant by Edmund, son of Athelstane, of all our fells and lakes and mountains and morasses to Malcolm the Scottish king, on condition that he protected the North of England generally, against all Edmund's enemies,, both by sea and land ? a grant that led to nothing but bloodshed and confusion between England and Scotland, and wars unceasing, and boundary lines never fixed, and rights by no possible means to be decided, until William the Conqueror took the county to himself, and bestowed it on Ranulph de Meschines, with the Border Service to follow. It was not likely that the Scotch king 38 who laid claim to the county as his right would submit quietly to this. He entered the land and ravaged it, burning and slaying in the wild wilful sin- fulness of those days ; but William Rufus came sweeping down at the head of his men obliged though to sweep back again, because "they could not bear the severity of the seasons," doing little good in his attempt, beyond that of rebuilding Carlisle, which had fallen into ruins, and settling a few agricultural soldiers on the land, which, since the time of the Romans, " had 38 The following is a summary from the Scottish side of the history of Cumberland. During the heptarchy, part of Northumberland was invaded by the Danes, in the reign of Kthelred, at the end of the eighth century, and thoroughly conquered in 875, by Halfdin tlio Dane, when Carlisle was most probably destroyed. The Scottish King Gregory, in S7(i, helped the Northumbrians to expel the Danes, but the Britons, quarrelling with their benefactor, invaded Scotland, were defeated, and as terms of peace ceded Cumberland and Westmoreland to Gregory, and retired to Wales, about 880. Cumberland, in rebellion iigsiinst Scotland, set up a king of its own, Dummaile. Edward, son of Athelstane (945) laid waste the country, put out the eyes of Dummaile's two sons, and restored Cumberland to Malcolm. 1001, Ethelred invaded Cumberland, because Malcolm, its prince, son of King Kenneth (the Scottish king's eldest son was Prince of Cumberland, as ours is Prince of Wales) had not paid his quota of tribute to the Danes ; Canute confirmed the county to the Scot on condition of homage, agreed to by Duncan, " gracious Duncan," after a struggle ; and young Malcolm, after Duncan's murder by Macbeth, took refuge in his own princi- pality, Edward the Confessor gave it to Seward, Earl of Northumberland, and William the Conqueror, offended at Scottish hospitality to Saxon refugees, took the county into his own hands, and made a grant of it to Ranulph de Meschines, our old friend of Westmoreland. LYSON'S Mitijiut llrit'iniiin. xxxvii Till; LAKE COUNTRY. never had a ploughshare through it." When Henry III. came to the throne, Scotland demanded back her counties, and Henry, to put off a demand for the moment inconvenient, gave as much land as was worth 200/. about Penrith and Sowerby ; but took it back again directly, and the Border wars went on, as they had been going on for centuries before. It was Edward I. that put the Border service into its first reasonable shape. He made Lord Robert de Clifford (1296) first Lord Warden of the Marshes, with full power to execute summary vengeance strict and stern on all offenders. That terrible but needful law of "hot trod" was a mutual convention between the peaceable parts of the two kingdoms ; the permission of pursuit for six days, into the opposite realm, of all moss troopers, rievers, black mailsrnen, thieves, and other offenders, with horn and hound, with hue and cry, hunting them with blood hounds, the sleuth or slough dogs trained and kept for that purpose. But it was not till the time of Queen Anne that these border violences died finally away, for all that there had been a common king for three generations before her. Great names, 39 though, are associated with those lawless times. The Grahams, the Howards, and the Dacres, Musgrave and Eeatherstonhaugh, even Richard Coldale, or Dick o' the Cow, that border guerilla and partisan of Lord Scroop of Greystoke, so dreaded by all naughty children, but lying peacefully now in Penrith church ; 39 Fuller's Worthies grants but few notabilities to our lake land. Of saints we have but " Herebert, Priest and Confessor," and Saint Abricke, belonging to Carlisle, whose soul another hermit saw " ascend to heaven " as it were in a spherical form of a burning wind, " but we listen unto it as unto wind." He was of very little value anyhow, for he did not more macerate himself with constant fasting than time since hath consumed his memory, which hath reduced it to nothing more than the scelleton of his name, without any historical passages of flesh to fill up the same." Of martyrs in Queen Mary's time nom ; because of our being " mezzell'd in ignorance and superstition ; " of worthies, only Edmund Grindall, of St. Bees, Sir Richard Hutton, " bom at Penrith, of a worshipful family," and called by Charles " the honest judge," " Sir John Banks, of Keswick, another judge in Charles' time ; and John Skelton, the ribald poet king s orator, and poet laureate to Henry VIII., called by Erasmus, Britannicarum Literarum Lumen et Decus. " Indeed he had Sclmlnrxliip enough, and Wit too much ; seeing one saith truly of him, Ejus serum salsus in mordaorin, risus in opprobrium, jocus in amaritudinem. Yet was his satyrical wit unhappy to light on three Noli me tatujcres : vi/., the rod of a sehoolmtixtfi; the mulx of l-'ri'irx, and tin; nip of a Cardinal : " the schoolmaster Lilley, the Dominican Friars, and Cardinal \\'O!N y Alil.ot Islip protected him in Westminster sanctuary, where he died. June 21, 1529. And these are all the old author and philosopher allows us. xxxviii EARLY HISTORY. Naworth and Corby and Netherby, 40 Lyddal 41 and Greystoke, they are all like snatches of border song in their very sound ; and who cannot realize a whole volume of rude poetry in such names as Clym o' the Clough, and Wyllyam of Cloudesle ? Part of the Border service consisted in the firing of beacons 42 at certain places, when the tenants were obliged to attend their lord for forty days against the Scots at their own expense ; some holding by nag tenements (the Manor of Bewcastle was all held by nag tenement), obliged to furnish a certain number of horses, or themselves to attend on horseback ; others by foot tenement, which involved only footmen or individual personal service, as the value of the holding might require. Many a castle rose on Cumberland ground, strong and sturdy, if not rich and ornamented ; 43 bonny Carlisle, Naworth and Dacre and Brougham, 40 About two miles from Netherby, is a strong entrenchment, called LiddaTs Strength, or the Mote, on a lofty and steep cliff, commanding a vast extent of country. At one end is a high mount ; in the middle is the foundation of a square building. On the weakest side it is strongly entrenched, having a sort of half moon before it, with a vast foss ; its form is circular. " This," says Leland, " was the moted place of a gentilman cawled Syr Walter Seleby, the which was kylled there, and the place destroyed yn King Edward the Thyrde time, when the Scottes went to Dyrham." It was taken by storm by David the Second, who caused the two sons of Sir Walter to be strangled before their father's face, and then commanded their parent to be beheaded. Netherby was also a Roman station, by name Castra Exploratorum. 41 The Barony of Lyddal was given by Ranulph de Meschines to his dependant Turgent Brundey, part of Arthuret going with it. 4 * The beacons stations in Cumberland were Black Combe, Bootle, Muncaster Fell, St. Bees Head, Workington Hill, Moothay, Skiddaw, Sandal Top, Carlisle Castle, Lingy- Close Head, Beacon Hill, Penrith, Dale Raughton, Brampton Mote, and Spade Adam Top. In Westmoreland, they were Stanemore Top, Ortoii Scar, Farleton Knot, Whinfell Fell, mid Hard Knot. Orton Scar is famous for dottrels, and all manner of wild fowl, and has a tarn Sunbiggin Tarn full of char and trout. 43 " This county pretendeth not to the mode of Reformed Architecture, the vicinity of the Scots causing them to build rather for strength than state. The Cathedral of Carlisle may pass for the emblem of the Militant Church, Mack, but comely, still bearing in the complexion thereof the remaining signs of its former bunnmj. Rose Castle, the Bishop's best Seat, hath lately the Hose therein withered, and the prickles, in the ruins thereof, only remain. The houses of the Nobility and Gently are generally built Castle-wise ; and in the time of the Romans, this country (because a L im itary) did abound with Fortifications; Mr. Camden inking notice of more Antiquities in Cumberland and Westmoreland, than in all England beside." FULLER'S Worthies. xxxix THE LAKE COUNTRY. Penrith and Corby, and Cockermouth, Rose, and the fortress of Kirkoswald, 41 and many more, if strength of wall and wealth of arms might be held to constitute a stronghold ; but if there were castles for the defence of bodies, there were prayer-houses for the salvation of souls, and when the dissolution of the religious houses was ordained, Cumberland had not a few in the list. There was Wetheral Priory, founded by Ranulph de Meschines for the Benedictines, or Black monks ; annual value in 1539, 130L ; and the Nunnery, for the Benedictine nuns, which William Rufus founded, and which, at the time of the dissolution, held one prioress and three nuns, and its rent-roll was but a poor eighteen guineas yearly ; and there was Skelwith Abbey, belonging to the Knights Templars; and Abbey Holm, or Holme Cultram, a Cistercian monastery of the yearly value of 5271. 3s. Id. This was the- monastery where the chancel of the chapel was burnt by means of a jackdaw's nest. And there was Calder Abbey, which Ranulph de Meschines also founded, worth 64L 3s. 9d. ; and Lanercost Priory, an Augustine monastery, worth 791. 19s. ; and the episcopal chapter of St. Austin, at Carlisle, the only one of its order in England, worth 513L ; and the priory of the same, worth 418?., and rich in relics, having a bone of St. Peter, and another of St. John the Baptist, two stones from the Blessed Sepulchre, and a bit of the Holy Cross, for the edification of true believers. Ah ! but better gifts than these has old Cumberland ! the gift of loveliness girt with power, of health on its moors, of freedom on its hills ; the gift of bravery and of manhood, of beauty and of strength, of self- respect which knows nothing of servility, of justice that is honest though not lavish, of truth that is straight if not smooth GOD'S better gifts than monkish relics to the men and women of the lakes and mountains to the dwellers in the loveliest homes of England ! 44 The weapon with which Hugh de Morville slew, or rather helped to slay, Thomas A'Becket, was Ion*,' preserved as a precious relic in the fortress of Kirk-Oswald ; which does not look much like the assassin's remorse. WINDEBMEBE CHAPTER I ONE of the most noticeable features of the lake district is the broad tract of poor land which lies like a way of separation between the loveliness hidden behind the hills, and the more generous beauty of the plains. If you trace on the map the boundaries of this district, rarely will you find the mountains flowing down into richness and fertility on the outer side, but generally subsiding into barren moors and impracticable fells : generally, though not always, this broad way of desolation between the grandeur of the hills, i B THE LAKE COUNTRY. with the heart of loveliness within, and the generosity of the plains. And so it is that from Lancaster, which may be taken as the gateway of the lake district, the country has been gradually getting more rugged and less populous as it runs up towards the mountains. Past Oxenholme and Kendal 1 the only human habitations are scattered fell-side hamlets, bleak and bare, where one wonders what the people find to do, and how they live, and what their pleasures and emotions, and what their special uses to the world at large. The laud is poor, with stones lying thick among the voung crops and over the coarse grass; the railway cuttings cleave clean through the solid rock ; bare stone walls, instead of hedges, mark the boundaries of the fields and properties ; streams as bright as crystal, but streams with no fertility in them mere brawling expressions of the waste and wet of the place break in all directions over beds of rock and pebble ; the country on either side gets wilder and rougher, the houses fewer and of still poorer character, the masses of yellow broom and golden gorse and trailing wealth of briar yet more lovely in their contrast with the grey boulders breaking out through the green grass, but yet more eloquent of the poverty they adorn ; the crags and fells are steeper, more jagged, and more inhospitable ; till, as you steam rapidly on, the dim blue outlines, 1 The lake country may be entered by the traveller from the south, either at Carnforth, taking the branch line from Ulverston, on the other side of Morecambe Bay, to Coniston ; or at Oxenholme Junction, for Kendal and Windermere. The latter is, perhaps, the better way, as Windermere, being the largest and therefore the most important of the lakes, claims priority of notice ; and also, because of its tamer character, ought to be seen before the wilder and more romantic. Before railway times, travellers generally went across the sands at the head of Morecambe Bay, which Wordsworth told Mrs. Hemans he thought the finest entrance. Leland, in his Laboriouse Journey and Searchefor England's Antiquities Geven of hym at a New Yeare't Oyfte to King Henry VIII., says : " If I had kept the by Shore Way from Lancastre to Cumbreland, I should have gone by Cartemaile Sand, wher a fresch W;iter doth cum a vii Myles ; to Conyhed Sande, whither a River resortith, a viij Miles ; to Dudden Sandes, wither a River resortith a iiii Miles ; Furnis Abbay up in the Mountaines a iiii Miles off. A ii Mile from Lancastre the Cuntcri began to be stony, and a little to wax MontAinions." WINDERMERE. first seen like darker clouds in the distance across the glistening breadth of Morecanibe Bay, and which you have been Watching lovingly since you left Kendal behind you, assume definite form and stability, and soon you recognize Wetherlam and Coniston Old Man others coming out from the clouds and unfolding themselves in turn as you rush on. And now the sunlight catches the surface of a small shining tract far to the left; in half a minute more, you see another shining glimpse under the wooded banks of Heald Brow ; and then you draw breath at the station, full in the narrow valley, and WINDERMERE, the first of the lakes, lies like a dream of Eden at your feet. Say that it is a May morning when you stand on the green height just above the Elleray Woods ; where, being so close to the hotel, as well as giving one of the best views of the lake, you, like all visitors, make your initiatory walk. The early mists are hanging in slender wreaths about Heald Brow and through the Calgarth Woods, rising up in rounder and more cloudlike forms from the lake which they leave calm and black below, and heaped in broken masses all along the glorious line made by the Old Man and Wetherlam, Crinkle Crags, Bowfell, and the Pikes, up to the denser cluster behind Ambleside. But though it is the middle of May, the spring you left behind in London fully matured you find here shy and tender and undeveloped. The oaks are mere sprinklings of golden beads threaded through with their darker stems ; the ash is unclothed, with naked branches bare as in winter ; but the mountain-ash the quicken or rowan has put out leaves and flowers both, and is as rich in scent and blossom as the dogwood, or the bird-cherry, or the flowery spikes of the laurel growing everywhere so luxuriantly. The copper beeches are brave in their first flush of crimson or more sullen purple, and the golden fringe of the Scotch fir is as beautiful as if the tree hung laden with flowers ; the spruce-fir is reddened with the tender blush of its young cones, and the hawthorn, which is just beginning to blossom, is reddened too, as if its stems and leaf- veins were quickened with crimson blood. ;< 2 TIIK LAKE COUNTRY. Amoug all this richness of colour the cold grey-green of the willow looks wan and ghastly, and the heavy gloom of the yew-trees, of the junipers and the hollies, becomes black by force of contrast ; but the drooping plumes of the larch, and the dainty leaflets of the silver birch, the full given and rounded symmetry of the sycamores, and the golden bursts of broom among the young elms and hazels, tell with increased force ; and not even in the gorgeous autumn are the lake-side woods so full of beauty as they are in the fresh young spring never do they so gloriously enframe that long blue line of water lying between them, " wooded Winandermere, the river-lake." For this is the characteristic of Windermere : its narrow length filling up the valley, and leaving little margin between it and the feet of the fells ; so that, for the most part, it is feathered with wood down to its brink, and only at its head, where the Bydal Valley begins, are there broad spaces of cultivated ground, or level fields for grass and corn. But now you must come down from your breezy height, where the air blows fresh and strong, full of sweet wood-scents, and with a power of manhood in it, of health and vigour, only to be had from mountain air ; and, leaving the walls fencing in a higher head the tufts of primroses among the roots of the trees the shining tract studded with islands and broken by promontories below and the everlasting hills above and around you wind through the Elleray Woods again ; passing by the small, low cottage where Professor Wilson first lived, and which is now half hidden by a grand old syca- more; then by his later and more sightly, if less picturesque, home; and on by trim, lu.me-kept, shrubbery paths, to the high road and the grey, half-Swiss, half-Elizabethan, houses in and about the new village of Windermere. Here everything is modern, wealthy, and well adapted. Natural arc made the most of, and natural beauties respected; becoming WINDERMERE. sites are chosen for mansions fitted for people of deep purses and liberal education ; a fine old tree is left standing, perhaps even fenced round with rustic palings, if it accords well with the newer building ; a rough ledge of rock is incorporated into the garden wall ; and wild flowers are sedu- lously planted on gate-post toppings, on wall copings, and against garden boundaries, to give an air of country -bred simplicity to the whole ; but it is all a wildness creditably laid out nature under the tuition of a land- scape gardener, smoothed and combed and daintily trimmed Wordsworth's mountain child with a perpetual Sunday frock on, and curls newly taken out of paper. Bowness, 2 which all writers agree to call the " port of Windermere," 3 is 2 Called Bulness (Bull's Nose or Promontory) so late as 1814. Gilpiii speaks of it rather grandly as " the great mart for fish and charcoal," " its harbour crowded with vessels of various kinds." It was to tliis same Windermere, or Wonwaldremere, according to the Melrose Chronicle, that " Ethred, King of the Northerns, in the year 792, convoyed Elf and Edwin, the sons of King Elfwold, prisoners from York, and assassinated them." 3 There were some strange misapprehensions of this lake in old time. Camden, quoted by Cony, speaks of it as " paved with one continued rock," whereas the bottom is for the most part' soft mud, save just across the head, where was the supposed Roman harbour for the camp : and as " wonderfully deep or unfathomable, as the neighbouring inhabitants informed me" its greatest depth being not quite forty fathoms ; but he speaks truly, even for this day, when saying that it is " abounding with chare, a golden Alpine trout." These char the speciality of our lakes " are of two sorts, called by some, from their colour, the xilrer and the golden char, and, by others, from a supposed anomaly that each breeding fish only spawns once in two years, the case char and the gilt char, the latter being thought the same as the silver char, and only retaining its name for the year that it is barren : it is accounted the most delicious, and is baked and sent in pots to London. A Winandemiere char ' is near twice the size of a herring. Its back is of an olive green, its belly of a light vermilion, softening in some parts into \vliite, and changing into a deep red at the injection of the fins.' The fishery of the lake is divided into three cables, as they were called in Machel's time but now cubbies. The first, or high cable, reaches from the Waterhead to the char bed half a mile above Calgarth ; the middle, from thence to below the ferry ; and the low cable, from below the ferry to Newby Bridge. In each cubble arc four fisheries. The rector has a right to a pleasure boat, and so much a boat in lieu of his tithe fish." Beauties <>f W'csUnorcland, and some others. 5 THE LAKE COUNTRY. simpler and more old-fashioned; and, beyond Bowness again, over Cartmell Fells towards Newby Bridge, nature is left natural, and habitations are made picturesque by accident by the loving grace of growing wood and crumbling crag, and not by the scholarly tuition of a landscape gardener understanding the rules of art. The road from Bowness to Ambleside is one of the most beautiful in the neighbourhood ; but there is nothing in the little village itself to call for much attention, excepting first, the old weather-stained church, with its shabby-looking cottage-like aisle windows, and its chancel panes of painted glass from Furness, its prelatic tomb, more unpretending than many a city shopman's, its belt of yews, and primitive lych-gate ; next, on the way to the Ferry Nab, the old parsonage the very ideal of a parsonage with its chimnied porch overgrown with ivy and large enough for a village assembly to be held in it ; and, last, the breezy point of the Ferry Nab itself, with its ghost story of the Crier of Claife in the quarry behind, and its beautiful panorama all round. Here, if you want to cross, you stand and call a boat, which comes to you from the ferry-house opposite ; meanwhile you may, if you are fortunate, catch a glimpse of some rare bird skimming over the water, or fluttering uneasily through the woods; or you may sketch the beauty of that little islet of Crow Holm, which is now a mere golden boss like a gigantic tuft of moss on the water; or you may admire the sycamores and snow-white cherry-trees behind the ferry -house ; or you may wander back a little way on the ferny road to Kendal for the ferry is part of the highway between Kendal and Hawks- head and jot down studies of rustic gates and stiles, and note the constantly recurring effect of the line of grey stone wall against the golden green of the woods. For the lake livery in the spring-time is gold and grey ; the gold of the young oaks and the moss and the broom and the Scotch fir- shoots ; and the grey of the stone houses, the stone walls, the boulders and great rocks bared against the green, the blue-grey hills, and the soft grey clouds above them all. Or else you may watch the steep road that goes up to Sawrey, over the shoulder of Heald Brow opposite, winding through walls and flowery WINDERMERE. hedges till it is lost between the hill and the sky ; or learn by heart the names and aspects of the mountains clustered in increasing grandeur at the head across that restless span of blue ever topped by the Pikes which, in the misty mornings, look like two handfulls of unsubstantial dust heaped up against the sky. Or you can turn your face to the foot of the lake, and see how the hills slide off into mere slopes and fells, till finally they slide away into railroads and plains and market-gardens and the lower existence of the midlands, down to the roar and the tumult of the cities of the south. And when you have done this, turn back again and thank GOD that you are breathing mountain air, and that the waves of a north-country lake are at your feet. If you want no ferry-boat, fill your hands with globe-flowers and marsh-marigolds, and then go back through the woods and the fields and the village, and by the Lower-road to Amble side. Your way lies between stone walls golden-brown with moss, the earth coping besprinkled with its auburn-coloured filaments and the pale mountain speed- well, and the base bestarred with stitch wort and blue bird's-eye, the yellow pimpernel and the deep pink flowerets of the wild geranium. To the left lies the lake, and beyond it rise the blue tops of the higher mountains; Wetherlam and Bowfell heading the lower sweep of Heald Brow ; with changing vistas of yet more distant hills caught as the road winds on. Mountain streams set in a broad margin of wild garlic " ramps," as it is called here so dainty to see and so evil to touch, rush through the wood on your right; the close-growing small-leaved ivy clothes the walls and tree-stems with a mantle of green ; arcades of beeches overhang the road ; on either side are woods with oak and pine and the waving larch, black firs, flowering garden bushes, and sycamores of the true emerald green ; stone steps and walks, as in a private park, lead through groves and fields, making short cuts to houses on the upper road; the trees are fountains of sound with the rustling of the leaves and the varied song of the birds ; here the round head and back of a green knoll hides all the view there the mountains are caught in broken outline and the water glances like silver through the fretwork of the 7 THE LAKE COUNTRY. leaves and stems; and now a full burst of lake and hill breaks across a level meadow dotted with milk-white lambs just yeaned, where a singing little brook winds its way through the grass to the great water. And so over Millar Brow and on towards Ambleside. By a wayside publichouse, where an old fir stretches its branches across the road and where a cottage, with high steps leading up to the door and twin rhi umeys covered with ivy, of which a trailing wreath swings to and fro in the wind, makes a pretty sketch for an artist's album, you hear the sound of water. Turn into a field at the left, clamber over a stone wall into a pleasant copse, and you will find yourself by the side of the river which comes down from Troutbeck Valley : the Troutbeck all above that long low-spanned bridge, but the Calgarth river below, and till it runs into the lake. They are felling and barking some of the young saplings in the copse, and these have fallen into strange shapes their white limbs branching out like stags' antlers, though some of them are more like ante- diluvian monsters, pterodactyles and bony beasts with multitudinous legs ; but the smell of the bark is full of aromatic freshness, and you can sketch the poor naked monsters pleasantly. For there is an old tree with a moss-covered seat in the parted root, where you may TROTJTBECX BRIDGE WINDEHMERE. sit for a long summer's hour looking at the branches dipping into the stream, and the mayflies flitting on the water, and the shy fish, so full of mystery and haste, gliding among the stones, and the water rippling about the rocks ; watching the restless waves with that infinite yearning it may be with those infinite memories and regrets which the flow of a river always creates. Returning to the highway the ground becomes more undulating, and belts of trees follow the undulations. Stone is quarried out of the road-side for road mending, and parish paupers sit hammering at the granite piled in heaps by the way. A castle, a hideous modern sham, is seen on the fell across the lake, disfiguring the height (Low Wray) on which it stands ; the Calgarth Woods, (in old deeds, the Calfgarth Woods,) planted by Bishop Watson, the Bishop of LlandafF he whose plain, flat tombstone is in Bowness churchyard continue on the left ; pleasant turns are in the road, and the scenery becomes wilder and yet more beautiful. In front stands Wansfell Pike by which a steep road leads up to Troutbeck Valley ; and immediately beyond is Low- wood. But before you halt there, go up that steep Troutbeck road to the right, to get a better view of the lake the view given at the head of the chapter. The first mountain to the left, half hidden by the trees, is Coniston Old Man ; Wetherlam is over Heald Brow, Crinkle Crags following and the Pike o' Bliscow below ; yet more to the right and in front is Lingmoor the round boll ; above it, in the extreme distance, Scawfell Pike ; to the right, seeming higher but only seeming Bowfell ; then, Hanging Knot, Great End, and Glaramara. The lowest dip to the right of the mountain next to Glaramara is the Stake Pass, leading from Langdale into Borrowdale ; Langdale Pikes the Pike o' Stickle, and Harrison Stickle come next, with the depression of Pavey Ark to the right ; and yet more to the right is Easedale Head, with Loughrigg Fell in front. The lake is at its widest here at Low-wood, broadening to a full mile across to Pullwyke Bay where the waterlilies grow and the lily of the valley is in the woods beside the shore ; and which is a long ferry towards Collision ; and, just beyond, the road goes close down to the water's edgo, 9 r THE LAKE COUNTRY. mid winds and turns with it. And what a road ! Fringed with beeches dropping their golden buds quite into the ripple globe flowers and marsh marigolds gilding the grey stones little promontories jutting out, and deep l>:tys indented here a wall built up against the further encroachments of the lake there a broken bit of sedgy shore, wooded and flowery twisted roots of trees lying bared like snakes in the water and at every ten yards the aspect of the whole scene changing was there ever such a way of travel set before man for his enticement and delight ? There is not a more lovely bit of coach road than this through the entire breadth of England. Sometimes the Pikes are wholly lost, and sometimes the road turns to the foot where the hills go oiF into plains and the lake joins the sky ; and sometimes there is nothing but a screen of golden oaks standing out against the slaty sky and slaty water, while the waves ripple and splash musically on the beach, and the birds sing from the wooded bank, thick with undergrowth and white with wind-flowers, to the right. Now you pass Doves-nest, where Mrs. Hemans lived, with its cropped hedge, and wealth of yellow poppy about the garden gate ; and you meet, perhaps, a scattered body of otter hounds, a characteristic of the country, headed by a group of broad-shouldered, light-haired men in velveteen and fustian, talking racy Westmoreland and smacking their whips noisily as they pass; or a couple of rough -mannered lads from the farther fells or lonely dales drive by in a small cart filled with frightened lambs ; and then comes the last reach, and again you are turned to the foot of the lake, with Ambleside 4 behind you. Now you see the glitter of a shining stream on Brow to the left, and some white houses (Clappcrsgate) clustered on the side of Loughrigg Fell: now 4 Aiiilili->iik- only since Queen Elizabeth's time. In the Boundary roll of Rydal, 1273, Ainlili-siilo is called Amelsate, and had a park ; after then it was Hamelside, Amylside, and A in. Nidi:. James the Second granted to Ambleside a weekly market on Wednesdays ; two fairs one, the Cow Fair, on Whit Monday ; and another, the Tip Fair, for long horns and tups ; also a Court of Pie powder. It is a common saying that often the market begins at twi-lvo and ends at noon. Here is also the pretty ceremony of rushbcaring, but flowers arc IHI\V substituted for the undent rushes, with better effect. 10 WIND ERM ERE. you are at the tollgate, and copper beeches and stone houses thicken before you, and the rich woods get richer, and the gardens are trimmer and the fields are greener : now you are at Waterhead, and the lake dwindles into a mere tarn : and then, in a few steps more, you are in the quaint, steep, clustered streets of Ambleside, under the lee of Wansfell Pike, and just at the entrance of Rydal Valley. And the first rich lake-country walk is ended. NBA.B DOVES-NEST LOOKING BACK It was a cold, chill day when we took boat at Waterhead for a row on the lake. The sky was partially covered by sullen-looking clouds, though flashes of angry sunlight broke in between, bringing out into all varied shapes of rock and crag the dim and indefinite grey masses which else showed nothing of their true forms. It was thundery in the distance, and copper-coloured edges and fiery spaces tinged the nearer clouds, while darker masses, swollen and purpled, hung above the farther mountains ; but we disregarded these signs, and pulled out of Waterhead Bay too rich in joy to count the probable cost. Streaks of light quivered across the water, or the shadows of the coming- gusts darkened the waves as they passed; and every now and then a pale, watery ray dashed a line of yellow light across a mountain top or struck a 11 c 2 THE LAKE COUNT KY. distant reach of lake, throwing all else into colder gloom by the contrast. The houses looked marvellously picturesque, scattered on the hills and by the lake side. One was set like a jewel in an enamelled framework of black and gold against its background of fir and oak ; another was almost hidden behind green sycamores and beeches ; a third stood like an Italian convent, declared and aspiring, high up on the treeless mountain side; and a fourth clung to a wooded crag, where it seemed to have scarcely room to root itself upon the jagged ledge : wherever they were they had a special beauty of their own, and seemed to be in the most fitting spot that could have been chosen ; this peculiar gift of adaptability belonging to lake-side and mountain houses generally, and only to be spoiled by an architecture of violent unsightliness. We pulled round to the mouth of the Brathay, 5 which divides Westmore- land from Lancashire, and which was one of the boundaries of the old Lord- ship of Furness; 6 and we passed the "Brathay rocks" little wave- washed rock-bases for a clustering of firs and a fair-set mansion backed by wood and fell, with its lawn sloping down to the water and its group of children among the trees their scarlet cloaks, and frocks of vivid blue, coming out powerfully * The Brathay comes from the Great and Little Langdale becks, and the thousand rills of that lofty mountain-group up by Langdale head its farthest source, perhaps, the stream on the top of the Stake Pass forming Elterwater, at the foot of Lingmoor, by the way : from Eltenvater, whence it is the Brathay proper, flowing on by Skelwith to where it meets the liothay at Three-foot Brandreth, in the fields just beyond Ambleside. The Rothay comes out of the Grasmere and Hydal becks receiving the waters of Stockghyll and Scandale Becks by the way to where it merges into the Brathay. But though the two rivers join before they pour into the lake, no one yet knows why the char, Camden's " golden alpine trout," always go up the Brathay, and the trout up the B^thay, at spawning time ; and why never, by any chance, do they miss their way or change their routes. 6 Though not included in the Lordship, yet the Lake of Windennere was put to pleasant HM->. sis well as to pious ones, by the monks of the old abbey. They had too many patrons and beiieiiii-tors aimmg the laity not to get all they wanted. William de Lancastre III., " for the health of liis soul and the soul of Agnes de Brus, his 'wife, gave the monks of 1'u rues one boat to be used on Wyuandermere for the carriage of timber and other commodities, and one other boat to fish in that mere one boat and twenty nets." 1-2 WINDERMERE. as points of colour in the landscape ; and we went into the recesses of two or three little bays ; and by a rocky islet Seamew's Crag just big enough for a small party of seamews to alight on ; and then to Pullwyke Bay, opposite Low-wood a rich and gracious harbour of wooded loveliness. Pull Scar is behind the bay a low rough crag ; and behind Pull Scar is Bowfell, and, more to the left, Latterbarrow, making a long soft line to the Ferry House, with a lake-side road passing over it. And on Pull Scar is one lonely white house placed high on the fell; and the name of that house is the "Drunken Duck " (Drook'n Dook, if spelling went by phonography), and the mission of that house is beer. On again, past the sham castle and its castellated boat-house on Low Wray High Wray above, with the pretty river, the Wray, forming Blellam Tarn on its way and in by Anthony Wilson's Bay, so called because one Anthony Wilson once kept his boat there ; by meadows with their green feet in the lake, and by small wind-worn trees on the tops of small wave- worn crags ; by lines of grey stone wall and grey wood palings against the green copsewoods ; with ever the crag and the fell and the moor, and the tops of Wetherlam and the Old Man towering over Heald Brow, forming the framework of the whole. But the intermediate mountains, and indeed most of the hills, are strangely dwarfed seen from the breast of this long and narrow lake. In the Belle Grange Woods with their wealth of silver birch or "birk," their black plumed junipers which are so often miscalled "savins," as sycamores are generally "maples," the lake-side road comes creeping down to the water's edge: "up-bank" to Wray, " down -bank " to the Ferry. And as we passed the sun flashed out in a sudden glare and fell on the pretty island of Saint Mary, or Lady Holm, which once belonged to Furness, and where, in the time of Henry VIII., was a chapel dedicated to Our Lady and service duly performed, by a monk of Furness, within, but which, since then, has passed from decay to total obliteration ; and that wild and sudden sunlight almost dazzled us as it flashed full on another group of scarlet cloaks sitting on a felled white tree, naked of its bark. Then we came to the 13 THE LAKE COUNTRY. Waterloo Gardens where the daffodils (" Lent lilies " or " flocks ") grow wild for the universal colouring of Easter " pace eggs," 7 but where the most notice- able thing at this present time was the crimson foam of apple blossom tossed up over the wall : and full in front were Curwen's Isle 8 and all the smaller islands 9 clustered like a band of broken jewels between the two promontories of the Ferry House and the Ferry Nab. We landed at the Ferry House, and struck off into the woods full of globe flowers by the lake side, and of yellow poppies by the wood wall ; of hyacinths beneath the trees ; of the 7 A corruption of pasclie or paschal. 8 Once called Longholme, and, still more anciently, Wynandermere Island. " Amongst the escheats in the 21 Edward III. there is an order, that the wood in the Island of Wynander Mere, called Brendwood (that is, firewood, from the Saxon brennan, to burn), shall not be several, but common to all the free tenants of Kirkby in Kendal, and of Stirkland, Crosthwaite, Croke, and others, as well to depasture all their cattle, as to take hausbote and heybote at their will, without view of the foresters." This island was the scene of the famous siege which Major Robert Philipson Robin the Devil, by more familiar baptism the Cavalier leader, withstood from Colonel Briggs, then Parliamentarian major and magistrate at Kendal. Robin bore the press for ten days gallantly ; and then, the siege of Carlisle being raised, his brother Huddleston Philipson, of Croke, the owner of the property, got together a band of men, and relieved him. The next day, being Sunday, Major Robert put himself at the head of a party of horse, and rode off to Kendal ; passed the watch, and into the church, where he rode up one aisle and down another, looking for liis enemy. But Colonel Briggs, by good hick to himself, had not attended church to-day, so Robin rode out empty-handed, when the congregation, recovering from their stupor, made a dash at him aa he passed out. One cut his saddle-girths, but paid for his act with his life ; and then Robin, chipping the girthless saddle on to his horse, galloped off, slashing liis way through the armed crowd ; and so got safely back to the island on the lake, more than ever " Robin the Devil " after the feat. He was killed at the battle of Washford, in Ireland. 9 There are ten in this centre group ; Rough Holm and Lady Holm, Hen, Hawse, and Thompson's Holms, two Lily-of-the-Valley Holms, Curwen's Isle, and Crow Holm our little golden boss and Berkshire Isle, somewhat lower down. Still more towards the foot, and close in shore, are Ling Holm and Grass Holm, Silver Holm, and Blake Holm Island : and up at the head are Seamew's Crag, Bee Holm, and Green Love ; but most of these are only like small tufts of gold set in the steel plate of waters, scarcely to be called islands at all : and some are only rocks. 14 WINDERMERE. curved crozier heads of the sprouting bracken ; of young foxglove spathes, thick, downy, and as yet flowerless ; of tufts of mountain fern like Indians' head-dresses ; of trailing brambles and yet more delicate sprays of wild- raspberry ; of bird's-eye, blue and lustrous ; of violets and wood-sorrel ; of lady's-mantles, green, gold-spotted ; of delicate wind-flowers and starry stitchwort, full of all manner of sweet wood-flowers ; and then, returning, we saw two large carts and two large horses put into the ferry-boat, which a man nearly as large rowed leisurely across, according to the mode and manner of the place. The lake was bright but opaque; slaty where the lighter clouds were reflected in it, steely where the darker. When the sun came out it glinted on the waves in broken glitter and the shine was reflected in the water below ; when there was no sun the under-side of the ripple was black. There was no reflection to-day, save at the edges of the quietest and most deeply indented bays, where the water was an olive-brown in which the trees looked blackened masses without break or detail ; but the pebbles gleamed bright and many- coloured, and the fish passed like streaks of light as they hurried over the rocks and stones. Yet, save in these still bays, the whole lake was of a dull, grey, troubled hue, and the flow of the waves was troubled too. But now they got darker in the dip and whiter in the crest and deeper in the curve. Up at the head of the lake black rain-clouds were gathered, with ragged edges torn and trailing, blotting out the farther mountains and throwing a smoke-coloured veil over the nearer. The water darkened and rose under the wind, with a wilder clash in its stroke and a fiercer hurry in its flow ; and the waves dashed against the boat which rocked and strained at each blow, while the spray flew over us, and the curling crests broke down the sides and swept across our feet. We were driven as if in a rapid stream, the oars scarcely plied at all ; but the storm flew faster than we, and we were soon overtaken. We swirled on, past Storr's Point and the bobbin-mills at the mouth of Cuusey Beck; Grass Holm, close to the bay, was passed, and another point, THE LAKE COUNTRY. scarcely discernible ; for now we could see neither hill nor wood ; the storm had won the race, and we were in the midst of a wild waste of blinding rain and stinging hail, of surging waves and sheeted mist. The mountains on either side disappeared as by enchantment, and there was nothing in the whole universe but our frail skiff far too frail for the lake and the lashed waves leaping under the hail and the wind ; nothing but the tossing water and the driving rain and the shroud of angry hail. In less than half an hour the storm passed ; and then all the hills stood out in the sun as clear and bright as if of glass, while the ghost-like wrath of cloud and mist hurried on the sun shining on its back as it went, giving it the appearance of a solid body. The wind passed with it, and the waves sank back into a network of rippling lines, with just an under-swell heaving up from beneath in long smooth curves, too smooth to break into crested edges. The woods glittered and sparkled in the sun, each dripping branch a spray of golden light, and the light was married to the loud music of the birds flowing out in rivulets of song. Countless flies shot through the air and vibrated on the water, and the fish leaped up to catch them, dimpling the shining surface with concentric ripples and throwing up small jets of light in the smooth black bays. Every crag and stone and line of waU and tuft of gorse was visible on the nearer hills, where the colouring was intense and untranslateable ; and on the more distant mountains we could see, as through a telescope, the scars on the steeps, the slaty shingles and the straight cleavings down the hides, the old grey watercourses threaded now with a silver line those silver WINDBRMER& lines, after the storm, over all the craggy faces everywhere ; we could see each green knoll set like an island among the grey boulders, each belt of mountain wood, each purple rift, each shadowed pass ; slope and gully and ghyll and scaur, we could count them all glistening in the sun or clear and tender in the shade, while the sky was of a deep pure blue above, and the cumulus clouds were gathered into masses, white and dazzling as marble, and almost as solid-looking. And over all, and on all, and lying in the heart of everything, warming, creating, fashioning the dead matter into all lovely forms, and driving the sweet juices like blood through the veins of the whole earth, shone the glad sun, free, cloudless, loving life of the world's life, glory of its glory, shaper and creator of its brightest beauty. Silver on the lake, gold in the wood, purple over the hills, white and lazule in the heavens what infinite splendour hanging through this narrow valley ! what a wealth of love and beauty pouring out for the heart of all nature and the diviner soul of man ! 17 WALKS ABOUT AMBLESIDE CHAPTER II MANY and beautiful are the walks about Ambleside : walks within a reason- able distance for any fair pedestrian, and which all but very fine ladies, or very delicate ones, may take without too much fatigue, and without risk or danger if they are but moderately careful. First, there is Stockghyll Force, just at the back of the town ; a rough unspoiled bit of rugged beauty, happily for the lake-world scarcely able to be spoilt even by Improvers, so imprac- ticable is it and so wild. (her nx-ks and stones, brawling and leaping in its imprisoned strength, the river rushes on in its mountain vigour past the bobbin-mill, where the 18 WALKS ABOUT AMBLESIDE. barked " stags' antlers " and " antediluvians " go, and where you may stand on the narrow plank that does duty for a bridge, and, if you have lost any one among the rocks, fancy you hear their groans behind you past the town, and Miller-bridge just below the town, where it makes its last leap before sub- siding, spent and dwindled, into the tranquil existence of the Rothay rippling through the meadows to the lake. Traced up beyond the mill, following the wild path of rock and running water and twisted tree-roots the rocks below getting larger and more broken, the rift between them deeper and sharper the roar of the waters louder, and the rush more fierce and rapid close to where an old tree bends over the ravine, with its mossy roots thrust through and through the pathway, while all its weight of stem and branches is flung across the rift there you come upon the "loosening silver" of the fall, with its forked double leap of seventy feet, and its thousand little cataracts below. In the centre, and splitting up into four what else would have been one unbroken sheet, is the obstructing rock, its bordering of vivid green marking the point to where the waters flow in fullest seasons, and its old scarred face grey and naked in the centre. Down below the leap are quiet pools where the water fairies live; and pools not quite so quiet which the passing rush of the torrent disturbs if it does not penetrate ; and desolate wastes of pebbles lying dry and many-coloured in the sun ; and rocks which the water never wholly covers but is forced to leave midway, falling like a mantle from their shoulders neither crowning nor concealing ; and others over which it is just able to lip with an effort and an almost visible strain, as of actual nerve and muscle, each wavelet seeming as if it must fall back before it reaches the edge, but each finally conquering and fretting painfully over; and others, with an unchanging crest of foam as the waters dash on triumphantly, burying them body and soul beneath their flow, and planting that crest of foam as a mark of their victory types, all three, of the power of the will and its several degrees of conquest and tyranny in life. Through the breaks in the wood may be seen the purple hills, and in the 19 D 2 THE LAKE CorXTKY. en-vices of the rock, wiudtiowers and young ferns; and, for those who luive stout nerves, and know the pattern of the thing they seek, the pyrola media, :i rare growth of the Winter-green, found only among the rocks in the centre <>t' the fall. But for every one there are sweet spring-flowers in the sheltered corners, and glimpses of the purple hills among the green. On a clouded day, rock and river and hill beyond are all soft and tender and subdued, with no angles or sharp outlines anywhere ; but when the sun comes out, the hills look shimmery in the light and the waters are blinding and gem-like ; and every pebble in the waste places, and every tuft of moss or clinging lichen, every ehannel worn by the water, and every furrow traced by the rain, is seen as distinctly as if it was a picture of mosaic work. Indeed, the whole thing looks like mosaic ; meaning by that, startling contrasts of colours and no continuity of sweep or shading, not even in the line of the Fall itself. The Stock, which separates the parishes of Windermere and Grasmere, comes chiefly from the barren heart of Red Screes up by Kirkstoue Pass : a desolate birthplace for so beautiful an outcome ! Round about both Force and Ghyll is a charming day's ramble, with just enough of difficulty and danger l to delight a town-bred tourist, and put a fine white feather in his mountain-cap. The Force and Wansfell Pike may be "done" in succession. Properly undertaken, this rather large grassy slope this moderate mountain of only one thousand live hundred and ninety feet is nothing ; but, attempted up his ridgy back and not along his softer shoulder, he is rather a tougher matter ; still, not tough in absolutes, according to the law of mountain nature. As you ascend, Red Screes comes out in rude majesty, the desolate way of Kirk- stone Puss winding between him and .Broad End: Loughrigg, rich and 1 An. I VH tlinv is dimmer, especially to the rash and over-confident. A fine athletic young man, in the very prime of his life and flower of his strength, lost Ms life at the Force while \v.. wciv tlinv. J king for ferns, he overbalanced himself and fell dashed into eternity in a Mnmd among the rocks. 20 WALKS ABOUT AMBLESIDE. beautiful, shows Silver How behind, apparently at the foot of Crinkle Crags ; and between Crinkle Crags and Bowfell, Scawfell's steep head appears like a dark point against the sky. You see the Kydal mountains, and where Ease- dale lies behind the Pikes, and where the Stake Pass leads over Langdale to Borrowdale. Then as you go higher, Rydal-mere comes into view ; and, a little higher still, lying behind an intervening point of Loughrigg, Grasmere water, looking as if it might be a continuation of the Rydal lake ; the Rothay winds gently through the meadows, and Brathay comes down more masterfully round by the foot of Loughrigg. The sheep-dogs are gathering the sheep on the mountains ; and you will probably meet an old Wordsworthian shepherd with his staff and shepherd's hat, with whom you stop and talk not to much enlightenment of your wits ; while the lambs wilfully lose themselves like wayward children, then bleat passionately for rescue, and the sheep those most phlegmatic of all living mothers answer with a temperate compassion, calmly confident in the providence of lambs. A few cows are dotted about in beautiful ordering of colours ; for the rich brown carries out the gold of the trees, and the slate- colour goes into the blue of the sky, and the white comes out as high light on the green, with much telling effect. On the fell itself you have to encounter all manner of bogs of varying intensity of boghood; and if you choose a way of your own, heedless of the authorized path, you must scale an endless succession of stone walls, with such lightness of limb or heaviness of muscle as nature and training ordain ; but, by time and patience and the philosophy of never minding, the last barrier is scrambled over, the last bog tramped through, and the last stiff bit overcome ; and then your labours are rewarded. For suddenly you burst upon the lake lying below, with its waistband of islands and its girdle of hills ; while far away to the right, out against the sky, lies a broad line of golden light the sea and Duddon sauds. To the left is tne winding thread of the Kent River ; to the right is Esthwaite Valley Coniston and Black Combe beyond. Wrynose is next to Wetherlam, and Scawfell stands up somewhat more distinctly than before, 21 TIIK LAKE COUNTRY. but still only peeping over the shoulders of Bowfell. Blellam lies in the ilip l>ehind Low Wray, and the Brathay Valley and Little Langdale steal up and away into the mountains. The crags, which are so grand when you stand below them, are now dwarfed to molehills; and beyond the 'head of Kydal rises a troubled sea of mountains for all present use of indistinguishable baptism. A steamer is on the lake, and the railroad is to the left, to remind you that you are not quite alone with GOD and nature ; but that, down below, the busy heart of man is toiling, and his hand is fighting, for toys and gewgaws for which you, too, do your share of toil and turmoil in the great battle-field of the world. SWEDEN BRIDOB By a pretty home-like road in the beginning, but soon going off into stones and loneliness and rough walking, with a lovely view of Kydal-mere loveliest when its waters are flushed with the burning sun on, in ever-increasing wildness, till the music of a stream is heard from the depths of a wooded rift far below wild crags about, and wilder clouds above there lies the Scandale beck, tearing down that narrow gully called the Scandale valley. Every now and then a glimpse of the waters down in the rift is to be had ; but the rough road does not follow the .course of the stream very closely, and it is only when bridge, which spans the stream higher up among the falls, is reached, 22 WALKS ABOUT AMBLESIDE. that a full view of its beauty can be had. But here is repayment for the long rough walking among loose stones and over boggy places and through uncounted mountain streams stretching across the path repayment for false steps on slippery rocks, and for ancle-deep plunges into sweeping streams repayment for even the heavy shower that has fallen between whiles by the rich clusters of bird's-eye primrose starring the watery way, and by the beauty of the scene. In front are the steep mountain sides without house or tree, barren and bare save where stone walls enclose a greener plot where sheep and cattle are feeding; and behind, is the wild torrent coming- down by Kydal Head, and resting in a broad pool beneath the little bridge before making its headlong journey onward. The stones are waterworn in cups and hollows, honey-combed some of them and white as bleached bones ; and the waters dash impetuously against them, with that restless look of force imprisoned which a mountain stream always has ; and the little bridge itself is one of the quaintest in the country. Leaving the bridge to the left, you take a sheep-track which soon widens out into a green lane between stone fences, through the treacherous swamps of which, and its thousand rills bursting over on all sides, you walk to where the lane ends and the living wall of mountain begins. For you come out literally against a mountain ; face to face with a conical, steep, bare bank, flanked on each side by banks still steeper and more bare, over which, however, you can tind a path that will lead you down to Brother's Water and Kirkstone Pass lying on the other side. Or rather you must make the path you will not find. Through the one unending bog that it is, more especially if after rain, up the steep ascent over the crags fording the streams swollen to quite tumultuous torrents plashing through water all the way to the small stretch of level ground on the top, granted as a breathing space before the descent is begun this is what your expedition to Scandale Beck may end in, if you are adventurous and brave. And now you must clamber down as you best can. Barren screes, utterly unscaleable, hem you in on both sides, so that you must needs find a way down this sharp descent, 23 THE LAKE COUNTRY. for none other is to be had. And in time, by dint of courage and firm tooting, you splash down as you splashed up, and drop into the Patterdale road just above Brother's Water. Calm and still lies this lonely lake at the foot of the Patterdale moun- tains a lonely lake at the foot of lonely mountains, cut off from the rest of the world, and of no account in the history of the time. The seagulls, so often in sullen flight above the black waters, only add to the soli- tude ; and seen for the first time, and unexpectedly, in the solemn grey of evening, the place looks the very home of desolation, a witch-haunted mere whence is no beyond and no return, and where life and hope are caught like wandering children, and held imprisoned for ever. But now, leaving Brother's Water behind, toil up Kirkstone Pass to where the Kirk stones look like a ruined church in the distance, and the starry and the mossy saxifrage are in long white lines by the wayside; up through unutterable desolation to the highest inhabited house in England. From here the road down to Ambleside lies between stone walls, which the parsley fern fringes with its tender green. Wansfell, on the left, is gilded with the setting sun, but old Ked Screes lies grimly in deep shadow ; scarred, furrowed with water- courses where the winter torrents plough their way into the very heart of the rock, barred with grey stone walls, and strewn with loose shingle and scattered boulders. Down below lies Windermere, rich and calm, her lake-side moun- tains, gentle hills, her islands specks, and all her blue expanse asleep in the evening sun ; and the contrast between the wildness just passed through, and this quietness beyond, is more than can be expressed by words. Looks may tell it, and a few broken expressions the flush on the cheek and the moisture in the eye; but no conceivable amount of epithets, and no number of graven lines. Kirkstone is one of the first passes to be seen. There are others wilder and steeper and grander, and even more deserted of life ; but these are only footways, or at the best pony paths for the strong-headed ; Kirkstone is a practicable ordinary coach road a good, broad, substantial highway on which you may drive your carriage 24 WALKS ABOUT AMBLESIDE. and pair with ease ; but, perhaps without exception, the most desolate and violently wild of all the coach - roads in England. Turning hack when well down the pass, the white road is seen wind- ing up in a long serpentine track, sharper and sharper in its curves and wilder in its way as it nears the top, as if going off to eternal desolation and the end of all human things. In another walk you may take in order the Roman Station, the Brathay, Loughrigg Tarn (" Diana's Looking-glass "), Elterwater, and Loughrigg Fell ; a rich programme for a few hours' walking. This Station, formerly held to he the Dictis of the Notitia, but which Wright says was Alonae, in Camden's time " the carcase of an ancient city, with great ruins of walls still remaining scattered about," and which others, later, speak of as "a castrum, a parallelogram of 396 feet by 240 " is now a ploughed field, with a slight depression in the centre, and a raised slope all round; a formation still visible, though so many hundred years have passed since it was first tilled and ploughed, and flattened by wind and rain, yet even, to this day, evident to the most careless observer to be something not usually met with in potato-fields. Signs of the ditch, too, are traceable on one side ; as also a dark meandering track along the meadow where the course of the Rothay was turned for the uses of the camp ; and still across the head of the lake is the great square stone pavement, as if for the foundation of a harbour the only bit of stone bottom in the lake, the rest being mud. And, though no more gold 2 or a In the Ifbraiy of the University of Oxford is a collection of coins found here, given bv the Braithwaites. TIIK LAKK CorXTRY. si her coins, rusty swords, brass eagles, sepulchral urns, or tesselatecl pavements 3 are to be found, yet broken shards of red Roman pottery, and bits of old Roman cement, and small fragments of freestone with illegible inscriptions on them, are yet to be turned up ; and a careful and thorough search would, doubtless, bring even more hidden treasure to light. This station 4 was certainly, as Wordsworth says, established here as a check on the passes of Kirkstone and Dunmail Raise, Hard Knot and Wryuose ; whence the wild Brigantes sometimes came pouring down, waking the Romans from their day-dreams, and making the old mountains echo to sounds more discordant than the blare of the evening trumpet or the song of the evening meal. How the Mariuses and the Manliuses must have cursed their gods which sent them to such lonely places, away from the blue skies, the vineyards and the olives, the gardens and the fountains, of their own native Italy ! How they must have sighed for the pleasures of Rome again ! for the amphitheatre and the gorgeous processions for the games and the sacrifices and the pomp of imperial majesty for the shining tresses of Julia and the perfumed robes of Lesbia for the love and the glory, and the home more noble than all, with its matron and its young citizens, left behind ! Little they cared for the stern beauty of this desolate Brigantia, this land of wolves and wild beasts and men even 8 Curwen's island, too, had certain remains, showing that some Roman of taste perhaps the officer in command had once made it his home, and had cared for it enough to decorate and embellish it. For when, in 1774, a Mr. English rebuilt the house, " in rutting a large drain on the west part of the building, to take away the wash from different parts of it, into the lake, were found several pieces of lead and old iron, and a great number of old bricks. About six feet deep they dug through several old drains, and a hearth WM found in a perfect state. They found, at the same time, several pieces of old armour. Ir I. -veiling the ground on the north of the building they dug through a beautiful pavement curiously paved with pebbles of a small kind. They also dug through several curious gravel walks." 4 One paved road, still traceable beneath its Iyer of mud, branched off from tliis castrum to Keswick, by Grasmere; another to Patterdale, by Kirkstone, meeting the other road on Iliuh Street, mid so on to Kciula nnd Eavonglass. 26 WALKS ABOUT AMBLESIDE. wilder than the beasts, where they were sent simply to subdue but in nowise to enjoy ; little they noted of the march of the clouds or the sunset triumphs in the sky, of the shadows lying softly on the summer lake or the grandeur crowning the hoary heads of the winter crags : the snow upheaped in fantastic shapes across the fells was only the pathway of beasts of prey and stealthy-footed savages to them ; the depths of the summer woods masked only death and danger, and a lurking Painted One crouching behind the leaves, with fierce passions in his heart and murder in his hand : they hid no softening influences of love and beauty in their tender glades ; where now we wander thrilled to the soul by this mar- vellous beauty, the Eoman soldier shivered with dismay or burned with the lust for blood, as nature had given him a strong heart or a weak. Britain was no Elysium for him in any district ; but in these northern parts he foretasted the pains of hell and Hades, and, doubtless, put the punishment to the account of his sins and the righteous anger of the gods. And now this reviled Brigantia is the favourite love-temple of the king- dom ; and more young lovers pass here into the gladness and security of marriage, than Rome ever sent soldiers to curse their unlucky stars which set them face to face with the desolation of the Brigantine lakes, and the lonely savagery of the mountain passes. Times change : it is a thankful echo and we change with them ! From the station the road leads over the Rothay bridge, and on beneath the fell, to the side of the Brathay dashing itself noisily among its rocks. Very beautiful is the Brathay, gemmed with little islands of golden mari- golds and " lucken go wans " (globe-flowers) set in the midst of its troubled waters, as if they had dropped from heaven for the good of beauty alone scarcely for the good of service ; very beautiful in its turbulence, in its richness, in its wilfulness and wayward wanderings, and quite different to the meek and tranquil Rothay, which has been tamed and pruned to a home and feminine existence, while this wilder stream shakes the hand of man from his neck, and rushes through the land bound only by the will of nature and the law -.'7 E 2 THE LAKE COUNTHY. of beauty. The two rivers are lilte the man's life and the woman's ; but they meet in the quiet meadows at the end, and there flow, undivided, calm, and strong, into the oblivion of the still greater life beyond. Perched on a rock, its feet besprinkled with flowers and the mountain wood clothing its sides, is the Brathay Church ; more like a church of the old time than of the present, for the unwonted picturesqueness of its site and the isolation in which it stands ; a beacon of the light rather than its home calling not indwelling ; and below it is the bridge flung across the stream under the dropping branches of the trees. "Winding beneath the fell all green and gold and brown catching lake-like views of the river now broadening out between its level banks you go forward into the new valley opening before you Skelwith Valley, with the cleft Pikes seeming at its head, but far beyond. Up a brant bit of road, and through a ragged lane with a watercourse dribbling over the stones and a carpet of purple butterwort to walk on, into a field blue with bird's-eye and crimsoned with f red rattle, and there lies the tarn, sleepy and still, in the hollow of u green grass basin. The water is absolutely unruffled, save where the leaping tish sprinkle it with sprays and circlets of light ; and the grand old Pikes are mirrored in it with a deeper purple in their shadows, while the gleam of light that takes the edge of Scawfell and falls across the chasm where Dungeon Ghyll is to be found, is translated into gold in its waters. 28 WALKS ABOUT AMBLESIDE. Dark banks of sullen clouds, touched into burning by the living sun, hang above the hills, but far above and beyond them ; while the rays break through the lighter "curl clouds" and pour down across the sky, till all the farther mountain-heads are lost behind a veil of gilded mist, as if it were a film of gold-dust between you and them. Partly through woods rich in their spring scents, and partly through the bounteous meadows, follow now the road to Skelwith Force, on the way to Elterwater. A perfectly beautiful, if scarcely to be called a noble, Force, this of Skelwith; beautiful rather for its accessories than in itself richer in the chased setting than in the gem but lovely, as a fair woman is lovely when her beauty is enhanced by grace. As the waters leap among the rocks the sun shining on the fantastic sprays flung up into its face, or on the white plumes of the cascades tossed down into the river the golden leaves mirrored in the quiet pools and the green wood throbbing to the ceaseless pulse of the waters, it is as much like fairy-land as anything to be met with. And as you sit there old dreams and poems of Queens of Faery, of Viviennes smoothing their silky shining tresses, of Titanias wilful and blinded, and of merry Midsummer's Night Dreams, crowd tenderly upon you ; for there are some places that are witch-haunted, some that are nymph-haunted, others that are full of elves and fairies, and others eloquent with the echoes of knightly romance and noble chivalry ; and this special waterfall this Skelwith Force is full of faery life, and rich in loveliness if not in heroism. And all the more penetrated with these sweet and subtle fancies, because of the pastoral simplicity of Loughrigg Tarn, and the grim associations of the Roman camp, just seen. Now you go on by the side of the Brathay to Elterwater. Indeed, Elter- water is only the Brathay itself, making three resting-places, or large pools strung together, at the outlet of the Langdale valley, before it goes on again as a river should ; but, as was said before, not yet christened by its name of Brathay until it has strung its watery beads and issued forth by that reedy delta at the end. A rather dead and disheartening place this, pretty 29 THE LAKE COUXTKY. and peaceful but without life or motion. Even the river, which elsewhere is so full of joy and the capricious grace of liberty, trails here in a chained and melancholy kind of way, and the three pools have nothing more vigorous to do than to reflect, in perfect stillness and silence, the outer forms of the mountains set round them, and the marvel of the sunlight beyond. And when the sun pours down a torrent of glory and colour, making the grey of the hills purple, and the metallic shine of the buttercups a hyacinthine orange, flooding the meadows with rose-tints and gold, and blurring all the outlines by excess of light when the day's cup is filled to the brim, and the yellow flood overflows with largest power and unrestraint then Elterwater is a place to meditate by mournfully, asking oneself cui bono ? and to what end this pageantry of loveliness, which so few can see, and still fewer under- stand when they do see it ? The intense solitude and irrepressible mourn- fulness of feeling and thought resulting, of certain of the remoter lake country places, must be felt to be understood. And when once felt, never possible to be forgotten. When you have dreamt out your dream, then go through a young wood full of yellow pimpernel and wood sanicle of healing power : 5 full to moss- like closeness of growth : where are exquisite effects, and glorious views, and walls that must be clambered over, and rough gates and uncouth stiles every- where, and where you are sure to find yourselves in places in which you have no earthly business to be ; but you will finally set yourselves straight, and strike the right road for a pathless scramble over the fell. And such a scramble ! The plovers wheel over you with their pitiful cry and their heavy flight, and the young lambs start bleating from their couching-places behind the grey rocks bordered with the pretty little parsley fern, or bound from sheltered nooks where the stag's-horn moss spreads its elastic branches, and which the young junipers fence in and the bent heads of the bracken carpet. On you must go ; up one craggy knoll after 4 " He that hath sanicle needeth no surgeon " an old herbal proverb. WALKS ABOUT AMBLESIDE. another, each seeming to be the last, hut always showing another further and higher, which must for shame, and the mountaineer's pride of perseverance, be surmounted ; down grassy slopes, smooth and soft as a well-kept bowling- green, lying between high grassy banks utterly impassable, down down with a perilous swiftness, till the slope breaks suddenly off into a rift, and you stand some hundred feet above eternity. Back again, up more last crags which never are the last, through pale yellow swamps with scarlet mosses set in their hearts and the graceful butterwort on its frosted leaves about their edges ; and, if you are fortunate, to a black peat tarn, deep and unsavoury but glorified with exceeding glory beautified with a living beauty, which has to be won at any cost its black unsightliness clothed and veiled and trans- formed to splendour by the loveliness of the marsh trefoil, " the fringed water-lily" growing there in the wild with more than garden grace. Care nothing for the black, unsavoury bog-water. In for the prize, no heed given to soaked feet or dripping hems in, even up to the mid leg, and think your- selves well rewarded by a fragile handful of the flowers, one of the loveliest wild-flowers in England ! The fells are beautiful everywhere. Those over by Wansfell, and to the source of the Skelghyll, and through the green road between stone walls, down into Troutbeck, 6 though not so varied as the Loughrigg Fells, are yet 6 Troutbeck is to Ambleside what Borrowdale is or was to Keswick, the land of Gotham, upon whose wise men is saddled every absurdity of the district the scapegoat bound to bear the weight of all the rude wit afloat. In a few years this, too, will be done away with, and pretty, dirty, neglected Troutbeck will be cleaned, schooled, and orna- mented, and made fit company for ambitious Windermere and respectable Ambleside. It is worth seeing, however, in its dirt and neglect ; its tumbledown cottages not one among them all straight according to the plumb-line with ivied walls and casements patched with rags and paper ; its one curious chateau-like house, with its formal courtyard, and formal ten-ace, and formal yew-trees clipped and closely shaven; its destitution and penury; all so grandly enframed that its very poverty becomes a charm the more. It is one of the real bye-hamlets of the lake district, picturesque, wild, dirty, diseased, which the ]>r< >s;uc architect and schoolmaster will sweep away before many years are gone. 31 TI IK LAKE COUNTRY. v.-rv grand ill their noble solitudes noble because useful though desolate, because fenced into natural fields where the birds find food, and the she' and cattle pasturage, and the wild-flowers root themselves, and even moth and butterflies make their home ; noble because, though deserted and un- tenauted by humanity, they are still brought into the service of humanity, and give of their strength and their substance for the uses of the world. Great, calm, wave-like sweep these fells at the head of Troutbeck, where you may wander for many hours, with no more variety of scene than what is to be had in the relative position of the mountains, or the need of climbing more and more stone walls rising everywhere against you. The path is rough and stony enough ; but who notes the rudeness of the way when the world is such as it is on a bright spring day bright as the days here are after rain? A bush with the sun shining through is a tree of golden flowers set upon purple stems ; the distant mountains towards Langdale are threaded with silver where the watercourses have filled ; and the Rothay in her even line, and the Brathay in his far-off pools sun-flecked, break out into spaces of light as eloquent as speech. Crinkle Crags and Lingmell are dusky with light ; but Silver How has caught the shadow of a cloud, and is dark with tenderness, not gloom. Loughrigg is radiant in the sunshine, and the lake is barred with silver or blue as the sun or the shadow falls. Going higher the Pikes come up Pike o' Stickle split in two ; and little Blellam shows itself behind Low Wray like a piece of glass let into the green. The Roman Station at the head of the lake is to be clearly made out now between the Rothay and the wood below, its square form and brown colour the potatoes not yet covering it marking it from among the green fields. Now, over a thorny dyke, down the darkest and loneliest of gipsy glens, through a newly-felled wood where the ground is blue with hyacinths, darkening to purple when broad patches of meadow cranesbill hold the way instead where ladies' mantles trail over the earth, and matted larch twigs make a carpet many feet above the ground up through this enchanted land over the fells to Troutbeck. 32 WALKS ABOUT AMBLESIDE THE ROMAN STATIOM Troutbeck, the smallest and most primitive of hamlets, has its own minute history, both authentic and legendary, as well as the best of them. It was the dwelling-place of Hogarth's 7 uncle, " Auld Hoggart," as he was called, a satirist, a poet, and an original, whose memory is still green in the vale, and who was by no means an ordinary individual. " He did as much good as a clergyman," was the report of one old lady, fondly mindful of the past however cloudy. And there was, besides, a clever and home- made genius, by name Julius Caesar Ibbotson, who painted a noted sign, called the " Mortal Man ; " one mortal man being round and rosy-gilled, the other cadaverous and lean ; with this distich underneath : " Oh, Mortal Man, that liv'st on bread. How comes thy nose to be so red? Thoti silly ass, that looks so pale, It is bv drinking Birkett's ale ! " 7 The Hogarths, Hoggarts, or Hoggards, were rightfully of Kirkby There. The eldest brother was a yeoman at Bampton ; the second a ploughman at Troutbeck ; the youngest, Richard, the painter's father, was educated at St. Bees, and went up to London, where his son William was born, December 10th. lf>!)7. TMK LAKE COUNTRY. The Mortal Man still exists as a not too luxurious public-house ; but the famous sign has departed, having been taken away to a place near Cartmell, where it gradually faded out of existence altogether ; thus proving its own mortality without question. There were other local worthies beside the Hoggarts (generally pronounced Hoggartys) and Ibbotsons ; and, for one, there was Huddleston Philipson of Croke (brother to Robin the Devil), who was the magnate of Troutbeck in his time. Charles I. gave him a park and estate there, as a reward for his devotion during the Civil War. Harriet Martineau says it was the same estate so cleverly obtained by a giant of the time of Edward VI., one Hugh Hird, or, as Clarke calls him, " Gilpin, the cook-lad of Kentmere, from his corcousness or corpulency," whose ordinary diet was " Porridge so thick that a mouse could walk over them 8 dryshod, and the sunny side of a wedder when he could get it." This Hird, " a man of amazing strength," " quite uncivilized, and knowing no law but strength," came begging his way to Troutbeck. There he found an empty house one which had been forfeited to the Crown, and of which no one cared to take possession, it was so valueless. But it just suited Hugh, so he established himself in it forthwith. When a lawful tenant appeared, the giant prevented his entrance ; and being sent for to London, there to answer for his contumacy, exhibited to his Majesty such feats of strength 8 Porridge is always plural. You " stir them with a thivel," and you " sup them " with a good will, unless they are " smeuked" or " bishopped," or " a' lumps and dozzels like Niinny Haikiu's butter;" and you give them to your childer, for they are " serious grand tilings for making banging bairns." When made of barley-meal they are called "kittly slipdnwns, and kittly slipdowns, eaten with fresh cream, are among the real luxuries of tli. north. Oatmeal porridge and oatmeal cake haver bread are very fair tasted. Even Fuller, who was not over fond of the north, does not despise oatcake. " While Wheat and Barley maij seem but the adopted, Gates are the natural issue of this Country. Say not Oates are Horse-yraint', and fitter for a stable than a TABLE ; for besides that the meal thereof is the di-tinguUliing/orro of Gruel or Broth from Water, mot hearty and whole- some Bread is made thcroof." Anciently none other was used north of the Humber ; and William the Conqueror gave the manor of Castle Bithan, in Lincolnshire, to Stephen Earl of Albermarle and Holdernesse, to supply his infant son with wheaten bread. 34 WALKS ABOUT AMBLKS1DK. lifting a beam too heavy for ten ordinary men, tying two bows together Mini breaking them, and showing how he once drove back a party of Scottish moss-troopers with his own bow and arrows unassisted that Edward offered to grant him any reasonable petition he might present. Whereupon Hugh prayed for the house at Troutbeck, the field behind for peat-turf for his fuel, and leave to cut what wood he liked in the new park; which, being granted, he lived happy all the rest of his life, dying at forty-two, pulling up trees by the roots. Troutbeck was once a place of some importance, and there is still a hill called Gallows How, where probably the old Barons at Kendal had a place of execution for their rebellious and misbehaving vassals ; and another place called Spying How, where was once a raise, which, when opened, was found to contain a kistvaen full of human bones. Were they the bones of the poor old Brigantes, listening in their woods to the ring of the Roman axe and the clang of the Roman hammer, as the victorious legions of Agricola marched over the mountain tops to join the cohorts at Concagium ? The valley, now so bare of trees, was once so thickly wooded that the old inhabitants used to say a squirrel could have passed from the lake side up to Thresthwaite Mouth without once touching the ground. It is at Troutbeck that we are told of the three hundred bulls, and three hundred bridges, and three hundred constables, belonging to the parish ; the explanation being that the township is divided into three Hundreds, and to each Hundred belonged a bull, a bridge, and a constable. BROMZE FODND AT AMBLE31DE .",.3 F 2 FROM AMBLE SIDE TO KESWICK CHAPTER III , 1 where the Le Flemings live, is the one bit of real aristocracy belonging to Ambleside. The whole valley was once a park for the entertain- ment of the lord, when he left his richer domains for a spell of vigorous north-country hunting ; and though so long since disparked and turned to the ordinary purposes of food and fodder -bearing, still retains traces of its former richness and exclusiveness, specially about the Hall, where the care- fulness of ownership has never been relaxed. There, the trees are trees of mere beauty and ornament, with no firewood in their twigs, no bobbins in their branches, no masts or tables, gate-posts or window-frames in their stems trees, the only functions of which are to give shelter to the rooks ; 1 llydal is said by some to mean the rye-dale or valley, which is surely a sad straining <>f etymology; by others, among whom was Mr. Wordsworth, to be a contraction of Rothay- dale, from the river a more likely reading, seeing that the old name of the lake was KnwtlmiiTr, which seems to have been from the same root as Rothay ; hence, by elision and contraction, Rydal, for the vale. Black gives it as Rliydle, a passage place. 36 FROM AMBLESIDE TO KESW1CK. the mossy lawn has been for centuries a lawn, put to no coarse ends of usefulness ; the meadows, where the cattle stand knee-deep in flowers and grass, seem as if they might have been just what they are now hundreds of years ago, when De Lancastre and De Eos 2 held high court and revel through the vale ; and through the whole estate lies that unmistakeable sign of ancient aristocracy which no money can purchase, and no art or science can supply. It all seems a lord's private property, where nature is elbowed out of court, and where meaner people exist by sufferance. The cottages are as trim and picturesque as if made of Dresden china for Madame d'Arblay's princes and princesses, while the Falls 3 the famous Kydal Falls are so pretty and well-arranged that surely their fittest place is the back scene of some pastoral opera, where the shepherds dress in velvet tights and silk stockings, and the shepherdesses dance in muslin and wreaths of roses ! Certainly they are pretty but they have been so trimmed and cared for the trees have been so artistically disposed the vistas so cunningly contrived the channels have been so scientifically deepened the resting-basin so tastefully arranged and the summer-house is such a bit of picturesque trick, that one loses all perception of nature, and cannot but 2 The Rydal estate was granted by Margaret, widow of Robert de Ros, of Wurk Castle, to Roger de Lancastre, somewhere towards the end of the thirteenth century, the grant being confirmed by Edward I. in 1274. From Roger de Lancastre it passed to the Lancastres of Howgill ; and then, by the marriage of Isabella, coheir with Sir John de Lancastre, to Sir Thomas le Fleming, of Coniugstone. These Le Flemings were the descendants of the famous Sir Michael le Fleming " Flandrensis" the relative of Baldwin, Earl of Flanders, brother-in-law to William the Conqueror, and a strict clansman of the King. Sir Michael was the ancestor of Lady Jane Grey. He was a famous man in his day : good against the Scots especially, and rewarded for his prowess in that direction, by the grant of several manors both in Lancashire and Cumberland: among them, Beckermet Castle, Aldingham Castle, and Coningstone Hall. Rydal Hall suffered much from the Parliamentary party ; the le Flemings remaining Catholic to the reign of James II. 3 There are two falls the upper and the lower situated in the Rydal Hall grounds, which you pay a fee to see. The way leads through the park meadow and outer gardens by a path of singular beauty and richness ; but all made and artificial luxury and the effeminacy of oivili/atinn stilling everything like natural growth or freedom. THE LAKE COUNTRY. regard those very elegant waterfalls as artificial altogether; to the extent of easily believing in a forcing pump or a steam-engine somewhere out of sight and hearing. They are like a wild fawn that has leaped the park-palings in her play across the moor, and has been caught, and led about among the young queens and kings, with a chain of flowers round her neck, and her hoofs shod with gold. She is very lovely in her tameness, and with all her old grace of limb and action ; but she is no longer the wild fawn with the mountain wind for her companion, and the mountain eagle for her playmate she is only a caged creature now ; well- fed and golden-shod, but caged. And so the free mountain stream that ran joyously among the fern and about the rude rocks, uncared for and dis- regarded, when it gave that one sharp leap from off the fell, leapt into civilization and subjection into flowery / , wreaths and mossy banks and all the luxuries of wealth and art ; but it is never the free mountain water again never anything but the toy of a grand domain. And, for this reason of patent artificiality, the Kydal Falls, though sweet, are not entirely pleasing ; like something warped from its first pur- pose and perverted from its natural meaning. Pass across the road, from the Hall to the Mount where the most famous of the lake poets lived ; and see there the celebrated terrace-walks, the garden-steps, the porch with its seat, the mound, and the view ; see and admire; for truly it is a poet's fitting home, set against Nab Scar as its shelter, the steeps of Loughrigg in front, Helm Crag at its side, and 38 FROM AMBLESIDE TO KESWICK. the gentle little mere at its feet. The terrace-walk along Nab Scar, with its desolation sometimes left bare and naked to the sky, and sometimes clothed with fern and moss and lichen, is very lovely ; lovely from the first step out- side the poet's garden, to the last by White Moss and the little pool of "fringed water-lily." And then the road must be taken; and GRASMERE, 4 and the churchyard, and the daisied nook where lie the Wordsworth family in quietness and peace, with poor Hartley Coleridge near them in death, as he had been in life. That quiet little nook in the churchyard among the mountains, with all the burning fire of passion, the light of thought, and the tender weight of love that lie buried there how one could dream away a working day in merely looking at those stone^, and remembering against what manner of human life they have set their solemn seal of "For ever!" Of all the lake country villages Grrasmere is the most picturesque and the likest one's ideas of the typical English home. It has no street, properly so called, but is a scattered collection of human habitations cottages, shops, houses, mansions each with its own garden or special plot of greenery, how- ever small, and all for the most part standing apart and individual. The postman walks daily some eight miles in and about the village in the delivering of his letters ; which may give an idea of its scattered and therefore picturesque character. And perhaps more than any other, does it impress one with the feeling of peace and the absence of passion or even of suffering. Though not trimmed and decorated as the dainty Rydal hamlet, nor so evidently 4 Grasmere, Gresmere, Grismere the mere, or lake, of the grise, or wild swine was once a chapelry only, under the mother church of Kendal. The ecclesiastical patronage was sold by Henry VIII. to Alan Bellingham, of Levins and Helsington, Gaythorn and Fawcet Forest, treasiirer of Berwick, and deputy warden of the Marches, he whose punning motto was " Amicus amico Alanus, Belliger Belligero Bellinghamus." He resold it, in Elizabeth's time, for 100Z. to the Le Flemings of Ilydal. The manor was formerly included in that of Windermere. 39 THE LAKH COfXTRY. artistic and considered as the new town of Windermere, it has a certain well-to-do look about it not as of fashion and luxury and a few large fortunes flaring out over all the rest like the dominant notes in an orchestra or the master colours of a picture but in the quiet beauty and cleanliness everywhere, and the absence of sordid squalor even in the poorer cottages. It is full of flowers and green trees and pleasant meadows and lovely little lanes, and the signs of human care throughout; but not of human care putting a luxuriant nature too fussily to rights. As the waters have made a halting-place at the foot of Red Bank and Fairfield, so man has halted here too, and finally has settled where he rested. This is the impression that you have of Grasmere, on your way from Ambleside to Keswick, as of a lovely halting-place, where industry has forced a living from nature, and not as if work had been lying there from the beginning which must needs attract hands, sooner or later, to itself. So sheltered and so peaceful is it, that even in the rugged winter time it does not look cheerless or dreary, while in the bright young spring, in the luscious summer, and in the ripe and lusty autumn, it is the pleasantest spot for lotus-eating, and dreaming in bye arbours of Armida's garden, to be found between AVindermere and Lowes Water. Unimportant, uncommercial, unproductive, but serene, beautiful, and happy, it is like some gracious lady sitting by the wayside and offer- ing milk to thirsty travellers. No costly wine in a jewelled goblet, and yet something more loving than water in a cup of leaves, it is the real sweet pastoral milk in the carved beechen cup that Grasmere gives such as Virgil might have drunk when he sat with Tityrus under the spreading beech-tree, or listened to the rivalry of Damoetas and Menalcas. It is the place for poets and lovers and the contented aged; but scarcely for the adventurous or the restless. As indeed may be said of most of these lake country villages, bound in the quiet bondage of love and beauty, but leaving no space wherein the wilder soul may "rage and ramp." Eat then your summer's lotus at Grasmere, but lay aside your life's armour while there, and think of no battles to be fought and of no victories to be won ! 40 FROM AMBLESIDE TO KESWICK. QRASMEEE FROM LOUQHRIOO BIDE Helm Crag stands out now boldly, with Dunmail Raise winding between it and Seat Sandal great sentinels of the pass and the Lion and the Lamb as its crest. Wordsworth called those stones the Astrologer and the Ancient Woman, but they are more like the old designation from this side ; perhaps from the other side the poet's picture may come into clearer shape. " Above Helm Crag a streak halt' (load, A burning of portentous red ; And near that lurid light, full well The Astrologer, sage Sidrophel, Where at his desk and book he sits. Puzzling aloft Ms curious wits ; He, whose domain is held in common With no one but the Ancient Woman, Cowering beside her rifted cell, As if intent on magic spell. Dread pair, that, spite of wind or weather, Still sit upon Helm Crag together!" At any rate the lines are good if the picture is less than exact, and poets have even more licence than artists. 41 G TIIK LAKE COUNTRY. But now a white stream, foaming down the deep blue recess between Silver How and Helm Crag, makes you diverge from the main road, choosing White Bridge and Butterlip Meadows instead, and a rough paved, way, us much water-course as way, with purple geraniums and spotted orchis set in golden kingcups among the sedges on either side. And by this rough way, getting still rougher and wilder as you go on, but with snatches of exquisite grace interleaved the wildness to conciliate your rougher moods, and the grace to harmonize with your more loving you finally reach and clamber up the rocky sides hemming in Sour-Milk- Ghy 11 Force, otherwise Easedale Force. A broken and tumultuous fall is this ; one fall indeed not, but a multitude of falls a knotted string of cascades rushing down the black rocks from the lonely tarn high up in the barren hills, and pouring out its life with as much of untamed wildness as the Rydal Falls have of artificiality. Nothing can be more thoroughly contrasted than these two waterfalls, so few miles apart and to be seen almost within the hour ; and of the two, surely the untouched natural life is the nobler and more beautiful. A little higher up, through reaches where the pale yellow moss is reddened with sundew, and where stag's-horn moss and club moss and the cock'scomb-shaped lycopod'mm complanatum give worlds of delight to those big boys and girls, the botanists, you come upon an amphitheatre, in the centre of which lies Easedale Tarn as it might be the arena. The outline is serrated like an elephant's tooth, and the sides are folded and wrinkled, and there is more the appearance here of landslip than in many other places, and a richer manner of natural beauty. It is especially lovely with the sunlight lying on every rock and stone a cup-full of sunlight indeed, round which the mountains are as pure and full of colour as if they were of metal ; the tarn reflecting every image and adding while giving back. Then up to Codale Tarn, of course not by the gentler way never take the gentler way but up the very face of those wild Carr's Crags ; the true rocky scramble, with the true rocky incidents to give it proper pleasure the ash- 42 FROM AMBLESIDE TO KESWICK. tree growing out from a rift, and bending over the stream the rocks bleached and bony the whitened skeletons of trees stripped of their leaves by the wind and the hail and the frost, never to be clothed again by the sun and the shower the fling of ferns across the grey all the dear old features of the craggy path, till you come to Codale Tarn, lying under the shadow of its own particular pike. Whence, if you have a mind, you may go to Stickle Tarn and Dungeon Grhyll, and down into Langdale, or over the Stake, as you will. To-day do none of these things ; turn back by the way you came, to the foot of Helm Crag; and passing among farmsteads and gentlemen's seats, shady narrow lanes, and fenced fields full of cattle, fall into the main road again at the pass of Dunmail Raise. 5 A dreary way enough lies before you; with Grasmere, pretty, pastoral, sleepy, and green, bathed in the summer sunshine, the haymakers just beginning their pleasant labours, and the cows and sheep dotted picturesquely about its pasture lands. Helm Crag is now only a corner-stone of large dimensions, the Ancient Woman and Sage Sidrophel taking the place of the Lion and the Lamb, as expected and Steel Fell, sharp and straight as its name, rises with a threatening kind of front, behind it. You have passed Fairfield which has been so long your landmark ; but Seat Sandal flows out perpetually into new lines, ever rugged and rough both in form and dip, whatever the change 5 Hutchiiison has a very quaint theory respecting the growth and meaning of this name, which we will give abridged so far as we can. Popular assemblies were called mallums, afterwards mallum-motes, folk-motes, ward-motes, wittenage-motes. Justice used to be administered by the presiding Druid, sub Dio, within the circle of the ray, equal to our bar: hence arraign (at ray in), arrested (at ray est). Even religio is ray-ligio (bound by the ray). Near Cockermouth is the hill Muta or Moota, and on the top Moota-man. Carlisle assizes are still held in the mote or moot-hall, and we still moot a point. A general meeting was a mallum-mote ; and in these motes every arrest or act passed was called dun-ivallo, the will done or enacted, our present parliamentary phrase the outgrowth of the same. Dun-mallard, near Ullswater, and Dun-mail-raise, evidence the same thing. Dun in old law records is a hill, and Dunmallo was the law of the hill. That heap at Dunmail Raise is our only monument, says Southey, and that doubtfi.il, because it may be merely a division made between the two comities. 43 c. * II IK LAKE COUNTRY. of position. The Raise beck, which here divides Cumberland and West- moreland, makes sweet mountain music at the foot of Steel Fell, singing its noble song with a clear, loud, freeborn voice that stirs the blood within your veins almost as the blast of a trumpet might, till the highest point of the Pass is reached, and you come upon the ancient pile of stones, now welted together with fern and moss and covered with the sweet charities of time and nature, which, they say, marks the spot where the poor county king, Dun- mail, was buried, when he was defeated and slain by the Saxon Edmund, and his kingdom given to the Scottish Malcolm. As you descend and round the last spur of Seat Sandal, Helvellyn, stern and fervid, sweeps down its barren lines in terrible majesty of power ; the upheaved mountain wall to the west breaks into more distinctive members, and new vistas reveal themselves ; and then, towering up above all the rest, and a long way off, a dim blue top comes out from among the grey clouds, and the dim blue top is SKIDDAW. Below lies the little lake of Thirlmere, 6 with its two promontories bound together by a bridge, 7 shaped like a bridge of boats set stem to stern ; and you pass by, not through, the City of Wythburn, a miserable hamlet with nothing curious about it save its ambitious name, past Thrispot, and the humble little church belonging to the district " Wytheburn's modest house of prayer, As lowly as the lowliest dwelling well in keeping with the place and people. Rough Crag and Raven Crag the last is one of those richly-wooded and ringleted-looking crags so often to be met with in the lake country stand boldly forward on the west of Thirlmere, where also is the Haunted House and the terrible ghost-story as reported by Harriet Martineau. And quite to the left is a mountain shoulder, with the well-known features betokening the probability of a tarn 6 Thirlmere has many names, Leatheswater and Wythburnwater, and anciently Brack- " At th<> foot of Wy I him ni fells lies Brackmere." GOUGH'S CanuJcn. 7 Siiid to hit Uoiiiiin, but more than doubtful. 44 FROM AMBLESIDE TO KESWICK. within the dip ; as indeed there is Harrop Tarn, with Dobghyll 8 proceeding, and that noble mass of rock, Tarn Crag, overhanging. Go across the boat-like bridge to the west side of the lake, to where Laucey Falls are 1 to be found among the trees and ferns : 9 not prettily tame, like the Rydal Falls not with the same amount of passion and tumult in their rush, as in Sour-Milk Ghyll but with an adorned luxuriance, a generous and graceful beauty, whether flowing through fairy nooks, or lost in shy entanglement of root and rock, or leaping out in bold cascades, laughing so that the old hills catch up the sound and fling it back with dimmer music these seldom-visited falls are as worthy of odes and pictured praises as many others of which so much public account has been made. Feathered with woods but not obscured craggy and wild but not bleak or bare bank and jutting stone moss-covered and fern-adorned but not softened into effeminacy, or their natural beauty crippled by false art dark, cool, lonely, and lovely, their wild grace at once rich and free, it is time well bestowed to take an hour or two from the journey, and spend them in golden moments by the side of those falling waters. If it is a still day, Thirlmere lies absolutely unrippled, the reflection so entire that you cannot, at first sight, tell where the line of water begins, and what is real and what only repetition. These marvellously clear reflections are characteristic of Thirlmere, kept by Helvellyn from the east wind, and by its own crags from the west, closed up by Nathdale 10 Fell and the 8 Under Bull Crags, not far from the ghyll, is a tall flat-topped stone, called the Justice stone, where the dalesmen of Wythbum, Legberthwaite, and St. John's-in-the-Vale, used to meet to settle public matters, such as the letting of the sheep-runs, repairing roads, &c. An old man now living at Wythbum remembers being taken by his father to the last of these meetings. The stone is half-way between the city and Armboth, and nearly opposite the little promontoiy called Clarke's Lope, where one Clarke tried to get rid of his wife, but was drowned himself instead. 9 Some rare ferns are to be found here : among them the asplenium viride, or green spleenwort, a limestone fern growing on a thin vein of limestone running through this district. 10 Pronounced Naddle. 45 THE LAKE COUNTRY. St. John's Vale hills against the north, and by Dunmail Raise from even the tender south ; and wonderfully perfect they are. The rich and stately trees of Dalehead, the desperate front of Helvellyn, the bounding leap of Brotto's Ghyll, and Eagle Crag like a bird's wing not in its sweep but in its grey striated lines fringed with growth of wood for feathers, all by turns appear, loaded with additional colour in the mirror below, and all are suddenly swept out, as an artist would sweep out a picture with one stroke of his brush, when a small light breeze glides swiftly across the lake, and shakes it mischievously into smiles. Keep still to the left for Shoulthwaite Moss ; passing now under Eaven Crag Great How, where Wordsworth's boys built their- snow man, covered with trees, on the right ; Wanthwaite Fell, a lower shoulder of Helvellyn, still further to the right ; Nathdale Fell, which runs like a hog's back between the vales of Nathdale and Saint John, in front ; and beyond Nathdale the blue mass of Blencathra; to be soon followed in full profile by Skiddaw. Turn back before the scene is changed, and take in the whole of the lake, THIRLMERE winding and river-like, to the very foot of the Raise ; a view to be well noted when seen, and not the less noted because not one of the more popular or widely known. As you descend, the Castle Rocks appear Green Crag properly where the Bridal of Triermain was held ; and where now, instead 46 FROM AMBLESIDE TO KESW1CK. of Arthur's love and Guendolen's proud beauty, instead of the revelry and knighthood of the magic time, is only a heap of cold grey stone, touched into golden glory by the westering sun; which the imaginative and short- sighted may believe to look like a ruined castle, but which the clear-eyed make to be only a heap of cold grey stone. But, from the Threlkeld side, and in a not too brilliant sunset, even they, the clear-eyed, may be deceived, and think they see the remains of a ruined castle in the broken rocks of Green Crag. Then, by sweet flowery lanes rather than an ordinary Queen's Highway, out from the Vale of Thirlmere (Legberthwaite properly) into the Vale of St. John's, and by wooded Castlerigg (which you must pronounce Castrigg if you wish to be understood by the vale people) where the great Derwentwater family had once a house on the heights above Walla Crag ; and down the long, steep, wooded slope to Brow Top, Skiddaw showing his huge bulk more fully, Latrigg standing like a watchdog by its side, Blencathra sharp and picturesque, the Bassenthwaite Fells distant and dim, and Bassenthwaite Lake like a silver line against them and the sky, the Greta, most musical, most beautiful of rivers, flowing on its careless way like a happy child singing in its play : all caught up, one after the other, as the eye wanders lovingly from each to each. There they all are the lake, the mountains, the islands where the sweetest wild flowers are to be found and the loveliest pictures to be made, the bays where the water-lilies grow, and where fairies used to live in the days when life was young and love was not ashamed of faith there are the sweet meadows, and the little golden becks running over their golden sands there smile the sunny slopes of Catbells there peers up to the sky the royal face of Causey Pike Grisedale Pike, and the sharp Newland hills, tell pleasant tales of summer rambles and the bold dark mass of Borrowdale's wilder cluster shuts in the heart of the Lake Rose against the world beyond. For it is in truth the Lake Rose, this VALE of DERWENTWATER the loveliest flower in all the garland the brightest gem of the whole grand crown ! PERWENTWATER from CASTLEHEAD KESWICK AND DERWENT WATER CHAPTER IV THE Vale of Derwentwater bears quite a different aspect to that of eith< Windennere or Ullswater. The first a long narrow tongue or inlet from the south modernised and beautiful, but tame, save at the head ; in all its lowe and middle lengths rather a promise of what is to come than the fulfilment hopes strikes one as a lovely garden, or park, where the very wildness is wel kept, and nature is constrained to neatness. A delicious translation for the town-weary Cockney, but too well-dressed for the true-born mountaineer, anc oppressive in its modern luxury to those who remember this country in it simple homeliness of forty years ago. The second is liker the ideal norther life, and has a certain savageness and solitude about it which makes one forge 48 KESWICK AND DERWENTWATER. its two grand hotels with their startling London prices, and the grim exclusive- ness of its one stately owner, careful rather for exclusiveness than for simplicity. Even its inconveniences are pleasant as a summer day's experience its no market and its no shops, and the need of sending fifteen miles to Penrith for a cap-string or a fishing fly, its butcher's supply coming once a week, and no oftener, and its postman in his little cart the general Mercury and the great event of the day. All this is very delightful ; though, to be sure, it is only a playing at the life of long ago, with the steamboat hissing on the lake, and crinolines swelling on the mountains ; but it charms during a short stay where no vital inconvenience is felt, and gratifies the imagination. Still Ullswater, like Windermere, for all its grandeur is only partially mountainous ; noble in the upper reach, beautiful in the middle, but tame if lovely in the lower, going off into softness and rich living and the broad plains of castle-crowned Penrith and the flowing wealth of rivers. It is not the amphitheatre that Derwentwater is, though it may be that it has grander lines about it; as in the lines of Helvellyn, which belongs to Ullswater, and which are nobler than those of Skiddaw. Yes, Derwentwater is the gem of the whole. Whatever there is of beauty special to the other districts is here in ripest fulness. Crag and fell ; the evidence of the mountain top and the secrets of the dale ; gentle river and brawling stream ; the turbulent ghyll and the grander force ; the lake hiding itself away in bays starred with water-lilies and blue with lobelia, or dashing round rocky promontories where it beats up in waves that are almost billows in the heavy winds of winter, or bossed with islands endeared by legends and beautified by poems ; distant prospects leading down to the dark blue sea, and over to Cumberland's old enemy, Scotland, beyond; and home views across one's own garden that touch the heart like the face of a fair child : nothing is wanting, and nothing is left unfinished, as where the hills rise up only as a kind of hood at the head, but wander off into undeveloped fells at the foot. Here they are set all round the vale in equal majesty a rampart or a crown, as one's mood would phrase it. 49 H THE LAKE COUNTRY. Again, the Keswick lake is not all the valley, as with the narrower and more river-formed. Between the roots of the mountains and the lake-side lies a wide tract, where fields and meadows and rivers and hamlets and sunny slopes and secondary heights, make a pleasant world of human industry and love. There is the hill where Southey 1 lived, in the midst of " great flourishing bears and monsters," as Charles Lamh called his " net of mountains," and its fellow fork where the Vicarage stands the Greta flowing between ; the Derwent hills out by Portinscale ; the peopled terraces under Skiddaw, creeping up on to his very breast ; the hills towards St. John's, and those on the Threlkeld road, all lovely with gardened homes, and sanctified by human hopes ; the broadest district and the most populous in the lake country. The form of the valley, too, is so beautiful in its roundness not a geometrical roundness scientifically true but a nearly unbroken circling of hills; its only visible outlet being towards the setting sun, where the Bassenthwaite Fells and Water are the barriers against the Cockermouth plains leading to the sea. Thus the lake itself is not such an all-absorbing feature as either Windermere or Ullswater, or yet Coniston. The first is ten, and the second nine, miles long; the last six with sometimes only the road and sometimes a meadow or a lawn betwec them and the mountain bases. Derwentwater is but three miles at its fullest, and lies away by itself at one end of the valley, leaving the rest free for man. So that it is only part of the life of the place, as the mountains are only part, too, shared with the woods and the fields, and the 1 Besides Southey and Wordsworth the last only collaterally Keswick has a claim on Shelley and Coleridge. Poor Shelley and his Harriet lived for some time at Chesnut Hill, where he used to go and see Mr. Southey, " like the ghost of his former (Pantisocratic) self," and eat Mrs. Southey's buttered cake, which he wanted to " eat for ever ; " and Coleridge, who was often at,. Greta Hall, wrote the second part of Christabel at Keswick, if not other things. Southey brought up Sara Coleridge as his own daughter, for he was a generous man to his own kindred if less than loving to the world at large, and the most thorough-bred gentleman of the whole lake school. 50 KESWICK AND DEKWENTWATEB. pleasant bye-lanes among hedges and corn-rows, and evening saunters through the hay-fields. From the little hill of Castlehead its love-name hereabouts is Castlet that wooded crag just out of Keswick on the Borrowdale road, the most expressive of the home views is to be had. Follow the sweet wood-path, winding and cool as a wood-path should be, up to the craggy apex where the picture bursts upon you. For it is truly a picture, of which the framework is the sky. Skiddaw stands to the right, isolated as ever, but with more sharpness of aspect than is its usual characteristic; even 'little Dod looks impudently independent, and no longer the " cub " resting by its parent, of ordinary times ; and that cone born of the mountain's very heart, that peak within a peak, Carsleddam by name, shows such a fierceness of front, and such a red wrath of background, that it might be a bit of Helvellyn, instead of a member of the mildest mountain patriarch in the country. Through the trees to the right Blencathra shows itself half shyly ; while to the left Bassenthwaite Lake lies like a shining belt against the sky, joining Skiddaw and its own special fells, Barf and Whinlatter, with a line of silver. In clear weather Criffel's dim top is to be seen beyond that line ; but this is rare, and not to be expected by the every-day tourist. The mountains round the lonely Newlands Valley look sharp and peaked and full of temptation to adventurous ramblers ; full of danger, too, let it be distinctly understood. Causey Pike, with its royal fatuous face 2 upon its crest, and Grhyll Mickle at its side, looks well from here ; and between it and Rawling End comes up a small pointed head, which, seen at the other side, has a noble body attached known to guides and tourists as Knot Pike. Red Pike, one of the Buttermere hills and as ruddy as its name, is in the distance, High Stile, its companion, following ; a small bit of Robinson and another, still smaller, of the rich sounding Goldscope look up over their " George the Third, double chin, snub nose, receding forehead and all, can be made out quite well in the crowning knobs of Causey Pike. 51 H 2 TIIE LAKE COUNTRY. neighbours' heads ; and then come the slopes of Catbells, and the wilder fall of Maiden Mawr; Gait Crag and Castle Crag below. But the highest points of all, Scawfell 3 and Scawfell Pike (the Wastwater giant), are far away, almost as dim and blue as the sky against which they stand. Great End and Bowfell, belonging to the same group, are also seen, but indistinctly ; Glaramara is to the left of Bowfell, heading Borrowdale ; and then comes the Lodore range, massed into Walla Crag, so far as perspective goes, which completes the panorama. 4 Below, is the lake, with the reflections as clear as if shadowed in a mirror, save where a light breeze creeps tremulously, as if on tiptoe, just across the surface, or where a boat trails a comet-like stream of widening ripple in its wake ; or perhaps where those shadowed places called " kelds" tell of a coming storm, according to the saying : " It is no hay-day to-day the kelds are on tne lakes." But ah ! how lovely is that lake ! Go down to the boat-landings, where the pretty wood of Cockshot on the one side and the sloping space of Crow Park on the other, catch the sunlight with their two expressions of mystery and revelation ; and go through its pleasant places one by one. 3 Scawfell is generally said to be the centre of the Borrowdale system, perhaps, because it is the highest point, and so appears as if it ought to be the centre. But a careful study of Flintoft 's model will show Great Gable rather as the centre ; the point whence the Langdale ranges and the Wastwater mountains (Scawfell itself and the Screes, and the rest), the Ennerdale mountains, and the Buttermere (but those last at Crummock are broken across, as if against the grain, hi a very strange manner), all radiate as the spokes of a wheel radiate from the nave. This last is a simile often used, but it is too good to be discarded for a newer and less fitting image. 4 Travelling from right to left, against the sun, and so coming back, save for the wooded knoll on which we stand, to Skiddaw, where we began. It is of course impossible to give tliis view as a panorama. Therefore, the best and most picturesque part has been taken as the heading for the chapter : namely, Walla Crag and Borrowdale, Castle Crag for the very centre of the picture, Glaramara, Bowfell, Great End, and Scawfell Pike behind it, then Maiden Mawr and Catbells, with the lake and islands below. 52 KESWICK AND DERWENTWATER. Here is Derwent Isle, which has had almost as many names as owners Vicar's Isle 3 when it belonged to Fountain's Abbey, Peachey's, Pock- lington's, The Island, and now Derwent Isle ; more appropriate if less distinctive ; surely the loveliest water-home ever made by man, with its emerald lawn sloping to the south, and its tulip-tree like a bit of tropical life among the northern growths. Friar's Crag, that bold jut of rock and tree, where the monks of Lindisfarne used to come yearly to be blessed by St. Herbert, and where now every artist tries his hand at a sketch, flanks it to the left; and beyond Friar's Crag is the largest of all the islands Lord's Island, where the Derwentwaters lived. They built them- selves a summer bower there, out of the ruins of the old Castlerigg mansion, when they abandoned that estate for Dilston, on the marriage of Margaret, the heiress and daughter of Sir John de Derwentwater, with the Ratcliffe of Dilston ; 6 cutting through the connecting tongue of land at Strandshag, 7 which made the island part of the mainland, and throwing 5 Alice de Romeli, the great religious benefactress of this valley, gave this island and the parish church of Crosthwaite to Fountain's Abbey ; but at the dissolution of the monasteries it was granted to one John Williamson, from whom it passed, by successive translations, into the hands of its present owners. It has had many owners, and among others, in Camden's time, German miners, and, perhaps but this is a mere supposition, without proof or groundwork some old Roman may have set up his tent among its trees, and defied the Britons in full security from its pleasant shores. 6 It was one of these Ratcliffes who figured in the old couplet " The Rat, the Cat, and Lovel the Dog, Ruled all England under the Hog;" the Rat being Sir Richard Ratcliffe, not one of the Derwentwater set, but belonging to the elder branch the famous Sir Richard, of scarcely enviable notoriety. It brings one face to face with strange things of bygone times, to be able to connect such mighty men with an insignificant little island good only as a show place to summer visitors. 7 In 1769, money of Queen Elizabeth's time shillings and sixpences, and a half-crown piece of Charles I. were found at Strandshag (hag means a wooded enclosure or coppice) ; doubtless buried there in a moment of peril by the Derwentwaters, or by some of their retainers. 53 THE LAKE COUNTKY. over a drawbridge instead, as a safer manner of way in troublous times than a level space of green. The flat of Stable Hills, where Southey would have built his house if he had had Aladdin's lamp or Fortunatus's purse, looks well from here and Scarf Close Bay, under the shadow of Great Wood on Walla Cn has very likely a shoal of banded perch or shy trout sleeping in the si among the stones. In the spring Ramps Holm is or was once thick wii wild garlic, as its name implies ; for Ramps Holm is only Garlic Island wh< translated into English ; and the Scarf Stones may be dangerous high-water time when their heads are covered, if you do not know thei] whereabouts. Then there is Barrow Bay, and the river inlet to Lodore, which takes close steering to keep the boat clear up its centre, and not run it aground on the mud among the reeds and rushes; and the Floating Island, 8 that strange phenomenon of the hotter summers ; and the beautiful Derwent, coming in its last hour, after all its rocky clearness, through a 8 In the summer of 1863 there were two floating islands a thing not known before ; but the second was part of the same system as the first, and both were portions of the bottom of the lake, torn up by some agency as yet a little undetermined by the scientific. It is evident that one cause is the generation of gases carburetted hydrogen and azote in equal parts, with a little carbonic acid underneath the lake bottom in very hot weather, by which means the flooring is at last torn and lifted up bodily, and floated to the surface. But why those gases are generated in that one particular spot is, after all, the real mystery. The older and more intelligent of the guides will tell you of a little stream that gets lost in the ground before reaching the lake, and which disappearance, they say, has something to do with the subsequent upheaval of the island ; but this point has not been quite established as yet. The island is a mere soft spongy bit of vegetation and earth, such as the bottom of the lake close in shore would be, covered with water lobelia (Lobelia dort- manna), common quillwort (Isoetes lacustris), and shore-weed (Littorella lacustris) ; the same plants, in short, as grow round the margin of the lake everywhere. There seemed great chance at one time this year of a very large portion of that Lodore side of the lake bottom rising to the surface ; for, owing to the heat and long drought, the water was exceedingly shallow the yellow part of the bulrushes standing nearly a foot out of it ; and, had the same kind of weather continued, we should probably have had a floating island of unheard-of magnitude, shaking its loose sides upon the water. 54 KESWICK AND DERWENTWATER. mere swamp where the herons find their food, and where there used to be snipes and wild ducks and the like, until population and civilization drove them all away to wilder places. And there are the points, like tongues, darting up towards Grange and Borrowdale ; and the lead-mine at Salt Level Bay, where there is a steam-engine with heaps of grey refuse, and the water soiled and whitened for a broad space outward ; and the Brandelow Woods under Catbells, where old-world smugglers used to live, and run their kegs of brandy ashore bold "Will Watches, bolder than honest, and with a monstrous amount of false sentiment about their memories. And then there is St. Herbert's Island, 9 the sweetest of all. Every one lands on St. Herbert's Island, and wanders through the close- grown paths to the summerhouse, where picnic parties, needing a roof over their heads, spread their table-cloths and bring out their veal pies and cold chickens ; and every one studies the new aspect of the mountains as seen from this Omphalos of the lake. Catbells looks steeper than in general, if 9 Almost every one knows the beautiful tradition attached to this island, where " Herebert, priest and confessor," came when he withdrew himself from the world of men and action, to live in the life of God and contemplation retaining only one earthly affection : his love for St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarn, or, as Bede calls it, Farn Island. When St. Cuthbert came as bishop to Lugubalia, (which we now call Carlisle,) St. Herbert went over to him for godly talk and affectionate communion ; and then it was that the elder saint prayed God to grant his younger brother's prayer, and to let them both depart from life on the same day. And the promise was given. On the same day, which was the 19th day of March, " their souls departed from their bodies, and were straight in union in the beatific sight and vision, and were transported hence to the Kingdom of Heaven by the service and hands of angels." For centuries after, the Vicar of Crosthwaite, attended by the priests and monks of every church and chapel and convent round about, went in grand procession up the lake on the 13th April, to celebrate mass on St. Herbert's Isle, to the joint honour of the two sainted friends ; granting forty days' indulgence to all the pious who accompanied them. Fuller's notice of the story is this, " Herebert, Priest and Confessor, may justly be referred to this county ; for there is a lake therein (Bede calleth \tpregrande stagnum), nigh Keswick, made by the river Darwent, wherein three islands are found, in the least of which this Herebert led an eremitical life." 55 THE LAKE COUNTRY. not so high, and Maiden Mawr is wilder ; Skiddaw is infinitely mild and paternal, and the valley between it and the lake is crumpled up into a few dotted lines ; Bassenthwaite seems to be endless miles away, and Blencathra is sharp and aggressive ; the front of Walla Crag, and the rocks about Lodore, are rich in colour and of threatening aspect; and the great purple caverns of Borrowdale seem close at hand, as if you could fling a stone against the very brow of Castle Crag, blocking up the way. In some conditions of the atmosphere the smallest accident of the hills, whatever it may be, is as clearly marked and as vividly coloured as if it was a toy model you had before you. In others you see nothing but the presence of large masses and the shadowy places of the dales, while all the details are rapt away into misty dreamland, and that southern gorge is the home of only spirits and genii. Sometimes the home of pale ghosts, or of furies let loose, when the clouds come down, and the wind and the rain go forth to meet them. Those great purple caverns that deep throat into which you plunge with such insatiable longing how often have the weary-hearted stood here on the very spot where St. Herbert prayed, and cast down the Rurden of their sorrows where he took up his cross ! Now back to your boat, past the hole by the Otter-rock where the big eel was caught one day, and into Derwentwater Bay or Waterend Bay, Waterlily Bay, or Sir John Woodford's, as you like to call it but under any name the sweetest haunt to be found within the four seas. One of the chief beauties of Derwentwater is its clearness on account of its shallowness : and of all its bays and shallows this is the clearest and most transparent. The water lies over a pavement of jewels of all kinds and of all hues ; ranging from pale sea-green passing into white, to the deepest purple of the shade next to black. It is a "wonderwork," that lake pavement inside the bay; so is the lovely wood surrounding it ; so is that broad roofing of lily leaves, red and green, beneath which the Undines of the lake sway the white cups to and fro in the evening ripple ; and even the broken steps leading up into the private grounds, with the battered old stags upon the gate-posts even 66 KESWICK AND DERWENTWATEK. the stone arm-chair on the rock ut the corner, with its rustic history belonging have a fascination and a fitness not to be found anywhere beside. Then, skirting past pleasant Silver Hill, where the sun always seems to shine, taking care not to get wrecked on either of the little Ling Holms at hand, but keeping within the shadow of the woods, so lovely at this par- ticular spot, as, indeed, they are all along the western side steering up and out again the reedy stretch of the issuing Derwent, the Greta joining close by but not meeting in the lake past the wooded Promontory and Crow Park, and then to the landing-place again ; the inventory of the lake complete. FROM SIB JOHN WOODFORD's GROUNDS Of the history of Keswick 10 not much is to be said, for all that it is the largest and most important of the Lake Country towns the metropolis, as it is the centre, of the district. It used to have three special branches 10 Kesh is the local name for the water hemlock, which grows very abundantly here ; so that Keswick is literally the head, or bay, or village of the water hemlock. In early times, Keswick was not the favourite place it is now. The town was almost wholly inhabited by 57 I THE LAKE COUNTRY. of industry the woollen trade, 11 the black-lead mines in Borrowdale, and the gold and silver mines in Newlands; 12 but the woollen trade has dwindled miners, and Leland, who seems to have hated our north country bitterly enough, calls it " a lytle poore market town cawlled Keswike, a mile from St. Herherte's Isle, that Bede speaketh of; " but Camden's summary was more gracious : " On the edges of this lake in very rich land," he says, " surrounded by dewy lulls, and defended from the north winds by Skiddaw, a very high mountain, lies Keswicke, a small market town, many years famous for the copper works, as appears from a charter of King Edward IV., and at present inhabited by miners, whose smelting house is by Derwentside, which, with his forcible stream, and other ingenious inventions, serveth them in notable stead for easy bellows - works, hammer-works, forge-works, and sawing of boards, not without admiration of th<' who behold." (This is quoted from a quotation.) A contributor to the Gentiamatt$ Magazine, in 1751, is very severe. He says out boldly, with no chance of being mis- understood, that " the poorer inhabitants of Keswick subsist chiefly by stealing, or clandestinely buying of those that steal, the black lead, which the}* sell to Jews or other hawkers." Hutchinson, in his Tour, gives his verdict, too, on the adverse side. " Keswick is but a mean village, wholly indebted to the amenity of its situation to the notice of travellers," he says ; and he sums up all that is to be said in the facts, that the accommodation is very indifferent, that no tradition is preserved of St. Herbert, that there are eagles in the cliffs near Bank Park (at the head of the lake), and on the shores a saline spring of very salubrious quality (at Manesty, probably), and that a cliff, projecting over the lake, is called " Eve's Crag" from its likeness to a woman. "NVhich was his own dream surely, whatever else he may have had warrant}- for ! " There are still some hands emplo} r ed in tin's, but very few compared to old time, when spinning and weaving and carding Avent on in all the cottages, and home-spun ginghams and fustians were the rule, not the exception. '- The Newland mines were discovered in Queen Elizabeth's time, by Thomas Thurland siiul I >aniel Hetchletter, a German from Augsburg : the upshot being a law-suit between the Queen and Thomas Percie, Earl of Northumberland, the Lord of the Manor, which ended in favour of the former and her prerogative, because more silver and gold than copper was found, sn they said, and the royal metals belonged to her, the baser only to the Lord. Fuller, in his ll'iirtfiii'x, has a very (jiiaint note on the Newland mines. " These Mines lay long neglected, choaked in their own rubbish, till renewed about the beginning of Queen Elizabeth, when plenty of Copper was here afforded, both for home use and for forraign transportation. I '.lit Copper itself was too soft for several! military services, and could not alone (no single person can pnn, ;| Parent) produce. Brass, most useful for that purpose. Here taste and 'ivine Providem-p : which never doth its work by halfes, and generally doubleth gifts by -(.asonable gning them: /,\\ regarded with romantic tenderness, perhaps hecause of the sad tragedy of the last of the race. For it was not the simple fact of his execution that made the story of the young earl so pitiful it was his youth and gallantry and chivahic character; it was his wife's devotedness, both to the cause for which she sacrificed her husband, and to that husband himself, when the stake for which he had played was lost, and only the player was to be rescued. It was the story of love and heroism a stoiy as old as time, and as noble as human history that has invested the name of the Derwentwaters with so much interest, and that has kept them still the traditionary heroes and local magnates of the vale, no matter what great name or greater wealth comes in their stead and on their land. To this day the Aurora Borealis is called " Lord Derwentwater's Lights," because they shone with unusual brilliancy the night after his execution. The common people said it was a sign of the wrath of Heaven for his execution, but the religious said it was the fiery chariot of his soul taken upwards ; and the last got the greater consolation. 62 KESWICK AND DEKWKNTWATKK'. the custom of old time ; but if their music was no better than their poetry, the world of hearers in and about that old Crosthwaite Church would not be much benefited. The manner of electing churchwardens and sidesmen in this church is of old-time origin. 18 The assembly of electors commanded to gather themselves together at Crosthwaite Church on the afternoon of Ascension-day, is to be composed of the Vicar of Crosthwaite, the eighteen sworn men (sidesmen), the churchwardens, the representatives of the house of Derwentwater, the sealer and receiver of the Queen's Majesty's portion at the mines, the bailiffs of Keswick, Wythburn, Borrowdale, Thornthwaite, Brundholm, and the Forester of Denvent Fells ; and these are to choose and elect the eighteen men for the year to come, and also the churchwardens. The oath to be administered on the Sunday following, between the morning prayers and the Litany, is as (juaiut as the rest, but too long to be given here. There is also a free or national school near the church abutting, indeed, on to the churchyard wall with certain local privileges helpful to the young of the place, and which the 18 There was more to do in those early times than simply to provide for the right ill distribution of the parish funds, or to look after the scholars and their master; for the north countrymen, slow to move in everything, were the last to accept the new dispensation. Clergy and laity, almost to a man, supported Aske's rebellion the Pilgrimage of Grace; iind Sir Ralph Sadler wrote in 1569 to Lord Burghley that, "the hearts of all the com - UK malty of the North country were altogether bunded with th' olde popishe doctrine." These Iioniiinistic proclivities got the poor Eighteen into temporary trouble ; and the authorities appointed for the better ordering of the religious observances of the county, did their best to drive them into the way of simplicity and the Reformation, and to destroy the lingering love of papistry and papistical splendours still existing. No great harm came to any of them, and no lives were lost. Fuller, speaking of Cumberland martyrs, says, in his diy sarcastic way. "This country aftbrdeth none in the Raign of Queen Maiy. First, the People thereof were mezell'd in Ignorance and Superstition. Secondly, such as favoured the Reformation were connived at by Owin Oglethorpe, the courteous Bishop of Carlisle, who crowned f^neen Ell/abeth. However. Cumberland had one- Native, who going up to London, first found a husband, and then met with martyrdomo therein: viz., Elizabeth 1'oster." born at ( Iniystock. burnt with six others in one fire at Smithfield, January 27, L556. G.T TIIK LAKE COl'XTKY. eighteen sworn men manage to the good or evil of the institution mid scholars, as the worse- or better element among them prevails. Sometimes there are disagreements between the Eighteen and the master ; one objecting to the over-severity and the other indignant at the over-leniency ; one fuming that his son does not learn fast enough and another fretting because his daughter is going to be such a fine scholar she will make but a feckless woman. Self-government has its disadvantages. The ancient and original village of the vale is Crosthwaite ; that little hamlet below the Vicarage-hill to the right, where there is a fine old house called Monk's Hall, now a farm, and a tree with a tradition at its roots. This was the parish hamlet when the Christian religion was represented by noble architecture and social inequality; when the monk dwelt in a celled palace, and the serf herded with the pigs and the goats. It is now nothing but the decrepit old name-giver, palsied, withered, and worn out. But withered and decrepit as it may be, it still lives in the glories whicl neither time nor circumstance can change : it still looks up to Skiddaw'i- calm, grand front, still sees the burning sunrise flushing it a glowing crimson as the day steals on and over the mountain tops and then down to the valley beneath ; still sees it paling gradually from red and purpl to grey and green, like a fire burning itself out to ashes, as the sun siul down behind the Bassenthwaite lake and the sea beyond ; still sees it whit and silent as a frozen statue in the winter green as a young flower leaf in tl spring belted with gold in the summer, but the gold broken into by purpl shadows and greyer markings and in the autumn time burnished with all tl richest colours nature can give purple and red and gold and bronze till it is one large garden of beauty and fragrance. And so the tim< wear on, and man and all his fashions change from year to year, and froi day to day ; but palsied, withered, and decrepit old Crosthwaite village lives in the presence of the Eternal the Eternally Young and the Eternally Beautiful ! G4 BORROWL>iL:E FROM BELOW THE BOWDEF THE KESWICK WALKS CHAPTER V YES, the Vale of Keswick is the opened rose itself, and all the other lakes and mountains are the leaves and buds. Noble sprays, some of them, fall of rich tones and delicious sweetness, but none equal to the perfected flower. And Borrowdale is the heart of the rose ; the inner golden recess where the bees seek their food and the butterflies their enjoyment ; the point where so many lines converge and where we rest before taking wider flights beyond ; for, indeed, the most noticeable thing in the whole vale is that cluster of dark blue mountains up at the head of the lake, if it be not the solitary Northern mass of Skiddaw set up like a kind of mountain Jove above the rest. THE LAKE COUNTRY. Borrowdale * is generally only ranked as one of the " walks about Keswick." Though the heart and nucleus of the mountain system, it is regarded mainly as the way to Langdale by the Stake, or to Wastwater by Sty Head, or to Buttermere by Honister ; not often as a place of sojourn or of intimate knowledge. And yet it has within itself beauty that would reward long months of loving roaming. For instance, the walk from Grange, ending at Stockley Bridge at the foot of Sty Head Pass, is without an equal ; especially if you choose an evening full of rich sunset tones, and know the worth of the loveliness about you. 1 The manor of Borrowdale was once part of the Castlerigg manor, belonging to the Derwentwater estate, but probably given by one of the family to the church ; for, in some I accounts, it is said that, " the monks of Furness held, of the honour of Cockerrnouth, in pure and perpetual alms, Borrowdale, which, by the dissolution of the said monasterie, fell into King Henry's hands, and was, at the time this survey of the Derwent Fells manor was taken (1578), still in the possession of the Queen. The abbot and convent of Fountains late held the other Borrowdale of the said honour, in pure and perpetual alms, which came in the said king by the dissolution of the abbey; and, by the said King Henry, granted to Richard Grame and his heirs." Another account gives the manor to William Whitmore and Jonas Verdon, by grant of James I., and they, by a " deed dated the 28th of Novemln >r. 1014, sold and conveyed to Sir Wilfred Lawson and thirty others therein named, all the said manor of Borrowdale, except all those wad-holes and wad, commonly called black cawke, within the commons of Seatollar, or elsewhere, witliin the commons and wastes of the manor of Borrowdale aforesaid, of the yearly rent or value of fifteen sliilliugs and fourpence, since which time it has been held distinct from other royalties of the manor." Great fun used to be made of the Borrowdale people when intercourse was rarer and local distinctions greater than now, (Clarke, writing in 1789, says that twenty years ago a cart was unknown in Borrowdale,) and many of the old Gotham traditions were fastened on them as on the Troutbeck men. True or not, it is believed to this day in Keswick that the cuckoo wall, which was to build in the gowk or cuckoo, and so ensure eternal spring, w:is actually begun at Borrowdale ; and " Borrowdale gowk " is a term not infrequently applied to the heavy Borrowdale men. There are other stories, as that of the red deer which \\;is certainly a witch, because it escaped the hunters; and that of the mule which was certainly a peacock (a beast heard of just then for the first time), for what else could it be ? and other rough old tales, expressive of the superior enlightenment of the towns and their consequent contempt of the dales. The " tongue," too, is of the broadest, and even a born Cumbrian lias difficulty in understanding tin- ivnl, ripe, racy, Borrowdale vernacular, whl 66 THE KESW1CK WALKS. Grange, 2 though not in itself beautiful as a human dwelling-place, is yet pretty to look at with its long soft line of double bridge leaping over the river. And the river flowing beneath, against that banked waste of stones, is as lovely as its name. Skiddaw and the lake behind look their best from here ; Maiden Mawr facing us, leading off into the bolder mass of Gait Crag, :i is at its noblest ; Castle Crag, wooded from base to summit, and standing like a fortress 4 to guard the pass, is picturesque as ever; and the greater mountains at the head look dim and full of mystery, as belongs to their grandest aspect. A little farther inward and you come to the choicest part of the valley, wild with crag and fell, yet rich with trees and flowers and flower-full meadows, and lightened by the life and music of the bright Derwent, flowing on like a noble song. You are near the bend of the road just facing Castle Crag (the place chosen for the large view), one of the loveliest of the walk, and singularly like a bit of Norwegian road. The wooded hill standing out from calls a heron " Joan na ma crank," and a glead or kite " Jackey Slope." The attachment of the dales people to their native place is at all times marked. In the parish register of the chapel is a notice that a youth who had quitted the valley, and had died in one of the towns on the east coast, requested that his body should be brought home and interred at the foot of the pillar where he used to sit as a schoolboy ; and many more of the like could be found by any one interested in the search. To go back to the old cuckoo scandal. In Cum- berland and Westmoreland an April fool is an " April gowk;" and the local proverb for the tirst of April is, " Hunt the gowk another mile." There are also May goslings, or ur slings," for the first of May ; but for that day only. If you tiy to make a May gosling mi any other, your answer will, or ought to be " May day is come and gone, Thou art the gosling, and I'se none." 2 Grange was the store place of the monks, their gi-anary or harvest-room, where they kept their grain and salt and tithes secure against all depredations; being guarded by the lake to the north, and by the then almost impassable mountains behind. The mountain passes, be it remembered, are quite things of modem invention. 3 Goat Crag often improperly spelt Gate Crag. 4 Castle Crag was a Roman station, commanding the pass behind and the valley in front ; but I believe that no Roman remains have yet been found on it. Some of the guide- books say they have, and that they are to be seen in Crosthwaite's Museum a fallacy. 67 K 2 THK LAKK COUNTRY. the rest is Castle Crag, black with shadow and burnt with sunshine a sun- shine that catches each pointed rock and craggy face upon the edges, and makes them aflame with ruddy gold, while it deepens the shadows in unfathomable blackness. Over Gait Crag and Maiden Mawr is poured a thin golden haze that thin soft haze which, more than any other atmospheric effect, transforms the mountains from their real being, and cheats the eye from its truth. At the base of Castle Crag runs the Derwent, winding away from fields red with ripe grass down to the quiet lake beyond ; and side by side with the river runs the road, grey to its blue, motionless to its flow, but repeating colour and line as an echo repeats the spoken word. The opposite crags are bright and clearly defined in their " coats of many colours," the bramble is corning into flower, and a lovely festooning of ivy of the small-leaved kind runs in and out among the stones of a beck- side wall ; while the air is perfumed with young meadow-sweet "queen of the meadows" just coming into flower, every now and then interrupted by wafts of honeysuckle clinging round the trees. Back, a little way, to where the shingle of the slate quarry is tumbled in road-side masses beautifully blue against the warmer grey of the rocks above, and up the side path to the great Bowder Stone, which has been likened 5 to all things on earth to which it has no manner of resemblance. Then, on again, to almost the same spot as that of the large view, but looking up the vale instead of across it, to the station whence the view at the head of the chapter is taken. 6 " Upon a semicirque of turf-clad ground A mass of rock, resembling, as it lay Right at the foot of that moist precipice, A stranded ship, with keel upturn'd, that rests Careless of winds and waves." WORDSWORTH. Tliis is the universal quotation ; but never meant by Wordsworth for the Bowder Stone. THE KESWICK WALKS. It is impossible to worthily describe the craggy rocks clothed in fern and heather ; the grey blue of the slate quarries ; the woods and fields and fells in all their sweet and subtle shades of green and grey and gold ; and, to crown all, the glorious sunset filling everything with intensity as well as delicacy of colour. Man is only a part of nature : how, then, should he fitly translate the infinite ? The western crags and hills are apparently solid black, but a black which, when looked into, is rich with purple and green and the finer tones of orange; on the north the contrast of the bright green bracken touched here and there to red and gold, and the blue slate darkened to indigo or lightened to cold grey, show clear and crisp against the dim uncertainty, the slow, shy, rich revealing, of the southern side. The broad grey bed of pebbles fringed with larch is warmed to purple, and the quiet pools among the waste are like sheets of beryl ; while Glaramara stands bathed in delicious radiance, as if the shadow of a rainbow was passing over it. Every tenderness and variety of tone and colour is there : from the richest orange to the deepest purple, and all possibilities of red and green and blue between ; but all toned down now into an amethystine violet, like a mass of molybdena, or "peacock ore" a little veiled, or the feathers on a dove's throat. The cup-like hollow which looks so like a tarn-bed, but is not, is softened to a mere tender marking a shadow darker, but more bloom - like than the rest ; the great Bull Crags glow and burn as if the very heart of them was on fire within ; and the river hurries through the valley like a thread of gold a little gentle streamlet, too meek for wrath and too weak for work. At least, so it seems now, shrunk to a narrow line against the wide belt of pebbles : wait till the floods break loose, and then see what that tender little stream can do. A few steps farther, and you see the way of the Three Passes : not the paths themselves, but the openings of the dales ; where the Stake Pass goes up by Stonethwaite and Langstreth, under Bull Crags and Eagle Crag; where the Sty Head Pass winds up over Aaron End, beyond 69 THE LAKE COUNTRY. Seathwaite ; and where the Buttermere Pass goes over by Honister Crag. There is also another, less known and less cared for a stony way between High and Low Scawdale which leads into Newlands, and whence the sunset effects are supremely grand. Follow this way to-night, and when you are at the top of the pass, turn back and note them. Rosthwaite and the valley, narrowed now to a mere line, lie cool in the evening shadows cooler and deeper for contrast with what is above. For the Borrowdale Fells, just over against the little village, are one broad band of reddened gold ; and beyond, but looking far too close to have all Thirlmere in the dip between, is the Helvellyn range, a burning purple in the chrysolite-coloured sky the very intensity of passion in the wonderful beauty of an eternal calm. While you look the shadows lengthen and the band of red gold contracts, an exquisite greenness mounting or rather flowing up into it, a green through which the gold faintly strikes like the changing hue of an opal ; Helvellyn gets more sombre in colour, but clearer in outline each form distinct against the liquid heavens less passionate and more sullen as the minutes pass. Every gradation of hue is before you, from the cold green and grey of the shadowed fell, which yet, when you look into it, is full of lingering touches of warmth, through the blue and violet and red of Helvellyn, up to the gold of the sky. And here, the intense orange in the line next to the mountain fades from orange to yellow, and from yellow to primrose, and then through a pale cream tint to almost white; till, looking higher, you see the pure blue, and the rose-red clouds turning gently westward to catch the last of the sunshine. And then the shadow finally conquers the golden band of the fell top. Helvellyn burns itself out and gets dark and slaty; and the glory fades from the sky, to be caught back and flung down in reflected light from the higher crimsoned clouds. And then the white moon rises behind amethystine Glaramara; and the daylight flows into the moonlight, in the commingling of indistinguishable beauty. And, in the moonlight, walk up to the head of the dale, and see the 70 THE KESWICK WALKS. glistening masses of refuse by the "wad" mines 6 under Ghyll o'Combe 7 on Base Brown ; and the black group of the famous yew-trees, the " fraternal four ; " and, farther on, the white streak of Sty Head Ghyll Taylor's Gliyll it is generally called muttering to itself long before seen; and the sharp road up Aaron End. And now you are in the very home of the gnomes and the genii, and may hear their voices sighing in the hills, and the hurrying of their feet across the water as they float like vapoury mists from out their caverns, and swarm about the mountain-tops and down the rocky fells. If no dear ones are waiting on your prudence you may walk away into the gloom of Wastwater over Sty Head Pass by moonlight. It would be worth doing on a reliable summer's night; something to remember for ever, and to set as a seal against the loving glories of the evening. But, alas ! prudence never had much to do with the moonlight yet ; so, if you are wise, you will turn your faces homeward, and lament ; and the owls and the corncrake will lament with you. This is Borrowdale in the dry summer weather. See it when the 6 These are the famous blacklead mines, so long held to be the only ones in the world, where fortunes have been made and some lost and which have been the origin and beginning of the prosperity of Keswick. The mines are very variable, a " sop " of large value being sometimes stumbled against, and sometimes notliing found for months. But so many substitutes have been discovered of late years, not to speak of the great Russian display in the Exhibition of 1862, that the value of the Borrowdale wad is a little diminished ; or, if not its value, yet the dependence of the public on the yield. 7 Gillercoom, as it is spelt, is a singular instance of the degradation of sense by sound, and the manner in which the true meaning of a word gets lost by phonography. Gillercoom Hollow is the name of the depression on the top of Base Brown, whence issues the fall, " Sour-Milk Ghyll." Now a ghyll is not a waterfall rightfully a ghyll is only a chasm or deep cut between two rocks or through a hill, down wliich is naturally the place of a water- fall. Above the ghyll, or pathway, of Sour-Milk Force is the Combe, or crest of the hill, over which the water of the force comes down. The ghyll, therefore, is the ghyll of the combe, and the hollow is still called Gillercoom (Ghyll o' Combe) Hollow the hollow between the ghyll and the combe. Sour-Milk Force in the Ghyll of the Combe, became Sour- Milk Ghyll only ; and Ghyll of Combe Hollow became Ghyll o' Combe, so intelligent ly spelt in the guide-books as Gillercoom. 71 THE LAKE COUNTRY. rain has fallen for twelve hours, 8 after the rising of the " Borrowdale sop," 9 and you will find the whole conditions changed. Lodore, which had scarcely a cupfull of water trickling through its stones, is now a turbulent and turhid Force in the place of a limpid stream rippling musically from stone to stone. The river into which it subsides a mere silver line before is now a boiling whirlpool, white or brown as it holds itself together in its sullen flood or breaks passionately into spray and foam upon the rocks. The fall comes down, parting into three fierce streams before they join again in one ; with just one or two black rocks putting out their heads above the waters ; but all the rest are covered, and their places marked only by the fiercer rush and the louder roar. The lake-side meadows are standing swamps ; and the river by Grange is no longer a waste of stones, but a waste of waters breaking up into thundering waves not the mere dashing of petulant spray against the rocks. It is the same higher up. There are no stones now in the river-bed by Castle Crag ; the larches stand waist-deep in the water ; the road is flooded up to the horses' girths, and the waters dash into the carriage and pour through it. The mountains are loud with water-courses ; and not a trace of that gorgeous colouring of twenty-four hours ago is to be seen. All yesterday Skiddaw was hidden under a straight-ruled smoke-coloured coverlet, which came nearly down to Applethwaite ; to-day it is washed clean out of the picture as the storm traverses the vale. So with Glaramara and the mountains at the head of Borrowdale. You see nothing 8 The accounts of floods, and disasters and irreparable losses following on tlie summer I'M ins. are far too numerous to be quoted liere. Any of the older guide-books and county histories give them, bxit it is a tiling of which south country people have no idea, and of which a simple and unexaggerated statement would look like romance to those uninitiated. 9 The " Borrowdale sop " is a small, single cloud, at first no bigger than a man's hand, but gradually gathering size and substance, which rises at Pierce Ghyll Head (a ghyll and force by the Sty Head Pass, on Lingmoor side), and floats away round by Sty Head Tarn and Sprinkling Tarn. Should it take the direction of Langdale, and fall over into the vale of Langdale, it will rain within twelve or twenty-four hours, even though the sky be cloudless, and the glass high ; but it marks the continuance of fine weather, if it floats over into the vale of St. John THE KESWICK WALKS. but a driving hoary mist, or a fiercer wrath of rain pitiless as hail ; nothing but trees bent in the wind, and waters foaming from the hill sides, and the rain pouring down a level torrent, and the paths of the mountain ghylls filled with raging mountain streams. This is what twelve hours' rain among the mountains has brought. "Round the lake" is perhaps the most beautiful of the home walks about Keswick, more especially if able to gather up into one knot all the scattered points of interest lying by the way the ascent of " Castlet," already spoken of ; the two cascades, Barrow and Lodore ; the Bowder Stone and Borrowdale, for those who have not been there before. Of Castlet and these last two no more need now be said, though, indeed, their loveliness is as fresh to-day as it was yesterday and will be to-morrow ; fresher than the words to paint it. But there is Walla Crag beyond Castlet, of which volumes might be filled, and never end by doing it justice. For what mere verbal description can photograph its purple scaurs and blackened rifts, its clefts and boulders, 73 L THE LAKE COUNTRY. and that pleasant tossing of green about its base? Walla Crcg lias the place of the declared Beauty of the Derwentwater range. Then, it is more interesting than any other from its associations; for there is still that steep and dangerous way called the Lady's Eake, up which poor Lady Derwentwater escaped with her jewels, to do her loving woman's utmost for the release of her lord ; and perhaps it is the human interest associated with it that has given it such a special holding in the hearts of the Keswick people. In old times, too, a large white stone in among the boulders used to be pointed out as the Lady's Pocket-handkerchief; and it was firmly believed in a certain nursery then filled with rosy-cheeked credulity, that the Lady had dropped her handkerchief in her flight, and that it still hung among the crags, where no one could get at it. It was a sad blow struck at faith when it became known that the handkerchief was a stone to which a certain Crosthwaite and one Atkinson were said to climb every year, and paint with a material paint-brush and white lead. The last story may be as apocryphal as the first. That Great Wood of Walla Crag, as it is called, is full of delicious walks ; some leading up among the crags, and some keeping to the low ground among the ferns and wild flowers and shy birds and shyer wood beasts ; and one, the sweetest of all, going by a field through the pleasant coppice of Keswick Springs into the road at Brow Top ; very lovely, and lonely enough for lovers. But now you are bound for Barrow Falls and " round the lake." Still under Walla Crag, you pass by where a mountain streamlet, set with ferns ;ii)