Arnside and Silverdale, in a couple of ticks

Morecambe Bay from Arnside, Cumbria UK

The M6 was pretty much your normal mid-week M6, thick with tradesmens’ vans, ton-up delivery vans, and long lines of lumbering heavies. This was overlaid with the familiar manic tapestry of boss-class Beamers and Mercs, all shiny in their lease-black livery, tailgating and weaving about likes jerks. I counted just the one caravan making a speculative foray towards the lakes.

The giant electronic signs urged us to minimize our travel – meaningless from all but the earliest of days, and clearly ignored by most. Still, it pricked my conscience. Arnside was fifty miles away, so hardly local but, since “local” was however we chose to define it now, I had the letter, if not the spirit of the law on my side. Plus, I’d not been more than ten miles from home – at least not for pleasure – in nearly a year, which was surely the very definition of minimizing travel.

Arnside was warming up a bit by 10:00 am, beginning to bustle a little too, but there was still plenty of parking. I’m fond of this place, but I can’t say I know it – only as a tourist, and occasional walker, come to take in the scenery, and frequent the tea shops. Today I was meeting up with an old friend for a walk down the coastal way to Silverdale, then back over the Knott.

Arnside, Cumbria UK

There is an eerie beauty about this part of the world. The limestone cliffs overlooking Morecambe bay provide a habitat for all manner of unfamiliar colour of flora and fauna – unfamiliar to me anyway. And the light, reflecting off the wet sands of the bay, is exceptional. The cliff-top sections of path here have a sporting feel to them, with, in places, nothing to guard against a near certain fatal fall, not helped by the fact the limestone underfoot is becoming polished. There is mixed woodland, also dense thickets of blackthorn amongst which the near fluorescent yellow-green brimstone butterflies were in profusion.

From Silverdale, we turn inland, and a criss-cross of well-marked ways leads us eventually down by the evocative ruins of the Arnside Tower. The farm here was selling rather fine bird boxes at just eight quid apiece. The honesty box consisting of a child’s welly, was well stuffed. I’m into bird boxes, have built a few for my garden, and I would have partaken of the offer, but I’ve had no cash on me since I can’t remember when, and we’d still a way to walk.

Arnside Tower, Cumbria UK

The Knott is our last objective, a wooded hill, clearing towards the summit with fine views over the bay. They’re grazing cattle here now. Belted Galloways mooched amongst the scrub – cows, calves and bulls, all looking placid enough at our passing, but beware, if you’re up here with a yappy dog, you’ll perhaps not get the same indifferent reception. On the way down from the summit, there’s a particularly scenic tree. It has a wood-crafted heart suspended from it with the inscription: “Live, Laugh and Love”. Hard to argue with that one. It was a favourite for passing walkers to pose with their selfies.

On Arnside Knott, Cumbria UK

It was pleasant to be taking pictures of things other than the shaggy moorland and sycamore trees close to home, interesting to see how the much softer light played out, especially in the post-processing. It was also good to get the car out on a good run. But the day was not without its downside.

On arriving home, I noticed I’d picked up a couple of ticks. I’ve not seen these outside the Western Isles, and had not thought they were an issue at all in England. However, further researches inform me they are indeed very much a presence in the Arnside and Silverdale area, so do be careful when exploring around here. Walk with your trousers tucked into your socks, check yourself over on return, and be aware they are adept at finding the lesser viewed areas like backs of knees, elbows and other private places. If you’re out with dogs you’ll need to check them too.

A tick removal tool is best for getting them off safely. Otherwise, you’ll need a pair of fine tweezers and grasp the things as low down as possible, where the snout penetrates the skin. Don’t squeeze or burn them, and especially not if they’re engorged. Then, over the coming days, keep a lookout for inflammation and a red ring around the bite-spot, an early symptom of the onset of Lyme’s disease. If it appears, get to the docs urgently, screaming tick-bite, and demanding anti-biotics. Hopefully I’ll be okay.

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On Dove Crag and High Hartsop Dodd

Dovedale

We were later than we should have been, the small blue car and I, slipping over the Kirkstone, already midmorning and by now meeting the tourist coaches lumbering up from Patterdale. We met one at the Inn, at that bit where the tarmac narrows by the Struggle down to Ambleside, a giant German tour-whale, incumbents all filming my humble passing. Thus I imagine myself now immortalised, part of the scenery, a silver fox in an old MX5. There are worse ways to be remembered, I suppose,…

Exotic it must seem, the Kirkstone Pass, to a continental European, as exotic as the Lauterbrunnen sounds to me, a northern Brit, still a die-hard European, though chastened now by this eternal BREXIT thing. All is relative,… or so they say. How many times over the Kirkstone now? Must be into the hundreds. Familiarity in this case though clearly does not breed contempt, for there is still the sense, as Patterdale opens ahead of the tumbling little road, of a spiritual homecoming.

I am here to climb Dove Crag.

So,… Cow Bridge at 11:45, and we pull into the last parking spot. It’s more than we deserve at this hour, so it’s fated, reserved for us by Providence perhaps and therefore a good omen. It’s a blistering hot day, mid-June, wide open sky of Cerulean blue, but a distinct lack of air, and a surplus of humidity. I’m thinking it’ll be better at altitude, but that’s a couple of hours away, the mad dogs and Englishmen hours, and I’m not convinced I’m going to make it that far, me feeling old and drained and unpracticed with my mountain mojo these days. If you don’t use it, you lose it. I lost mine a long time ago and, trust me, Dove Crag is not the best place to try to find it again.

But still,….

Dove Crag

It’s grown famous of late, Dove Crag, on account of the Priest’s Hole, a slot of a cave, high on the face of the crag, indeed this must now be the most famous secret spot in Britain after being on the telly and gaining mention in travel articles for the urban selfie hungry. I have no desire to further advertise it here, except to say it’s also a dangerous place to get to, and I had no desire to join the surge of casualties, including fatalities, in recent years, making pilgrimage. We think of England as a cotton wool cosseted place, health and safety numpty’s tut-tutting everywhere and always someone to sue with our ambulance chasing no win no fee solicitors, if we so much as stub our toe. But the mountains aren’t like that, even English ones.

Anyway, a promising start was made with a glorious opening stroll along the shores of Brothers’ Water, where, I swear, a pair of sweetly rounded ladies were skinny dipping and giggling joyously like nymphs – I admit I may already have been hallucinating in anticipation of hardships higher up the fell. But even without the water-nymphs the approach to Dovedale is seductive in its loveliness, gentle on the legs too, at least as far as the first of the falls. The falls are a good place to gather breath and wits, because beyond them the going is much harder, and it has a darker vibe about it as the fells close in and the ferns give way to rock.

I seemed to have no power in the legs at all. At the first of the falls, reduced now to a trickle by drought, I paused a good long while, eyes already sweat-stung, hat dripping, shirt-soaked and my head befuddled by a cloud of horse-flies. One of them got me on the back of the hand which provided little by way of encouragement. The pack felt impossibly heavy with weatherproof gear, unlikely to be needed, but foolish to leave behind.

I had barely the spring to get back on my feet, and my legs felt like they were not my own, my feet pointing backwards and about as sure footed as a drunkard. I was encouraged though by vague memories of other walks, where the legs slowly warm and you find your pace, and the breath to keep you going. I stopped a lot on the way, drank a lot of water, talked to myself.

In Wainwright’s day the last bit onto the shoulder of Dove Cag was all loose rock and scree – must have been a nightmare of a pull, and Wainwright, this prolific pipe-smoker, never seeming short of breath. Now its a precipitous, spiralling staircase of set stone and all beautifully crafted to blend into the natural tumble of rock. I was just about able to haul myself up it, and then it was on to the summit, where all was dry as bones and not a soul for miles.

Dove crag summit

Normally the legs would recover now, and I’d be able to pick up the pace, regain some spring, but Dove Crag had given me a good hiding in the heat, and it was plain it didn’t matter how long I rested by that cairn, I’d be finishing the day on what was left, and it wasn’t much. I’d passed this way a few times before, on circuits of the Fairfield Horseshoe, but those days were long gone, like the youth who’d casually burned the miles in gale force winds and horizontal rain. No,… I was never so robust or bold in the fells, and any of that this afternoon and I was going to die up here. But the day was utterly stunning in its clarity, like a near death vision of an idealised afterlife – and all the fells gathered round of course, their names returning to me as I decoded their profiles from dusty archives. I’m  sure I’m not the only ageing fell walker to have dreamed of a post popped-clogg world like this and the legs to do it justice.

I headed eastwards along the Fairfield route, a fine section of breathtaking views, probably the best weather I’ve ever had up there, and the mountains catching the sun, slanting sleepy shadows into the deep dales and the ravines and raising something of the old mojo magic of the Lakes for me. But I had miles to go and feet for very few of them, and just another good swallow of water left in the bottle. Perhaps I amplify the hardship, but I was painfully aware one slip-up with navigation bringing me down into the wrong valley, and I’d nothing in reserve to correct it. But on such a clear day it would be hard to miss the path for Patterdale.

Patterdale

I skirted the summit crown of Little Hart Crag, too far gone to waste what bit of breath I’d got on petty peak bagging. Instead I gained the gently undulating ridge towards High Hartsop Dodd, set my head to the task. This was supposed to be a four-hour round, according to the guides. It was going to take me five. But who’s counting? Here, as you crest the last rise, the tip of the fell points like a prehistoric arrow-head down the length of Patterdale, Brothers’ Water blue as the sky amid the multifaceted green of the dale, and the heart swells with delight that there can be such places as beautiful as this, and surely I have known and loved it for more than just the one life-time, for it to have such a profound affect upon the senses.

Yes, it was worth the walk, and the sweat, to say nothing of the emptying of myself to see that view – that last gift of the way before the way plummeted with a brutal steepness to the valley bottom, a twisting slalom of a route, hard on the knees and jelly-legs. Thus I descended like a fragile centenarian, alpine sticks deployed Zimmer fashion, progress slow and cautious. I could see where the car was parked, miles away; I felt it might as well have been on the moon.

The water nymphs had gone, sadly, when, with feet on fire, I made my way back along the shore of Brothers Water, pausing to allow myself a moment of respite where they had bathed themselves. Divested of boots and socks and paddling out gingerly over the pebbles, that blessed water gave me back the mile still remaining to the car, and I returned at last to my reward: that post-walk mindful calm sunk deep into the bones.

It was a memorable day, as all walking days are in the Lakes, and a triumph too, of sorts, but also a reminder of the advance of years and how the fells demand a high degree of fitness, a toughness in the gut, a resilience in the legs, to say nothing of leathered feet. I can accept the ultimate defeat of advancing years, am sanguine about it in many ways, but as I sat on the terrace of the Brother’s Water Inn, sipping on a cold Lime and Soda, first light of evening coming on, I swear Dove Crag was smiling, telling that time was not yet near, telling me also well done, lad, and Dylan Thomas, whispering in my ear, you know,… that line about not going gently into the good night!

She can be a stern mistress, this fell country of ours, but I know of nothing, no other corner of England more inspirational, more building of self-confidence, nor more rewarding to the spirit. Yes, a tough old walk for one grown so lazy of late, also a wake-up call, and a promise that I’ll not leave it so long next time.

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Alcock Tarn and the counsel of King Dunmail

The mountain tarns of the Lake District are as worthy an objective for a day’s hike as the mountaintops, particularly as we age and begin to linger longer in appreciation of their character. Once a curiosity glimpsed in passing en route for a lofty summit cairn, I now collect them in the same way I once bagged peaks. A mountain tarn is indeed a special place, bringing something of the sky down to the earth, mirroring the mood of both the day and the man.

Alcock tarn sits on a shelf above Butter Crags. Beyond it rises the massive grassy flank of Heron Pike, one of several summits on the Fairfield Horseshoe route. Look east from Grasmere and the tarn lies hidden, about half way up that wall of green, just above the highest reach of the pernicious bracken. On paper, it makes for a decent half-day’s walk, though somewhat steep, but all walks yield more on the ground than their paper promises, and so it is with Alcock tarn. At just over 1100 feet, it’s a modest enough climb, but I wouldn’t underestimate it.

My guide to the tarns of Lakeland is the water-colourist, William Heaton Cooper. He describes it as a modest and pleasant sheet of water, a mirror of the distant sky, as one looks southward towards the lowlands, Windermere and the sea. An experienced mountaineer, and native of Cumberland, Heaton Cooper would use this walk as an introduction to the fells for anyone new to him and whose “mountain form” was unknown.

I’m not sure what he would have made of me. My mountain form is best described as sluggish these days. Though I’m up a hill most weeks now, the ascent from the foot of Greenhead Ghyll was a “several stopper”, sometimes hands on knees, sometimes in full rest mode on sit mat and with binoculars drawn. My consolation lay in the knowledge that the fellsides here are uncommonly steep, and an ascent is always harder when walking alone.

The weather in the valleys was gloomy-hot, cloud base scraping 1500′, truncating the tops and trapping the heat to make a very steamy day. Humidity was 85%, so it was a very sweaty climb. A sleepy clag hugged the fellsides, ghost-horses drifting down. A light rain had me pulling on my new walking jacket, but its breathability soon proved to be disappointing; before I’d climbed a hundred feet I was wet from the inside out. And hot. Even the rain that day was warm.

The fells were silent, just the sound of my own breath on the ascent. I was thinking of my uncle as I climbed, a veteran of Dunkirk. Following the evacuation he spent the years up to 1945 training in the mountains around Fort William, with the Highland Light Infantry. By the time he embarked for Normandy, he told me he and his mates were like stags. Their mountain form must have been akin to superhuman, and a thing to be envied, though not of course the task that lay ahead of them.

I paused to rest below Butter Crags, once I’d cleared the thickest of the bracken. Bracken is a notorious habitat for sheep ticks, carriers of Lyme disease, and I’ve read they’re on the rise in the Lakes, but have yet to encounter any myself. The only problem I have with it is there’s nothing like pushing your way through its wet ferny fronds for soaking you to the skin. It also stinks at this time of year.

From there, the vale of Grasmere glowed without sun, something luminous in the mown meadows, far below, and which warmed an otherwise sleepy grey. I could see DunmaiI Raise, the steep climb of the ever busy A591 carrying tourists over the pass, on to Thirlmere and beyond. Dunmail was the last true native Celtic King. He met his end in a battle with the Saxons and the Scots in 945. Routed, his surviving clansmen rescued his crown and fled with it up the nick of Raise Beck and on to Grisedale tarn, where they hurled it beneath the dark waters for safe keeping.

King Dunmail rests in the huge pile of stones at the summit that bears his name, and by which there now flash thousands of careless cars every day. But once a year, the spirits of his clansmen return with the crown and bang on the cairn, wakening their sleeping King, and urging him to take up the crown once more. Each time he tells them the time has not yet come. Other more prosaic accounts have him dying on a pilgrimage in 975. I prefer the former myth which has something archetypal about it, like an Arthurian legend. But then the Celts  were always better story tellers than the Saxons.

I remember the climb to Grisedale tarn up Raise Beck. I did it in 1993, on a wild day in the company of friends. We went on to climb Helvellyn. The mountain was dark and angry, snow spiralling in a finger numbing, aggressive wind, and there was a feeling as we climbed, of coming to the world’s end. It was a Saturday afternoon, March 20th, the day the IRA bombed Warrington. I heard of it on the car radio, on the drive home. They had left two devices in rubbish bins on Bridge Street, a crowded shopping centre. The first device drove panicking survivors into the path of the second device. Fifty four were injured, two young boys killed. There were lots of bombings on the mainland throughout the course of the troubles, but that one was closest to home for me, and will be for ever associated with that climb up Raise Beck and onto an angry mountain.

It was an evil day.

The tragic overtones of Grizedale Tarn are carried on in the story of the Brother’s Parting Stone. It was here in 1800 William Wordsworth last said farewell to his brother, John. John was leaving Cumberland to take up command of a British East Indiaman, the Earl of Abergavenny, into which he had sunk his fortune. The vessel was lost off Portland Bill, and John drowned. Some say the event marked a steady decline in Wordsworth’s poetry.

But anyway, on to Alcock tarn!

It comes upon one suddenly, a pleasant sheet of water, as Heaton Cooper says, reedy at its northern end, and a mirror for a steely sky. Looking south along its length it forms an infinity pool, the great sliver ribbon of Windermere and the southern Lakes beyond. I’d seen not a soul all morning, but here I came upon pair already settled in with sketchbooks and watercolours. The mountains held their breath, the only sound was a lone duck dabbling in mud among the reeds at my feet. I fired off a rare haiku tweet to that effect but it felt cheap and shallow compared to the deeply patient deliberations of these two artists. All is not lost, I was thinking, that there are those still willing and able to take the time for al-fresco water-colouring.

I gave them space, waved to let them know I was harmless, then settled down to ponder over my notebook and a poem for which the muse had delivered the first two lines complete the night before, and left me to fill in the blanks. But the words would not come, and the silence was eventually broken by a party of talkers which put an end to my deliberations. They sat down not five yards from me, a flock of gassy old birds, treating me to a voluble warts and all expose of their various intimate lives and which sent the lone duck off in search of quieter waters. They had not seen me. My walking gear has morphed from fashionable fluorescence to unobtrusive greens over the years. With my hood pulled up, monk-like and sitting still in a little clutch of crags, I had apparently vanished, blurred out of the misty, muggy world, so that when I later rose to pack my things away, I gave one old bird a satisfying fright.

Sorry, dear, but I was there first.

Perfect as a circular walk, the route continues south, becoming quite airy on the descent, then fast losing itself in the densely forested glades above Town End, and the broad, well made tracks that lead you unerringly home. A couple of quiet hours up, then an hour down brings you back to the bustle of the many-peopled Wordswortharium.

I took coffee in the garden-centre cafe, and pondered the old Celtic legends. King Dunmail has been a long time dead now, and I wondered at the meaning of his clansmen keeping faith with him year on year. I wondered too what counsel he might offer in addition to his persistent procrastination as regards his throne. For me, I realised, while taking that break on the climb to Alcock tarn, he had pointed out the long lay-by beside the 591.

“Next time you come here, lad,” he said, “Get up a bit earlier. Park your car there in future, for free! And stop moaning about Broadgate Meadow!”

I shall.

It seems I have friends in high places!

Alcock Tarn, Grasmere, Cumbria

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The ghost horses of Hartsop

There is a secret place called Hartsop. Most people are aware of it only as a signpost glimpsed briefly in passing on the A592,  between the Kirkstone pass and the obligatory tourist halt of Glenridding. It’s better known to hill-walkers, there being a small car-park here at the far end of a tortuous little lane, and valuable as a starting point for exploring the fells in this area. The road into Hartsop is narrow and leads nowhere, which has perhaps helped to spare the village the more usual fate of such places, and thus far it remains entirely unspoiled by the trinket shops and the other dubious trappings of the tourist trade.

There are an increasing number of holiday rentals here, quaint 17th cottages restored to a state of modern countryfied chic  but it is still a place where people live, and farm. Thankfully there are as yet no “leisure facilities” of any kind. The only facilities here are the stunning scenery, the fells, the lakes, the taste of the air and the sound of running water. If your thing is walking, climbing, fishing, or writing, Harstop is the place for you.

I’ve been exploring the Lakes since I was a teenager and old enough to drive up here in my first old banger – a rickety, rusty old Honda N600. There’s hardly a fell I’ve not stood on, and barely a ridge I’ve not traversed by now. I love the Lake District’s compact diversity,  and I’ve stayed in many of its more famous towns, but I keep coming back to Hartsop. There is for me something uniquely beautiful about it, about the valley it nestles in, the valleys that branch off it, and of course the fells that dominate it.

Alfred Wainwright, our most famous authority on the Lake District once described Hartsop Dodd, the most prominent protuberance hereabouts as resembling a child’s drawing of a hill – a great bell-shaped dome of a thing – not quite real, not quite believable. I think that sums up the charm of the area.There is something of fairy land about it. It’s no doubt a hard place to live in winter, as the shattered state of the A592 this February would suggest, but it’s become for me a place of dreaming.

I spent the weekend here at the beginning of February. The events of my daily life ebb and flow, the trivialities that define my outer world change, all be it in trivial ways, grow old and flimsy and break off into new directions. But Hartsop changes slowly, rendering the impression of a place outside of time for me. I come here as often as I can, to think, and to breathe.

It was here I wrote Ghost Horses, back in 2007 – basically a poem about being unable to write – something of a contradiction, I know, because I was obviously writing as I wrote it. But the timelessness of this place blurs memory and 2007 could easily have been 2010. I blink, years pass, I’m older, my children are older,… but Hartsop remains the same.

The snow has cleared from the lowland ares of the UK now but the hard weather continues on the fells, where snow still lies above 2500 feet. Local intelligence informs me walkers have been caught out ill-equipped for snow and ice. It seems fresh generations are forever re-learning the lessons of their fathers, still coming to grief on Helvellyn’s Striding, and Swirral Edge, still falling through cornices, and getting swept away by avalanches.

Not for me the High Fells in this weather. Indeed the High fells are becoming strangers to me now even in the summer months. I can remember every walk I’ve ever done here, and there’s a sharpness about them, as if the memory was cast in a cleaner stone, to emerge jewel like and sparkling with the intensity of a rare emotion. I smell the air. I taste the waters of the beck, feel the ache in my legs as I climb. Striding Edge, hot and dusty under the sun of a summer’s Sunday. Hartsop Dodd, lush and green with Brother’s Water sparkling below, the massive beacon on Thornthwaite Crag,…

Then I blink free, amazed I’ve been retracing steps from twenty years ago, and that the last peaks I bagged here were the Angletarn Pikes in 2006.

Ghost Horses

What makes me think the words will come today?
That by some magic not yet understood,
This place can somehow show to me the way,
So words might then pour freely from above?
Or well up from that secret place inside,
From whence all thoughts come clear and ready made,
To slide into the puzzle of my mind:
A sense of something learned, of distance gained.
But now the mist obscures the mountainside,
And idly seeks the hollows of the vale:
Ghost horses on whose backs my lost thoughts ride,
Too lame to hunt and yet afraid to fail.
A greyness takes the shape of what I knew:
Fair hills of hope, all lost to memory,
Days of sweet grass and glory all too few,
So I am rendered blind to what I see.
Snow falls like ashen moths into the mud,
While making no impression on the land.
They are my thoughts those moths and do no good,
Quite useless in their flight to understand,
What makes me think there’s any point to me.
But still I sit with fingers lightly poised,
O’er keys worn smooth from times words came with ease,
Words whose faint traces now bring little joy.
But no wise creature hunts on days like these,
So I must turn within and seek the warm,
And stir the glowing embers of my dreams,
In whose soft whispers all is granted form.

Hartsop
February 2007

Michael Graeme

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