Lakeland GOLD
Autumn in the Lake District sees the fells and forests turn crimson, amber and gold. Walk its leafiest acres at the season’s peak.
THE LAKE DISTRICT is ablaze. Not literally you’ll be glad to hear. Summer sighed its last balmy breath over a month ago, and now the woods and fells smoulder with vivid, ephemeral colours. Change is in the air. The silver birches began to shed their leaves a week ago; they drift en masse down treacle-black becks and tarns like a spill of golden pennies. Oak leaves are poised to follow, their lobed edges already singed yellow-brown. On the fells, the bracken has turned the colour of muscovado sugar, heaped between the crags and green pasture. Autumn has arrived.
Typecast in a springtime role (think Wordsworthian daffs and frolicking lambs), the Lake District can seem a drab prospect in late October. When calendars touting ‘Great British Landscapes’ go on sale, it’s usually a New Forest glade or Chiltern beechwood which gets the autumn gig. But not to be outdone, the Lakes can put on an excellent show of fiery foliage too. It’s ripe territory for what our Yankee cousins call ‘leaf peeping.’ Don’t let seasonal showers put you off.
‘If the district were without lakes and mountains it would still be very lovely because of the great wealth and variety of its trees’, declared celebrated guidebook writer Alfred Wainwright. Fellwalking’s most venerated sage could have been describing pockets of ancient woodland and plantation around Ullswater, Grasmere or the Jaws of Borrowdale. But in this instance, AW’s observation accompanied the entry to lowly Holme Fell in the southern quarter of the Lake District. Few areas of the national park are so thickly wooded as High Furness – a rumpled mishmash of broadleaf woods and coniferous plantations. And nowhere is the wealth and variety of trees more evident than around Tarn Hows – a National Trust beauty spot between the villages of Coniston and Hawkshead.
By autumn, honeypots like Tarn Hows simmer down as the fair-weather crowds dissipate. Don’t expect an eerily empty car park, but at the very least you won’t be walking toe-to-heel with a hundred others. Straying from the main trail which circles the lake and up onto the fells nearby, you can soon be striding solo.
What you see at Tarn Hows today was created in the 19th century by industrialist and landowner James Garth Marshall, who dammed the valley’s stream to make one large tarn where three smaller pools existed previously. Five islands were created in the process and Marshall set about planting spruce, pine and larch. The result was an ornamental landscape to impress Victorian
“In autumn, Tarn Hows’ larches turn radiant yellow like candle flames, ready to drop their needlelike leaves.”
visitors – more Caledonian than Cumbrian. Years later, Beatrix Potter (of Peter Rabbit fame) would come to love the scenic paths laid out by Marshall, walking here from her farm a few miles away at Near Sawrey.
In 1930, Potter bought the 4000-acre Monk Coniston estate from the Marshall family, which included Tarn Hows, and sold off chunks to the National Trust as the charity raised the necessary funds, bequeathing the remainder in her will. She continued to manage the land for some years afterwards, stocking its farms with traditional Herdwick sheep and conserving Marshall’s vision.
In autumn, Tarn Hows’ larches turn radiant yellow like candle flames, ready to drop their needle-like leaves. But in recent years, larches across the Lake District have contracted deadly ramorum disease and the National Trust are felling trees to prevent infection spreading. The trust hopes to replant lost woodland and is encouraging visitors to clean their boots post-walk to wash off any contagious spores. Thankfully, the area’s oakwoods are unaffected and their crowns are gloriously shaggy as ever.
In mixed woodland, evergreens like the Scots Pine come to the fore in autumn, as others lose their colour and shed their leaves. They stand out clearly on the islands and far shore as you make your way across the east bank of the tarn. Vaulting a stile halfway around, you can leave the beaten gravel track and make for higher ground.
Few visitors to Tarn Hows extend their walk up to Black Fell, but according to Wainwright, they’re missing out. In his pictorial guide to the Southern Fells, he hails it as ‘the best viewpoint for the sylvan
charms of the area’. It may be a minnow among Lakeland peaks (a mere 1060 feet above sea level), but Black Fell packs a panorama worth going out of your way for. And though it seems like unpromising terrain on Ordnance Survey maps, there’s a path to the top which has so far managed to elude cartographers.
From the Iron Keld Plantation this sketchy trail breaks cover onto blustery open fell dotted with lonely birches and rowans bearing lipstick-red berries. It wiggles up to the trig point on Black Crag, where a drystone wall divides the summit.
First in frame are the sugar loaf cones of the Langdale Pikes ranged to the northwest, which draw your gaze to the brooding outline of Bow Fell at the head of the dale. Sweeping west, crumpled Wetherlam bookends the Coniston Fells, while behind an unusual, saltshaker cairn, the massed conifers of Grizedale Forest cloak the Furness Fells to the south. Windermere – England’s largest natural lake – ripples into picture on your eastern side, lapping at the foot of Ambleside and the long, brawny ridges rising to Fairfield and High Street. Below and all around, small woods and coppices cram between the folds of the land.
Backtracking a mile or so, and turning west towards the Tilberthwaite Valley, you can follow a rutted and stony byway winding through patchy sessile oakwoods to Oxen Fell. Here, more signs of autumn are emerging. Toxic red fly agaric toadstools sprout from the moist earth, while scallop-like bracket fungi nuzzle at the bases of tree trunks. A respected mycologist before she turned her talents to children’s stories, Beatrix Potter would be in her element. And like her, you might also clock the bushy tail of a red squirrel, gathering acorns to stash in its winter larder.
Felled over centuries for grazing and timber, ancient woodland in Cumbria is thin on the ground, accounting for just 2% of all land in the county. Scraps survive hereabouts, but up ahead nature has created new woods. Green slate was quarried at Hodge Close up until the 1960s and in the years since its open cast pits were abandoned, pioneer
“On bracken has turned
the fells, the the colour of muscovado sugar… Autumn has arrived.”
species like birch have colonised the old spoil heaps. Glimpsed from the path south to Holme Fell, even the gaping quarry workings now bristle with treetops. Wainwright calls it a ‘glorious jungle of juniper and birch, heather and bracken.’
The quarry required reservoirs for a waterpowered funicular, which are skirted as you steer up a swampier trail to a nick in the fell called Uskdale Gap. Persevering through a rugged tangle of crags, another leafy view unfurls from the cairn on Holme Fell’s 1020-foot summit. Down the length of Coniston Water, trees swaddle the east bank and speckle the west shore.
The path back to Tarn Hows takes you down through Harry Guards Wood – a wonderful bank of ancient, semi-natural woodland bristling with oaks, alder and larch. At its foot, Yew Tree Tarn is a favourite autumnal haunt of photographers, who park up early by the A593 to capture morning mists lifting from its glassy waters. From the delightfully rustic Yew Tree Farm, where Beatrix Potter opened a tearoom in the 1930s, various paths twist their way uphill to Tarn Hows.
In a few weeks’ time, the branches will be bare and the fellsides jaded, awaiting the first snows of winter. Autumn can seem a melancholic season: dull, damp and decaying. But it’s also a last hurrah; a feast for the senses. Mild, mellow and marvellous, it lays the ground for the cycle of seasons to begin all over again. And in this corner of the Lake District, it’s all too fleeting.
“Few Tarn visitors to Hows extend their walk up to Black Fell, but according to Wainwright, they’re missing out.”