Jasper Winn

Makes the case for sitting still in one place for a long time. No, longer than that...

ERHAPS I WAS over-thinking Welsh poet W H Davies’ lines - ‘What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare’ – when on a summer’s day I walked south along the Macclesfield Canal to find a place to, indeed, stop and stare. For twenty-four hours. I wanted to see what it was like to sit in one place for a day and a night. Just as through the ages Neolithic hunters, folk-song poachers, star-crossed lovers, naturalists and poets would have done.

At Bosley Locks, in the mid-morning, I stopped walking and sat down on a bench. On the water’s far side there was a high hawthorn hedge and medium-sized oaks. I had a poncho against rain, warm clothing and basic provisions in the rucksack next to me. The seat would be my home until the following day.

The first hours sitting in the warm sun felt… well... just normal and pleasant. Strollers, boaters, joggers and daypack-toting hikers passed by. I watched a coot bobbing about. Thought about life. But then I began to get restless. I wanted to be up on my feet and walking, again. It felt odd – and I must have looked odd – sitting in one place, hour after hour. I ate biscuits and cheese. I looked at the grass at my feet. And up into the sky.

Clouds were rolling in. Dark, heavy nimbostratus. The swallows that had been flying high, began dipping lower and then disappeared. It began raining. Drops tapping and pattering as I crouched under my poncho, with the disconcerting offrhythms of a tiny, drunken bongo drummer.

It rained off and on all afternoon. The ‘odd’ feeling faded away. I stopped clock-watching and ticking off hours and minutes. Instead I gazed at a cloud of gnats twirling upwards as the rain stopped, and breathed in the smell of warm pondweed and

PIt was a revelation when I found that botany – flowers! – could be almost as interesting as bird and animal watching when out walking. It took knowledgeable friends to expand my countryboy’s knowledge of plants, (more limited than one might expect), and field-guides to teach me what I was looking for and at. It’s turned out to be as challenging, frustrating and rewarding as learning a new language, though not actually in the ‘he talks to plants’ kind of way.

Jasper Winn is the author of Water Ways: A Thousand Miles along Britain’s Canals. drifting pollen. Time was moving as lightly and seemingly directionless as the canal’s waters.

Sitting still for long hours is the skill of the wildlife photographer, remaining immobile in a hide for days to catch the exact moment when wolf cubs are in mid-play tumble or a hummingbird appears pinned to a flower by its beak. It’s meditation mixed with masochism but brings rewards, even to the amateur. In the late afternoon there was a ‘zii-t zii-t’ sound and a flash of blue, emerald and nectarine. A kingfisher materialised on a willow twig a few feet from me. It perched there, immobile, for twenty minutes. Watching and waiting, like me. As suddenly it zinged away. I didn’t. Hours later a buzzard circled in, slowly, floated into a tree in front of me and settled out of sight. I sipped a mug of wine and ate biscuits and sardines. Dusk became darkness.

I’d hoped for moonlight and stars, nightingales and nightjars, but instead I got more dark clouds with a tawny owl’s calling. I saw and heard what there was, not what I wanted. Water gurgling through lockgates. Sudden big splashes. An otter? A pike? I slouched, cold and half-asleep for hours. Dream-time half-thoughts came into my head – some drifting in slowly at buzzard pace, others fast and unexpected as kingfishers.

Cold, damp dawn. The first dog walkers in grey mist. One had passed me late the night before. Oddly, she didn’t seem surprised to see me still sitting in the same place, instead singing out ‘lovely morning’ as her Labrador pulled her down the towpath. Perhaps I looked like a forgetful angler who’d mislaid his fishing rod. Or a wildlife photographer. Or perhaps she knew her W H Davies and understood the pleasure of just standing – or sitting – and staring for a while.

COUNTRY WALKING

AUGUST 2020

S A RULE, walkers aren’t record chasers. We aren’t looking to be the fastest to get anywhere, or the first to reach something. We might chase a few personal bests of course; there’s a certain joy about knowing you’ve walked further than you’ve ever walked before (see #walk1000miles), or climbed higher than you ever thought your legs would allow. But mostly we’re more about the enjoyment than the achievement.

But when it comes to walking locations that are themselves record-breakers, that’s a different matter. There’s a definite magnetism about places that are the tallest, smallest, oldest, longest, deepest or weirdest, whether we speak of our home nations, or Great Britain, or even the planet.

AVisiting them feels like sharing in the mythos of the land. And the ability to say you’ve been to them, climbed them, touched them or swam in them somehow makes you part of them. It feels good, both in the moment and later, when you quite rightly tell everyone what you did.

Here, then, is our guide to that feeling and how to get it. We’ve corralled our biggest and best ever list of biggests and bests, and unearthed the stories behind them. And where else would we start but amid the densest cluster of record-breakers we could find?

It’s this place. Wasdale Head.

Here you can see England’s deepest lake (Wast Water) and highest peak (Scafell Pike). But they aren’t the only record breakers to be found in this fascinating valley…

And those are just the certifiable ones. How about some more informal extras?

Kirk Fell

The steepest straight mile in Lakeland

At the age of eight I had my first encounter with fake news. My Dad told me four things about Wast Water. Two of them turned out to be true, two of them not so much. See if you can guess which. There’s a crashed Wellington bomber in it.

It’s the deepest lake in England.

There’s a gnome garden at the bottom.

It’s as deep as the Screes beside it are high. The crashed Wellington, it turns out, is actually a Grumman Avenger, which crashed into the Screes during a night exercise in January 1945.

It is the deepest lake in England. But there’s no way you could fit the Screes inside it. And, against all plausibility, there is a gnome garden at the bottom. It’s been there before, it’s been removed by police to deter inexperienced divers, it’s come back. I can’t say for certain whether the gnomes are in residence as you read this, but I like to think they are. And if so, they are of course contenders for yet another Wasdale record: Britain’s deepest gnome garden. Unless you know different.

But let’s focus on the essential truth of Wast Water: that it is England’s deepest lake. Wast Water is 258ft (79m) deep at its lowest point. (The Screes, properly known as Illgill Head, top out at 1998ft or 609m, thus you definitely couldn’t hide them in the lake, even if you really wanted to.)

A big question round here is pronunciation. In Cumbrian dialect, Wasdale is ‘woz-dull’ (meaning ‘well-watered valley’). And Wast Water defies all

St Olaf’s Church

Scafell Pike

Foxes Tarn

Broadcrag Tarn

Scafell

This iconic view of Wast Water, with Great Gable ahead, the Scafells right and Yewbarrow left, was voted Britain’s Favourite View in 2007.

Wast Water

logic because it reverses the two ‘a’ sounds. ‘Wast’ rhymes with ‘lost’, and ‘water’ rhymes with ‘batter’. Thus it’s ‘wostwatter’ – spoken quickly, with the clipped diction of a sheep farmer. The name is also a tautology, a splicing of the Old Norse vatnsa and the Old English waeter, both meaning water. Thus it means ‘water water’, much as Pike o’ Stickle, a few miles to the east, means ‘rocky-topped hill of the rocky-topped hill’. You could accuse Cumbrians of a lack of creativity with names, until you remember Blencathra, Helvellyn and Glaramara.

This is a proper U-shaped basin of a lake, defined by the sheer wall of the Screes to one side, the smooth domes of Seatallan, Middle Fell and Yewbarrow to the other, and Great Gable rising like the Cheops Pyramid down the far end. It has become part of the emblem of the Lake District itself; someone obviously concluded that Wast Water and Gable were the most pleasingly iconographic pairing of lake and mountain in the whole of the park. And in 2007 this scene was voted Britain’s Best View by ITV viewers. Well played, Britain.

You can walk along the shores of Wast Water, and it’s a tale of two paths. The northern shore is a gentle affair; the path runs parallel to the road and there’s plenty of time and space to soak up that epic view. You can paddle, swim, sunbathe; play mermaid on offshore boulders. In contrast, the southern shore is a wall of mountain, where the

Screes plunge into the lake and keep going, almost straight down, for 258ft. There is a path along it but it’s a traumatic riddle of boulders and scree. Alfred Wainwright loathed it. For a contrary view, read Tom Bailey’s account in our next issue.

But it’s the paths that lead away from the water’s edge that entice most people to Wast Water. The tracks and trods that lead to the highest fells of Lakeland. But think on: those big peaks wouldn’t have half their grandeur were it not for the mighty blue sheen that sits beneath them.

Illgill Head, better known as The Screes, hugs the south-east shore of Wast Water.

At 3209ft or 978m, Scafell Pike is England’s highest ground. But it’s not by any means a ‘perfect’ mountain. It doesn’t look stunning from ground level, like Great Gable or Blencathra; it hides way up at the top of a sprawling massif, visible only after a lot of hard legwork out of the valleys. It doesn’t have elegant curves and ridges like Skiddaw or Helvellyn. It’s a big grey dollop, latticed with footpaths that are A-road width in places.

And it doesn’t have an automatic association with Wasdale; neighbouring peaks such as Gable, Yewbarrow or Scafell have a much more immediate impact on the valley scene. (The Wasdale residents who named the fells didn’t clock its importance at all; they were overawed by neighbouring Scafell and its immense northern crag, and just named the thing next to it ‘Scafell’s pike’.)

And yet, Scafell Pike is a Wasdale mountain. Wasdale Head provides easily the quickest and most direct route to the summit of England (via Brown Tongue and Lingmell Col) – far quicker, if tougher and less entertaining, than the lugubrious traverse of the Corridor Route from Borrowdale. The landmark stretcher box at Sty Head belongs to the Wasdale Mountain Rescue Team. And the pike’s Wasdale face – Pike’s Crag – is a dramatic and sheer bastion that’s easily worthy of a recordbreaking mountain. In effect, Scafell Pike and Scafell are a pair of burly brothers, joined at the shoulder, sheltering and enclosing Wasdale like bodyguards shielding a VIP. And Wasdale, as we’ve established, is a Very Important Place indeed.

The Cenotaph in Whitehall is 18ft above sea level. The memorial plaque built into the summit cairn on Scafell Pike is a bit higher; 3191ft to be precise.

The summit of the Pike was handed to the nation (specifically, the National Trust) by its former owner Lord Leconfield in 1919 as a memorial to those who were lost in the First World War. There being no higher commemorative display in Wales or Scotland, the top of Scafell Pike is thus, to this day, Britain’s highest war memorial.

Four years after Leconfield’s donation, in 1923, an even more momentous gift was given in memory of fallen men. The Lake District Fell and Rock

SCOTLAND/BRITAIN/ BRITISH ISLES Ben Nevis 4413ft/1345m WALES Snowdon 3560ft/1085m NORTHERN IRELAND Slieve Donard 2790ft/850m REPUBLIC OF IRELAND Carrauntoohil 3407ft/1038m BRITISH TERRITORIES Mount Hope (Antarctica) 10626ft/3239m THE WORLD Mount Everest (Nepal/Tibet/China) 29029ft/8848m

Scafell Pike (left) and Scafell as seen from Wasdale Head. Scafell Pike’s actual summit is further back; what you see here is Pike’s Crag.

Climbing Club purchased 12 mountains around Sty Head and handed them over in memory of 20 of its members who never returned from the trenches.

The hub of the 12 summits is Great Gable, where a plaque explains the true scale of ‘the Great Gift’. Each year at 11am on Remembrance Sunday, walkers gather at the summit to pause in contemplation of those it commemorates.

Remarkably, the Great Gift is not the world’s largest war memorial. That honour goes to the Great Ocean Road in Victoria, Australia: 151 miles long, built by soldiers who returned from the Great War and dedicated to those who never made it back.

But it’s definitely the largest in Britain – and an integral part of the Wasdale skyline.

The view of Great Gable and Sty Head from the summit dome of Scafell Pike.

St Olaf’s church and (right) its famous window, etched with Napes Needle. The text is a misquotation from Psalm 121:

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my strength. For the intriguing story behind the misquoting, see Footnotes on page 122.

The first thing to know about the annual World’s Biggest Liar Competition is that Westminster MPs are barred from entering, on account of being ‘professionals in an amateur sphere’.

The second thing to know is that it all harks back to a Wasdale hero by the name of Will Ritson. Born in 1808 and a farmer in his early life, Ritson spotted the trend for tourism, and cultivated a talent for entertaining visitors with outlandish tales. He really found his stage when he and his wife Dinah took over the Huntsman’s Inn (now the Wasdale Head Inn). Visitors flocked to hear the local sage tell his tales – only sometimes realising that most of them were made up.

One well-recounted Ritson classic is the story of a funeral procession in which a Wasdale woman’s body was being transported on horseback. After colliding with a rowan tree, the coffin fell from the horse and the supposedly deceased lady woke up, living for several more years with her husband. Not that he was too chuffed: later, when the poor woman finally perished, he took special care to ensure the horse avoided the rowan tree this time.

But Ritson was at pains to point out that his tales were never malicious or designed to mock his credulous guests; simply to entertain and give a taste of what Wasdale wit could be.

These days the mendacious master’s name can still be found in Ritson’s Bar at the hotel (and in the nearby waterfall of Ritson’s Force), but the World’s Biggest Liar event happens further down the valley at the Bridge Inn at Santon Bridge. It’s hotly

COUNTRY WALKING contested: John Graham has won it seven times (typical tale: his undersea voyage to Scotland in a magic wheelie bin). In 2006 comedian Sue Perkins became the first woman to win it, with a tale of climate change forcing Cumbrians to ride to work on camels. In normal times, this would take place in November; keep an eye on santonbridgeinn.com to see how it pans out this year. Until then, here’s to ‘Auld Will’: the man who turned blarney into an artform, in the shadow of his beloved hills.

And with that, our tour of record-guzzling Wasdale is complete. We’re sure you will find it a soulless, uninspiring place that will always disappoint you and lacks truly impressive scenery.

(That last bit? That was a lie.)

The iconic Wasdale Head Inn, with the steepest straight mile path in the Lake District rising to Kirk Fell behind it. Looks alright from here, doesn’t it? It’s not.

Ritson’s Bar at the Wasdale Head Inn, once the home of fibber and flim-flam fan Will Ritson.