On top of the world
As a boy, Melvyn Bragg biked up and down the fells. At 30, he bought a cottage there. Now 80, he is still bewitched by the Lake District
Iwas brought up in North Cumbria on the Solway Plain between the fells and the sea. Skiddaw, the northernmost big fell, was, most days, clearly in view 12 miles to the south, the guardian of the Lakes, that other country. It was Skiddaw we had in mind when, in the choir, we chanted, ‘I will lift up mine eyes to the hills from whence cometh my help.’
My first trip into the Lakes was a choir outing to Keswick, a couple of miles south of Skiddaw. We went on one of the boats that, then as now, motored around Derwentwater, which Wordsworth called the ‘jewel of the Lakes’, stopping half a dozen times to load and offload passengers. We rowed in the awkward rowing boats for hire.
Most of all, I just looked around. It must have been a fine day because I recall so much: the remains of the Celtic fort at the southern tip of the lake, the little bays, the magical island which sank below the surface and came up again – of its own free will, it seemed – and the bigger island once inhabited by St Cuthbert, whose prayer was to die on the same day as Bede.
More memorable than all the details was the sweep of landscape and the peace: the roll of fells in all directions, woods, cliffs, a sense of ever-dissolving and reassembling landscapes as the boat moved around the lake, and the beautiful intricacies of this unique location – at times densely packed and then expansive; now crowded, now solitudinous.
Coleridge first observed that, as you walk up any fell, the prospect changes every two dozen yards. Daniel Defoe, visiting the area, describes its horrors, its fearsomeness; Turner was to transform that into magnificent landscapes; Wordsworth found a language for it that helped drive a revolution.
For some of us, at school with bikes, it became in our adolescence a soaring, swooping masterpiece of nature which we were allowed, tempted, encouraged to occupy. As we – three or four of us – became more adventurous, we would take more sandwiches and go further.
An early expedition was the first time we went to Buttermere, for years a secret lake, and still, on the many good days, a lonely huddle of houses, a few farms and two pubs, one of which became nationally famous as the birthplace and workplace of the landlord’s daughter, Mary Robinson, the Maid of Buttermere.
We’d leave our bikes behind the pub, go into the Bridge for a quick and cautious bottle of beer and then tramp along the western shore of the lake, and take the path through the little-used Scarth Gap Pass to look down on Ennerdale. We were alone on the top of the world, looking down into a long valley now reverting to deciduous forestry.
Below was the Black Sail Youth Hostel, the most remote in the Lakes. We looked down on Pillar Rock, where so many of the early English mountain climbers earned their spurs. We could see Scafell, one of the three greatest heights in England; Red Pike; and, out and over to the west, the sea, the incoming storms. Biking back, we experienced the luxuriance of aching limbs; home was in sight and downhill most of the way.
Just as in that valley Buttermere all but merges into Crummock, so Crummock does into Loweswater. I have a particular affection for Loweswater. During and just after the war, my mother used to take me to the village of Lamplugh, where my father’s sister lived with her husband and two children. Somehow my mother and I also fitted into the tiny cottage.
Later, in my twenties, I would walk around the place on the High Fell Road and, not far away, discovered Mosser, a hamlet distinguished by a tiny Quaker meeting house. I could circle the sides of Loweswater on bridle paths and come
down to the water by a different route each time.
When I was looking for a place in the Lakes, in 1970, I went to the village of Dockray above Ullswater. The property was priced in five figures and out of my league. Eventually I found a cottage in the Northern Fells in a hill-farming hamlet.
I have been there ever since, but going to Dockray gave me the chance to walk up Aira Force, one of the most spectacular of the waterfalls. You had to keep your wits about you. The steppingstones could be slippy and the surges and jets from the fall could easily distract you. Although on a minor scale, it felt like a real ascent! That you were splattered and soaked added to the feeling.
And at the top – a wonderful pub. The sight of the majestic Ullswater below, with the pleasure boat churning along the 16 miles, could dream the day away. Memories of the boy Wordsworth’s fears and nightmares after he stole a boat one evening add to Ullswater’s attraction.
Julian Cooper, whose mountain paintings define for me the modern Lake District, has made several studies of
Greenhead Ghyll, which is just outside Grasmere, where Wordsworth and Dorothy lived for some time. I went up there at Julian’s suggestion. You get at it from just under Dunmail Raise (once a Scottish-boundary marker).
The reason I was so keen to go was that Wordsworth, born 250 years ago, set his plainest and most moving narrative poem, Michael, up there. Michael is an elderly shepherd; he and his wife have a son who at a certain age leaves Cumberland for London where he goes to ruin. His heartbroken father was building a new sheepfold when the son left, and now keeps returning to it with less and less heart to complete it. On some days, he ‘never lifted up a single stone’.
Julian told me there were still remains of that sheepfold on the fellside. I think I found it – but one fold shelter with a collapsed wall can be much like another. Still, I made the journey and undoubtedly felt melancholy for the good old man. And that, if you are interested in such things, is another part of the unique quality of the place.
There are significant Celtic remains, Roman remains … and then the Norsemen came, finding valleys and fells which reminded them of home but were warmer! They brought their language, not yet erased, and their customs, some still extant, and for a thousand years guarded the place against all comers.
The walls alone – so many miles of dry-stone walls, climbing the steepest fells, diving into the valley – follow the Norse ownership, netting the district as if Neptune had risen from the Solway and done the job himself.
My cottage in a hamlet of nine dwellings is on the north side of the most northerly fell. One side faces across the Solway to Scotland, where Criffel and other hills are in some way a mirror to the Cumbrian Fells.
When you walk up the fell at evening, you see one of the many sights that have stirred the hearts of millions since Wordsworth’s day. To the east – on a fine evening – I can see the Pennines, the glimmering spine of England. Looking ahead takes you into the core of the place: peaks, level fells, half-seen fells and, with luck, a late aura of light, giving the place an Arthurian splendour. To the west you gaze across more fells, to the sea and on sunsets too red perhaps, even for Turner. Colour streams in and lands on Skiddaw, on the heather, bronzed by the late light like a shield, a glittering bronze, displaying all that’s best in nature.
Do not disturb.