William Heaton Cooper, Sprinkling Tarn
FOR A PLACE called the Lake District, the mountain tops can hog a lot of the limelight. But there was one man who celebrated the national park’s watery attractions, and that was William Heaton Cooper. A landscape artist (as was his father Arthur), he was fascinated by tarns, the upland lakes that he called the ‘eyes of the mountains’. In 1960 he published a book, The Tarns of Lakeland, with sketches, paintings and prose about a selection of tarns in which he ‘found delight’. One was a particular favourite: ‘At all times of year and under any conditions, without any doubt I find Sprinkling Tarn the most completely satisfying of all the tarns of Lakeland. In the end it is the character and feel of the place itself that finally attracts so strongly.’ It’s most easily reached from Seathwaite in Borrowdale, by a path up beside Grains Gill, and if you fancy starting a tarn-bagging challenge – walking to all the tarns in the book, which is known as Coopering – you can return by Styhead Tarn to tick off a second. But Cooper advised walkers not to rush, and instead to take time ‘looking at these places, quietly absorbing the glint and feel of them’.