Scafell Pike the Wordsworth way...
Two centuries ago this very month, Wordsworth made a daring climb of Scafell Pike. But there’s a twist in the tale that deserves a closer look.
Can we retrace a route walked two hundred years ago?
Left. Right. Left. Right. I’ve done it tens of millions of times in my life. I try to do 10,000 of them every day. But the footsteps I’m taking now towards the head of Borrowdale Valley feel extra special. For they might just be landing in the 200-year-old footprints of Wordsworth.
Two centuries ago, on one sunny October morning, Wordsworth set out on a fanciful ascent of the Scafell range, and later detailed an account of the excursion in a letter to a friend. The correspondence, which notes the exact date of the jaunt as 7 October 1818, was
then published in the appendices of one of Wordsworth’s books, A Description of the Scenery of the Lakes in the North of England. And so, having acquired a copy, I deemed it a worthy exercise to mark the bicentenary of the adventure by retracing the very same route.
But, and here comes the plot twist, the Wordsworthian footsteps I would be ghosting aren’t those of the great Romantic poet William, but of his younger sister, Dorothy. Remarkably, it transpires the letter was, in fact, penned by William’s sister before he then had it republished in his own Lakeland guidebook – thus making the work appear to be his own and as though it was he who had journeyed to the summit of Scafell Pike that day. Already excited by the idea of retracing a 200-yearold Wordsworth pursuit to the roof of England, this delightful quirk in the story only propelled my enthusiasm.
Now, before I’m lambasted for accusing one of the world’s most celebrated poets of crude plagiarism, I should say I’m not some raging literature conspiracist. Literary historians understand Wordsworth often borrowed from the journals and diary entries of his sister, with whom he was very close, to influence his works, perhaps most notably for his famous poem I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, also known as Daffodils. No, my interest in this unexpected discovery is the historical intrigue of it all.
This was a time when public interest in the Lake District was swelling. The late 18th and early 19th century is recognised as the advent of the era of British tourism, largely thanks to the romantic waxings of Thomas West, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert
Southey, John Keats and Wordsworth himself. The specific popularisation of the Lakes is also attributed to a nation’s growing yearn to escape the smogchoked cities of the industrial revolution, as people sought the beauty of nature and exultation of outdoor adventure. But how did it come about in the early 1800s, when it was uncommon for women to have many pastimes outside of reading, polite conversation and sewing, for a lady to trek up the highest mountain in England? How did she plot a route without access to accurate mapping (the first OS-published map of the Scafell range wasn’t printed until 1865) or obvious pathways? What were her expectations? What clothing and footwear could she have worn? How did she prepare for such an unprecedented exercise? I found the more questions I considered, the more that exploded into my mind.
Having used Wordsworth’s book as the basis of my research, I delved further into Dorothy’s account by searching online. This revealed she undertook her excursion with her friend, a painter and poet called Mary Barker, plus a maid, a porter and a local shepherd who was drafted in as a guide. Inexplicably, I was unable to recruit such an entourage for my own venture, so I had to make do with the company of my long-time walking buddy, Tom.
The start of Dorothy’s letter, which
was addressed to another of her friends – Rev. William Johnson, a former curate of Grasmere – reads ‘Having left Rossthwaite [sic] in Borrowdale on a bright morning…’. So, when planning where to base ourselves the night before our walk, we had the decision made for us. While sipping an ale at our B&B accommodation that evening, Tom and I scanned the appendix in Wordsworth’s book Excursions to the Top of Scawfell, which contained Dorothy’s letter. We read through the eloquent narrative, picked out any discernible locations mentioned and duly marked those points in red ink onto our OS map to formulate our route.
THE WALK
We rose the next morning to a burst of sunshine through the bedroom curtains, the warm rays like fingers that bring you softly into consciousness. This parallel with the fine weather that dawned in Borrowdale on 7 October 1818 (a Wednesday, as it was) felt like a happy omen for the day ahead. And so, after a wholesome breakfast, we set off for Rosthwaite with Wordsworth’s book in hand to take the first of our retraced steps.
‘We ascended from Seathwaite to the top of the ridge called Ash-course,’ wrote Dorothy. With ‘Ash-course’ being a corruption of the mountain pass we now recognise as Esk Hause, it is interesting to note the spelling of some place names in Dorothy’s narrative – Rossthwaite, Scawfell and Great Gavel (Gable) being other examples. These discrepancies with the accepted spellings of today are likely down to phonetics and how the place names would have been pronounced in the 19th century. Having passed through Seathwaite Farm, we stalked Grains Gill and ascended the valley head towards Esk Hause and Great End, the creviced fortress wall of the Scafell massif. The heat of the morning sun pounded our backs as we climbed, and sweat gravitated from forehead to eyebrow to cheek as though my hairline was a tap that leaked a stream of salty water. Our 200-yearold directions would follow what is now one of the most popular approaches to Scafell Pike – indeed the Seathwaite route is now regularly used by Three Peaks Challenge walkers. Today, mercifully, the way was quiet and we’d met just one other walker by the time we reached Esk Hause. ‘Thence beheld three distinct views,’ notes Dorothy at this point. So, Tom and I accepted a pew on the grassy ridge top and determined to tick off the writer’s trio of perspectives one by one. First was the ‘continuous Vale of Borrowdale, Keswick, and Bassenthwaite … and in the distance, the Solway Frith and the Mountains of Scotland’. We strained our eyes in the direction of the border, with necks craned as a heron might when it surveys the mirrored surface of a lake, but yes, tick! And ‘on the other side, and below us, the Langdale Pikes, Windermere and Ingleborough in Yorkshire’. Maybe a little imagination was needed for the latter, but it was an easy tick for the Langdales at least. And finally, ‘the green Vale of Esk – deep and green, with its glittering serpent stream – and on we looked to the Mountains near the Sea – Black Comb pre-eminent – and, still beyond, to the sea itself, in dazzling brightness’. Wordsworth remarked of the ‘deliciousness’ of this final prospect
“…‘THE AIR CHANGED TO COLD, AND MIGHTY MASSES OF CLOUD CAME BOILING OVER THE MOUNTAINS,’ WROTE DOROTHY”
and, laying back against our rucksacks lapping up the sunshine 200 years on, it was hard to disagree with her. A big tick.
THE SUMMIT
Tom and I eventually moved off towards Scafell Pike, clambering over the large boulder fields that precede Broad Crag like ants scrabbling over pebbles; all under the surveillance of the mighty Great Gable looming on our right shoulder. We read Dorothy’s description of the same stretch and how she ‘saw the summit of Scawfell, apparently very near to us; and we shaped our course towards it; but, discovering that it could not be reached without first making a considerable descent, we resolved, instead, to aim at another point of the same mountain, which I have since found has been estimated as higher than the summit bearing the name of Scawfell Head’. This is perhaps the most intriguing passage in Dorothy’s memoir. After realising they couldn’t reach their target of Scafell without first tackling the notorious rockface we now know as Broad Stand, they determined instead toward Scafell Pike – and then later learned it stands higher than their original destination. The elevation of the Scafell range would not have been widely known, if at all, at this point in time so merely imagining the adulation of this discovery makes Dorothy’s autumnal adventure all the more stunning!
Having reached the pinnacle of their walk, Dorothy writes, ‘On the summit of the Pike, which we gained after much toil, though without difficulty, there was not a breath of air to stir … the stillness seemed to be not of this world – we paused and kept silence to listen; and no sound could be heard … and there was not an insect to hum in the air’. As we gained the summit ourselves, the only parallel we could draw from Dorothy’s experience was, predictably, the toil. The ant-sized figures that had punctuated the Pike’s 978m cairn from our vantage point near Esk Hause had now materialised into hordes of selfieshooting, silence-cancelling summiteers.
It was now midday and after briefly wedging myself into a space the size of a postage stamp on top of the busy cairn for my own obligatory woo-hoo-I-made-it
“THEY WALKED VIA SPRINKLING TARN AND STY HEAD WHERE THEY ‘ADMIRED THE VIEWS OF WASDALE AND GREAT GABLE’”
summit photo, Tom and I were keen to take our lunch away from the crowds. We settled for a separate, deserted cairn 100m away on the rocky plateau, tucked into our tiffin and returned to our paperback guide. Of Scafell Pike’s top, Dorothy remarks, ‘not a blade of grass is to be seen. Cushions or tufts of moss, parched and brown, appear between the huge blocks and stones that lie in heaps on all sides to a great distance, like skeletons or bones of the earth not needed at the creation, and there left to be covered with never-dying lichens.’
We sat and tried to imagine Dorothy’s sense of exaltation in reaching this lofty perch, rapt with heavenly views that stretched for miles in every direction and with no one but her small party to absorb them. Sadly for us such prospects would require the powers of imagination too, as the morning sunshine had retired in favour of some wrathful clouds that were dark and bulging, big with rain. They had crept in from the west and set on wrapping around the shoulders of Scafell Pike, obscuring any far-reaching views. This inbound weather might have dampened our spirits more had it not been serendipitously alike events in 1818. ‘I know not how long we might have remained on the summit of the Pike, without a thought of moving, had not our guide warned us a storm was coming … the air changed to cold, and mighty masses of cloud came boiling over the mountains’, wrote Dorothy. We needn’t a second invitation to assume this as our cue to take leave from Scafell Pike.
The version of Dorothy’s letter republished in her brother’s book mentions very little of her descent route, save that she ‘again reached Ash-course’ and then returned to Seathwaite and ‘pursued our way down the Vale to Rossthwaite by moonlight’. This assumes the shepherd guided Dorothy back along their exact ascent route, though my research revealed that from Esk Hause they walked via Sprinkling Tarn and Sty Head where they ‘admired the views of Wasdale and Great Gable’. We did likewise and also took the opportunity to submerge our aching feet in Styhead Tarn. The water was surprisingly, flinchingly cold but refreshing for the soles. We got to wondering whether Dorothy might have been inclined to refresh herself similarly after her great excursion. Perhaps she even took fancy for a wild swim? We supposed not, towelled our feet dry and headed for home.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge is thought to have made the first recorded rock climb (actually a haphazard descent) of the Scafell range when he wrote a love letter from the summit of Scafell in 1802 to a woman he was besotted with (William Wordsworth’s sister-in-law as it happens) then descended the lethal Broad Stand. After this Dorothy’s was perhaps the next notable dispatch from the Scafells and, as we pursued our own way back towards Rosthwaite, I pondered whether she could have predicted how seminal her intrepid outing might have been on the rise of the Lake District. Even if it was in the name of her brother.