The English Lakes :: CHAPTER XI BUTTERMERE

CHAPTER XI BUTTERMERE

Buttermere is Crummock’s sister-lake, divided only by half a mile of level, swampish meadows. Doubtless, in early ages, the twain formed one long water, reaching from the foot of Fleetwith eight miles to the hill at Scale. In size the upper lake is much the smaller: even more than Crummock it is a mountain mere. The fells rising from its shores are among the lofty ones of the Lake Country: Red Pike and High Stile with their back views into Ennerdale, Robinson and Hindscarth facing the vale of Derwent and far-away Skiddaw, and Brandreth hiding behind Fleetwith. Buttermere is a solitary place: the presence of the hamlet, the sheep-farms, the small, dark woodlands, and the one mansion on a head driven out by the activities of a fell beck, almost accentuate its loneliness, for the bare pikes of mountain dwarf them almost away. It is the coach-road which brings the idea of modern life and relationships here. It runs close to the lake, and every day in summer and autumn a procession of vehicles passes along just before the luncheon hour. From Keswick they have started—coach, char-a-banc, wagonette, or more lordly landau, wheeled into lovely Borrowdale to the merry crack of the whip and gleesome blast of horn; with a long pull, they have been hauled up steep Honister Hause, with a brake-wrenching plunge they have safely negotiated the narrow shingle-shelf called a road. Timorous passengers have shrunk in terror as they gazed at awful depths below, but now all nerves compose themselves as the hooves rattle on the hard, undulating road by the lake-side. After a suitable rest the horses will draw the crowd away over Newlands Hause, where out of the green hillsides a road has been delved, to Keswick, and our dale and lake will forget disturbance till to-morrow. The eternal silence of a mountain-land will fall around and render rapturous evening and night and blithesome morning. To drive from Keswick to Buttermere and return is no mean item in a tourist’s day; it is a noble day’s work for horses, and only good ones can endure frequent journeys over these rugged passes. Even the “easier” slope of Honister is sufficient to “break many a horse’s heart.”

HEAD OF BUTTERMERE

The villaget of Buttermere was apparently unknown to Roman, Saxon, and the building tribes of old; its only historic building is the lowly public-house where the Maid of Buttermere dwelt. Mary was the belle of the glen in good King George’s day—a blithesome Cumberland lass, bonny enough to charm a yeoman’s eye, wealthy enough in a modest way to bring his love and hand. But she was not for the dalesmen or the shepherds of the mountains. Her fate was ripe when one day a post-chaise brought to the little inn a grand gentleman from Keswick. His dress was fine, his looks noble, he had plenty of money. He gave himself out to be Colonel Hopetown, son of a peer and otherwise highly connected. Soon the guest condescended to woo the Beauty, and ere a short summer passed they were married. A few weeks later the “colonel” was arrested on a charge of forgery—“franking” letters with his “relative’s” name to pass the Post Office—and was proved to be the son of menial parents. Many other and viler frauds had he practised after leaving the South Country, but these he was never called to book for on this earth. Forgery was a crime involving death under the merciless penal code of those days, and the impostor duly suffered at Carlisle. Mary of Buttermere, so forcibly parted from her husband, did not repine him long, but married a neighbouring farmer and lived to a good old age. The small chapelry of Buttermere was, some time previous to the happenings mentioned, held by one of Wordsworth’s heroes, “Wonderful Walker,” the curate of Duddonside Seathwaite, whose life-story of labour and frugality was once so well known and esteemed. How he lived several years in his office here is almost a “wonder” in itself, for Buttermere allowed its priest no more than “whittle-gate” and twenty shillings yearly. (Some accounts aver that the remuneration was “clog-shoes, harden-sark, whittle-gate, and guse-gate”—that is, a pair of shoes clogged or iron-shod, a coarse shirt once a year, free living at each parishioner’s house for a certain number of days, and the right to pasture a goose or geese on the common.) Either scale would not be too luxurious for even a successor of the Apostles, bound to forswear the lusts of the flesh and the pride of life. The person who held Newlands chapel in the time of George II. was a tailor, a clogger and butterpat maker, and the Mungrisdale priest had £6 0s. 9d. a year. Such cures were often held by unordained persons—hedge-parsons with a vengeance.

The day I first came to Buttermere forms one of my fairest memories. Starting before midnight on the opposite edge of Lakeland, at daybreak I stood on Dunmail raise; by breakfast-time I reached Keswick; then I went up Skiddaw by way of Latrigg, descending by the same route—the only one I then knew of on that shoulder of the mountain; at noon I was on Newlands Hause, plodding on cheerily. Hot and grimed with dust, my eyes bleared with sweat and the glare, I wonder if I looked so disreputable, so much of a tramp, as I felt. A stripling of seventeen, not stoutly built, poor in dress and pocket (I left home with 1s. 9½d. and returned with but 3d. less), carrying on my back a satchel with food for my day, to be eaten in the open air and washed down with water; there would be little jauntiness of face or body or stride, I trow, after that forty-eight miles’ tramp. And this was not the end of the journey. Buttermere was only the Mecca, the turning-point, of my walk; after passing it I turned up rugged Honister for Borrowdale, and then by the Stake pass to Langdale, and so home. Perhaps it were unmannerly to boast, but eighty-five miles of road, mountain, glen, and pass, in twenty-five and a half hours, is not a feat of my every-day. As I entered the valley that day the clouds closed down, shutting off the beating sunrays and throwing a light, refreshing shower. Like the mountain daisies, the wanderer for a full minute raised a rejoicing face to the cooling raindrops. Then, like the sky, he felt a trouble. “Nay, nay, it’s nobbut cestin’ a shooer,” said an aged shepherd, and my heart was comforted. Not long before I had walked thirty miles through pouring rain, and found it no light matter. Like a soft slab of slate the lake stretched from the fringe of treetops before to the stony, scrubby hillside opposite. Save where coots and water-hens played by the sedges and rooty river-mouths, the surface was calm, the light rain merged into the water without splash or circle. The hillsides round Buttermere are furrowed into ravines, dark and gaping they split the festive green swathes of summer-tide. And down these hollows dash lively rivulets playing hide-and-seek, mazily threading through shadow of alder and rowan, by groves of flowering hawthorns, now lost in the depths of a ghyll, now spouting in lively haste over a ledge curtained with fern and bracken.

HONISTER PASS AND BUTTERMERE

It is a rare pleasure to be at Buttermere after a series of rain-storms. From the rockrib wherefrom the church commands its little flock, you look into a great amphitheatre of crag-set mountains. Beneath the eye is the water; it seems to be palpitating with movement from the rich riot its tributaries are hurling down the steeps. See how it wimples beneath the farther shore—through a wide rent in the lake-bed untold gallons of water are being forced upward from the heart of the earth; that flat circle in mid-lake against which the creeping catspaw of wind in vain forces its feeble ripples shows another fountain swelling up in quiet power. The steep hillsides are seamed with threads of white; Sour Milk ghyll, in a shimmering veil, sways from skyline to lake-shore. Where often a hermit stream hides and glides behind crest of rock, beneath screen of bracken, now is all tearing, jumping, spreading fosse. Every fold in the hillside casts down its bounding cascade; there is nothing in the air so loud as this turmoil of waters, this joy-song of deeps bursting from dark prisons in bog and crag. Already, we are warned, the paths to Wastdale and Ennerdale are impassable; the floods are out at Gatescarth. Climbing would be a questionable pleasure to-day; “beck-dodging” is far more suitable. At first our road is dry, washed free from dust by the heavy rain; through wide culverts the floods rumble beneath. The wider becks are bridged: look up this tree-hung gullet and see how the waters wilder down. Not in waves do they come, but in great gush after great gush, green and white. How they crash against unseen rocks, throwing feathers of spray at every shock, till the stream shooting beneath the arch seems but a flying mass of airy, tortured foam! There comes the sprite, the winged spirit of the day, robed in brown and white—the dipper, our mountain water-crow. How it chirrups and revels in the tumult! how it flirts its tiny wings and dives through some curling gout of spray! how it scolds the volume roaring through the darkened tunnel beneath the road, causing it, O highly important fairy, to flight up like a mere blackbird, among the dripping plumes of larch!

“Boat ahoy!” we shout anon, and our friend afloat a field’s breadth away waves answer; in a minute the boat is grinding the gravel, and we are almost down the soaking field to reach it.

“What, tired of fishing?” we ask. He is a desperate keen one with the rod as a rule, yet his tackle is packed up.

“No,” he grumbles, “can’t catch anything.”

“Now I did think to-day would suit you. Good spates in the becks, a light breeze, and plenty of cool clouds,” I marvel.

“Now look here,” protested the angler wearily, “it’s no good talking like that. The floor of this lake is leaking upwards as though the steam was escaping by a thousand cracks in the ceiling of the nether regions and being condensed into Buttermere. Why, man, the lake bottom’s that lively that the trout and the char, the big pike down to the tiny minnow, are all having a job to hold the water at all. I bet every minute they’re expecting a geyser that’ll blow the whole lot of ’em over Red Pike to Ennerdale.”

When an angler relapses into this mood he is hopeless to cheer, so we silently respect his sorrows. Perhaps into that vigorous pulling he will throw some of his despondency. Now Fleetwith, flanked by the precipice of Honister, is frowning at us over the low fields. To the right, against a background of watery clouds, is limned rugged Scarf Gap; the path to it is white with rushing waters. The rocks everywhere glimmer with oozing springs: down Honister pass a wide torrent is foaming, attracting to it many a milky force from Robinson and Fleetwith-side. The scraggy stone-pines by the lake-head give a characteristic finish to this scene of sodden brae and spouting rill. Save for the sycamores round the farm of Gatesgarth, there is hardly a tree for shelter; the aspect is bleak and storm-riven. The boat is run on to the shingles beneath the Scotch firs that we may land. Not far away is the main road; we pass up the hillside beyond it. In the recess beneath Fleetwith we are conscious of a flood indeed. Much of the stony level is swamped; with difficulty the sheep have been brought from danger, and are flocked near the farmstead. The torrents rushing in at the head of the mere can be traced, first by white horses, then by dark, level-flowing currents, far down the lake. From this height we again feel that the great water is rocking in its cradle of mountains. The furrows of incoming rills give the peculiar idea of ever-changing level to the water. I have never yet seen the whole level to Scale under water—one lake of eight miles instead of two smaller ones—but viewed from these heights it must be a noble sight indeed. Our boat pushed into the in-dashing beck, rapidly rides to halfway down the lake, thence by carefully avoiding unfavourable currents we easily make our landing-place.

To my mind, the valley is hardly less interesting when a thick winter mist glooms it, when, for all you can see, there is no difference between Honister top, the crest of Robinson, and the stony fields round Gatescarth. Under such circumstances it is well to be afloat an hour, and allow impressions to establish themselves in your mind. Twenty yards out you lose the land: the boat glides along in a grey circle of moving fogbeards and rippling waters. Save for the sounds from bow and rowlock you are in a dead silence. Shortly, however, the ear catches faint echoes: the croak of the raven, the skirl of the curlew, ranging in clear upper air, with now and then the attenuated bleat or low or crow from the farmlands. In mid-lake there are few sounds of water-birds, though at an odd time a coot, traversing the width, may show, a scared patch of brown and white, inside your zone of vision. The lake-birds are cuttering softly close inshore, finding the curtain of cloud an effective cloak for feeding. An hour of boating thus, in gloom and rowk, will form an experience not to be forgotten.

THE BORROWDALE YEWS
Evening

The fishing of Buttermere is now in a few hands: sportsmen have leased the mere and devoted much attention to its re-stocking. The result is that few anglers outside this coterie come here, though on an occasional day the mountain becks are worthy attention. Most visitors here are active enough to relish rambles over the fells, and there are many routes to select from. Away from the narrow band of meadow-land touching the lake, there are few obstacles to free-and-easy wanderings. Sheep walks are divided by wire fences, but these are fairly negotiable, by climbing over at the “posts” or squeezing between the running strands where slackest. Stout folks find the latter the preferable method. To make the circuit of the glen of the lake is a fairly big task, but it can be divided into three moderate courses. You start by crossing the meadows and climbing Scale Force brow, then, left-handed, along Red Pike and High Stile (over bog and bracken, across ghyll and up steep, with a glimpse into Ennerdale here, a peep through Newlands at Derwentdale there, and always the moor in sight, with a clean, sweet breeze and, if the day be clear, a wedge of blue sea on the horizon), finally descending into Scarf Gap, the home of mists, where an easy return path ends course one. From Scarf Gap, into the back-o’-beyont country behind Haystacks, and to Brandreth with its legs into Buttermere, Ennerdale and Borrowdale, always keeping to the right, and ending the course over Fleetwith to Honister Hause. From Brandreth it is easy to pass over Green Gable to Great Gable, and so to gain Wastwater. Honister pass-head is the scene of a legendary battle between Britons and Picts, or between Angles and Scots—history hardly decides which. One party had been a-foraying in Borrowdale and hoped to withdraw over this pass with their spoil; their pursuers, however, cut them off and, after a wild resistance, recovered the cattle. From Honister Hause—it is a wild place of rocks and screes and untamable streams—the final stage carries the wanderer over Dale Head to Hindscarth, whence he descends by Robinson to Buttermere or to Newlands Hause.

Every one walks up Honister as a matter of course. What is it like on a bright July day, when the beating heat is tempered by a smart breeze? Every rambler should live with eyes open to nature; to-day will repay him his interest. Up in the brilliant blue ravens and hawks are hovering, crows and rooks are ever passing over the glen. From one wood to another the wild pigeon wings rapidly, the blackbirds in the hedges are busy at their nestage duties. Take note of the flowers, O man with seeing eyes. In the pastures are great purple spikes of loose-strife, amid the white waves of ox-eyes; round by the lake are belts of blue lobelia. The air is full of the scent of meadow-sweet, the honey-suckle here and there throws trailers, adorned with creamy bloom, along the hedges, and in great clusters blow the wild roses. Up the shady beck-courses you might find the blue forget-me-not and the still bluer birdlime, and in the mossy springs the violet-shaped butterwort. Butterflies and dragon-flies, softer moths and gaudy beetles, are attracted by the multi-flavoured feast spread about.

Now we come to Gatescarth, the largest sheep-farm within many a mile. A noted breeder of mountain sheep lives here, one who has done much to improve our semi-wild Herdwicks—much honour to him. The farmlands, even in the glorious to-day, look harsh and bare, though the soft, short sward is of the greenest. In winter there is often severe stress here; at times the shepherds are called upon to collect, in a day of storm, the flocks from far-off crags and ghylls. Long hours are spent battling the elements, collecting the unwilling sheep, and bringing them down. The wanderer here on a stormy winter night is not unlikely to see a light patrolling far up the hillsides—one of the belated shepherds patiently driving his sheep down from the danger of flood and drift and gale. The white cross which is attracting the eye, O inquirer, is erected to the memory of a young lady accidentally killed at that spot: “In the midst of life we are in death,” is carved on it. The incident is one to make every mountaineer pause and think. It was an everyday risk, alas! The lady descending a steep slope held her alpenstock straight in front of her; the point struck the ground, but the lady slipped, her chin caught on the butt of the stick and, such was the force of the fall, her neck was dislocated, causing immediate death. Such an accident is possible a score times in every day’s walk here. Now the great crag of Honister is frowning by our very side. Around its base the rambler will find broad tracts of alpine ladies’ mantle, while forked spleenwort and many a rare plant besides are among the screes and shelving rocks. Among the grass and boulders near our path are long fantastic growths of stagshorn moss, with more alpine ladies’ mantle, with wild thyme, the precious eyebright and yellow tormentil lifting their lovely heads in the desolate wilderness. Now we reach the passhead: Honister is the wildest of our passes, the place where the great thews of Nature are least hid. But the slate quarries make Honister less desirable to some eyes; great confusions of debris, railroads sweeping up into the bowels of the great crags; for nowadays men do not work here, as they did in Wordsworth’s time, hanging down the cliff in frail basket-chairs tapping and blasting the surface rock, nor do they carry down the slate on handsledges as they did two score years or so ago. The mining is more scientific—more reliance is placed on machinery than on men. The new railroad, carrying slates to Seatollar has improved one thing at any rate—there is far less of that penetrating screaming of brakes than when the loaded carts descended the pass-road. On a calm day the racket could be heard for miles.

LODORE AND DERWENTWATER
A summer’s morn

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