A few stalwarts took the charmed treasure from his hands, and with a furious onslaught made the attackers give way. Step by step they fought their way up the ghyll of Dunmail’s beck—broke through all resistance on the open fell, and aided by a dense cloud evaded their pursuers. Two hours later the faithful few met by Grisedale tarn, and consigned the crown to its depths—“till Dunmail come again to lead us.” And every year the warriors come back, draw up the charmed circlet from the depths of the wild mountain tarn, and carry it with them over Seat Sandal to where their king is sleeping his age-long sleep. They knock with his spear on the topmost stone of the cairn, and from its heart comes a voice, “Not yet; not yet; wait awhile, my warriors.”

The road now turns down the pass, a long, swinging slope where the steadying brake is necessary. To northward show the storm-washed sides of Helvellyn, with new rents staring like fresh-turned loam in the sunshine. A blue peak of Skiddaw is holding, as though unwilling to part with, a fleecy cloud, and here sweep into sight Raven Crag with its precipitous front, and the laughing summits of Armboth, one by one. Our cycles are gaining speed; we reach a corner, the top of a steep pitch,—there before us is a sudden view of Thirlmere, with Saddleback rising in rugged majesty behind. The open water is ruffled with breezelets, but every sheltered cove shines level blue. The pace becomes faster; the long curves are turned at ever-increasing speed. On either side are wide grass slopes, cut up by stony gullies. We are still above the zone of trees, if we except the fringes of rowan, the solitary hawthorns. Now across a bridge, spanning a wilderness of rubble where after heavy rain a flood roars and even throws veils of spray on to the road. A straight descent, and below we view the gardens and trees, white-walled inn, and grey church at Wythburn. Now, instead of allowing the machines full way to race in fifty seconds down the half-mile incline, we approach more leisurely, for halfway down the steep the road we are to take turns off at a tangent. Out of a clump of tall sycamores an old farm emerges; this is the Post Office, far removed from neighbouring houses! To the right Helvellyn is now in fuller sight, furrowed with watercourses, jagged with scaurs, with the sunshine dancing on the brackens and warming up the sober green stretches of grass. The dale is desolate and barren, yet a portion is known as the City, in memory possibly of a settlement of Britons in its stony waste.

The great gap of Wythburn Head will afford a pleasant ramble to any one who has the time. There is no towering crag, no huge cataract, no narrow, yawning ravine, but an infinite variety of the sweetest brook scenery. Only a few hundred yards from the road is a small basin of water, entirely hedged by slabs of stone, ten feet deep, and so clear that the least pebble on the floor can be seen—a place scoured by floods as clean of sand and soil as though Nature were the most expert of housemaids. On the bottom, in their season, the chrysalides of the Mayfly crawl—how wonderfully protected they are by their stick-like shape and their coats of sand! most realistically they imitate a piece of rotting twig as they lie in a chink of the pool-bed.

Another sweet corner I remember well. It is a dream of beauties in miniature. The down-pouring rivulet divides round a boulder, throwing two pearly cascades into the gloomy pool a fathom below. Round this pool the rocks rise sharply, crowned with foxgloves, heath and bog-violet, with a single stem of fly-orchis, with ivy and a cluster of the grass of Parnassus; more ivy wreathes around the roots of the trees, and long beards of moss drip with the outpourings of secret springs. Overhead, the alder, the rowan, and a few spindly self-grown ashes flourish, with a bush of glorious wild roses wilting loose petals into the slow-moving, bubbling circle. Ferns cluster among the tree-stems and on haphazard ledges, parsley and oak, the broad buckler and others, together with hardy bracken and other ubiquitous plants of the uplands. In a hole there a wren has built her nest, a thrush homes in the thickest holly, while the hawthorns are inhabited by a colony of hedge-sparrows and titmice. It is an active corner in bird-life if you have time to see it and your patience exceeds that of the busy midges.

The road has a slight incline which carries the cycle along with small exertion. The fences, as is customary in tourist Lake Country, are partly wall, topped with wire rail—a plan which allows the journeyer by road fully to enjoy the scenery. Tall, moss-grown walls and dense hedges are a feature of unfashionable Lakeland, but, pretty as they undoubtedly are, they sadly narrow the wanderer’s vision. The lake is now close by, stretching into the reedy level meadows. One curious feature is a now useless bridge, raising its hog-back in the mere. Wee looks the white-walled inn across the glen, with the great mountain range almost overhanging it. The fellside above us is bristling with crags, some splintered and hanging as though a breath of wind would hurl a shower of stone down upon us; others rise in flawless tiers, grandly immovable, impervious to the forces of Nature. And beneath them is the dainty, dancing harebell, the jocund foxglove, the sweet blooming heather, and many a starry mountain flower. Few trees are in sight; round an abandoned farm is a lonely cluster of sycamores; gulls are screaming and paddling in what was once pasture-land. Bare and stern is the last back-glance ere our way curves into a passage cut through the rocks. Then, suddenly—is this a new land, a new Thirlmere? The transformation is sudden and complete. To northward, many a mile, stretches a narrow lake, basking in the afternoon sun. Dense coppice and green larches clothe the slopes rising from the water; there is no indication of farms, of humanity.

The lake is quite close, we gaze down a terrace of rock at its shining mass. A knoll crowned with tough, short oaks is almost cut out from the land; a faint swell breaks entirely round a rock on which heather is in bloom. In the bay some wild ducks are feeding; Thirlmere in the quiet of winter is a grand haunt of migrants from ice-covered Northern seas. The lake is at its widest here; right opposite is the sham castle which Manchester erected over the pipe which draws, through ninety miles of mountain and meadow, the waters of Thirlmere. It is a pretentious battlemented horror of red sandstone at present, an insult to the shade of dour and grey Helvellyn. But perhaps time, and ivy, will soften the harshness, dull the too vivid colours, and the ugliness of to-day may be the beauty of a not-far-off to-morrow. On the road swings, ever softly on the incline, making the cycle run easier, and we pass through aisles of tall larch, beneath the shadow of sheering crags.

For a mile or so we pass through avenues of larch woods with broken crags ever shouldering against the roadside; then we come to Launchy Ghyll, the most extensive break in the mountain wall this side the lake. Not far from the ghyll, yet some little climb above the road, is the flat-topped boulder called the Justice Stone. It has been a famous landmark. It is suggested that its first use was in the plague years when the folks of Keswick laid money here to exchange with pedlars for goods from the outside world. Up to a century ago the shepherds of the neighbouring valleys used to meet at this place and exchange straying sheep. The climb up to the Stone gives splendid views of the lake and its surroundings, of Helvellyn range from Seat Sandal to Clough Head, of three-piked Saddleback, and of Skiddaw.

Armboth House is the next feature: the haunt of the grisliest set of phantoms the Lake Country holds. For once a year, on All Hallowe’en, it is said, the ghosts of the Lake Country, the fugitive spirits whose bodies were destroyed in unavenged crime, come here. I would not like to be present at their banquet, for they are, according to Harriet Martineau, an unpleasant lot. Bodies without heads, the skulls of Calgarth with no bodies, a phantom arm which possesses no other member, and many a weird shape beside. But they are a moral lot—victims and not sinners. Does the wild shriek in which ere dawning ends their banquet mean that to the spirit eyes has come a revelation of their wrongers in torment? But I forget: no man can hear that cry and live. Yet people will not believe the straight-forward story of the Armboth ghosts, of windows lit up with corpse-lights, of clankings of chains in corridors, of eternal shriekings which cannot be traced, as though murder was being done in some secret chamber. But why has this house been compelled to be a ghosts’ haunt? I have never heard a word against its reputation, ancient or modern. Perhaps it is most central for the guests to the ghost supper.

From Armboth a road turns over the moors for Watendlath and Borrowdale. It is a breezy moorland walk ending in a beautiful glen.

The road leaves the woodlands, and we cycle for some distance in full view of the water. The land is fertile meadow; a welcome change from the sterile wastes. A wood clothes the further shore; the hillside in front is known as the Benn, its summit stands well out from the fellside to which, if you trouble to climb so high, you find it is attached by a narrow spine of rock. Up here the Britons of old had a fort impregnable to assault. Now we reach the embankment, which has enlarged the bounds of the mere. It rises to a great height above the waters at present, but the engineers say that by a trifling amount of work the lake would rise sufficiently for a man, leaning over the parapet, to wash his hands in it. A road runs the width of the bank, giving a view up the sheening waters to far-off Dunmail. It is a pretty picture this—a succession of bluffs, some bare and stern, others clothed in clinging scrub of oak and ash, clustering with larch.

The return road winds round the hill into Legburthwaite, faces Helvellyn as though seeking a passage to its stone-strewn head, then turns sharply over a rise, and we are by Thirlmere again. The first view is exceedingly pretty. Neither sham castle nor embankment is visible, and you need not remember that the mere is semi-artificial. The fells of Armboth face one like a wall, broken here and there by a narrow ravine. On the fell you find the dip where Harrop tarn, beloved of wild fowl, is lying; you trace its rivulet threading down toward its long home in the lake. For a long mile we cycle along a terrace road high above the water, with Helvellyn rising to invisible heights to the left.

The next point of interest is Wythburn, its little church and inn across the way known over the wide world. Wordsworth describes his “Waggoner” making a journey past here at midnight, and halting at the Cherry-tree (now a farm), a public-house on the disused lower road where a merrynight was in progress. Coleridge has given his tribute to the little house of God, and other equally famous names occur to one, who have not disdained to ponder on the simplicity here. Wythburn was once among the smallest of English churches, but an addition has been made to the chancel since those days. In a batch of notes collected from aged dalesmen many years ago I have the following story concerning Wythburn.

The rector, after forty-six years’ constant and punctual work, caught a chill which, as the week wore on, prostrated him. On Sunday morning his wife persuaded him to send word to the clerk to take service as far as possible and then dismiss the congregation. Ten o’clock came and a quarter past, when the single bell should have tolled to assemble the congregation. But to the concern of the invalid its welcoming clatter did not ring out. To appease him his wife hurried to the church, half a mile away, to ascertain the cause. She found the clerk scrambling up the moss-grown roof with a newly twisted straw rope which had to be fixed ere the bell could be rung. A wild goat (there were wild goats on Helvellyn then as on the Coniston fells now) had during the week descended from the fell where keep was scant, had leapt on to the low roof, and, nimbly stepping along the ridge tiles, had found something eatable in the bell rope.

In another fellside the thatch of the church was once eaten by sheep. Services were not held in the building during winter; that was a particularly hard season, and a snowstorm had scattered the flocks ere they could be brought down. At still another fellside church a sudden jerk of the rope was apt to cause the bell to vacate the steeple, and with a rumble and a thud it would land in the adjacent field. Something was wrong with the swivel, but the yeoman who acted as bell-ringer did not know how to repair it. When the bell had finished its journey he would carry it back to its old position, and trust to luck for its remaining there awhile. But the parish clerk was a character, a class of himself in the dales, and on theological topics his voice carried little less weight than that of the parson. He was an independent fellow as a rule, and even the visit, once in a lifetime, of a bishop could not induce him to vary the methods which had descended to him through half a dozen generations.