Borrowdale and a “Day Off” from Walking (writing evening of 30 May)

Borrowdale and a “Day Off” from Walking (writing evening of 30 May)

 

Thursday, we took one of the walks from my Collins guide to the lakes.  They rate it as one of the easiest in the book that still has a lot going on.  We started by catching a bus that dropped us at the Honister Youth Hostel.  Along the way, we talked with a few of the English walking enthusiasts with whom we shared the ride.  We heard vague things about the spirituality of walking to high places.  When we admitted we were actually taking a downhill walk, they managed to hide their disappointment and disdain admirably.  Nobody told us, as Sara and I heard in Yorkshire back in 95, that every walk we had taken or planned to take was “Just a doddle.”

 

The hostel itself sits on the fringes of a working slate quarry.  Heavy machinery chugged around, breaking and collecting stone.  We saw neatly stacked piles of slate on packing skids.  There was a helicopter on the site, I’m not sure why. 

 

I should make some effort to describe Lake District scenery in a general way for those of you who want to envision where we are.  For anyone who has been there, it is a little like Switzerland in miniature.  There are hills.  There are passes and valleys between the hills.  The broadest valleys are full of water, creating lakes.  Different hills and their surrounds are made of different kinds of stone, so the weathering patterns, vegetation, and especially the tiny vegetation – mosses and the like – differ a great deal from place to place, softening or leaving rough exposed stone.  People have affected the landscape as well in a variety of ways.  They’ve grazed sheep here for more than a thousand years, so there are few trees on the hills and not even very many in most of the valleys.  They’ve built thousands of miles of stone walls to control the sheep, and the mosses have also softened or failed to soften them depending on base stone and exposure. 

 

I’ve included a few snaps that give you a sense of it, but the whole reason for really coming all this way is that pictures can never get it entirely across.  The views are just breathtaking, and they change with every variation in sunlight, shadow, mist, rain, or 40 mph gale – all of which we had on our walk Thursday, sometimes all four at the same time. 

 

For a while, our route ran along the same narrow road the bus had driven us up, but then it turned off away from the road and hugged a higher contour while the road sunk to our left.  I have the map I used yesterday spread out beside me now to reconstruct it.  Because of starting at the top of the pass, we had it mostly, though not entirely, downhill. 

 

We walked by a bunch of named hills and crossed a number of named streams.  The classic way to describe a walk like this would be to quote all those names to you in a way that made it seem I had gained an intimate connection with the place and would take the burning imprint of its beauty and majesty to my grave, forever linked to those names.  Now it’s true that this is beautiful country to walk in, and I remember lots of what I saw, but the place names mean nothing at all to me.  Most of them I can’t remember five minutes after I turn away from the map.  Places have been getting names here for thousands of years in layers of languages, and it would take someone who’d heard the names and stories all his life, a world class linguist, or a champion trivia memorizer to associate any kind of meaning at all with most of them.  In a very simple example, we were walking down Borrowdale.  I had learned in Yorkshire that a Dale is a river valley, and thought they were always named for the river that cut them, but I can’t find a river Borrow anywhere.  So either this all means something different here, or one of the rivers that runs through it used to be called Borrow and the river name changed but the Dale didn’t.  I certainly can’t keep up with the difference between a crag, a fell, a moor, a raise, a rigg, and a pike.  As nearly as I can tell, they are all stark, stony hills.  I haven’t given an exhaustive list of the names they have for hill.  The things called crags perhaps set themselves off from the others as having particularly cliff intense faces, so that if you fell off of one you would plummet for a long way and die in a sudden impact rather than rolling down the steep sides of any of the other named features and be slowly bludgeoned to death somewhere on the way down. 

 

That is all an aside from the fact that we had a nice though demanding walk mostly down hill through beautiful scenery and two seasons worth of changing weather.  The only reason I can still read the map I was using is that it’s a plastic coated, rainproof map.  It was an odd mix of rain sun and wind.  Mom and I both had our rainproofs on the whole time – as windbreakers when it wasn’t actually raining – but our trousers got rained on just enough and blown dry just enough that they were never damp enough to be chilly nor dry enough to feel really dry.  The track was usually stony and often steep.  Every so often, a pair or a pack of serious English walkers would go steaming by us – most in the opposite direction, doing the walk uphill for greater spiritual benefit. 

 

The walk called for a small amount of clever navigating, which I managed.  There were several times I thought I might be lost, but every time we came upon an indubitable landmark, it turned out we were right where we were supposed to be and more or less could only have arrived there by the official route. 

 

We eventually made it back to the valley floor at the foot of one feature I actually do remember – Castle Crag.  It does look quite a bit like a ruined castle and is sheer cliffs most of the way around.  We saw it from three sides and under many different lighting cues on our way, and it was beautiful.

 

Most of the rest of the way back was along the edge of Derwent Water, the lake that the theatre is by in Keswick.  Our route took us through a number of named woods, all of them lovely, tiny, and clearly carefully tended.  One was fairly marshy, so there were boardwalks in places.  Out on the lake, we watched a little motor launch make its way between various landing stages, and debated the wisdom of flagging it down to cut the walk short, but in the end we made it all the way to the town of Portinscale, where we put the lake off to our right and crossed a couple of sheep fields back into Keswick. 

 

Garmin facts:  I forgot to charge the batteries in the GPS, so I’m relying on the guide to say that the walk proper was 8 and a half miles while various walking around town and out to the theatre and back brought us very close to 10 total for the day. 

 

Back to the hotel for a quick wash and change of clothes.  We had dinner at the Bank Tavern at our landlady’s recommendation – it was a good dinner that we were ready for.  I forgot to mention earlier that all we’d had for lunch had been a sort of giant, soft scone called a plum loaf that we’d bought in the morning from a bakery called Bryson’s – just like the travel writer.  It was good, but while I describe it as “giant” when we ate it after 4 miles on the trail, after the last 5 miles from lunch to our B&B, it seemed it had gotten a lot smaller.

 

Dinner was quick enough that we got to the theatre in time to see both student festival productions, and if the Bank Tavern had served a bit more slowly, we’d have had a better evening.  It turns out that this festival in Keswick is kin to a group of similar festivals all over the UK that amount to the out of town tryouts for productions that will eventually be selected from to be performed at the National Theatre in London.  I suspect the first show is unlikely to make the cut.  I have forgotten a comforting amount about it already and hope with time to put it completely behind me.  The second was better, although it started more than half an hour late due to technical difficulties.

 

In both cases, the main thing wrong with the productions was not the young actors.  The program we saw part of is the opposite of Young Playwrights Theater in Washington.  YPT has kids write plays then presents them with adult actors.  The theory is that kids have things to say, but not necessarily the skills to say those things.  This worked the other way.  Professional playwrights were asked to churn out plays appropriate for young people to produce.  The results were laden with heavy handed themes and showed signs of having been written in a hurry. 

 

There is an English theater custom that allows the audience to have ice cream in their seats during intermission, and it was only that that saved the evening from being a total frost.

 

Today (Friday, last of April), we decided that we didn’t want to do any heavy walking, so we instead loaded up the car and drove out to a few of the cultural sights around the area.  We started at Dove Cottage where Wordsworth lived for a number of years in his late youth.  You can look up any facts you want about the cottage on the web, but I will say it looked a nice place to live if you were, as Wordsworth was, much wealthier than any of the locals and so could put all your time into taking refreshing, inspiring walks around the district then dictating the resulting poetry to your sister or wife. 

 

It is not lost on me that I am also playing the role of wealthy literary dilettante walking through England, but I’m producing a light, brief journal rather than my weight in romantic poetry. 

 

The guide at the cottage told us stories that were well chosen to evoke a sense of the place when the Wordsworths lived there.  The most interesting fact was that it wasn’t just them.  Other romantic poets, and one literary drug addict lived with them most of the time as well, so by the time they had a few children, it really was a good time to move house to a larger place a few miles away, which is exactly what they did; apparently failing to get rid of the hangers on in the transition. 

 

At the museum, there was a good exhibit about a fellow named Hazlett who wrote a book full of character sketches of major 18th century figures.  The exhibit had paintings of the figures captioned with pull quotes from Hazlett’s book.  It was interesting enough that I’m putting this in my journal primarily to remind myself to think about reading it sometime.

 

From Dove Cottage, we drove on to the village of Ambleside.  There were a number of spots we wanted to see there including, I thought, Hill Top – Beatrix Potter’s home.  In fact, Hill Top is a few miles away and was closed on a Friday anyway.  There were still a promising garden a short (though it turned out hilly) walk away and the site and some of the foundations of a Roman fort.  Ambleside is also a great place to walk around in its own write.  Pretty, slate buildings on winding lanes.  We put in about 3 miles in and around town, possibly a bit more, but as this was nominally a day off from walking, I’m estimating low. 

 

The garden we visited is a national trust property called Stagshaw Garden. It’s a romantic style garden set into a steep hillside and planted with mostly flowering shrubs including some of the most exuberant rhododendron I’ve ever seen.  The place was a riot of colors and shapes of blossoms.  It was a flower intense walk, because the wood above the garden that we’d walked through on the way was carpeted with bluebells and little yellow flowers the names of which escape me.  I took a few snaps of flowers that I’ll include with the journal.  One of them was, I think, a primrose which I snapped because Sara grew up on Primrose Road.  If I’m wrong, and it’s really some other kind of flower, it was still a pretty yellow.

 

We did come to Cumbria at a good time for flowers.  Lots of stuff is in bloom, although the rafts of daffodils, most of which can apparently be blamed on one of Wordsworth’s better known poems were mostly past their prime.  I should have mentioned while I was writing about Borrowdale that the hills are covered in many places with a plant called gorse that has a tough, evergreen looking body and right now vibrant yellow orange flowers.  They appear as singles in some places and as whole fields in others.  I’ll leave the description here rather than editing back, because it was only on Friday that we learned what they’re called.  The main reason they are so numerous is that they are too tough and spiny for the sheep to eat.  Where they grow across paths, they’re viewed as a nuisance by walkers, but so far they’ve stayed out of our way and make nice décor.

 

After some tea and scone back in Ambleside, I fetched the car and we drove the most frightening piece of road I ever need to drive through a narrow pass to another lake, the Ullswater.  Mom says the scenery all the way was great.  I mostly saw how narrow the lanes were and how rapidly drivers from the other direction were coming at me, many with a substantial portion of their cars in my (did I mention it was narrow?) lane. 

 

Eventually we got back to the flat land, and realized we were going to survive.  We stopped at a parking area that was the trail head for a short (but hilly) walk to a waterfall called Aira Force.  The walk went along the sides of a wonderful gorge, constantly wet with spray and draped in thick green mosses.  Very much like some of the gorges Sara and I walked up off the Columbia River Gorge in Washington and Oregon last summer.  Just stunning.  When we finally got to the bottom of the falls, I was amused to see that the only spot that gave a really good view because of the way the rock projects around the falls is a spot that is always covered in mud because the spray from the falls washes down bits of earth that pool there.  Maybe the romantic poets were getting to me, but it seemed as though dirty boots were the price of admission to get the best view of the falls.

 

We took the less hilly other bank back to the car park, then drove back to Keswick with no furtherterrifying incidents.  We made a quick turn to try to get to the internet café in town before closing.  We made it in time, but they reported technical difficulties, so I’ll try again in the morning. 

 

We walked to Fitz Park to watch some kids practice soccer, cricket, and, I think, some Cumbrian wrestling.  We took a river side path back towards our B&B.  Lounged around a little bit and cleaned up.  Had a serviceable Italian dinner.  Walked around the town square a little.  This is the beginning of a three day weekend for the UK, so we’d been told to expect crowds, but if they’ve arrived yet, they’re all too tired from the trip to be out this evening.  We headed back to the B&B for the night.  Total walking was somewhere between 5 and 6 miles, but some of it was at least on the flat. 

 

I spent the last few hours going through my photos and writing this, with which I am now done for the moment.  And so to bed.