6 70 Qlnrnell Intu^rattQ library BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF fi^nrg m. Sage 1891 §306" PAST AND PRESENT AT THE ENGLISH LAKES PUBLISHED BY JAMES MACLEHOSE AND SONS, GLASGOW Publishtrs to tlu anibsrsity MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD., LONDON New York The Macmillan Co. Toronto • The Macmillan Co. of Canada London • Sinipkin, Hamilton and Co. Cambridge Bowes and Boiues Edinburgh Douglas and Foulis Sydney Angus and Robertson Past and Present at the English Lakes By the Rev. H. D. Rawnsley Canon of Carlisle Author of " Literary Associations of the English Lakes," etc. Glasgow James MacLehose and Sons Publishers to the University 1916 6 M^^Til GLASGOW : PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT MACLRHOSE AND CO. LTD. ^^ n^ \' V. PREFATORY NOTE My thanks are due to those who have supplied the photographs for illustration. To Mr. Mayson for view from Helvellyn Top ; to Mr. Pettitt for Harter Fell and High Street from Mardale and for the Nag's Head, Wytheburn ; and to Mr. Abraham for the portrait of Mrs. Dixon. Specially must I thank Mrs. Jackson for allowing me to reproduce a photograph by Henry Mayson ot Keswick of the Old House of the Hechstetters. To Mr. F. C. Eeles for his photographs of the Consecration Crosses at Crosthwaite from which my wife made the drawing. To Mr. Ernest Coleridge for permission to have a photograph made of the portrait of Hartley Coleridge in his possession, which was painted the year before his death by William Bowness of Kendal, and which has been pronounced by those who remember the poet as a most excellent likeness. vi PREFATORY NOTE I make no apology for reproducing my article " on Gough and his Dog"; it has been many years out of print. H. D. RAWNSLEY. May 19 1 6. CONTENTS PAGE Sunrise on Helvellyn . i Reminiscences of Hartley Coleridge - - lo From Gowbarrow to Mardale and Back - - 37 - The German Miners at Keswick - - 64 The Home of the German Miners in Tyrol - 85 The Bluebells of the Duddon - - - . 102 The Consecration Crosses, St. Kentigern's Church, Crosthwaite 109 A Hundred Miles of Beauty at the Lakes - 119 The Story of Gough and His Dog - - - 153 At the Sign of the Nag's Head - - - 209 Crossing the Sands ------ 230 A Crack with Mrs. Dixon of Dove Cottage - 270 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Towards the Sunrise from Helvellyn Top Frontispiece Hartley Coleridge, aetat. 52 - - - - 16 Harter Fell and High Street from Mardale 48 The House of Daniel and Joyce Hechstetter 80 The Parish Church, Schwaz - - - - 96 The Consecration Crosses, Crosthwaite - - 112 The Nag's Head, Wytheburn - - - - 224 Mrs. Dixon 272 SUNRISE ON HELVELLYN When a few minutes after midnight on a morning of mid-June I went out into the cool night air, it was almost with a shock of surprise that I found Rydal-water and Grasmere lying ghostly grey beneath the grey hills. That Orion should have drawn his belted sword above Helm Crag, and that Cassiopeia should be sparkling above Stone Arthur, seemed a strange and unexpected thing, for the day had been one long golden glory from dawn to dusk, and the sunlight had so soaked into one's senses that it was difficult for a moment to realize that there ever could be night. I left the quiet village behind me and made my way to Tongue Ghyll. That was the rendezvous of my companions who had determined to ascend Helvellyn to see the new morning made. An owl hooted, a corncrake shook his rattle in the grass, and I heard the chirring of a nightjar. All else was silent. At Tongue Ghyll another sound blest our ears. It was the sound of falling water in the deep gully beneath us as we went by the grassy 2 PAST AND PRESENT AT THE LAKES upward path towards the 'intake' and the sheep- fold. I could not help remembering that one of my first two walks in the Lake Country was to the deep recesses of this Tongue Ghyll. The poet of Tongue Ghyll—Edward Thring—was with me, and I can remember to this day the enthusiasm with which he pointed out the particular beauty of rushing water-break and shadowy pool, and how enthusiastic he waxed as he described a rainbow which he so often came to see, springing from the shattered waterfall. Wise people who climb Helvellyn by way of the Grizedale Gap at night, should cross Tongue Ghyll near the sheepfold, and pass by the much less fatiguing incline on the eastern side of the beck toward the head of the valley. We were among the unwise, and more for happy memory of early days and other midnight ascents we determined to tackle 'The Tongue,' as it is called. This great upswelling moraine-mass is not easy going in the day time, but in the dusk of even, or midsummer night, when no moon is shining, it is a most laborious ascent. As we ascended, we seemed to see ahead of us an upstanding ebon wall, which, as we pushed on towards the face of the precipice, seemed to melt back into air. At last, hardly knowing how we had reached our goal, we found ourselves cresting the precipice SUNRISE ON HELVELLYN 3 height and sorrowfully descending into a bottom- less pit. All our labour of the upward climb appeared to have been lost. We stumbled on down a stony path and up a stonier one, with the cup of green-white sky above us, which we knew to be the Grizedale Gap : the flanks of Fairfield on one side and of Seat Sandal on the other stood up in the darkness, blank black barriers that bewildered us. Many a time had we descended from the Grizedale Gap with no precipice heights to left and right, but only the fern-clad slopes and purple shale of the Westmoreland hills on either side of us. But more black and more terrible in its steepness stood up the massive wall right ahead of us. Impossible of ascent it appeared ; but again, as we stumbled forward, this precipice in turn melted into thin air, and at last a little nick in the dark bastion which crowned the height, really only the wall of a common enclosure, made us know that we had gained the height, and in another moment should behold the water of Grizedale Tarn beloved of Faber the poet. Velvet dark it lay beneath us, except where, at the eastern end, it shone like polished steel toward the dawn. We stopped involuntarily with wonder at that first sign of morning beyond the vale of Ullswater. A great golden glow of level beauty was already shining through a curtain of violet and 4 PAST AND PRESENT AT THE LAKES amethyst. Fairfield and Cofa Pike and the dark bastions of St. Sunday Crag closed the gateway of the dawn on the right hand, and on the left rose up the dark outline of Helvellyn. Rounding the tarn and passing over meadow- land spongy and wet, our tired and somewhat bruised feet rejoiced in the elasticity of the turf beneath us, and turning our eyes from the pageant of the dawn we began the long zigzag of the Dolly-Waggon Pike, which should lead us to the summit and to our view-point for the rising sun. It is only when the climber turns his back upon the dawn at this point that he can understand the folding of the hill ranges out west, nor is there any vantage ground so good in the whole walk from which one can see the beauty of the slumbering hills westward, as from a point half way up Dolly- Waggon, where through the gap between Seat Sandal and Helvellyn, the eye is caught up from the grey Easedale hills and High Whitestones to far-off Wetherlam and the Scafell range. Though the path was steep and stony, the air was so refreshing and invigorating that we remem- bered how Keats, when he went through the morning air to the top of Skiddaw, described the effect of it " as if one were going to a tournament." Right and left of us the mountain pippets shook the air with their first morning song, and above us, SUNRISE ON HELVELLYN 5 as we neared the summit, came the bleating of lambs. The mountain sheep knew well that here they would be free from that midsummer plague, the flies, and further, they had come from the lower sultry levels of the dale for rest and cool ; this notwithstanding that the pasture was almost barren for them and in dewless contrast to the herbage of the lower slopes. Reaching the clifi^-crest of Dolly-Waggon, we saw the Grizedale Beck, a silver thread for several miles passing through purple shadow to the vale. Ullswater lay lifeless in the distance, and in strange contrast to the eastern glow stood up the dark shoulder of St. Sunday Crag. Rounding Dolly- Waggon Pike by easy path and almost a terrace walk, we had a grand view of the mass of Skiddaw to the north, saw Harrop Tarn gleam on its fell across the Thirlmere vale, and were able to under- stand the glory of Great Gable, the Pillar and the Haystacks and the mighty mass of the Scafell group that took the eye south towards the pinnacle of Bowfell and the ladder of Crinkle Crags. Dwarfed into nothingness by its mighty neigh- bours, the Langdale lion lifted its head out east, and Pike o' Blisco and Lingmoor seemed to obliterate Wrynose Gap and lead the eye to Grey- friars and Wetherlam.