Rainy Day Rambles

in and around the Lake District

John Self Drakkar Press

Rainy Day Rambles includes the first ever published extracts from a controversial file of documents recently discovered in a derelict barn in Aspatria, Cumbria. The documents appear to have been written for the Cumberland Courier but were never published, presumably because their content was deemed detrimental to the image of the Lake District as a paradise for tourists.

derwentwater

Council Head Loses his Head

      There were chaotic scenes at the recent North Lakeland District Council meeting when Mr Dick Burrow, head of Cumbria County Council’s Transport Services, reacted furiously to complaints from local residents over the condition of roads and paths after the recent snowfalls.
      After a series of concerns were raised at the meeting, he literally exploded:
      “These nimby-pimby, whiney-twiney, feckle-fainted, lilac-livered, supermarket-shopping, wine-sipping, Southern offcomers don’t know what a winter is. Why, my parents really looked forward to six months of blizzards. ‘They blew away the flies’ they said. My father was out tramping the drifts every day, looking for buried sheep and old Mrs Hargreaves from High Dudgeon. Yesterday I saw a woman, eighty if a day, on the icy path to the delicatessen in her slippers. ‘That’s why they’re called slippers’ I told the crumpled heap. People should get a grip. Use crampons. They complain that the roads are dangerous. Too bloody right, they are dangerous. You can’t expect my men to go out in those conditions”.
      County councillors spent hours picking up his pieces.

Photo: Treacherous road conditions forced Keswick residents onto an even more treacherous frozen Derwentwater.

Low Brow Opening

Details of the new season of cultural events were today announced by Abigail Sparti, Cumbria’s cultural commissar. “It is important” she said “to invigorate the mind, as well as the body, of our visitors, and also to give them something to do if it rains, as it does from time to time”. The highlight of the new programme is undoubtedly the long-awaited opening to the public of Low Brow, which was once the home of Willie Black, the ‘Bard of Bowness’.
Ms Sparti said “We are all excited by this addition to Cumbria’s cultural scene. I have yet to visit the Willie Black exhibition myself but I am sure that it will provide a valuable insight into the life and work of one of Cumbria’s greatest men of literature”.

      The National Truss, supporter of all that is great in Great Britain, has carefully restored the property to the exact condition it was in when Willie died in 1965. Low Brow is therefore a time capsule of an amazing life. Packed full of the bric-a-brac and debris of a shambolic existence, the cottage appears as if Willie had just wandered out for a smoke. Every room contains subtle references to images in the poems, as only those familiar with them will recognise. The cottage garden is an overgrown, haphazard jungle of brambles, weeds and shrubs, just as Willie always ignored it.
      Wilhelmina Black was born in 1924 in Bootle to working-class parents who cleaned and walked the streets of Liverpool. Her childhood took her through the Great Depression, but she was depressed ever after, as reflected in her poetry. She remained true to her roots when in 1946 she moved to the ramshackle cottage of Low Brow, near Bowness, where she wrote gritty poems about the workers of Cumbria, the sheep farmers, the foresters, the bobbin makers, the slate quarriers, the miners of Workington, and the shipbuilders of Barrow, with all of whom she felt much kinship.
      Willie was patronised by the upper classes of Cumbria but she didn’t mind as long as they bought her poems. It was they who dubbed her the ‘Bard of Bowness’. “Pretentious prats” said Willie. “You’d think I sold ice-creams rather than poems the way they come knocking on my door asking for one”.
      Visitors to Low Brow will see the workshop where all her poems were hammered out. Beside the battered typewriter lie half a decade of the Daily Worker, half-smoked Woodbines, half-drunk bottles of Guinness, half-eaten potted meat sandwiches, and half-completed poems, indicating the suddenness of her demise, or her slovenliness.
      Her bedroom is as it was, with no roof. Willie liked to lie gazing at the moon and stars, seeking inspiration. She rarely received it: saturation, yes, but inspiration, no.
      The National Truss has re-installed Reggie, Willie’s long-term partner, who devoted his life to supporting her genius. Now 88, he goes slowly through his old routines in the kitchen, which include preparing tripe sandwiches that gourmands may sample in the generously-provisioned bistro tucked away in the nearby copse.
      The main, but still tiny, room of the cottage has the same chandeliers, looking absurdly out of place amongst the dereliction, that were installed by grateful electricians so memorably eulogised in her Elegiac Stanzas to Electricity and Those Who Bring It To Us. In this room, Willie gave readings to adoring visitors, especially to workers from the Ruhr valley, where she was a cult figure.
      The outside toilet is - well, let’s not go there.

      Visitors should note that there is limited free parking. In fact, there is none at all. Willie Black did not want a road to Low Brow and the National Truss wants Low Brow to remain as it was, preserved for everyone, for ever. Coach parties must ring up in advance to be told that they cannot come. All visitors must walk along the clearly signposted five-mile track from Windermere railway station. The track is narrow and can be very busy, so visitors are advised to allow extra time during peak periods such as summer holidays and Willie Black’s birthday (October 5th) and deathday (April 28th).

Photo: The Low Brow parlour.

Notes:
• Low Brow was closed shortly after it opened. A wall fell on four visitors. They survived. The wall didn't. The National Truss wanted to restore the building to its previous unstable state but planning permission was refused.

Four Men in Their Boots, Day 5

... Glenridding ...
      After breakfast Thomas said that he needed to replenish stocks at the Glenridding shop, the first chance to do so since we had set off from Windermere. I asked if he needed any help but he insisted not, although the others stayed with him, reflecting perhaps some lingering resentment over the events of yesterday. I left them to it and ambled down to the pier, where the aimless splicing of mainbraces was oddly reassuring.
      I felt sorry for Thomas. He was doing a fine job on the food front but I knew that he was suffering stoically, from a lack of cake. He had dutifully supplied us with those sawdusty congealed-fruit energy bars when I was sure that, if it were practical, he would have preferred to have carried several large cakes around the fells.
      Thomas liked cakes as Wainwright liked fells. He was besotted with them. Every spare moment, when he wasn’t tackling one, he was writing about them. He kept a detailed database of cakes. He wrote recipes. He wrote reviews. He wrote letters to the newspapers about cakes. He was an expert witness at the notorious Jaffa trial, which concluded that cakes differ from biscuits by going hard not soft as they age. Thomas insisted that you should be able to tell a cake from its taste alone. For Thomas, dessert was the main course of a meal and cake was the only dessert. But he preferred cake at tea-time, for then his stomach would be empty and his concentration full, on the cake.
      The only thing that Thomas did not like about cakes was their names. It annoyed him that there was no rhyme or reason to them: cakes were named after places (Black Forest gateau, Eccles cake, ...) or ingredients (cheesecake, carrot cake, ...) or function (birthday cake, mooncake, ...) or people (Battenberg, Lamington, ...) or shape (Swiss roll, ...) or the way they are cooked (upside-down cake, stack cake, ...) or a fanciful allusion (angel cake, red velvet cake, ...), and so on. On those very rare occasions when Thomas came across a new cake it frustrated him that he could not tell from its name what sort of cake it was. What, for example, is a buccellato?
      Being a chemist, Thomas appreciated the benefits of a scientific naming scheme. He could predict something about 1,2,3-trihydroxypropane but not about glycerol. He wondered why it couldn’t be the same for cakes. So he invented his own scheme. He used four ‘dimensions’ to define all cakes: place of origin, shape, main ingredient(s), and function(s). A Lamington cake is an Australian, cuboid, coconut and chocolate, dessert cake. A buccellato is a Sicilian, ring-shaped, fig and nut, christening and Christmas cake. He proposed his classification scheme to the editors of the Journal of Gateauphilia but so far they haven’t adopted it.
      I wandered back to the shop. They were waiting outside. “All ready? Then, let’s be off. After yesterday, today will be a piece of cake”. Thomas glared at me, as I knew he would.
... Striding Edge ...
      A gentle drizzle, soothing and refreshing, fell as we climbed Birkhouse Moor. We soon reached the Hole-in-the-Wall, for after a few days of good walking we were now well into our stride, with no handicaps other than Harry’s blisters, Richard’s sore knee and Thomas’s stomach pains.
      I led the team on to Striding Edge, scrambling along the very razor’s edge of the ridge, for there is nothing to compare with having precipitous slopes dropping down on both sides. The others, I noticed, preferred the safer paths slightly below the crest.
      As we scrambled along, nose to rock in places, we noticed that the rocks were covered in scrapes. This I assumed to be caused by the hobnail boots of ice-walkers. But, as I looked around, I realised that my team was inadequately garbed and that almost every other walker had a pair of sticks, which they seem to use to poke and probe around the rocks. I thought that walking sticks were for the infirm but here they seemed to be an essential aid to nearly all walkers, old and young. I like to get to grips with the rocks with hands, knees, elbows, buttocks, or any other extremity, but this new breed of walker seemed to prefer to keep the rocks at stick’s length.
      After we emerged onto the Helvellyn plateau and had settled slightly off the beaten path for a bite, we had ample opportunity to study walking stick techniques. On Striding Edge they seemed more of a hindrance than a help but here on top they enabled walkers to bowl along in style. In many different styles, in fact. Some thrust the sticks out in step with the legs, some put the stick out opposite to the leg, some put two sticks out (like off-piste skiers), some used the sticks haphazardly to prod rocks they didn’t like the look of, but our favourite style, determined after a thorough scientific study, was that of a young woman who had tied the two sticks to her belt to protrude, fore and aft, like buffers and then ignored them.
... The Helvellyn Memorials ...
      We ambled over to look at the memorials, which some consider to add a romantic air to the fells. One commemorates the death of Charles Gough in 1803 or, rather, the sentimental fact that his dog stayed by his side for three months until his body was found. We are supposed to be impressed and inspired by this.
      The memorial was not erected until 1890, by which time the facts of the case had been well mythologised. Did Mr Gough die instantly from some accident, or did he lie injured for some considerable time? If the latter, I would be more impressed if the dog had run back for help, as Lassie did on so many happy occasions. And dare we ask how the dog survived for three months?
      A second memorial marks the landing of a plane on Helvellyn on December 22nd 1926. The pilots are named as John Leeming and Bert Hinkler. The latter achieved fame in 1928 for the first solo flight from England to Australia, but, not being a woman, not as much fame as Amy Johnson did for her flight in 1930.
      In the course of my thorough preparations for this expedition, I had investigated this matter, in order to enlighten my team along the way. I can confirm that December 22nd 1926 was, as you’d expect, a day when the snow and ice was thick upon Helvellyn. It was not a day that anyone would choose to land a plane there. So, why did they? It is said to have been a publicity stunt. But, if so, what were they publicising? Themselves and their plane, presumably. But there seem to be no photographs - why not?
      So, did they, in fact, land a plane on Helvellyn? There was said to be one independent witness, a ‘professor’ who happened to be walking on Helvellyn. His or her name seems to have evaporated. In those days a professor was an unimpeachable pillar of society, unlike today. Weren’t the pilots lucky it wasn’t, say, an estate agent? They took off from Helvellyn over Striding Edge. Of course they did.
... Threlkeld ...
      We continued briskly on, up and over Whiteside Bank and Raise, and dropped down to Sticks Pass, so called because here those walking north from Helvellyn realise the uselessness of their sticks and throw them over the sides of the mountain. There they accumulate in great piles, to be rummaged through by skiers using the Raise ski tow and in need of extra ski sticks.
      We climbed the Dodds - Stybarrow, Watson’s and Great - which are neglected except by connoisseurs like myself, perhaps because they hardly require climbing. While the hordes queue to scramble nose-to-bottom along Striding Edge and down Swirral Edge for the later glow of achievement, hardly anyone bothers to walk the Dodds. We, however, appreciated the quiet, lonely, grassy expanses where we could stride out unhindered by others. It made a pleasant change not to have to be careful on every footstep not to trip over some rock or crag. We could stroll along, heads up, enjoying the panorama in all directions. A light drizzle obscured the view a little but we didn’t mind as it was so pleasantly refreshing.
      We hurried down to the Old Coach Road. The coaches became old by tackling this rough track but at least the travellers within them must have valued the Dodds more than the modern generation of tourists. We turned west, following the track, before dropping down to Threlkeld, our base for the night.

Photos: Mint cake (which was banished: the mention of cake was too much for Thomas); Striding Edge; The second memorial (which reads “The first aeroplane to land on a mountain in Great Britain did so on this spot on December 22nd 1926. John Leeming and Bert Hinkler in an Avro 585 Gosport landed here and after a short stay flew back to Woodford”. Who says so?)

Notes:
• Arthur's research into the landing on Helvellyn was incomplete. A Guardian article of 1926 described this alleged landing in some detail. It even named the witness: Professor E.R. Dodds, Professor of Greek at Birmingham University. It described Professor Dodds as "a man of very retiring disposition, and it was not generally known in Birmingham University quarters that he included mountaineering among his hobbies". That sounds suspicious!
• Further research has confirmed that Professor Dodds was indeed a real person, in so far as anyone who has a wikipedia page must be a real person. He later became President of the Society for Psychical Research, whose stated purpose is to understand events and abilities commonly described as psychic or paranormal. Perhaps the Helvellyn landing initiated such an interest.