Unlocked in the Lakes

We are in the Lakes…..plenty of room…..come and join us. So ran the text, and for the first time in fourteen months I am crossing the border, the wide motorway funnelling me southwards. I am unreeling. Unreal.

I find the house perched on the hillside above Coniston, facing east towards the lake and the sun. My son, Andrew, emerges and behind him Sharon. They have not told the girls I am coming. There follows a joyful confusion of surprise, laughter and hugs.

The sundrenched garden is a magical kingdom — a miniature castle, church, little bridges over the runnel, all built with tiny chips of slate.

A little bridge, and Lucy…...

And a Magnolia tree with twisted branches and candle-white blooms, luminous, and ‘the leaves were full of children’.

Magnolia tree with Ava…...

…then she flits away

The garden is jewelled with birdsong. I am woken, as I am at home, by the mellifluous blackbird at four. Then the chorus sparks up, fairy-lit with robin, blue-tit, chaffinch, dunnock, greenfinch, chiff-chaff and, always, the distant crooning of the woodpigeon.

.

Evening, and we walk by the lake. We come to a shingly beach and the obligatory stone-skimming takes place. Andrew is a good skimmer. Lucy, 7, does her best. My creaky joints protest at the unaccustomed motion. Sharon looks on, bemused. Ava, 10, points to a tiny rivulet cutting through the shingle. ‘Erosion,’ she says.

*

The slate path by Langdale Beck leads away from Elterwater. The silver-grey ripples and currents as they chatter along betoken the flux of time as it speeds from one moment to the next, taking our fleeting thoughts and feelings with it. We enter the woods where the banks are a haze of bluebells

Ava and the bluebells

An astonishment of blue, then to look west through the lakeside trees to the unmistakable profile of the Langdale Pikes topped with May snow.

The Langdales from Elterwater

The stream has become the River Rathay and now thrusts its way over and through the fist of rocks at Skelwith Force, an exhilaration of the elemental power of water, to be both felt and feared. Ava is not a little concerned as Dad and Grandad edge ever closer to the brink to get a good photo.

Skelwith Force

Our path leads through fields abounding with ewes and their little black Herdwick lambs, then through a plantation of tall trees where we find a sunny spot to sit on the mossy ground to eat our picnic, Sharon’s unbeatable cheese and pickle sandwiches. The vigorous song of a chaffinch rings through the vaults of the tree trunks.

A little further one, hidden away in Moss Rigg Wood, lie old slate quarries. As early as the 16th Century, gangs of men quarried here for green slate for roofs and walling.

We find the stony path which opens out into the sudden and breathtaking surprise of Cathedral Cavern. A vast cave…you could be in York Minster…seemingly propped up by a massive central buttress. One end opens to the upper air, brilliant with sunshine, and towering rock faces beyond. The cavernous space echoes with reverential voices and the click of smartphones.

As we leave I notice the ancient graffiti on the wall and the primitive cave drawing of a prehistoric sheep.

Our way back takes us across Slater Bridge, a trim stone structure, 400 years old, spanning the little stream that flows out of Little Langdale Tarn.

Slater Bridge

Then the long descent down a stony track to Elterwater again. We have to queue, bemasked, at the Britannia Inn until we are shown a table. But then, O joy, my first pint of handpulled bitter in fourteen months!

Cheers!

*

The sunshine is promising as we walk down to the lake. On the shore by the jetty the busy-body mallards await with their broods of scurrying ducklings. Ava and Lucy get up close. I buy them some duck food which they scatter liberally….not the best idea, as it happens, resulting as it does in a violent bar-room duck brawl.

Almost as soon as we set off in our little motor-boat it starts to rain and this modest craft has no wipers. We take turns at the wheel as we nose slowly down the lake. Little boathouses go by, private jetties, stacks of kayaks at some outdoor centre, quiet stretches of shore and hillside farmhouses, a mist-shrouded Old Man. Our hour is almost up so we turn back.

*

Another day, another boat, this time the motor launch which in better days sails a circuit of Derwentwater with various landings on the way. Now it is simply the Hawse End Shuttle ferrying passengers the ten minute ride from the lakeside at Keswick to the opposite shore which for most uf us is the starting point for an ascent of Catbells.

Catbells from the boat…..Ava and Lucy

Who better than the famed fellwanderer, Alfred Wainwright, to describe the allure of this little mountain?

Catbells is one of the great favourites, a family fell where grandmothers and infants can climb the heights together, a place beloved. Its popularity is well deserved: its shapely topknot attracts the eye, offering a steep but obviously simple scramble to the small summit; its slopes are smooth, sunny and sleek; its position overlooking Derwentwater is superb.

A page from Wainwright’s ‘North Western Fells’

My family is no stranger to Catbells. I have a photograph of another granddaughter, Martha, when she was little more than a toddler, sitting on the grassy slopes pointing at the distant view.

Today it is as popular as ever, but without the usual quota of children. They should be in school, but this is a far better place to be I think. Most climbers are familiar with false summits and in this respect Catbells does not disappoint — there are two. Up we go. The path is steep and we gain height quickly. The surrounding fells reveal themselves in a fine panorama, and our spirits ascend too, raised by air, light and the pulsing blood. On such ascents nowadays my method is to find bottom gear and plod steadily upwards, preferably without stopping. The concept of a steady pace is, however, alien to children. For Lucy, impressively speedy sprints alternate with frequent collapses by the wayside.

Ava is a little more measured and comes into her own when we get to the final rock scramble where she nips up like a nimble goat..

From its modest 1400ft the views from Catbells summit could not be better: across the Newlands Valley to Grisedale Pike, Hindscarth and Robinson, with the snout of Causey Pike in the foreground; to the south you can just see Pike o’ Stckle in the Langdales; across the lake, the brilliant snowcapped skyline of Helvellyn, Dollywagon and Fairfield; then Skiddaw and Blencathra to the north.

The Lake District is its own kingdom which abides in the memory and in the imagination long after you have left it. We find a little hollow for our picnic — cheese and pickle sandwiches — before descending the steep, stony path to the lake below. There is no launch to pick us up at Brandelhow, so we walk back through the woods to complete our circuit. From the heady, airy crests of Catbells we find ourselves among the shifting shadows of a woodland path by the shore of Derwentwater.

Some lakeside trees hang out from the bank by the tentacles of their roots, exposed by wind and wet. ‘Erosion,’ says Ava. She has been ‘doing’ erosion at school and takes a keen interest in such things. In shafts of sunlight we ponder erosion and I show her varieties of lichen on the stones and tree bark.

Ava among the roots

We saunter back to Hawse End to await the launch. Five souls laced with the same genes, five heavenly bodies whose orbits sometimes align and sometimes don’t. In a space by the path, a large timber sculpture of hands, palms upwards…..

Two birds in the hand….

*

I wake to rain sweeping across Coniston Water, not that it silences my blackbird. ‘Time to move on, time to get going, what lies ahead I have no way of knowing,’ the words of Tom Petty in my head. The scene in my rear-view mirror — the house, the garden full of voices, the waving — is already memory. Through the driving rain the car picks up speed as it arrows north. Unreal. I am being reeled back in to arrive where I started and, in Eliot’s words, ‘to know the place for the first time.’