Flood

I remember the old black Morris that struggled up hills and how my dad used to switch off the engine to let it roll silently down again (to save petrol) and the particular struggle he had getting over Shap Fell.

One year on our way to visit relatives we diverted from calling on my mother’s cousins and ended up in a dusty triangular shaped building. We walked from one end to the other, nothing much to see I thought and forgot about it. Years later I realised this was the dam that had been built to drown the valley and village of Mardale Green in Cumbria to provide a reservoir for the burgeoning city of Manchester and my appetite grew to discover more.

Mardale

The countryside here is remote and it doesn’t take much romancing to think of the idyll of mountains, waters and green pastures, it must have been entrancing a valley enclosed on three sides without traffic except the odd bicycle and car and only the sound of sheep calling, birdsong, and the school/ church bell tinkling among the greensward, but as in all good tales this wasn’t to last.

Manchester was left out on a limb after Liverpool turned to North Wales, another source was needed and Mancunian eyes turned to Haweswater, the highest and remotest lake in the Lake District. In 1919 Manchester Corporation secured the Haweswater Act which gave the go-ahead for the creation of a new reservoir from the lake and large catchment area. It was agreed that the lake be increased from 2 1/2 to 4 miles long, the water level to 96 feet. Sir Edward Holt stating: “ In my opinion Haweswater is presently very much over-rated. It will be more beautiful in years to come.”

As a huge amount of “manpower” was needed, a village of small bungalows was to be built on the fellside at the entrance to the valley, called Burnbanks. Work on building the dam began in 1930, was postponed because of lack of finance and recommenced in 1934.

construction of the dam

Some of the workers left to join the forces when war broke out, but building continued and was completed in 1942. So the valley became a lake with the old road submerged, the farms, church, the Dun Bull Hotel blown up by the Territorials and only the school survived, being dismantled and rebuilt near Burnbanks. Several thousand people gathered for the last church service with loudspeakers fastened to the church tower. The Bishop of Carlisle stressed he didn’t weep for Mardale as sacrifices had to be made to help the urban populations, the stones of the building to be used for the draw-off tower and the graves had all been relocated.

Just think of the mixed feelings, the intense sorrow of the small community the loss of everything they had ever known, being without choice, knowing their homes were wiped out never to be revisited but maybe, just maybe a few people who are seeing new beginnings, new prospects before them.

Today, it still feels cut off from the rest of the lakes but it is known for the only Golden Eagles in the country. It is still a wonderful setting tinged with mystery which a cohort of the faithful visit after a particularly dry season when magically those low stone walls, remnants of field and track and bridge appear and can be walked on as though there is no permanence to their drowning.

Haweswater

I couldn’t find a poem about Haweswater or Mardale so opted for poem XL from Housman’s 'A Shropshire Lad ':

Blue Remembered Hills

Into my heart an air that kills

From yon far country blows:

What are those blue-remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.

Thanks for reading, 

Cynthia.

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Walking Lakeland Magic

 by 

 K D Grace

   

Surely there is no other place in this whole wonderful world quite like Lakeland...no other so exquisitely lovely, no other so charming, no other that calls so insistently across a gulf of distance. All who truly love Lakeland are exiles when away from it.
     --Alfred Wainwright

It was difficult to write this post and keep it under ten thousand words. The insistent call of Lakeland that Wainwright talks about is, for me, a rather wordy call – a trilogy’s worth so far, not counting all the blog posts and emails and stories still in my head to be written.

As a walker, I’ve come to believe that one can never truly know the soul of a place until one walks it. A car can never take you to the heart of the land. I know of streams and springs in Lakeland where the water tastes better than the best wine. At Rannerdale Knots, I’ve walked in a valley that was once secret. Every spring it’s awash in bluebells. According to the legend, each flower represents a fallen Norse invader defeated by the local Cumbrians in the late 11^th or early 12^th century. There are lots of ghosts in Lakeland, and some take such lovely forms. I’ve been on the roof of England at the summit of Scafell Pike, and I’ve been into the bowels of Cumbria in the slate mines beneath Fleetwith Pike. And always on foot, because there’s something about putting one foot in front of the other that brings the landscape and it’s magic into me and transforms it to story.

One of the things I love best about the Lakeland fells is what can be seen from high places. From the fell tops, I can view a landscape I could never see from the valley below. A big part of magic, and a big part of writing, is to find that place where I can see differently, where I can understand differently than I have before. Sometimes that means not seeing with my eyes.

I got caught in the mist once while walking the Newland Horseshoe, which is a ridge walk near Keswick. Suddenly everything that was familiar was gone. Walking in the mist is like being in another world, an ether-world, a place where any kind of magic could happen. It wasn’t that difficult to imagine ghosts and witches and demons. It was a familiar walk, an area I knew well, a safe place, and yet suddenly, in the mist, it was an alien landscape.

 

The magic of the land is in the people as well, and in what they’ve left behind. Much of Lakeland is a manmade landscape. Forests have been stripped away in ancient times to make way for sheep. Great gouges and mountains of tailings scar the fell sides from a long history of mining and quarrying. Against all odds nature has still taken back her own, reclaimed it and transformed it into bones laid bare, yet still alive and flourishing and achingly beautiful.

I’ve walked the perimeter of Castlerigg stone circle at both sunrise and sunset. Castlerigg is a circle embraced by a greater circle, a circle of fells, a reminder that people were practicing magic in the thrall of Lakeland long before I magicked a story set there. 

I understand why. I understand it with my feet, and somehow understanding it with my feet makes it fit closer to my heart.

***  

K D Grace is a celebrated author of erotic fiction. Her most recent titles have  been set firmly in a magical version of the Lakes and include: Body Temperature & Rising and Riding the Ether - available from all good book shops. 

For more information about K D Grace, and her alter ego Grace Marshall, visit: 

http://kdgrace.co.uk/

http://gracemarshallromance.co.uk/

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