From Gretna Green to Land's End: A Literary Journey in England.Bates, Katharine Lee
General
From Gretna Green to Land's End: A Literary Journey in England.
Bates, Katharine Lee
England -- Description and travel
A week at Ambleside, under Wansfell's "visionary majesties of light,"
went all too swiftly in the eager exploration of Grasmere and
Coniston, Hawkshead, Bowness, Windermere, and those "lofty brethren,"
the Langdale Pikes, with their famous rock-walled cascade, Dungeon
Ghyll. The coach-drive from Ambleside to Keswick carried us, at
Dunmailraise, across again from Westmoreland to Cumberland. Helvellyn
and Thirlmere dominated the way, but Skiddaw and Derwent Water claimed
our allegiance on arrival. What is counted the finest coach-drive in
the kingdom, however, the twenty-four-mile circuit from Keswick known
as the Buttermere Round, remained to bring us under a final
subjection to the silver solitude of Buttermere and Crummock Water and
the rugged menace of Honister Crag. The train that hurried us from
Keswick to Cockermouth passed along the western shore of pleasant
Bassenthwaite Water, but from Workington to Furness Abbey meres and
tarns, for all their romantic charm, were forgotten, while, the salt
wind on our faces, we looked out, over sand and shingle, on the dim
grey vast of ocean.
The Lake Country, it is often said, has no history. The tourist need
not go from point to point enquiring
"If here a warrior left a spell,
Panting for glory as he fell;
Or here a saint expired."
That irregular circle of the Cumberland Hills, varying from some forty
to fifty miles in diameter, a compact mass whose mountain lines shut
in narrow valleys, each with its own lake, and radiate out from
Helvellyn in something like a starfish formation, bears, for all its
wildness, the humanised look of land on which many generations of men
have lived and died; but the records of that life are scant.
There are several stone-circles, taken to be the remains of British
temples, the "mystic Round of Druid frame," notably Long Meg and her
Daughters, near Penrith, and the Druid's Circle, just out of Keswick.
About the Keswick circle such uncanny influences still linger that no
two persons can number the stones alike, nor will your own second
count confirm your first. Storm and flood rage against that mysterious
shrine, but the wizard blocks cannot be swept away. The Romans, who
had stations near Kendal, Penrith, and Ambleside, have left some
striking remembrances, notably "that lone Camp on Hardknott's height,"
and their proud road, still well defined for at least fifteen miles,
along the top of High Street ridge. A storied heap of stones awaits
the climber at the top of
"The long ascent of Dunmailraise."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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