The English LakesBradley, A. G. (Arthur Granville)
History
The English Lakes
Bradley, A. G. (Arthur Granville)
Lake District (England)
The memory of one of these spectacles on Hayswater, but a mile or so
distant, is suggested by the little hamlet of Low Hartsop at the mouth
of a lateral glen that comes in just where the valley widens somewhat,
bringing with it Hayswater beck to join the Goldrill, which last has run
through Brotherswater. Hartsop Hall is a plain, rugged old manor house
overhung with trees on the Kirkstone shore of the lake, long the abode
of sheep farmers, but possessed of the inconvenient disability of a
public right-of-way through the centre, now presumably lapsed.
But till a few years ago a venerable champion of popular rights, or
perhaps merely a humorist with plenty of spare time, used to make an
annual pilgrimage here, and walk in at the front door and out at the
back without any ceremony.
Low Hartshope itself is a group of some half-dozen mellow and mossy
homesteads, planted irregularly above the beck at any time within the
last five centuries. Fine old trees of sycamore, ash, and oak spread a
protecting mantle of foliage over this snug and ancient haunt of
dalesmen--a little patch of leafy opulence between the stern walls of
fell that rise sharply on either hand. One or two houses of the group,
representing, one might fancy, the proportionate decline of population
in the dales, are falling or have long ago fallen into ruins. Moss and
ferns, stone-crop and saxifrage, have seized alike upon both the
abandoned and the fallen, upon the sagging flagstone roof which covers
neither more nor less of the exposed weather-stained oak rafters than it
did ten years ago, upon the fallen stones of a more completed ruin
slowly sinking into the ground. Here may be seen, too, the deep,
oldfashioned spinning galleries thrust out from the upper story and
covered by an extension of the roof, invaluable not merely for the
summer air, but for the lack of winter daylight in those massive,
low-browed, small-windowed fortresses where the thrifty dalesmen dwelt.
Wordsworth has celebrated a pretty old tradition that the spindles ran
truer after the sheep had mounted the hill for their night's rest.
Now beneath the starry sky
Crouch the widely scattered sheep,
Ply the pleasant labour, ply,
For the spindle while they sleep
Runs with motion smooth and fine,
Gathering up a trustier line.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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