Calgarth and its fine woods, just under Orrest, is the oldest and perhaps the most notable place on the lake, partly because in ancient times the well-known family of Phillipson lived there, though in a former house, a dare-devil race in the Civil War period, one of whom, known as Robert the Devil, did all sorts of heady things. The _skulls of Calgarth_, too, which occupied niches in the old hall and could never be got rid of, wherever flung to, always returning to their place on the wall, are a treasured legend of the district. But the present mansion and woods of Calgarth are little more than a century old, and are the work of another Lakeland luminary of the Wordsworthian period. Bishop Watson, officially of Llandaff but otherwise of Calgarth, is famous in ecclesiastical history and of immortal memory in Wales, not for the things he did, but rather for the things he left undone. For he was bishop of Llandaff for about thirty years, and only once visited his diocese in that period, preferring the life of a country gentleman at Windermere. [Illustration: CONISTON LAKE] Precisely parallel to Windermere, a little more than half its length and half its breadth, and four miles to the westward, lies Coniston, its head in the mountains, its foot almost trenching on another, and virtually lowland, country. There can be no doubt whatever about the presiding genii of Coniston, the "Old Man" in the substance and Ruskin in the shadow, if one may put it that way, having no rivals. The hills crowd finely around their leader, the "Allt-maen" (lofty rock), at the lake-head, as our artist well shows. As the lake shoots southward, however, in a straight line, without any conspicuous curves or headlands, and no heights comparable to those it leaves behind, one feels upon thus looking down it that Coniston lacks something of the fascination which never flags at any part of the other lakes. If Windermere, too, trails away from the mountains, it does so in glorious bends and headlands, curves and islands, and has an opulence of detail and colouring all its own. But if Coniston, with its straight unbroken stretch all fully displayed, and framed in a fashion less winsome than Windermere, and less imposing than Ullswater, "lets you down" a little on arriving at its head, looking upward from its centre it assuredly lacks nothing, while the view from Ruskin's old home of Brantwood, perched high among woods upon the eastern shore, commands all that is best of it. After thirty years of intermittent residence here, Ruskin was buried in the churchyard at Coniston, exactly half a century after Wordsworth had been laid to rest at Grasmere. A generation later than his great predecessor he has Coniston to himself. And if the points of divergence between the two seers have been more than sufficiently insisted upon, it is from the very fact, perhaps, that in intellect and temperament they had so much in common. THE HEART OF LAKELAND RYDAL AND GRASMERE