After passing Wall-end, you are fairly upon the floor of the vale of Langdale, and crossing its fertile fields by a tolerable road, and the other branch of the Brathay by an equally tolerable bridge, you follow the road rather down the vale, till you reach the farm house of Mill-beck, where you must stable your steed, whilst you scramble about a quarter of a mile up the fell to look at Dungeon Ghyll. Arrived at the entrance of this famous “rock-dungeon,” where Coleridge says “three wicked sextons’ souls are pent,” and occasionally make a terrible rumpus with “bells of rock and ropes of air,” the devil answering “to the tale with a merry peal from Borrowdale,” you descend by a rude, but stout ladder into the watercourse. After clambering over some rather impracticable rocks, you obtain a full view of the fall, and declare it to be an ample recompense for your journey, had it been five times as toilsome. A perpendicular wall of solid rock rises on each side, scarcely three yards apart, to the height of one hundred feet. At the inner extremity of the chasm, about fifty yards from its external opening, and directly opposite to you as you enter, the water rushes in one clear unbroken fall, from a height of ninety feet, into a deep circular basin, whence a lamb, which had been dashed over the fall without injury, was rescued from drowning by Mr Wordsworth, to await the legitimate fate of all lambs, they, like many of the human species, “being destined to a drier death on shore.” The most curious feature of Dungeon Ghyll is two huge rocks, which appear to have been rolling down simultaneously from the Pikes above, and to have met and jammed together across the top of the chasm, forming a bridge, which it is a favourite feat with adventurous spirits to cross over, and which, in its “contempt of danger and accommodation,” might almost seem to have been placed there to gratify the peculiar taste in bridges of the lamb’s benevolent preserver. [Sidenote: WET OR DRY?]