In the Highest Pennine – Part Two

The farmer led us to a position of vantage, the better to give us directions which, delivered in broad Lowland Scots, were difficult to understand.  However, we had two excellent allies, a wind due west which we must keep to our faces, and clear weather in spite of the stormy skies.

The first cairn called Moss Shop was in full view.  We gained it easily, afterwards bearing right on rising ground to cut out the great loop of Maize Beck, which we would have to cross later.  By this means we also avoided the deeper peat hags or runnels, which are a problem to cross, often many feet deep with sheer yielding sides and water in them.  They are a trap, sometimes almost impossible to get out of.  The going was better than we had expected, rather wet and heavy, and slow with the loaded bikes.  In truth our luck was in, for the hills were sharp and clear in spite of great banks of black cloud sailing like stately galleons, too high to be effective.  In half an hour we passed between two small cairns our guide had called “herricks”, and farther along another cairn surrounded by thistles confirmed our direction.  Now Maize Beck appeared, bearing across our line of vision from its headwaters on Rasp Hill.

Gazing round, we realised the force behind the Birkdale shepherd’s warning.  This is not a land for the street lover.  Vast waves of brown and black moorland rose to black shoulders with black peaks beyond, the very heart of Cross Fell, the highest Pennine (2,902 feet), the wildest moorland in England.  Not a tree nor a building, nor the track of man or beast lay within sight.  The silence of it, the weird broodiness lay like a hand on us, for here we saw the primeval world, unchanging through the ages.  It was all so magnificent; it entered into our innermost selves as we stared at the three-thousand feet altitudes so utterly desolate and forsaken.

Cross Fell is feared in the North country.  It is the cradling place of the Helm Wind, that terrible local tornado so utterly foreign to these islands.  This gale begins in a kind of south-easterly whirlwind and devastates everything in its path, throwing huge boulders into the air and even lifting the roofs off building made to withstand the the fierce winter gales of the district.  Coming with the roar of an express train, it gives anyone caught in its trail a poor change indeed.  Happily, the Helm-Wind is a rare occurrence, and is entirely local and short-lived.  The fell itself covers a great area of entirely trackless moorland, largely bog which is in many  places capable of swallowing a man without leaving any traces of his existence.  Nicholas Size, the Lakeland author, makes use of the Helmwind in his book “The Secret Valley”.  He says:

“The phenomenon of the Helmwind, which sometimes lasts for three days, is caused by a collision of two weather systems among the mountains.  It generally originates in the long valley running North and South near Cross Fell, and it is said that the clouds coming up from the East do not mingle with those coming from the West, but form long lines with a lane of clear sky between them; and the wind beneath forms an acute disturbance over a curiously localised area, which is sometimes in one valley, sometimes in another”.

I underline the ‘sometime lasts for three days’ because other authorities on this phenomenon do not agree with this.  Maize Beck was our guide.  Gradually we descended to it, traversed the bank for a likely crossing.  The fording was knee-deep, icy cold, and not very comfortable to bare feet.  Fortune again favoured us; we had no difficulty in finding a promised cairn from where a soft turfy track the width of a main road led us up the brown slope – the ‘green band’ of the Birkdale Prophet.  With a last sharp climb we were in the Pass, rejoicing that without a falter we had crossed a corner of the dreaded wastes of Cross Fell.

With breathless suddenness, in the middle of the Pass, we came upon High Cup Nick.  This is a tremendous ravine, 500 feet deep, scooped from the solid bed of the pass in some unremembered convulsion, some ice-age never known.  The two sides, viewed from the head, are as identical as if they had been neatly clipped by some unimaginable scoop wielded by some impossible hand.  One might call it a monstrous cup laid on its side, so the name of it is extremely apt.  Far beyond, framed in the inverted arc of High Cup Nick, lay the Vale of Eden, rumpled and very green.  Our track was now distinct, an arduous scramble along the northern lip, suggesting danger in misty weather.  At the highest point we topped 2,000 feet.

Dusk came; we were ready to camp, but where water ran the chaotic rocks prohibited a pitch, and where green turf sprang beautifully underfoot water was entirely absent.  The darkening Vale lay in a huge sweep far below; towards Lakeland the mountains were already gathering the indistinctness of nightfall about them, and the foothills ahead of us rose in shapely billows of barren greenery.  Now encountering rock and loose scree, now on tangly heather, we hurried down to a gate, through a sheep pen, and reached a track we could ride, down, down, into the fold of the foothills a thousand feet below, where we found water and the most comfortable campsite.  Supper was a lazy period of supreme content, when Jo, at least, was happy in the retrospect of another conquest.  Came the steady drumming of the rain, and with it the muffled blackness of the Styx fell upon the fells.

The morning was clear and breezy.  Two full days ahead of us amongst the tempting scenery of the Dales; behind us – towering above us, in fact, Cross Fell and High Cup Nick.  There was desire for hurry.

Appleby is a venerable little town, very quiet, very clean, and the river Eden which flows serenely through the heart of the town is also very clean.  Its lovely situation in the middle of the valley has no doubt been many times cursed by its citizens of the Middle Ages when, constantly harassed by the fierce Border raiders, it was often sacked and burned, and the people massacred.  There are relics of those very uncertain days in the fine old church which dates its first rector from the year 1070.  And on the tablets lining the walls one may read names familiar in the bloody pages of English history.

From Appleby to Kirkby Stephen are ten miles of crinkly lanes and old world village drenched with the turbulent history of the North.  A happier relic is the village maypole at Warcop, still, I believe, the centre of the May Day festivities.  A gossiping woman at a restaurant in Kirkby Stephen kept us until dirty weather came rolling down the Dales.  Up the long depression of Mallerstang we were at times beaten to a standstill by wind and rain until the turn to Hawes at the Moorcock junction gave us the favour of Boreas, down to Hardraw.

In the Highest Pennine013

At the head of a ravine which is effectively barred by the property of the ‘Green Man’ Inn is the famous Hardraw Force.  A notice board invites people to view the fall and ‘enquire at the hotel’.  As much from principle as from motives of economy, we opened the gate, passed through some henpens, and, quite aware that we were being watched, we boldly (or brazenly) walked to the fall.  In full spate, it presented a magnificent picture, pouring over a lip and falling eighty feet sheer onto an islet of rock which smashed the smooth glass of it into a million flying spraylets.  A path passing behind the Force enabled us to look through the wall of water, ourselves guarded from the remotest splash.  This peculiarity is shared to some degree by Thornton Force near Ingleton.  The once beautiful vicinity is ruined by a bandstand, an artificial shrubbery, and some refreshment huts, empty and rotting in the damp atmosphere.  I shudder to think of it during the height of a holiday weekend.  As we walked back a man locked the gate, approached us, and quietly diverted us to the hotel.  Still bold (or brazen) we walked through the building, out at a side door, and were well awheel before the astonished innkeeper could challenge us.

Wensleydale was lovely in a light drizzle like a half revealing veil, heightened by evening tranquillity as we passed down the east side on a road that lifted and fell as gently as a breath.  From old Askrigg we crossed the swollen Ure by a wooden bridge to Aysgarth, then a quiet lane into Bishopdale, a minor Dale that always seems to impart a rich atmosphere of settled prosperity (a rare thing to capture in these days).

Still raining, dusk creeping down, and a hard face-wind, the road gradually ascending by the river.  Jo remembered a sheltered nook above Cray Gill, but that is overlooking Wharfedale and we had little stomach to struggle another thousand feet, wet and hungry.  The hedged roadside offered no camping spaces.

Bishopdale narrowed; the misty fells closed and loomed ahead; the road tilted, bringing us from the saddle.  Where we might have snatched a campsite the wind, now awake again, howled defiance.  The summit of Kidstones Pass, grey, cold, unreal in a shifting half-night.  We began to descend; a swing left, a swing right, a straight drop, till, where a small aspiring Hardraw Force breasted a diminutive cliff we pulled up, and behind a wall we found all the space and shelter we wanted.  A sanctuary there, where was cooked the simplest of orchard fare, and superlative smells floated out of  a dry tent door to mingle with the rain-mists wandering on Kidstones Fell.

Now the last, easy day, with home a bare fifty miles away.  At breakfast we had the roar of the little Hardraw for accompaniment.  A hundred yards away a copious streamlet showed in half a dozen gleaming places half a dozen white cascades.  A mist cut the fell tops into ridges of perfect evenness; Wharfedale, below, was faintly green through the everlasting drizzle.

There was no hurry.  We kept as close as may be to the brimming Wharfe, on the road that hugs the east bank from Kettlewell.  At Kilnsey, across the river, great activity prevailed, for this was Showday, and Kilnsey Show, any Dalesman will tell you, brings forth magnificent stock.  Wharfedale is always very beautiful, easily reached, but no less pleasant for that, and at monolith-crowned Rylstone, where we branched west for Ribblesdale, the bonnie heather gleamed a warm purple.  The crinkly plain by Gargrave, the unsteady lanes of the Pendle country, and with Pendle itself looming high in the borrowed grandeur of mists, and final familiar roads homewards – always a reluctant way.

While plotting another ‘dotted line’ route, Jo keeps an eye on High Cup Nick, and the further possibilities of the Highest Pennines.

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