Arthur Bradley - The English Lakes

The luxuriance of Windermere is of course its dominant note, a quality infinitely enhanced by that noble array of mountains which from Kirkstone to Scafell trail across the northern sky beyond the broad shimmer of its waters. The upward view from various points in the neighbourhood of Bowness, for obvious reasons of railroad transportation, has been the first glimpse of the Lake District for a majority of two or three generations of visitors, and this alone gives some further significance to a scene in any case so beautiful. Orrest Head, a few hundred feet above the village of Windermere, is the point to which the pilgrim upon the first opportunity usually betakes himself; for from this modest altitude the entire lake with its abounding beauty of detail, and half the mountain kingdom of Lakeland, are spread out before him.

On the slopes of Orrest, too, is the house of Elleray, successor to that older one in which Professor Wilson, by no means the least one of the Wordsworthian band, led his breezy, strenuous life. Son of a wealthy Glasgow merchant, winner of the Newdigate and a first classman at Oxford, and scarcely less conspicuous for his athletic feats and sporting wagers, young Wilson bought the land at Elleray while an undergraduate and built a house on it later, after the passing of an unsatisfactory love affair. As "Christopher North" every lover of the rod with any sense of its literature knows him yet. Nor would all this be worthy of record were it not that the brilliant little band who did none of these things held Wilson of Elleray as one of themselves. Losing his fortune ten years later through a defaulting trustee, he became the brilliant supporter of Blackwood and Professor of Moral Philosophy in Edinburgh University, though always retaining his connection with Windermere. In fact, when Scott made his memorable visit to the Lake District, and with Lockhart and Canning stayed with the then owner of Storrs Hall, now a hotel on the lake shore, we find Wilson doing the honours of Windermere as commodore of its large fleet of yachts.

Country houses, villas, and rich woods cluster thickly up and down either shore; here and there perhaps a little too thickly. But the general prospect up to Ambleside on the one hand, and down past Curwen Island – named after one of the oldest of Cumbrian families – to Newby Bridge on the other, is no whit blemished. One feels it to be a region rather of delightful residence, which indeed it is, than of temporary sojourn for the tourist, with the mountains beckoning him into the deeper heart of Lakeland and to more primitive forms of nature. Shapely yachts flit hither and thither, less alluring steamboats plough white furrows, while the irresponsible pleasure boat is in frequent evidence. Occasionally, too, there are winters when the great lake glistens with thick glassy ice from end to end beneath snow-peaked mountains, and the glories of such a brief period – glories of scene and of physical exhilaration – shine out in the memory yet more luminously than the unfailing pageants of summer; even the pageants of early June when the lake is quiet, and in sequestered bays the angler, like his neighbour of Derwentwater, celebrates the festival of the May-fly, the only one seriously observed by the lusty and wily trout of these two waters.

The personal associations of these opulent shores of Windermere are too crowded for us here; but Dr. Arnold of Rugby had, of course, his holiday home of Foxhowe near the Ambleside end, which is still occupied by his daughter.

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.

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.

Those delectable little sister lakes of Rydal and Grasmere probably suggest themselves to most of us as the heart of Lakeland. If we took a map and measuring rule we might possibly be surprised to find, as we should do, this vague intuition geometrically verified. How singularly felicitous, then, one may surely deem it, that Wordsworth lived and died here, and that the shrine of the sage and all thereby implied should be thus planted in the very innermost sanctuary of the hills.

The intrinsic charm of these two little lakes and all that pertains to them lies in the delightful variety exhibited within a small compass of wood and water, of rugged crag and fern-clad slope, of velvety park-like meadow and stately timber. The blithesome Rothay unites the upper and larger lake of Grasmere with Rydal Water by a short half-mile display in meadow and ravine of every winsome mood that a mountain stream has at command. The broken, straggling heights and skirts of Loughrigg Fell fill most of the western side of either lake, and on a minor scale, like the stream below, show every type of form and colouring, of drapery primeval or man-made, from naked crag to bowery lawn, all within the compass of three miles and the modest altitude of a thousand feet.

Rydal Water has almost the air of being designed for the embellishment of man's immediate haunts.