Blencathra

Impassioned debate this year over the management of the Lake District reveals strong opinions and not a little antagonism towards The National Trust. I am a mere fell walker, a grockle. Here is my two penn’orth and my celebration of a favourite mountain.



Buttressed like a slate cathedral Blencathra was formed 360 million years ago. It has stood watch in the northern fells of Cumbria, eying Celts, Romans, Angles, the Scots, the English, Urien Rheged and me. All came to make a living on, or explore, the northern slopes of the Lake District. It gave passage for packhorses and coffin carriers; provided inspiration to the laudanum-stoned Lake Poets. From 1879 it provided employment for a hundred lead miners and for over six hundred years its grassy upland has sustained generations of shepherds. Writing about the Lake Poet Robert Southey in 1839, the essayist Thomas de Quincey said the view from Southey’s house “was closed for many a league by the vast and towering masses of Skiddaw and Blencathra – mountains which are rather to be considered as frontier barriers.”

Photo by Helen Brooks

Photo by David Hall

I first set eyes on Saddleback (the other name) in 1967, from my seat in an airliner bound for Canada. I marvelled at the proud stature in, what was to me then, an alien landscape. Not setting foot on it until 1981 (via Hall’s Fell in the early days of my peak bagging odyssey) a further fifteen years passed before I felt the mighty mountain at it’s February fiercest.

The late, great Alfred Wainwright – a bean counter turned fell discoverer, writer, visionary and grumpy old man – wrote in 1962: “Blencathra is one of the grandest objects in Lakeland”. And with a mixture of awe and grudge a local foxhunter said: “there’s a terrible lot of unseen ground up there”. Only the eleventh highest fell in Lakeland, for me above every other it symbolises all that is essential to knowing the Lake District. AW concluded: “This is a mountain that compels attention, even from the dull people whose eyes are not habitually lifted to the hills”. He liked to get a grump in.

This ‘noble mountain’, as my bête noir at English A level John Stuart Mill wrote, has provided wonder to artists, photographers and painters and inspiration to many a writer. The parents of the poet W.H. Auden owned a holiday cottage at the foot of Blencathra at Wescoe just outside Threlkeld. Auden visited regularly in the 1920’s and 1930s. On returning exhausted and confused by the politics of civil war in Spain in 1937 I like to think he became refreshed by opening his back door and climbing Blease Fell, then to ponder life’s meaning from the summit – as countless walkers did before him and do today.

Photo by Helen Brooks

It is the sense of isolation and separateness of the Blencathra landscape, beyond the frontier with the rest of England, which is both endearing and attractive. Some visitors and local inhabitants feel entitled to protect it as it has always appeared. I used to think that a good trip to the Lakeland fells was one when I met nobody – when I had a mountain to myself. After I began to meet some of the farmers and shepherds any sense of entitlement in me gave way to one of curiosity about their part in the seasonal cycle of mountain life. Climb Blencathra in summer and you will see sheep lazily grazing the emerald green slopes and swallows dashing over the trickling streams. Ascend Sharpe Edge and then the side of Foule Crag in sub-zero February temperatures, with snow and ice under foot (as I did when Barrie, a friend, said “you just saved my life”), and you might just forget that shepherds make their living here.

A recent addition to the substantial literature of the Lakes is worth reading. James Rebanks’ The Shepherd’s Life provides the testimony of a fourth generation hill farmer who, with validity, challenges ‘outcomers’ whose wish for “the future of our landscape would be tourism and wildlife and trees and wilding”. Maybe AW was right back in 1962 when he wrote “roads into Lakeland are being widened, straightened and enlarged to improve access for visitors, commerce and faster traffic.” He argued that Lakeland should be left “as we found it, as a haven of refuge and rest in a world going mad…as a precious museum piece.”

I would loathe the idea of Blencathra – or any mountain – being frozen as an antiquity. It withstood proudly the Celts and it just about commands walkers today. It certainly has had the awe of all the Rebanks, and Terry Abrahams in his new film The Life of a Mountain. For me farmers, tourists, painters, poets and sheep can co-exist, so long as self drive cars, lorries and the military are held at bay, no nearer than the M6.

Hill farmers struggle to make a living, putting the farms, the people, the way of life and their custodianship of the fells I love at risk. The Lowther estate still owns the fell. It owes James Rebanks’ descendants and my fell-walking grandchildren by not gambling with the future of a living, vibrant, working giant of a mountain. All with a love for Blencathra and the fells must listen to each other’s viewpoint (as a contributor to Abrahams’ film says “no we don’t have Wi-FI, talk to each other”) and ensure this unmodified landscape is sustained.

Photo by David Hall

If you would like to share your thoughts on the landscapes and ideas discussed in this blog please record them in the Comments section.

Books by all the authors referenced above can be bought at: https://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk

Wild Cumbria, W.R. Mitchell.  Robert Hale 1978

The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Liberty Fund Inc. 2006

A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells: Book 5 The Northern Fells, A. Wainwright. Westmoreland Gazette 1962

Recollections of the Lake Poets, Thomas de Quincey. Penguin 1970

The Shepherd's Life, James Rebanks. Allen Lane 2015

Blencathra: Portrait of a Mountain, Ronald Turnbull. Frances Lincoln 2010