GREY FRIAR AND ITS ‘SOLEMN REGIONS.’

Photograph by Bill Birkett

In the summer of 1824 Thomas Wilkinson, stood on the summit of Scafell Pike. ‘I am alone in the mountains’ he wrote, ‘The air is still and the earth seems at rest: the sound of water is not heard. The voice of man, the notes of birds, do not reach these solemn regions’. The intoxicating pleasure of solitude in the high fells is nowadays perhaps more elusive, and such days are long remembered and treasured, small beacons stored against darker times. Five miles south from where Wilkinson stood is a place where that same solitude might still be found. While the crowds buzz around the honey pot of the Old Man, the intriguingly named Grey Friar, standing aloof from the main spine of the Coniston fells, remains unruffled. It is one of life’s outliers having somehow wandered away to the west and the Duddon, perhaps for a better view of the sea, or some peace and quiet. Certainly it has both.

Wilkinson would perhaps have overlooked Grey Friar since in truth it is a stubborn terrier of a fell, inelegant, all knobbly tors and hanging crags, lacking the austere grandeur of its northern neighbours. However its summit, expansive, airy and littered with curious outcrops, bewildering in the mist, has the sight of nothing but mountains. A small section of middle Eskdale is visible from the northwest cairn, and a few bright fields in the Duddon, but all else is hard blue grey rock with a wide seascape beyond. Most compelling is the view to the north, the immense eastern wall of the Scafell range, defined by explosive geology, continental movements and the erosive effect of glaciation. If this was a theatre, Grey Friar would be a seat in the gods.

From Grey Friar and the grassy sheep walk of Fairfield, forming a link to the main Coniston ridge, and following the great arc to Dow Crag, all the waters drain to Seathwaite Tarn. William Heaton-Cooper remarked that this tarn must once have been the finest in the district before the Barrow Corporation dammed up the lower end for their town’s water supply. ‘There is’, he wrote, ‘a certain swing and thrust about the forms of Greyfriar and Swirl How that show most clearly when there is a sprinkling of snow on the higher fells lying in lacey patterns across the tops and linking them with the winter sky’. Geophysically speaking, it is a rule breaker, lying part of the way down a double-headed valley, rather than at its head, with the shapely crags of Loft Rigg, Blake Rigg and Shudderstone How, forming a great rock gateway to the valley’s remote upper reaches.

Wilkinson saw these places as ‘regions of innocence’ which had persisted entirely in a state of nature. But landscape, like life, is complicated and the heavy weight of time can more or less disguise man’s work. Evidence of early activity in the area has only recently emerged with the discovery of a series of Late Bronze Age ring cairns from Lead Pike to the south-west, Tarn Brow to the north-west, Brock How at the head of the tarn and at Woody Crag to the southeast. Their function although probably ceremonial and possibly linked to a Late Bronze Age fascination with water, differs significantly from earlier ring cairns with the notable absence of burials. They appear to fall within a wider pattern of change that is known to have taken place between the Early and Late Bronze Ages in Britain and suggests a discrete class of ceremonial monument existing in the high fells; a new and significant component of the prehistoric legacy of the Lake District.

On the southern flanks of Grey Friar where the extensive rock face of Great Blake Rigg plummets towards the deeply confined waters of tarn are the remains of the Seathwaite Copper Mine, the only mine on the western side of the Coniston massif. Here, three tunnels 180m long were driven into the fellside sometime in the years between 1750 and 1850. Lacking the spectacular success of the Coniston mines, a mere packhorse trail sufficed to take the ore to the nearest railhead at Broughton-in-Furness. The remains of this route can still be followed intermittently along the north shore of the tarn, and down past the outcrop at Black Allens, where the stream divides and meets again in deep pools above the stepping stones. From here it winds down the rocky fellside to join the main Dunnerdale road at Troutal.

More intriguing perhaps and located within a vast and almost impenetrable ‘borran’ or boulder field at the base of Great Rigg Crag is, what appears from below to resemble a miniature broch. It is in fact a stone fox trap with a second and third higher up the fellside. These are a feature of the high fell country, probably dating from the 18th century long before the introduction of organised foxhound packs in Lakeland. The word ‘borran’ has evolved from the Old English burgaesn, meaning a burial mound or ancient heap of stones. In this case they are entirely natural features, but undoubtedly resemble the tumbled ruins of a vast city cast down the fellside by some extraordinary force. In mist, they can assume unpredictable and unsettling forms, full of small caves and deep recesses, places where foxes live, breed, and go to ‘earth’ if pursued.

The traps themselves are circular structures, their upper courses corbelled to form an inward overhang. It is claimed that they were baited by attaching the fresh carcass of a goose or chicken to the inner end of a plank projecting over the wall. The weight of the fox up-ended the plank, tipping it into the trap, from where it would, in theory, be unable to climb or leap out of the constricted space. But there are problems with this premise, and as one writer puts it, the history of fox traps is, ‘as impenetrable as the Lakeland mist which often covers them, their date of construction, how and why they were actually used, remains a mystery.’ None are now complete in their original form and, though most evident in the southern and western fells, may once have been a common feature of the mountains of central Lakeland.

These features are however slight and evanescent, year by year becoming less discernible. Beside them the elegant and austere structure of the dam, which forms a gentle arc 300m long, just outside the original margin of the tarn, is truly monumental. During its construction between 1904 and 1907, it was the home of around 100 Scottish navvies housed in wooden huts during summer months. In June 1904 Soulby’s Ulverston Advertiser and General Intelligencer reported that due to the large numbers of workmen continuing to pour into the valley ‘An enterprising grocer from Dalton pitched his tent in Seathwaite, but possibly not finding it the ‘Eldorado’ anticipated, has struck his camp’.

It was also a not altogether a peaceful time. Initially there was considerable concern about the pollution of Tarn Beck largely due to the poor sanitary arrangements in the huts. Numerous complaints were lodged by local householders entirely dependent on the beck for their water supply, both agricultural, and more particularly, domestic. Moses Tyson of Tongue House Farm, pursued a claim to court in 1906, demanding £26 in compensation, he was eventually awarded just £5 and £5 costs. More claims followed however these were all dismissed with promises of a clean water supply ‘in due course’.

The presence of an alien workforce gave rise to other problems, most infamously, in July 1904, the Newfield Hotel at Seathwaite was besieged by 50 drunken navvies after the landlord Thomas Dawson had been obliged to ‘stop the tap’ on them. Windows and furniture were smashed, and the church and vicarage were also damaged. The landlord, along with a group of local farmers defended themselves with firearms, and three workers were injured, one fatally. Twenty constables were drafted in by the local authority to restore order. The whole episode was reported in the local newspaper under the headlines: ‘Riot at Seathwaite, Navvies become unmanageable, Farmers fire upon them!’. Thomas Dawson, his barman James Greenhow and Henry Knox Todd an assistant engineer for the dam, were arrested and charged with various offences. A fortnight later all the charges were dismissed, and the inquest jury returned a verdict of ‘justifiable homicide’. The wider interest in the events at Seathwaite is evident from a report in the Ulverston Advertiser which stated that ‘a large number of people’ had visited Broughton and its neighbourhood on the August Bank Holiday following the riot ‘many of whom wended their way to Seathwaite to view the Newfield Inn and Seathwaite Church’.

In some ways it seems that Wilkinsons ‘regions of innocence’ may be fanciful. In the high summers of the early 19th century the landscape was loud with industry, mining and quarrying in the high fells and streams of packhorses trailing over the passes. The daily intercourse of man and nature was as highly visible as it was fundamental to life. Nonetheless, from the summit of Grey Friar with its incomparable views northwards, to Seathwaite Tarn within the confines of its hanging valley, the scene has altered little in the last two hundred years or indeed in the many centuries since the Bronze Age decline in upland forest 3000 years ago. The miners, navvies and fox trappers are long gone and walkers intent on the highest peaks rarely stray this far west. Even the dam, weathered and mottled with more than a century’s exposure to this desolate place, has settled and come to terms with its environment. The centuries have left their mark on this restless landscape, grained into the rocks, but still there is that sense that, ‘I am alone on the mountains’, an instinctively understood euphoria that echoes back down the centuries.

First published in ‘Cumbria’ magazine December 2023.