Moss Rigg, Little Langdale.

Last month we walked over from Tilberthwaite towards Little Langdale through the ancient woodland of sessile oak and hazel, the ground a wash of bluebells. Our intent was on Moss Rigg, an abandoned green slate quarry some 300ft. above the valley, last worked in 1984.

Back in 1949 Norman Nicholson, a man who knew much about the legacy of heavy industry, wrote of the scars left by quarrying in the Coniston-Tilberthwaite-Langdale fells. Describing them as true to the nature of the rock, introducing nothing alien and soon mossed over by the seasons, he saw little to deplore. Seventy years on we can see the truth of this. In the older quarries the buildings, always of slate, are quietly settling back into the scree. Water seeps through the empty levels as gorse, rowan, and tangles of briars are closing up the mouths of the shafts and ferns colonise the damp sunless margins. The older quarry heaps have disappeared under the creep of moss. Relentless seasons blunt the edges of the slate.

But at Moss Rigg things are still raw, and the ring of loose slate loud underfoot. Forty years have seen the pioneers, the silver birch, emerge in quiet legions from the slate clitter of the working floors, followed by larch and grey willow, while a crab apple blossoms in the shelter of the last remaining building. Close to the ground patches of the bitter wood sage and dove’s foot cranesbill appear with the crimson stemmed herb robert and wild Strawberry snaking through the chippings. Cushions of moss fur the low walls sheltering spidery maidenhair spleenwort. Reclamation is indeed in full swing.

A few miles away at Elterwater, one of the last remaining green slate quarries is winding down for closure. If the present owners have their way, it will be transformed into what they somewhat inelegantly term ‘a zip wire adventure tourism experience’. Meanwhile here, high on the quarry face at Moss Rigg, a peregrine guards her eyrie, filling the space with raw energy.