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  Quite by chance, lockdown coincided with the broadcast of a series of recorded readings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's epic poem,  The Rime of the Ancient Mariner . I remember listening to it, the same time each day, as we worked out how to live in the new confinement. It is an inclusive, immersive work of audio and visual art in the 21st century curated by Sarah Chapman who, if I remember well*, is an academic based in Sussex. I first came across her a few years ago because she had organised a shared reading of Freud's Civilisation and Its Discontents at the Freud Museum.  Anyway, the point here is that the Rime of the Ancient Mariner was first published in 1798, which is four years before his epic climb of Scawfell (as it was spelled then). I think it was this activity that invested the term "climbing" with its modern connotations. Before, it was not a "thing." If you read the account of it as gleaned by Marina Morpurgo,  who has consulted his letters an...

When I was still a young woman living in Nottingham, my mother knitted me a beautiful coat out of the wool from Herdwick sheep. The coat had a high roll neck that kept the heat in, and buttoned up down the front to my knees; it had no pockets. There were thick lines of cables running its length which traced the contours of my body. I don't know what happened to that coat, but it recently reappeared from the folds of my memory when I read this snippet from a collection of writings inspired by the Lake District. The name – Herdwick – caught my attention. I kept reading, found another word to hold on to ("heaf") and then set about some research. The breed is known for the attachment it forms to the place it lives. The ewes must teach their lambs the place of their birth, a process for which this beautiful word has been coined: 'heafing' (also "hefting"). When a new flock is introduced onto a pasture (for example after the devastation of the foot and mouth e...

  I'll preface a few remarks on Katherine Mansfield with an extract from a letter she wrote to a friend in 1916, when she and her husband, John Middleton Murry (who was also her publisher), were sharing a cottage in Cornwall with D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda. (The person to whom Katherine refers in this extract as the "Pasty" is their maid.) I want to talk about the L's, but if I do don't tell Kot or Gertler for then it will get back to Lawrence and I will be literally murdered. He has changed very much. He is quite 'lost.' He has become very fond of sewing, especially hemming, and making little copies of pictures. When he is doing these things he is quiet and gentle and kind, but once you start talking I cannot describe the frenzy that comes over him. He simply raves, roars, beats the table, abuses everybody ... What makes these attacks insupportable is the feeling one has at the back of one's mind that he is completely out of control, swallowed ...

From Harriet Martineau's Complete Guide to the English Lakes , London Whittaker & Co,1855; 157-160 Ascent of Scawfell . ordnance survey  2025 The ascent of Scawfell is sometimes made from the Sty Head Pass; sometimes from Lingmell; and sometimes from Langdale, whence the path meets that from Sty Head on Esk Hause. From Esk Hause the summit of the Pike is visible; but still, care is necessary not to ascend the wrong summit. There are four summits which collectively go under the name of Scawfell; viz, the most southerly, which is called simply Scawfell; Scawfell Pike, which is sixty feet higher, and the highest mountain in England (3,160 feet:) and the lower hills, Lingmell and Great End, – the last being the northernmost, and fronting Borrowdale. The Ordnance surveyors set up a staff on a pile of stones on the highest peak; so that there need be no mistake henceforth. The two summits are about three quarters of a-mile apart, in a straight line; but the great chasm between t...

Photo: John Malley   Look Along the well Of the street, Between the gasworks and the neat Sparrow-stepped gable Of the Catholic chapel, High Above tilt and crook Of the tumbledown Roofs of the town – Scafell Pike, The tallest hill in England. How small it seems, So far away, No more than a notch On the plate-glass window of the sky! Watch A puff of kitchen smoke Block out peak and pinnacle – Rock-pie of volcanic lava Half a mile thick Scotched out at the click of an eye. Look again In five hundred, a thousand or ten Thousand years: A ruin where The chapel was; brown Rubble and scrub and cinders where The gasworks used to be; No roofs, no town, Maybe no men; But yonder where a lather-rinse of cloud pours down The spiked wall of the sky-line, see, Scafell Pike Still there.   Norman Nicholson