In the first of our new series on classic country walks, Vivienne Crow scales a Lakeland peak in search of the remote pond that inspired one of Britain’s greatest outdoor writers
All is calm on the sprawling plateau that stretches south from England’s third-highest mountain. Despite lingering patches of snow clinging to the escarpment edge and the disorientating cloud occasionally drifting across the fell-tops, the Helvellyn range feels surprisingly benign today.
Peering over the precipice, though, I’m looking down into an uninviting landscape: a bowl of shattered rocks and scree resting precariously at the foot of dark, impenetrable cliffs. This lonely prospect is what guidebook writer Alfred Wainwright described as “the wilderness of Ruthwaite Cove” (the name for a corrie on the flank of Helvellyn), and it’s home to one of Lakeland’s highest and most difficult-to-reach mountain pools, Hard Tarn.
In The Eastern Fells, published in 1955 and the first of his seven Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells, Wainwright describes a visit to the remote tarn, lying in the sun on the narrow, rocky shelf that cradles it. “The air was still; there was no sound, and nothing in view but the shattered confusion of rocks all around. I might have been the last man in a dead world. A tiny splash drew my gaze to the crystal-clear depths of the tarn…” It was a newt, “a speck of life in the immensity of desolation”. And it got Wainwright wondering about its purpose in life and, in turn, his own.
A new book, A Newt in Hard Tarn, examines why this encounter was so important to Wainwright. Author and former secretary of the Wainwright Society Derek Cockell explains: “That was the only memory Wainwright wrote about in detail in his guides, and it sparked something, something he wanted to share. He was more than just a guidebook writer; he was interested in the landscape and nature and how those things affected people’s personal lives and happiness.”
INTO A JAGGED LAND
I’d approached the mountains from the east, climbing through the spectacular glaciated valley of Grisedale. Patches of woodland and sheep-filled enclosures adorned the valley bottom in the early stages, but the surroundings became more hostile the higher I climbed. Dark crags towered ominously while whitewater becks came crashing down from
