Clouds, mists, streams, watery rocks and emerald turf,Clouds of all tincture, rocks and sapphire sky,Confused, commingled, mutually inflamed…In fleecy folds voluminous enwrapped.
Clouds, mists, streams, watery rocks and emerald turf,Clouds of all tincture, rocks and sapphire sky,Confused, commingled, mutually inflamed…In fleecy folds voluminous enwrapped.
Clouds, mists, streams, watery rocks and emerald turf,
Clouds of all tincture, rocks and sapphire sky,
Confused, commingled, mutually inflamed
…
In fleecy folds voluminous enwrapped.
It is nearly fifty years since I saw that sight, but we do not forget what we see among mountains as what we read in books.
There dwell in the memory too (for I must not give the impression that the mountains are always scourged with storm) the days and sometimes weeks in succession when the weather is without a flaw—trance-like spells when the hills stand calm and pensive in every vicissitude of loveliness, now clear and imminent, with ridges sharply outlined against the sky, now dim and ghostly, half shrouded in a mild and breathless haze. But even the loveliest day is seldom perfected without the ministry of cloud, for clouds are the Genii of the mountains, concealing much, but revealing more, by their presence, and bringing to view the manifold depths and distances that would otherwise be unobserved. You cannot learn the moods and character of a mountain until you have studied its attendant clouds.
Nor must the pleasures of winter be overlooked, for, as Southey wrote of the mountains:
Who sees them only in their summer hour,Sees but their beauties half, and knows not half their power.
Who sees them only in their summer hour,Sees but their beauties half, and knows not half their power.
Who sees them only in their summer hour,
Sees but their beauties half, and knows not half their power.
It was pointed out by the same writer that snow, instead of making the view of the fells monotonous, has a contrary effect, “it brings out all their recesses, and differentiates all their inequalities.” Even clouds are scarcely more efficacious in revealing the hitherto unnoticed distances; for the snow, when not too deep, is a mask which does not conceal, but takes a delicate impression of the hillside, so that every crack and crinkle, every unsuspected groove, ravine, terrace, or even sheep-path, is made to stand out in clear relief. To rocks, in particular, a thin powdering of snow will give a strange, chequered, almost ethereal look, reminding one of Scott’s lines about Melrose Abbey seen under moonlight:
When buttress and buttress, alternately,Seem framed of ebon and ivory.
When buttress and buttress, alternately,Seem framed of ebon and ivory.
When buttress and buttress, alternately,
Seem framed of ebon and ivory.
In the joy felt by the experienced climber on arriving at his mountain-top the view, perhaps, plays but a subordinate part, though there is always a fascination in a very distant prospect across sea or plain, such as one may get in the early morning, or when the air is clear after a rain shower or a snow squall, as when, from Wales or Cumberland, as the case may be, one sees the Isle of Man resting like a dream on the water, with a pillow of fleecycloud around it. In this respect the views from the two districts are very similar, for on every side except the east their horizons extend to the sea, and both possess the same great charm, lacking in the Alps and other continental ranges, of overlooking a coast-line broken by shallow estuaries, where at low tide there is an expanse of gleaming red sands, with the plain of dim blue water in the rear. To have seen Snowdon from Scafell, or Scafell from Snowdon, across the hundred miles that lie between them, is a rare privilege which few climbers have enjoyed, and of which, in spite of many visits to either mountain, I cannot personally speak; far more often it is the great northern headland of Carnedd Llewelyn which is discerned from the Cumbrian hills and bars the further view. Apart from such remarkable sights as these, the pleasure of the summit, I think, arises chiefly from that sense ofpowerto which a wide outlook contributes—you feel how vast a territory you “command” from your airy fortress; you are for the moment an overseer of men, a super-man, with all the kingdoms of the world stretched at your feet.
Having spoken of the sights, let me speak of the sounds of the mountain, for the ear is not less fascinated than the eye in these echoing temples, where the upper cloughs and chambers are as huge whispering galleries, and sounds are often carried from immense distances, yet in so modulated and subtle a tone as to leave a haunting impression on the mind. There is asolemnity about these mountain voices which is only comparable, on a larger scale, to the effects produced in the hollow space of a cathedral; hence the perfect appropriateness, as has been pointed out, of Wordsworth’s much criticized reference to the “solemn voice” of the mountain lamb. The singing of the stream below, the deep croak of the raven as he sails on his straight course overhead, the shrill cry of the wheeling buzzard, the bleat of a sheep and even the noise of a detached stone falling from the cliff to the screes, come to us with a significance which would hardly be intelligible elsewhere. The wind, too, has some strange things to tell us, as it tears itself into shreds on the rocks, or lifts the water from the tarns and streams and dashes it in spray to the sky, or startles us with muffled subterranean sobbings as we cross some exposed ridge. Listening among the higher mountains in rough or cloudy weather, we may hear sounds so wild and mysterious that their origin wholly baffles us. There is also felt, at times, a strange apprehension—or should we say premonition?—of the presence of human beings, which may be due to the ear having become unconsciously aware of their approach, if not to some other sense more poignant and occult.
One sometimes sees strange companionships on mountains. Once, when I was on the Glyder Fach with some friends, we heard the steps of a party ascending by the steep northernscrees from Cwm Tryfan, and presently two men came into sight, the leader with a cloak thrown over his shoulder in cavalier-like style, the follower in the garb of a serving man. In this manner they crossed the summit-plateau, and when they neared the edge of the southern escarpment, the valet (for that he was valet, not guide, we inferred both from his demeanour and the order of their procession) dropped respectfully to the rear, while his master stood for some time as if wrapped in thought, and gazing out over the wide scene that had Cardigan Bay as its limit. Then, the reverie ended, he turned back towards Cwm Tryfan, and followed by his demure attendant, descended as he had come. Was he a prince or a poet, we wondered; and if a poet, how could his sensitiveness bear the near presence of a servant—a servant!—in that great freedom of the mountain, where one would expect the distinctions of rank to disappear?
The voices of the mountain streams become, of course, less powerful in proportion to the height to which the traveller attains, until from the distant summits he hears them only in fitful intervals, now clear, now hushed, according to the force and direction of the wind; but alike in the valley and on the hillside there is that singular aerial quality in the sound which makes it different to all other voices in Nature. This is the music which De Quincey described as like that “of pealing anthems, as if streaming from the open portals of some illimitablecathedral,” and he adds, with special reference to the river Brathay, in Langdale, that “such a sound does actually arise, in many states of the weather, from the peculiar action of the river upon its rocky bed; and many times I have heard it, of a quiet night, when no stranger could have been persuaded to believe it other than the sound of choral chanting, distant, solemn, saintly.” The same illusion, if it be an illusion, may be felt by one who rests with closed eyes on the bank of any of the small steep becks, which go purling down the slopes, to feed the larger rivers below.
And now for the joys of the descent. The regret with which the mountain lover turns his back on the summits and leaves
The monstrous ledges there to slope, and spillTheir thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke,
The monstrous ledges there to slope, and spillTheir thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke,
The monstrous ledges there to slope, and spill
Their thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke,
is tempered with the pleasure of choosing some well-pounded scree-slope or soft grassy stair, down which he may race, with the skill and sureness of foot which long practice has given him, towards the abodes of men, and, like a miser turned spendthrift, may squander in one wild fling the thousands of upward steps so laboriously amassed. It is extraordinary with what speed, given suitable foothold, you may run from top to bottom of a mountain which it took you hours to climb; the Alpine glissade is hardly more glorious. Then, if the day be hot, there awaits you that supreme reward and crown of your labours—the bath.
Can bliss be greater than that of coming down sun-scorched and footsore, to the divine cool streams which fall from hill to valley through a series of rock-pools, each a fit bath-place for an emperor, or to the lakes which tempt the swimmer below, or to the sea itself, never far distant from these mountains? To bathe after a stern day on the heights is the elysium of the climber; no ordinary mortals can understand the passion with which he betakes himself to the healing waters. After coming off the Glyders in a burning sun, I have known the traveller leap into Llyn Idwal, to the consternation of its motionless fishermen; I have seen wonder, too, in the faces of wood-cutters by Buttermere, at the sight of a fellow-being rushing down crazed, as they thought, from the banks of High Stile, and plunging into the lake even while a thunderstorm burst overhead. Assuredly the Delectable Mountains themselves can contain nothing more delectable than their streams.
There is a reckless joy, too, in the descent on a wet and stormy afternoon, when, after facing rain and wind for hours on the ridges, we return home drenched and weather-beaten, with the exhilaration that arises in the mind which has nothing to hope or to fear. Indeed, the foul day has its proper place, no less than the fair day, in the economy of the hills, when the rain-curtain is drawn visibly across the valley, and scores of white runnels are coursing down the slopes, and the voice of the swollenriver sounds hoarser every hour, while it rises as only a mountain river can rise.
Such are some of the pleasures which the mountaineer is heir to. But whether we leave the heights in calm or storm, in sunshine or shadow, we leave them only for the moment; we descend, but with an inner prompting to return. However prosperous our ascent may have been, there is always the something left undone, the ridge unclimbed or valley unexplored, which is the spur to further effort. Here, if nowhere else in the land, the sense of satiety is unknown; and it is to this mental tonic, even more than to the bracing air of the heights, that we owe the unwearied spirit which nerves us to walk more leagues upon the mountains than we could walk miles upon the plain. For in the lowlands we walk with the body only; in the highlands we walk also with the mind.
To the rambler upon these hills few things are so attractive, next to the hills themselves, as the glimpses which he gains into the ways of the non-human people that have their homes there. It thrills us to remember that the mountains, lonely though we call them, have for centuries on centuries had their own populous dramas of life and death, and that their rocky tenements were inhabited, in some cases down to comparatively modern times, by the bear, the wolf, the boar, the wild cat, and other hardy outlaws that now exist but in a name or a tradition; but while we must lament the loss of such peaceful animals as the beaver, spoken of by Giraldus Cambrensis as still resident on one Welsh stream in the twelfth century,[16]and the stag, now surviving only in a corner of the Lake District, we need not affect to regret the disappearance of the more savage beastsof prey, for banditti, whether human or non-human, must be subdued.
And it is one of the compensating advantages of the destruction of the greater “game” that the mountains are no longer a hunting-place. You may walk where you will, round Snowdon or round Scafell, without the fear of being turned back, as so often happens in the Scotch highlands, by the nuisance of game-preserving; nor will your own feelings be harassed by the spectacle of a troop of deer-stalkers, or other blood-sportsmen intent on “killing something.” There is, of course, fishing in plenty, but that, as far as I have watched it in these upland places, is an exercise rather of faith and imagination than of the red right hand; at any rate one seldomseesthe fisherman catch anything, and the “fool with a gun” is now as rare a sight as the rare birds whom his forerunners have “dropped”—to use that telling expression of the game-keepers. Fox-hunting on foot goes on to some extent in the winter months; but the need of killing these mischievous pilferers is here a reality, and not, as in fashionable hunting-counties, a sham, and we may rightly wish to see the fox exterminated as the wolf has been—a far humaner and more rational course than that of “preserving” him to be tortured by huntsmen. The otter-worry, that very mean form of cruelty, is carried on in the lower valleys of a few mountain districts, where the pools are large and deep, but climberson the hills are in little danger of meeting with the motley rabble who partake in it.
Here, then, is another goodly feature of mountaineering, that, as one of its accomplished masters, Mr. Owen Glynne Jones, observed, it “does not claim the sacrifice of beasts and fishes.” The craft of climbing is a fine physical training which, as a school of manliness and self-reliance, immeasurably transcends the wretched amateur butchery that masquerades as “sport.” “The mountaineer,” says Reclus, “experiences, like the huntsman, the delight of conquest after toil, yet he enjoys the pleasure all the more, in that he has risked none but his own life; he has kept his hands unstained.”
In the absence of the larger kinds of wild animals that have gone down under the stress of what we call civilization, it is to the mountain birds that we first turn with interest. We think at once of the golden eagle, in regions where the names of so many cliffs recall his former sovereignty; and those who have seen the great bird, as I have, flying in freedom among the mountains of Skye, and, as happened on one occasion I recall, mobbed by dwarfish-looking ravens, as a kestrel is mobbed by sparrows, on the shores of Loch Coruisk, until he sailed off on wide wings across the corrie, cannot but regret that he is no longer known in his traditional haunts on Snowdon, or on his famous crag in Borrowdale. But when we read in old books of travel, such as West’sGuide to the Lakes in Cumberland(1781), that “the devastation made on the fold in the breeding-season, by one eyrie, was computed at a lamb a day,” we understand why the doom of the eagle was even then unavoidable and why it became “a common species of traffic,” as another author described it, “to supply the curious with young eagles, in the taking of which the inhabitants were very expert.”[17]
I was told by a sheep-farmer in Scotland, who had trapped or shot over a score of these feathered freebooters, that for an eagle to carry off a plump lamb from the pastures there is need of a freshening breeze to lift the mighty wings; he had seen cases when, in dull listless weather, the bird was unable to rise with its quarry, and on the approach of the shepherd was obliged to abandon it and flap reluctantly away.
A lady who had been pained to see a golden eagle “for sale,” once asked me whether, in the event of her ransoming the captive, it would be possible to set him at liberty on some mountain height, and for a time I was rather dazzled by the idea of releasing the imperial bird from the top of Snowdon or Scafell, or, if the companionship of other eagles was desired, from some far northern peak; but on my consulting a well-known ornithologist he assured me that the eagle,cramped by long imprisonment, would probably be unable to fly, and that if he did fly he would almost certainly fall a victim to some local “sportsman,” or be pecked to death by his wild congeners, if there were any in the neighbourhood; so in the face of these discouraging predictions the project was given up.
Eagles, then, we have none in our Welsh and English mountains, and the kite having now been reduced to so poor a remnant as to be numbered with the lost British birds, we turn perforce to the buzzard and the peregrine as the two most noteworthy representatives of the family of the Falcons. The fiery-hearted peregrine, or “falcon-hawk,” as the dalesmen call him, still breeds on certain rocky ramparts, whence he can overlook the valleys and dart forth unerringly on any passing prey. An eye-witness once described to me how a falcon, having struck down one of two pigeons in a field at the head of Langdale, and being scared from his victim by some harvesters who saw the chase, rose instantly and was off at lightning speed after the other pigeon over the ridge of Bowfell!
We look in vain to the buzzard for such indomitable energies; yet it is a grand sight to watch him sailing aloft in leisurely circles, or hanging poised, as he sometimes does, off the edge of some broken escarpment, so near that you can see his barred feathers and quickly glancing eye. On a misty day in rounding a sharp headland, I have sometimes come suddenlyupon a perched buzzard at only a few yards’ distance, and have seen him flutter up in a panic, to lose himself in the clouds; in the nesting season the bird will occasionally “shadow” an intruding climber almost as the curlew does, and follow him at close distance along the ridge of the mountain until he has conducted him off his estate. I have frequently seen buzzards and ravens sparring at each other in the sky, in that desultory and ineffective manner of warfare which many birds seem to adopt.
The raven, who, in default of the eagle, divides with the buzzard the empire of the crags is, perhaps, the most interesting bird that now claims our attention; and robber though he is, we are always glad to hear his deep “kronk,” or his wild dog-like bark, before the black form is seen skirting the edge of the precipice or winging straight across the glen. It is somewhat strange that in spite of the persecution of shepherds, the cupidity of collectors, and the inroads of rock-climbers, so large a bird can still find undisturbed breeding-places, and maintain his numbers as well as he does among our British hills; but I think the case of the raven, as far as these districts are concerned, is hardly so desperate as ornithologists give us to understand. To walk for several hours among the Carnarvonshire or the Cumberland mountains without evidence of ravens, is in my experience rather unusual, and at times one may see them there in greatstrength; a few years ago, for example, I watched nine birds one August afternoon soaring and skimming with playful antics along the edge of Grasmoor, and so intent on their game that they allowed me to come within quite close range; on another occasion I saw more than a score of them rise together from the side of Skiddaw, doubtless from a carrion feast.
It is astonishing how near this wary outlaw will approach to dwelling-houses in the early summer mornings before mankind is on the stir. It so happened that from the cottage at Capel Curig where I used to stay, I could see a section of the hillside above as I lay in bed, and on two successive mornings I was puzzled by what seemed to be a concourse of large fowls hopping and squabbling, a few hundred yards from my window, round some object on the bank. On further investigation I found this object to be the carcase of a sheep, and the combatants to be hungry ravens “on the grab.”
But there are other and more cheery singers in the mountain choir. In the early summer, when the bird-life of these upland valleys is at its prime, two voices above all others are resonant along the Welsh hillsides, those of the cuckoo and the curlew, who fill the clear air with their clear melody the whole of the long June day, and not a little of the night. There are, perhaps, few sounds in wild nature more fascinating than the curlew’s call, starting, as it does, with its strange single note, and gradually rising and breaking into what seemslike rings and bubbles of exquisitely liquid song, which fall here and there on the grey moorland while the singer is often unseen. As for the cuckoo, thatimprobus anserof the hills, there are seasons when he seems to be ubiquitous; you pass him shouting in the valley as you start out; you meet him again and again about the middle region of heathery boulders and grass slopes; and when you emerge on the sky-line and think you have left him far below, his voice comes after you, as jubilant as ever, and pursues you to the very cairn on the top.
Familiar friends, also, are the ring-ousel, or, as some call him, the rock-ousel, and the wheatear; the one as fussy and loquacious as his lowland cousin, the blackbird (thanks to his outcry, I have sometimes found his nest on a ledge of steep heather-covered rock, as under the northern front of Tryfan); the other flitting silent and watchful, with quick jerky movements, from stone to stone, or along the grey wall on the mountain. These with the ever-welcome meadow-pipit, are rarely absent from the hillside. Of the river birds there is none that has so strong a hold on the affections of the mountaineer as the water-ousel, delightful little sprite of the tumbling becks and eddies, from which his very being seems inseparable. No writer with whom I am acquainted has paid a juster tribute to the many charms of the water-ousel than the author ofThe Mountains of California, whose chapter on theAmerican variety of the bird (Cinclus Mexicanus) recalls many of the traits of our English “dipper” as we have known him, none too plentifully, beside his native streams and pools. The grey wagtail and the sandpiper will be found in similar haunts.
The beasts of the mountain, as viewed by the passing observer are, with one exception, less interesting, because less wild, than the birds; for the fox and the “mart” are seldom seen by the climber, who, in his eagerness to reach his goal, has no time to devote, as the naturalist would, to a patient watching of their haunts. The exception is the wild goat, which, strange to say, is not known as a British species by the majority of naturalists, though it has much more right to that distinction than the “wild” Chillingham cattle; for it is a fact that on some of the Welsh mountains as on some Scottish islands, there are still herds of goats which, if not indigenous (that claim, it seems, is disproved by their mixed colours and the shape of their horns), are yet living in a state of absolute freedom and wildness, full of courage and resource, and able to hold their own under hardships of climate which no domestic animal could endure, and there is little doubt that these herds, though descended from escaped animals, and reinforced from time to time by “strays” that have taken to the hills, are of very great antiquity. They used to be common, a century or less ago, in a number of craggy spots, suchas the Pass of Aberglaslyn, from which they have now been driven; but a remnant may still be seen on the Rhinog Fawr, and a few other lonely ranges, by those who approach them with due care.[18]It was lately stated in a London paper that “wild goat stalking among the Hebrides can fairly stand comparison with ibex shooting”; and I can remember, some forty-five years ago, hearing some talk at Pen-y-Gwryd about an expedition to Snowdon to shoot goats. There are as few goats as eagles on Snowdon now; but I can testify that the sport is an excellent one when the field-glass is substituted for the rifle, for in this way I have stalked some fine goats on the Rhinog and elsewhere, and have rejoiced to see them go bounding across the cliffs in style that would do credit to the Swiss chamois or the white goat of the Rockies. I was told that there was a similar herd on the Yewdale Fells, near Coniston; but the only wild goat that I have seen in the Lake District was a solitary one whom I surprised, in a steep and secluded hollow, on the rocky side of Glaramara.
These wild Welsh goats must not be confused with the half-domesticated herds which it was the custom until about fifty years ago to keep on the hills as sheep are now kept. We are told by Cliffe in hisBook of North Wales(1851) that “but few of the national animal, the goat, are now kept, in consequence of the injury which they have done to the young plantations”; and the same writer gives a vivid account of a goat-hunt—apparently of the wild animal—which he witnessed on the Rhinog.
While ascending we heard much shouting, and barking of dogs, intermingled with piercing shrieks. Then we passed a gigantic snow-white billy-goat, with his legs tied, struggling at intervals convulsively, and uttering very shrill cries. Presently we came in sight of several men in a narrower part of the Pass, striving to capture another white billy-goat of greater size and even longer horns. The animal had taken refuge, after a long chase, on a very narrow ledge in a precipice, and apparently bid defiance to his pursuers. At last he bounded suddenly from a great height, and ran rapidly over broken rocks and heath for about six hundred yards, with the pack of dogs close at his heels, who ultimately brought him up, but were kept at bay by his horns.
While ascending we heard much shouting, and barking of dogs, intermingled with piercing shrieks. Then we passed a gigantic snow-white billy-goat, with his legs tied, struggling at intervals convulsively, and uttering very shrill cries. Presently we came in sight of several men in a narrower part of the Pass, striving to capture another white billy-goat of greater size and even longer horns. The animal had taken refuge, after a long chase, on a very narrow ledge in a precipice, and apparently bid defiance to his pursuers. At last he bounded suddenly from a great height, and ran rapidly over broken rocks and heath for about six hundred yards, with the pack of dogs close at his heels, who ultimately brought him up, but were kept at bay by his horns.
From the mountain goats we pass naturally to the mountain sheep, who, though nominally domesticated, are so little subject to human interference and live so great a portion of their lives at large upon the hills, that as compared with our dull southern breeds they may almost be regarded as wild animals. Very familiar to every one who has spent much time on the mountains is the sharp “sneeze” of the sheep as he gives warning to his fellows that a stranger is approaching. Writing of the Welsh sheep, half a century ago, Cliffetells us that they differed entirely in their habits from those of an enclosed country. “Roaming wherever inclination leads them, confined by few or no fences, they are obliged for mutual defence against foxes, ravens, and other birds of prey, to form parties of ten or twelve, of which number, if one perceives anything advancing towards the little flock, he turns and faces the object, when, if its appearance be hostile, he warns his companions by a shrill whistling noise, and the whole scamper off to the more inaccessible wilds.”
Since this was written, the extent of many pasture-lands has been lessened; but there are still places where the sheep have a whole mountain, or several mountains, to roam over, and live in a state of considerable freedom and liveliness. An old man who used to spend the summer months at the top of a high pass in the Lake District, where he sold refreshments to tourists, and slept in a little hut built right into the steep hillside, told me that his only discomfort arose from the noisy gambols of the sheep, who kept him awake by disporting themselves on his grassy roof after nightfall. Thus, like the lady inLocksley Hall, he must lie and ponder—
In the dead unhappy night, and when theramis on the roof.
In the dead unhappy night, and when theramis on the roof.
In the dead unhappy night, and when theramis on the roof.
Imagine any one suffering in this manner from the frolics of our south-countrymuttons!
The mountain lambs, especially, have arare sprightliness and beauty, and there is scarcely a more lovely picture to be seen among the hills than one of these superb little creatures poised intrepid on a high rock or wall as the traveller passes below, and looking down on him with an innocent and wistful curiosity. Such a sight makes it pitiful to remember to what base uses man has turned the sheep, and how degraded is the domestic breed, as we commonly see it, from the glorious wild animals described in theMountains of California. “The domestic sheep,” says Muir, “is expressionless, like a dull bundle of something only half alive, while the wild is as elegant and graceful as a deer, every movement manifesting admirable strength and character. The tame is timid; the wild is bold. The tame is always more or less ruffled and dirty; while the wild is as smooth and clean as flowers of his mountain pastures.”
The sheep of the Welsh hills and the Cumbrian fells is a sort of connecting-link between Muir’sovis montanaand the silly creature of our meadows; but it must be admitted that he sadly lacks the marvellous climbing powers of his wilder relative, for when he ventures on the tempting ledges of turf that intersect the sheer precipices he sometimes shares the fate of the “meek mountain lamb” in Scott’s “Helvellyn.”
I once saw an unfortunate “cragbound” sheep on a narrow and very dangerous terrace that overhangs the great eastern verge ofTryfan, where, having eaten all the grass on the ledge, she was peering nervously about, trying to summon up the courage to make a backward leap to safety. After descending from the mountain, I called at the farm below, and got a promise that the sheep should somehow be saved from its plight; but on the following day I found the same tragedy proceeding. Again I sought and received assurances from the shepherds that they would go with ropes to the rescue, but as I had to leave Wales the next morning I never learnt the sequel, which I fear may have yielded more satisfaction to the ravens than to the sheep.
If the mountain sheep must be deemed half wild, can less be said of that lean, gaunt, hungry, savage, but highly intelligent animal, the sheep-dog of Cumberland or Wales? It is one thing to see these “friends of man” in their educated capacity, collecting or dispersing the sheep under their owner’s vociferous bidding; it is quite another thing to see them gorging ravenously on a carrion sheep, and slinking off with wolfish demeanour when disturbed. Historians may tell us that “the last wolf” was killed among these mountains some centuries back; but we make bold to doubt that assertion when surrounded by half a dozen bristling “Gelerts” in the wilds of Wales, for it would then seem that not a little of the character ofcanis lupushas survived in domestication. For my part, I would rather meet a Welsh bull on an open grass-slope than apack of these snarling sheep-dogs when their master is out of call, for I can bear witness that at such a moment Mr. Jack London’s choicest wolf-stories are brought too forcibly to mind, and that “the call of the wild” has an unpleasant reality of its own. The traveller who has been followed halfway up Carnedd Llewelyn by a troop of these “white-fangs,” in an interval of their duties at the sheep-washing in Llyn Llugwy, will be able to form at least an “intelligent anticipation” of how it feels to be pursued by real wolves in the forests of the north-west. The mountain sheep-dog is still half a wolf, and not without reason has Mr. Thompson Seton made sheep-dogs the heroes of two of the chapters of hisWild Animals I have Known.
I have incidentally mentioned the bull; and who that has walked much in Carnarvonshire or Merioneth will be so pedantic as to deny the bull his place among thefaunaof these districts? Theoretically, no doubt, he must be classed with the domestic; but in practice there are times when his domesticity is apt to be doubted by the wayfarer, and when even the cheery assurances of the Welsh herdsman (if within hail) that “she will do nothing to you,” leave much to be desired. Turned out in early summer on the roadways and hill-slopes, with that national disregard for Saxon weaknesses which has characterized the Cymry from of old, the black bulls of these hilly regions are an element that has to betaken into account, together with winds and waters, in the traveller’s plan of campaign. I have known a party of tourists compelled to elect between meeting the angry animal or relinquishing the direct ascent—a choice between bull and “bwlch”—and unanimously agreed in favour of a rearward move. I once camped with a friend for a fortnight in an artist’s van, pitched on an open plot in an upland valley where a big bull was pastured; and when we heard him in the darkness playfully scratching back or sharpening horns on our door-step, we bethought us of those weird stories of wild life in the backwoods, where the dwellers in the lonely log-hut hear the long-drawn sniff of the strolling bear, as he “samples” them under their bolted door at night.
In some of the valleys round Snowdon there is a strange-looking breed of black and white Scandinavian cattle, whose appearance at close quarters on a dark night is rather eerie, because only the white part of each animal is easily visible, and the traveller has the spectacle of a detached head, or shoulder, or hind-quarter, as the case may be, confronting him through the gloom.
As a rule, it is only in spells of great heat, such as occasionally descend upon the mountains, that the bulls are really dangerous, and then they are seldom approached, even by the herdsman, without the aid of dogs. It is said that the most ominous symptom on thebull’s part is when, instead of the usual shrill bellow, he gives vent to a low querulous grumbling sound, which seems to imply a deeply felt long-cherished grievance; at such times it is wise to give him a wide berth. After all, can we men complain, if the bull sometimes shows himself dissatisfied with our treatment of his fellows? Who knows but that his splenetic outbursts have some reference to the massacre of his kith and kin at the hands of the “family butcher,” or to the savage dietetic habits of the very people who denouncehimas “the savage brute”? What I have thought a little hard, however, is that no discrimination is made by the bull between beef-eater and vegetarian, and that the peaceful pilgrim who has not tasted sirloin for over forty years is compelled to skulk up the hill under cover of a stone wall as guiltily as the shameless intruder who has a beef-sandwich in his pocket. Some vegetarians, I believe, advocate the wearing of a badge; there would be more to be said in favour of the distinction, if the black bulls of Snowdonia would consent to recognize such flag of truce.
We see, then, that the Cambrian and Cumbrian hills, though far less richly populated than they were some centuries back, have yet no little interest to offer us in the races of non-human peoples, wild or half-wild, that inhabit them—races whose life is much more closely intertwined with the life of the mountain itself, and more responsive to its varying moodsand seasons, than that of the shepherd born and bred on its slopes, not to speak of the summer visitor who comes there for mere pastime or recreation.
We talk of the barrenness of the mountains, and barren in a sense they are, when contrasted with the teeming wealth of the plain, yet the bleakest of them, if studied with sympathy and insight, will be found to have a living and life-giving freshness of its own. Now and then, perhaps, when face to face with some scene of more than common severity, we are tempted to exclaim, with Scott:
The wildest glen, but this, can showSome touch of nature’s genial glow:On high Benmore green mosses grow,And heath-bells bud in deep Glencoe,And copse on Cruchan-Ben;But here, above, around, below,On mountain or in glen,Nor tree, nor shrub, nor plant, nor flower,Nor aught of vegetative power,The weary eye may ken.
The wildest glen, but this, can showSome touch of nature’s genial glow:On high Benmore green mosses grow,And heath-bells bud in deep Glencoe,And copse on Cruchan-Ben;But here, above, around, below,On mountain or in glen,Nor tree, nor shrub, nor plant, nor flower,Nor aught of vegetative power,The weary eye may ken.
The wildest glen, but this, can show
Some touch of nature’s genial glow:
On high Benmore green mosses grow,
And heath-bells bud in deep Glencoe,
And copse on Cruchan-Ben;
But here, above, around, below,
On mountain or in glen,
Nor tree, nor shrub, nor plant, nor flower,
Nor aught of vegetative power,
The weary eye may ken.
But austereness, too, has its place, and often is to the mountains what fertility is to the fields, not a blemish, but a glory; and if greycrag[19]and wild hillside bear no visible fruitage, yet many are the spiritual crops which may be gathered from them by the understanding eye and mind.
Some centuries ago the Lake District, as Wordsworth has remarked, “must have been covered with wood to a great height up the mountains, where native Scotch firs must have grown in great profusion, as they do in the northern part of Scotland to this day”; and he quotes a traditional saying that a squirrel might have travelled from Wythburn to Keswick without touching earth. In Wales the same conditions once existed, and Pennant, in 1773, referred to the earlier destruction of the oak forests which had clothed the upper dales. “Avarice,” he wrote, “or dissipation, and its constant follower, poverty, have despoiled much of our Principality of its leafy beauties.” We can no longer say of Snowdon or of Helvellyn, as of Mont Blanc, that “around his waist are forests braced”—even miniature forests—but a closer knowledge will teach us that the hillside, even when barren of vegetation, is never barren of charm, and it may be that these mountains have gained as much as they have lost by the change. Certainly thereis a keen pleasure to the climber in standing free of all entanglement of trunk or thicket on the bare and open fells.
Not that the mountain is often a mere treeless and shrubless waste, for in some places, on the lower slopes, there is a thick ground-growth—carefully shunned by the traveller, but rich and beautiful in itself—of heather, bracken, and bilberry, and there are not a few spots where the flanks of the hills are a very wilderness of intermingled crags and brushwood, ancient lurking-place of “mart” or fox, but rarely if ever trodden by foot of man. When these fail, there may often be seen a line of stunted yews, or hollies, or junipers, straggling up the slope, or a mountain-ash jutting out slantwise from the side of some narrow ravine and almost bridging the watercourse. The bilberry, like the heather, is at times found growing at great heights, especially in the rockier and less accessible places, such as the sides of Tryfan or Scafell Pike, where it flourishes amazingly in some seasons and produces berries of giant size.[20]
Not less delightful is that close-fitting vestment of the hills, which follows so faithfully each ripe curve and contour, and so trimly encircles the projecting bosses of rock—the short crisp sward, on which the mountain sheephave their pasture. Even the stoniest tracts are softened, here and there, by these verdant interspaces, and it is refreshing to see a steep saddle of turf flung across a craggy ridge, or a streak of greenery running far down, like a path, among the grey and pathless screes. These grass banks are in parts notched and graded into a kind of natural stair, easy to climb and luxurious to descend; elsewhere they have a smooth and glassy surface which in dry weather becomes highly polished and rather treacherous to the feet.
Very inviting, too, are the narrow winding tracks, models of skilful engineering, which sheep and shepherds between them have worn along the slopes—slender thoroughfares which often skirt the fells for some distance at the same level, and offer a less toilsome footing to those whose course is round some projecting bluff or hollow combe. A terrace-road, where one has a steep rise on one side and a steep drop on the other, is always a delight, even when one’s terrace is but a tiny sheep-path of a few inches’ width; nor is there any need to go to show places, such as the so-called “Precipice Walk” at Dolgelly, for a sensation which can be enjoyed in abundance on any unfrequented hillside.
But let it be supposed that verdure of any kind is lacking, and that we stand face to face with an expanse of bare cliff and scree—such as the south face of the Great Gable—the solid cliffs rising above, and the broken screes streamingdownward and outward from their base. Here is barrenness indeed, yet a barrenness which, to the lover of such solitudes, is more fruitful than the choicest vineyard or cornfield. For how weird and suggestive is this stationary rock-fall of screes, this stony glacier arrested in its flow, yet retaining in its stillness something of the undulant shape! Viewed from across the glen, it looks like a great “tongue” of rocks lolling out from the mouth of the gorge many hundreds of feet above, and gradually widening in its fall; at closer quarters, it presents itself as a tolerably compact mass of individual boulders, none of any great size, across which it is necessary to pick one’s way with some deftness, because, like Wordsworth’s cloud, it “moveth altogether if it move at all,” and a floundering step may set half the hillside creeping daleward.
It is centuries, no doubt, since these detached stones fell from their holdings, and they are themselves for the most part weather-worn and sun-stained like the parent crags, but they are still occasionally reinforced by new outcasts, when some exposed layer of rock has become disintegrated by winter frosts and rains; and then the story of the latest landslip is written visibly for several years in the paler hue of the screes and in the discordant rift in the escarpment. As a rule, falling stones, so great a danger in the Alps, are rare among our mountains; once or twice in a season, perhaps, you may see, or hear, a big stone go thunderingdown the hillside when no human agency has been at work.
I refer to human agency, because the mention of falling stones reminds me of the now disused sport of crag-bowling. The rolling of stones down mountain sides, still a recognized method of warfare among hillsmen, has rightly been anathematized in this peaceful country since rock-climbing became popular; but in the old days, when no one went on the crags, it was a harmless and diverting practice. Thus Gilpin, in his travels among the mountains of Cumberland, a hundred and thirty years back, remarked how the native children amused themselves in this manner; and Bingley, describing his ascent of Tryfan some half-century later, observes: “We stood on a mere point, and on each side of us was a precipice more deep than any I had before seen; we united our strength, and rolled down it several huge pieces of rock.” Forty years ago it was common to see guides and tourists assiduously engaged in the sport, the process of which was somewhat as follows. Having first selected a steep “scar,” or a grass slope, with a pool if possible at the foot of it, and having made sure that neither man nor sheep was in the line of fire, the party turned their attention to some “huge stone,” as Wordsworth has it,
Couched on the bald top of an eminence,
Couched on the bald top of an eminence,
Couched on the bald top of an eminence,
and expended such energy as they had to spare in detaching this rock from its station, until itslowly toppled over, gathered fierce speed, went smoking and crashing down the hillside, and buried itself with a wild plunge in the waters. Such was the pastime, a sort of vicarious glissade, and from my own bygone enjoyment of it I have been led to hope that the famous “labours” of Sisyphus, who, according to the old Greek legend, was condemned in Hades to roll a large block up a hill only—only!—to see it roll down again, were not quite so cheerless a form of punishment as poets have feigned. The self-imposed labours of the tobogganist seem to belong to the same class.
But if any reader thinks that so dangerous a game as crag-bowling ought not to receive even this faint retrospective approval, let me add, as a warning, that I know one pilgrim who, for his former indulgence in it, sometimes pays the penalty in dreams. He has loosened, maybe, from its high parapet some monster of a rock, in weight and girth far exceeding any upon which he ever laid waking hands, and no sooner has he launched it on its mad career than he remembers with horror unspeakable that there is a cottage in the glen below—even now he sees its chimneys as the crag goes thundering towards it, and he awakes in remorseful agony at the sickening thud upon the roof.
From the loose screes we turn naturally to the stone walls, where some at least of the scattered blocks have found lodgment and reconstruction. So familiar are these wallsto us, and so closely associated with the hillside itself, that they seem to be a natural part of it, as the bridges of the valleys, and one would not willingly miss them from the bare landscape. It is rather surprising, indeed, to find De Quincey speaking of the “sad injury” done to the beauty of a mountainous country by its stone walls; for to some of us the stone wall has a more native charm in such districts than any quickset hedgerow could have: it has often furnished us with a shelter in storm, a shade in heat, a lunching and a siesta-place; we love it, too, as the haunt of our mountain companions, the wheatear and the rock-ousel. The scaling of a seven-foot wall, when the top stones have become insecure, may present some difficulty to the novice, and it is then that he is glad to find one of those convenient loop-holes or rather sheep-holes, through which, after temporarily removing the door-stone, he may insinuatingly worm himself. On some of the lower slopes, especially among the foot-hills near the seacoast, these walls are often of huge girth and solidity, and, being overgrown and intertwined with numberless ivies, mosses, and lichens, have a rare and peculiar beauty; but the increasing use of barbed wire, as an adjunct or substitute for the walls, is yet another sign of the vandalism which in so many ways is working havoc among the hills.
But of all the treasures of the hillside the brightest and purest are its water springs, sources of those many Welsh “afons,” andEnglish “gills” and “becks,” whose beauty might convince the most hardened and sceptical of town-dwellers that the Naiads were something more than a dream. Follow one of these swift mountain rivers, such as the Cumbrian Esk or the Cambrian Llugwy, or better still, perhaps, one of the lesser and more headlong freshets, from its deep pools and rock-basins in the lower valley to its birthplace under the heights, and you will marvel at the prodigality of its charms—so deliciously do the waves come dancing and singing down the slopes in a succession of hidden falls, no two of which are alike, or in an open cascade of white foam, such as often wins for such streams in the Lake District the name of “Sour Milk Gill”; and at last, as the current dwindles, you will trace it to some brimming tarn, or to its high fount in green mosses among the rocks, or will possibly lose it underground, where it may be heard bubbling and gurgling below the stones in its invisible cradle.
These becks, it must be remembered, unlike the turbid snow-fed torrents of Switzerland, are as clear as crystal, so that in calm weather you may see every pebble at the bottom of the pools, and the trout poised with waving fins; but after a heavy rainfall, when the streams are in “spate,” it is often no easy matter to ford them, for then the merest runnels, across which you step to-day without hindrance, may to-morrow be a raging flood. On the other hand, there are times, though much less frequent,when the smaller streamlets are withered up under a spell of summer heat, and their dry channels are useful only as a stone staircase for the climber, who in such seasons may become acquainted, as never before, with the feeling of thirst. I think the sorest temptation I ever underwent, without succumbing to it, was when, on my first visit to Scafell Pike with two fellow undergraduates, on a burning August day, we found a jug of claret-cup left to keep cool, in the spring above Esk Hause, by a party which had trustfully preceded us to the summit. It must have been owing to some morally bracing influence in the high mountain air that that cup was untouched by us: had we been subjected to the same ordeal on the banks of the Cam, it seems but too certain that not one drop could have been spared.
The mountain tarns, in which many of the becks have their origin, lie for the most part in hidden recesses, unsuspected from below, under the crowning heights, and mark the beginning of the last stage in the ascent. It is rather curious that the older school of nature-lovers should have felt themselves disposed to melancholy rather than to joyfulness amid such scenes; even Wordsworth speaks of a “not unpleasing sadness” as naturally induced by the sight of these pools, and surmises that “the prospect of a body of pure water, unattended with groves and other cheerful rural images by which fresh water is usually accompanied, and unable to givefurtherance to the meagre vegetation around it, excites a sense of some repulsive power strongly put forth.”[21]Here is a strange relic, in the mind of a great modern poet, of the medieval sense of antagonism between man and nature: we now think rather of these remote tarns as wells of life and healing, to be repaired to by the pilgrim who needs refreshment and comfort in the jostling conflict of mankind.
With the features which I have mentioned, the barren hillside is not likely to lose its attractiveness for nature-lovers. A wilderness it may be, but of a sort which brings to mind the rapt words of the poet—