One Man and a Mule: Across England with a Pack Mule

Mules are particularly free kickers, often shy with strangers, and touchy about the head and ears.

The War Office, Animal Management (London, 1923)

TO GET OVER to Grasmere, we now had to retrace our steps cumbersomely and take Jethro around in the horse lorry: a considerable drive, as you have to head north to Keswick and then down past the murky depths of Thirlmere. At least we had arranged some excellent grazing for him: a large field at Knott House Farm, the home of Peter and Joanne Bland.

Peter was another member of the Bland fell-running dynasty. We had found his number in the Lakeland Shepherd’s Guide. These guides have been in publication since 1817 and record the smit marks – the daubs of dyed colour on the fleece – and ear tags of every fell sheep. They are produced every ten years to enable every animal to be identified, usually so they can be returned when they’ve wandered off-piste. And for the same reason, they give the contact details of every farm.

With great generosity, given they didn’t know us from Adam and Jethro didn’t even have a smit mark, Peter and Joanne offered us a field for the night. As fields went, it was perfect for Jethro: a few non-toxic trees to give shade; plenty of grass; and best of all, a gate where he could stand to survey the world. Mules, like farmers, enjoy looking over gates.

Peter and Joanne lived a little to the north of Grasmere, and there was a youth hostel nearby. Our accommodation was more spartan than Jethro’s. The man who opened the reception hatch to sign us in looked like the last resident of Middle Earth: bearded beyond beardiness. There was a long list of rules and regulations which included being shut out of the place during daylight hours. Our room was clean, but had a series of security locks to get inside.

At breakfast the next day, a young man asked if he could have an extra teabag for his Thermos. The staff reacted as if he had suggested burning the place down. In much the same way, in fact, as when I had asked on the phone if they had anywhere we could tie up a mule for the night – which was why we were sleeping apart.

When we arrived to collect Jethro, he was happily rolling on the grass. Peter Bland was amused by having a mule in the field, although he did say it would wreck it for the sheep if, as Joanne and their daughter wanted, they had a more permanent horse.

Peter was in his early forties, athletic and with a light layer of what would have been called designer stubble in London, but here was more like a farmer’s ‘I’m not bloody bothering to shave when I get up at four o’clock in the morning’.

Sitting out by his front door step, with six or seven dogs, we talked about the recent controversy over Grasmere Common, on which small farmers like Peter had traditionally held grazing rights. The owners of the common, the Lowther Estate, had been blocking applications for increased sheep production because of pressure to ‘re-wild’ the Lake District. They wanted some areas of the fell to be fenced off and revert to nature.

Peter claimed the Lowther Estate’s decision could cost him thousands of pounds.

‘I’m a tenant farmer here. Have to pay my rent. They shouldn’t be allowed to take a decision which effectively puts my livelihood at risk.’

‘I was expecting a big black mule, but this is a nicely coloured, pretty thing. He’s not nearly as big as I thought he’d be. But I guess a bigger animal would take more feeding.

‘If we had a horse in that field – which is what, about two and a half acres? – by spring it would be jiggered. Probably would be with that small mule as well. There wouldn’t be any grass left. Completely jiggered. So, farmers and horses are not the best of friends.

‘I mean years ago, of course, you had to have horses. You’d have so many cows and a horse, maybe two horses for a farm like this. And big horses: cobbs. Then when tractors came along, farmers could keep an extra cow or two instead. A swap – more cows for the horses that were no longer needed.

‘When we were growing up, we was told that in the old days, if you found someone else’s sheep from another valley, you’d send them a postcard. And they would ride over on a horse to bring them back. Might take a couple of days. Now we get on the telephone and say, “we’ve got ten sheep of yours”, and they come round in the pickup by lunchtime!

‘We still do some distances though. We walk our sheep round from the Grisedale valley, over towards Patterdale.’

‘So that’s a fair way.’ I knew it was, because it was our stage for the following day.

‘It’s not too bad. But the only reason we can do it is because we’ve got Herdwicks. You wouldn’t do it with these low-country sheep or Swaledales. They don’t have the energy or the stamina. They’d go soft and lie down and that would be that. But we can walk our sheep back from near Patterdale in four hours. It’s not that steep and it’s a well-trodden path. Isn’t that the route you’re going to take with your mule?’

‘Yes, it is, but you’re fell-runners. I bet even the sheep are in training. You probably do it a bit faster than anybody else.’ I couldn’t see Jethro doing it in four hours. Or us, for that matter.

I asked Peter the question I had earlier asked Jeff: why was his family so passionate about fell-running when they spent all day on the hills anyway?

‘It was always something done from a young age. Junior fell-runners would get involved and then you’d come up through the age group until you ran in the adult races. My father would run when he was a busy shepherd but he never used to train. He always said he had done his training during the week. So come the weekend he could go off and enjoy a race. It was social. But he would never train.

‘Whereas his brother Billy Bland, my uncle, who was a stonemason in Borrowdale … Now Billy, he did use to train. A lot. At five o’clock, when he finished work, he would get on the fells to get proper fit. Two hours every night. And Billy was superbly fit – he was British champion and that.

‘We Blands are good at getting down mountains. The rougher and steeper, the more we like it. Because we’re sure-footed. We pride ourselves on that. Some of the fell-runners who come over from Lancashire and Yorkshire – they aren’t used to it, so we make up ground on them.

‘So your question: why would you want to do it when you’ve worked on them all day? I suppose it’s just a challenge, isn’t it?’

‘And in the old days,’ I asked, ‘would there have been any messing around about not having a drink afterwards? How austere was the training regime?’

‘My uncle Billy wouldn’t drink much. Not when he was winning races every weekend. He wouldn’t be a big drinker at all. Sometimes he would have a Mackeson’s milk stout. “It does you double good!” as they used to say in the ads. I can remember when I was doing the Bob Graham, I’d often have a tin of Mackeson’s to give myself a rest before setting off on the next section.

‘Uncle Billy used to do the whole race during daylight hours. He would set off at six in the morning. And then as a boy, I’d see him run into the market square in Keswick at eight the same evening. You had pacers for each leg to make sure you did your tops, and the lads that were with him, his pacers, even they couldn’t keep up with him! He made it look easy. Even though it wasn’t.

‘Every valley in the Lake District still has a race, where you run up to a watershed and back. Borrowdale, Ennerdale, Langdale. They’re all well supported.’

What was it, I wondered, about the Bland family that had produced so many great runners? What had their mother put in the porridge?’

‘Stamina’s got a lot to do with it. And my top tip? Take small steps when you’re going uphill. A lady’s steps. Small, dainty steps like a dancer.’ He demonstrated on his porch, going up and down the ledge. The dogs looked on impassively, but Jethro started staring at us over the gate.

Peter’s father arrived from his own nearby farm. He was a larger, more solid version of Peter.

‘I’ve got a big jar of pickle for you in the van,’ he told his son, in a broad Cumbrian accent.

Peter explained what Jasper and I were trying to do with Jethro – ‘He’s got a mule, Dad’ – but his father looked blank; at first, I thought, from incomprehension of what might have seemed a daft scheme to transport a mule across the country.

‘I can’t hear a word you’re saying, son,’ he said with a poker face. ‘I’ve been at altitude. When you’re working all day on the fells, like I have, at 3,000 feet, your ears start to go. When you come down, you can’t hear a thing.’

There is a tendency to decry Grasmere for its bustling High Street, full of outdoor gear stores – the nearest the Lake District comes to bling – and, well, just for being so popular. But I thought it injected some much-needed vulgarity into proceedings. The large Co-op also had a better (and cheaper) selection of pies than anything in the more genteel villages we had passed.

The young guy serving us espressos in the small takeaway coffee-shop said that, while local himself, most of his friends had left town; much of the workforce was made up of young Europeans, who came for a long summer.

As we left Grasmere, I thought of Wordsworth striding from one valley to another, whether to meet Coleridge or, as he once did along this route, to say goodbye to his brother John for the last time; John was drowned at sea a few years later. He was always a great supporter of what he called ‘the old muleteer tracks with their primitive simplicities’ which ran through the Lakes.

‘If we had a book of his poetry, it would be a gazetteer of almost the whole of the Lake District,’ said Jasper.

This was true. Yet I felt strongly that following the Romantic poets through the Lake District was not just a heritage trail. Once you peeled off the layers of varnish that have encrusted Keats, Coleridge and particularly Wordsworth, you came face-to-face with an ambitious project that is as radical today as it was then.

The attempt to examine the human heart – one’s own heart – and trace its evolution from the child to the man is as bold as ever. And it is one that is curiously out of favour with British literary culture. In poetry, particularly, the shadow of modernism lies heavy on the land: the idea, attributed to T. S. Eliot, that the poet should be impersonal and the lyric impulse suppressed; that one should speak in other voices, and that to speak in one’s own is to ‘grandstand’. The work of many a modern poet shows a studied and polished impersonality: one reason why they like translating so much, where the technique is their own but the lives are someone else’s.

Of course, Wordsworth can be frustrating. There are times in The Prelude when the reader – or certainly this one – wants to throttle him. Just get on with it, man.

‘Imagine you’re doing the pitch, William. You have three minutes in front of the panel. Don’t keep telling us about the thing we might need to know before you tell us another thing we do need to know, before getting to the whole point of what it’s all really about. With a flashback to your earliest memories. It’s not a Terrence Malick movie.’

But for all its unwieldiness and slowness, The Prelude is still a magnificent manifesto for the humanist project. We all matter as individuals and have our own consciousnesses that crawl towards the light. There are moments when we lose our way, and for that reason those moments when the clouds part and we reconnect – those moments which Wordsworth is so good at isolating – matter even more. And a close encounter with landscape, with nature however red in tooth and claw, can help those moments of self-recognition.

Wordsworth was like the old relative who you feel duty-bound to have a conversation with, only suddenly to be surprised by a flash of unexpected acuity in the midst of a familiar anecdote.

The decision by Wordsworth and then Coleridge to come and live here – and to do so from 1800 as a joint project, together with Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy – was a bold one. Daniel Defoe, writing in the 1720s, had famously claimed that the region was ‘eminent only for being the wildest, most barren and frightful of any that I have passed over in England’.

But the idea that Wordsworth and Coleridge ‘discovered’ the Lake District is as absurd as the idea that Elvis invented rock ’n’ roll. Thirty years before, Thomas Gray had already put it on the map. His description of Grasmere in his published journal equals anything Wordsworth wrote: ‘… to see Helm-Crag distinguish’d from its rugged neighbours not so much by its height, as by the strange broken outline of its top, like some gigantic building demolish’d, & the stones that composed it, flung cross each other in wild confusion’.

No wonder that most historians of British travel date the birth of modern tourism to roughly 1750 – precisely the moment when Lake District literature emerged, marking the first stirrings of what would become the cult of the picturesque. By the Romantic period, conditions were firmly in place for tourism to flourish on a large scale.

Wordsworth chose to settle in the heart of the Lake District not just because it was his childhood home and the repository of personal memories, but because it had become a prominent aesthetic territory.

We had risen high enough with Jethro to be able to look back and see Grasmere in its valley, with the distinctive silhouette of Helm Crag off to one side – the only ‘Wainwright’ that the great man himself didn’t reach due to the brief scramble involved to get to the top of what Gray described as its ‘strange broken outline’. A. W. didn’t like climbing.

‘What I like about this landscape,’ mused Jasper, ‘is that you can go from the micro to the macro. So, you can follow this stone-built wall with your eye from where it leaves us here … down to the beck where it opens out to the valley below … and of course then I’m lost, as I’ve never been here before, but it recedes away into this Narnia-like landscape of woodlands and peaks.’

‘And with so many hidden valleys between the larger ones,’ I added. ‘Which is why you can spend a lifetime exploring and mapping it, as Wainwright did.’

I wondered if the Lake District reminded Jasper of Ireland at all. ‘Or was Ireland just an altogether different green?’

Jasper lifted his tanned face towards the hills as he considered this. ‘There are bits of it that do, of course; and probably vice versa, there are bits of Ireland that remind me of here. But this is very much its own landscape.’

We started walking on with Jethro. ‘There’s something about the scale of the Lake District,’ I suggested, ‘which is so perfectly in miniature. Although it’s got the highest mountain in England, Scafell Pike – so not that miniature, I suppose – but compared to the Andes or the Atlas Mountains, we’re still talking about hills that are very small.’

‘Small but perfectly formed. This place is like a cabbage leaf – lots of intricate indents and folds. But one thing that has caught my lack of attention, so to speak – and surprised me – is that there’s not a lot of wildlife. Over the last few days, I’ve seen two ravens when we were higher, a male kestrel quarter-flying and some sort of finch skulking in the grass. That’s about it. There are plenty of places for birdlife to go down into, valleys with woodland, but I guess these higher reaches just don’t hold much attraction.’

Jasper was the quintessential muleteer: hard-drinking, a roamer and given to music and song. He also had a fine eye for the natural world, and was proving to be the perfect companion. As a young man, he had taken his guitar and harp around the bars of Cork for sessions in which he played from a high stool by the fire. When I could prevail upon him, he would get his guitar out of the horse van and play us something at night, usually with a few muso mutterings about how he was aiming for Keith Richards’ five-string open tuning.

As we travelled, I learned some of his more unusual quirks. He liked to listen to Norwegian long-distance weather forecasts, as he said they were more accurate than British ones; and he consumed prodigious quantities of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut bars to go with the vats of black coffee.

Jasper’s advice about mules was usually terse and to the point. ‘A mule is not stupid …’ was how one of his homilies might begin.

Muleteers have always been one-of-a-kind. For my night-time reading on our travels, I had brought On the Road with Wellington: The Diary of a War Commissary by August Schaumann, a classic account of the Peninsular War which the Duke had waged against Napoleon. Schaumann was a commissary whose duties included providing the many mules needed for the campaign.

The Spanish muleteers form a large and hardy class of men. They seldom change their clothes or sleep under shelter throughout the year; they are always on the road and are very merry and constantly singing. When their mules are hired out for riding, they run alongside them at a trot for ten miles at a stretch in the greatest heat without getting tired. While running along in this way they fling their arms about and this seems to give them great relief. They wear large black felt hats with tassels, short jackets, a blanket with a hole in the middle for their heads, blue plush breeches and spats or sandals.

On arriving at an inn, they are very smart in finding accommodation for themselves and their beasts. Eggs cooked in oil, codfish, garlic, sardines, bread and a measure of wine are then prepared, and round this meal they sit, to the accompaniment of much noise and smacking of lips.

Schaumann’s account of the mule train was also charming, and he himself was so taken by the animals that he chose to ride one rather than a horse:

My foreman had some magnificent mules which I rode by preference. When they are on the road they are decked with numbers of bells which tinkle melodiously in the distance … Their endurance, strength, unexacting wants and gentle pace, and the fine manners and certainty with which they climb up and down the impracticable mountain roads in which the country [Spain] abounds, are incredible. I have often travelled as many as forty-five miles in one day, and they carry the largest loads day after day on long marches, and patiently and unwearyingly subsist on the most exiguous supplies of food and water.

Jethro still had a little way to go before he could match that sort of stamina. Years of standing around in an RSPCA field watching the world go by had not done his fitness any good, through no fault of his own. The batteries would often run out during a day’s walking, so we would have to stop for him to recharge. But I did like the idea of putting some bells around his neck, or perhaps the copper cylinder that another fine nineteenth-century commentator on Spanish mules, Richard Ford, once described as ‘having a wooden clapper called a cencerro zumbón’, which hung down so the mule would gently knock against it, creating a ‘tintinnabular clatter’.

Ford also described – in a way that even by nineteenth-century standards was not terribly PC – how mules were pimped up by their owners.

The mules in Spain, as in the East, have their coats closely shorn or clipped; part of the hair is usually left on it striped like a zebra, or cut into fanciful patterns, like the tattooings of an Indian chief. This process of shearing is found to keep the beast cooler and free from cutaneous disorders. The operation is performed in the southern provinces by gypsies, gitanos, who are the same tinkers, horse dealers and vagrants in Spain as elsewhere. In the northern provinces all this is done by Arroganese, who, in costume, good for nothingness, and most respects are no better than the worst real gypsies. The mule clippers are called esquiladores; they may be known by the formidable shears which they carry in their sashes. They are very particular in clipping the pastern and heels, which they say ought to be as free from hair as the palm of a lady’s hand.

Richard Ford, A Handbook for Travellers in Spain (1845)

I was tempted to get out the clippers; but it might not go down well with the RSPCA if we returned Jethro looking like he had spent a drunken night at the tattooist’s. However, I did like the idea of those bells. The thought of Jethro proceeding ahead of us and tinkling gently with a ‘tintinnabular clatter’ was immensely appealing.

The bridleway led up from High Broadrayne and then divided around the tongue of land that fell from Hause Riggs, with the footpath going one way and the bridleway the other.

Beyond was a small stream in a ravine, a ghyll, of the sort that make the Lake District such a delight. It was banked by ash and rowan. The rushing, forceful noise was a spur for all of us, Jethro included, who always picked up his pace when he was near water. A running stream has a compulsive noise that makes you somehow want to walk faster and further.

Over the watershed was Grisedale Tarn, one of the most emblematic of the mountain lakes, ringed by peaks. A path circled the water and led on to Helvellyn beyond. While Jasper and Jethro had some lunch, I quickly shimmied up a small peak called Seat Sandal which I had never climbed before.

Was I, like Jethro, getting fitter? My wife had made some acerbic comments as I set off on this mission about how a journey of 200 miles on foot might produce a svelter, more streamlined figure, if I kept off the pies and pints along the way. I had patiently explained that it was a necessary part of muleteering practice to subsist heartily; that not to do so would lead to historical inaccuracy; and that moreover, it might disappoint Jasper, who would expect me to follow the strict apprentice rules of that long and honourable tradition. What did she expect me to live on? Salads? I would probably be thrown out of the guild before I’d even begun. Would any of those fine Spanish muleteers who helped Wellington reconquer Spain have ever ordered a salad? Unless it was a chorizo one.

No, a disciplined approach to diet and exercise was already working wonders. Jasper had put it to me well: if you walked twenty miles a day, you could drink and eat as much as you liked, and still get fitter. Seat Sandal was a short but steep climb, and I felt I had done it in overdrive.

Just when I was sitting on the top and feeling pleased with myself, three men came by, at considerably greater speed than I had achieved. They were fell-runners reconnoitring the route for a later attempt – but they still didn’t stop for a moment, or even a tin of Mackeson’s milk stout. You can always tell a fell-runner because they never look at the view when they get to the summit of anything: only at their feet.

But I was certainly taking in the view, which was a special one for me, even though much of it was swathed in mist. In the foreground stood Grisedale Tarn, an oval fringed by sedge and moorland, with a drop-off at one end where the water cascaded away over the lip. Small pockets of a darker, lusher green marked the hanging valleys that extended down towards Ullswater. And on either side of those valleys, the familiar profiles of some of Lakeland’s finest mountains were a guard of honour for the route that lay ahead.

For I knew Grisedale Tarn well, along with the approach to Helvellyn and the dramatic exit down Striding Edge, as I had come here twenty-five years ago, shortly before my first wedding.

The idea of having a stag party in the mountains had initially been a good one. Why go off to some overpriced club with bad drinks and a strippergram, organised by the best man to comply with expectations? When instead we could have a day or two in the mountains and round it off with a final sybaritic meal at one of Ullswater’s Michelin-starred hotels?

I invited a heterodox group of friends from different periods of my life: school, college and the buccaneering period in my twenties when I had tried to get going as a filmmaker (with limited success, but considerable enjoyment).

In my enthusiasm, I had forgotten one essential element of the male psyche. If ten young men arrive at a hotel, some of whom know each other extremely well and some of whom don’t, and they have come for a weekend’s celebration, they are not going to wait for the final evening to get started. They will hit the ground running. Or falling.

It was all over by the end of the Friday night, after we had congregated from different ends of the kingdom. The barman was still handing out malts at midnight. There was a pool table. Some of the London crew had brought cocaine. Saturday saw a distinctly jaundiced group trying to negotiate first Helvellyn and then Striding Edge in the spring sunshine.

Striding Edge is still the postcard ridge walk in the Lake District – a serrated knife that slices brutally down from one of its highest peaks. The fact that, in good weather at least, it is far easier to traverse than it looks is an added bonus. Although a clear head helps.

Coleridge passed it at nightfall, and left one of the first descriptions of its perils when he saw it from Helvellyn:

That precipice fine on this side was but its ridge, sharp as a jagged knife, level so long, and then ascending so boldly – what a frightful bulgy precipice I stand on, and to my right how the crag which corresponds to the other, how it plunges down, like a waterfall, reaches a level steepness, and again plunges!

Now there’s a man who would have been a quite excellent member of our stag party. Coleridge was used to walking with a hangover; indeed, was used to walking when still drunk.

Many a walk in the clouds on the mountains did I take; but all would not do – till one day I dined at the house of the neighbouring clergyman, and somehow or other drank so much wine, that I found myself on the hither edge of sobriety.

It is the engaging ‘somehow or other’ I like so much – that and his choice of a clergyman’s house to take him to the ‘hither edge of sobriety’. Coleridge was then the same age as us, in his late twenties. I can imagine him as wonderful company, holding forth on wild schemes, expostulating as he walked, taking in both the view and the universe with an expansive sweep of the hand.

The revelatory biography of him by Richard Holmes had come out a few months before the stag party, and I had been reading it. The book portrayed a man who was – like many at that age – full of ambitious projects he might never be able to realise.

As Holmes put it: ‘His real professional difficulties lay within himself … A lack of concentration of his efforts, a thousand brilliant projects without the corresponding energy to execute them. Yet when he did execute, it was still with astonishing speed, power and assurance. Just as physically he was a lazy, easy-going man, yet capable of tremendous feats of walking and climbing; so mentally, he was a drifter and dreamer, yet capable of sudden, short bursts of extremely imaginative intensity.’

The truth is, I have never really thought of the Lake District as Wordsworth country – which anyway is the polite southern bit around Grasmere. I think of it as Coleridge country, and its epicentre for me is Greta Hall near Keswick in the north, a far less cosy place. I have a vision of Coleridge standing in his study at Greta Hall with its big windows, looking out at a vista of mountains and space in which all seemed possible, but nothing was quite within reach.

The two men, although united for a time when they first proposed a radical new poetics, had such different outcomes. Coleridge is a lesson in heroic failure; Wordsworth is a lesson in what happens when you succeed too well.

Coleridge joined Wordsworth in the lakes in 1800, shortly after they had published their first edition of Lyrical Ballads. Aged twenty-seven, he was at the peak of his imaginative powers, before opium addiction took hold. ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ had already been written. He was getting prestigious commissions and recognition as a journalist from the London papers.

For Coleridge, this partnership with Wordsworth was round two. His first poetic affair had been with Southey in Bristol – Coleridge referred to them as ‘bedfellows’. Intense and idealistic as this had been, it had not lasted, even though they had married two sisters in the process. The wild ramblings of ‘Pantisocracy’ and anarchy – thoughts even of founding a new idealistic settlement in America – had blown away into the dust.

Now came the Lake District and a new bromance – with Wordsworth. Coleridge even followed the same pattern by falling in love with Wordsworth’s sister-in-law; although, as he was still married to Southey’s sister-in-law, this was both inconvenient and complicated.

But then Coleridge never took the easy route: the unpublished poems – almost incredible that ‘Kubla Khan’ took twenty years to get into print – the opium, the years of despair and failure; and all this set against a prodigal talent. One of his students noted Coleridge’s constant habit of looking at himself in the mirror. I doubt this was vanity: more surprise at who he might be that particular day.

There is a rock-star quality to Coleridge that he shares with the young Tolstoy and, more obviously, the young Byron: the wild hair; the full, Jagger-style lips. Contemporaries commentated on the charisma of his presence.

But Coleridge had a signal disadvantage compared to those two aristocrats. He had no money.

When looking at the lives of artists, not enough time is spent examining their finances. Coleridge had young children and debts; his borrowing from friends like Wordsworth often caused embarrassment in what was an already-complicated relationship.

The hills of the Lake District were an escape from everything for Coleridge: his financial problems, his complicated and frustrated love life, his creative impasses and, as time went on, even Wordsworth, when the relationship soured. No wonder he poured himself so fervently into the landscape, going for long marathon walks that would have qualified him for the Bob Graham; yet noting each blade of fern and each cascade of a waterfall with the intensity of an opium addict.

From the moment he arrived, he devised ever-more-epic walks, often at night – both for the drama of it, and because he just set off so late. These walks are detailed in his notebooks, which, far more than the poems, show his senses almost deranged by the beauty and the wildness of the Lake District.

My spirit courses, drives, and eddies like a leaf in autumn: a wild activity, of thoughts, imaginations, feelings, and impulses of motion, rises up from within me – a sort of bottom-wind, that blows to no point of the compass, and comes from I know not whence, but agitates the whole of me.

Wordsworth walked in the Lakes to give himself a poetic constitutional. Coleridge to give himself utterly up to the moment. To get lost.

In 1802, when the relationship with Wordsworth was already deteriorating – the intensity of Coleridge’s poetic friendships was short-lived – he left Greta Hall to tramp a huge circuit of the Western and Southern Fells. You have to warm to a man who sets off with a converted broom for a walking stick (although in the conversion, he left most of the broom-brush scattered on the kitchen floor, to the annoyance of the long-suffering Mrs Coleridge). He had special Welsh walking boots, which included a back strap for pulling them on. In his knapsack, along with paper twists of tea and sugar, he carried a portable inkwell, which he put to good use on mountain summits, writing to Wordsworth’s sister-in-law Sara Hutchinson, with whom he was still besotted.

One recurring feature of Coleridge’s writing in his letters and journals when describing these walks was his obsession with clouds. Here he is, when taking much the same drovers’ path past Skiddaw that we had taken Jethro along with Jeff Ford:

We see a moving pillar of clouds, flame and smoke, rising, bending, arching, and in swift motion. From what God’s chimney does it issue? I scarcely ever saw in the sky such variety of shapes and colours, and colours floating over colours.

If the classical version of pastoral was one of an upland Arcadia fixed in time, the Romantics wanted constant movement. The landscape was only interesting for them if it was changing – was in a state of flux, like the onlooker’s mind. No wonder that if Coleridge was not looking at clouds passing, he was staring transfixed at the movement of a waterfall – or, as he preferred to call them, a ‘force’. Like the one at Newlands, in whose waters he saw ‘an infinity of pearls and glass bulbs, the continual change of the matter … an awful image and shadow of God and the world’.

Nor was he alone in this. Shelley was prone to lie on his back for hours, watching clouds pass overhead. Meteorology has affected British poetry as much as it has, more famously, affected its art. The turbulent Atlantic brings such changing weather to the Lake District – hence the high rainfall count at the Honister Pass – that there was constant variety and stimulus for the Romantic poets.

Coleridge’s favourite analogy for the Lake District was of a sea, forever on the move. When he walked up the Helvellyn ridge, like us, to see Striding Edge, he thought himself on the ‘last surge of that enormous ocean formed by the mountains of Ennerdale, Butterdale, Wasdale, and Borrowdale’.

The last thing Coleridge wanted was a Claude’s Glass to fix the landscape in a particular view. What he needed was a kaleidoscope to shake it up. A century later he would have been a futurist, enthusing over the speed of trains and aeroplanes. How he would have loved the coming of the movies.

Coleridge our contemporary. My contemporary. Perhaps I empathised so much with the Coleridge of 1800 when I was younger – and still do – because my own life had only started to come together in my late twenties. When I walked here with those ten friends, after years of trying fruitlessly to break into the fortress of the BBC, I had finally succeeded, and was getting married, to a fellow filmmaker. The interesting film commissions were coming. I was already dreaming of being a travel writer. I loved the mountains.

And Coleridge was fascinated by travel writing. It was tremendously influential on his own work. Both ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ are in some ways pieces of fan-fiction: tributes to the travel books he consumed with the prodigious appetite he applied to every enthusiasm or vice.

Just before coming to the Lakes, when he was supposed to be earning a living as a journalist, he had lost himself in the Narrative of a Five-Year Expedition in Guiana, on the Wild Coast of South America, by J. G. Stedman. In some ways, it was lucky for Coleridge’s imagination – and for posterity – that he lacked the means to travel abroad. Instead, he recreated exotic locations in his head and in his poetry.

Twenty-seven, the age at which Coleridge arrived in the Lakes, is a far more pivotal age than twenty-one, for both men and women: much more an age of majority. At twenty-one, most people are still trying to make sense of the adult world. By twenty-seven, they should be up on the board and surfing. Or be left floundering in the shallows.

Looking back, I find it interesting to reflect on what has happened to the group of about that age who I invited on the ‘stag walk’. Unlike our fathers’ generation, few of us have kept to one profession for life. The only one who has is Fred, my blacksmith friend. For both those in finance and the arts, there has been serial insecurity. Many of those friends, like me, have wives who earn more than they do (but then, as my own wife is prone to point out, it’s hard to earn less than a writer). Though none of them, unlike Coleridge, have gone on to develop a heavy opium habit.

It had been a happy moment at the end of the day when we rolled down the hills back towards Ullswater. We had just about walked off our hangovers enough to start incurring another one, with the elated feeling of exhaustion that a true walk brings on – the sort of mood Coleridge was in when he arrived in those early days of their partnership at the Wordsworths’ house in Grasmere. Coming by moonlight and staying up with Dorothy until three in the morning; talking about poetry and life; putting the world to rights.

I still have a note of the menu we ate on that final stag party night in Ullswater. This was the end of the eighties, so an age of excess; even so, it reads like something as remote as the banquet served up at a Tudor court. First, smoked duck wrapped in guineafowl; then smoked trout mousse wrapped in smoked salmon; a cleansing sorbet; turbot in cream with lavish trimmings; sirloin steaks in Chateaubriand sauce; blackberry mousse; champagne; cheese and coffee. Port and other fine liqueurs.

No Michelin-starred restaurant would dream of plating that up for customers these days. They would be prosecuted under the Public Health Act. And anyway, for better or worse, we live in an age of measured taste. A few line-caught scallops and locally sourced lamb. A dessert with a Zorro’s mark of raspberry coulis etched over some low-sugar confection.

Not that Jasper and I were having any of that. We might be staying that night in a youth hostel rather than a tent, but dinner, when we wearily rolled down at the end of the day, was chicken and chips at the local pub.

We studied the maps to see how best to get around the next obstacle, or spoke in the wheel, which was driving over the Kirkstone Pass with Jethro.

The problem was the old Dodge van. While in time, it might make beautifully converted accommodation for any barmaid, writer or itinerant musician, as a vehicle to get across the high places of England it had considerable limitations. It was a heavy van with a relatively small engine. Jasper did most of the driving while I navigated, as I was supposed to know the route. Getting from second into third was more of a leap of faith than a mechanical manoeuvre. Each time we went over a steep pass, we wondered if we would end up as a sad note in the local newspapers about how traffic had been blocked for hours by a broken-down lorry; it happened so regularly at Sutton Bank, the papers had stopped bothering to run the story.

I had bought the van at speed from a Jehovah’s Witness called Steve. He lived in a city in the Midlands that didn’t see many horses cantering the streets, even though, according to the amiable and talkative Steve, there was a blacksmith who lived nearby.

He showed me the lorry parked outside some lock-up garages around the back. With its half-timbered, mock-Tudor finish, it was so big it looked like a garage itself.

‘The thing you have to remember about this van, Hugh,’ said Steve, who had clearly rehearsed this line for any prospective purchaser – I was the first – ‘is that it is reassuringly old.’

‘No, you see, what I mean is, it’s old. So there’s much less to go wrong with it. No electronics. No power steering. No electric windows. It’s all manual. You know what I mean.’

He showed me the ‘Luton compartment’ over the driver’s seat, with a mattress (‘it’ll take two’), so that you could sleep in the van, and a simple stove running off a gas canister. The cupboards were hanging off their hinges and tied together with string. ‘I’m not sure if the stove works – we’ve never tried to light it.’

The one owner of the horse lorry previous to Steve had used it to potter between point-to-points, so the Dodge had done less than 1,000 miles each year. The travelling compartment for Jethro was spacious and high, with a ‘jockey’s door’ through to the front. And as Steve said, it did at least start each time.

He was intrigued by my plan to take Jethro across the north of England. ‘Well, that might give the Dodge a bit of a work-out.’ It would indeed. Perhaps too much of one.

Sold, to the man who knows nothing about horseboxes. The next day, Steve delivered the Dodge and I drove him home: a journey long enough for him to tell me about what had been a complicated life.

There are conversations you have when driving which would be different were you to be looking someone in the eyes. After the conversational preliminaries, Steve told me his parents had separated when he was young. He had left school early to go into the building trade, despite some early talent for professional football, and developed a gambling habit.

Then things got more extreme. To fuel his gambling habit, he had started to rob betting shops with a few other young friends, wearing balaclavas.

‘No guns, though, nothing like that,’ he said quickly, to reassure me. ‘Just baseball bats.’

As we navigated the multiple roundabouts of his hometown, Steve quickly came to the denouement of the story.

This happened on their second outing as an armed band. Steve, in a way he found suspicious – ‘I think I was set up’ – was the only one of his friends to feel the firm hand of the law on his shoulder. He refused to divulge the names of his accomplices and so got a much longer sentence.

During his five years in prison, ‘which were really, really tough’, he became a Jehovah’s Witness. This helped him give up the gambling which had led him astray in the first place. For the last thirty years, he had led a prosperous and blameless family life. And he had another passion.

‘It was football used to help me get rid of all my aggression when I was young,’ he told me. ‘And I was quite good. If things had turned out differently, I might have gone professional.’

He still looked solidly built. I suspected that if you had been tackled by Steve – and he played in defence – you would have known about it. That he had, as they used to say of Gary Neville, sharp elbows.

The last thing Steve did when I dropped him back off at his house was to tell me how the immobilising cut-off switch worked.

‘Worth leaving it disabled. I realise a horsebox is an unlikely thing to steal. But they could break in and nick stuff. You can’t be too careful. You never know who might be about.’

As it turned out, the Dodge coped with the Kirkstone Pass with aplomb – far better than a modern Winnebago ahead of us, which was clearly following a satnav and hadn’t realised the gradients involved.

We parked the van up by the old Cow Bridge near Brothers Water. I wanted to get Jethro out as fast as possible after the journey, so that he could sniff the air of a new valley.

I always took pleasure in getting Jethro out of the Dodge, partly because it was the one time he never gave any trouble whatsoever. As instructed by Annis in my correspondence course, I had tied a large haynet to the ring to which he was secured by baler twine, and put daily fresh straw on the floor of the truck; ‘have plenty of shavings on the floor to absorb pee and poo,’ as Annis had put it. ‘It’s not called mucking out for nothing.’ The Dodge was designed for at least three animals, so Jethro was enjoying the equine equivalent of a presidential suite. No wonder he was both frisky and pleased with himself after travelling in it. Even Jasper, who had firm views on Jethro’s more truculent ways, particularly when it came to catching him in the morning, felt that he was superb at getting off and back on the Dodge. It was like one of those Hollywood movies where the difficult teenager turns out to have a secret talent after all.

‘Excuse me. What’s in the saddlebags?’ asked a young girl of about nine politely, who was watching with her parents as we positioned them.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘They look almost empty. And your backpacks look quite full.’

Our intrepid party set off through the pretty village of Hartsop and started climbing towards High Raise and the peaks of the Eastern Fells. The bridleway was wide enough for a couple of jeeps to come charging down at us from the small lake that lay above. For once, we were more surprised by them than the occupants were by Jethro.

Inside the two jeeps, rows of business managers wearing yellow safety jackets over their suits were sitting very stiffly in their seats. They had to stop as our mule team blocked the path, so I asked what they were doing.

‘We’ve just had a team meeting before we start installing the pipe for the new hydroelectric scheme up there,’ replied the man in the front passenger seat, who seemed to be their leader.

‘The new National Trust one. It’ll generate about 250 kilowatts for the grid – and 200 litres per second of water.’

The leader rattled off the figures with practised ease. Then he took another look at Jethro.

‘Never seen a mule here before. Be careful when you get up on the fells towards High Raise. There are wild horses that might attack him. Always trying to eat our sandwiches. And the red deer are rutting now.’ His voice took on a darker tone. ‘Well into rut.’

We headed on, taking our chances. These hills had long been harvested for water. The lake the engineers were working at was relatively small, but over the brow of the hills we came to Haweswater. This provided the setting and title for Sarah Hall’s precociously gifted first novel, published in 2002 when she was twenty-eight – and a far more contentious site for a water project.

Haweswater is based on historical events in the 1930s when a dam was built and the valley of Mardale flooded. For the young heroine Janet, and her family and friends, this means not just a dislocation of home, but of the spirit. The whole novel is about a void created at the heart of life; as 20,000 million gallons of water fill the valley, death follows, if by a drowning of the soul rather than the body.

The characters react in different ways when they first hear of the proposed flooding. Janet’s father, Sam Lightburn, is a stoic and pragmatic character who will always walk behind a sheep wall if he can avoid the wind. He tries in his own way to accommodate and understand the changes that are to come and the loss of his family inheritance.

Janet is more passionate – likely to advance into the wind, hair and clothes streaming behind her, and declare, ‘Blow winds and crack your cheeks!’ She responds as characters often do in Sarah Hall’s subsequent novels: by both losing and finding herself through sex, in her case a passionate affair with Jack Liggett, the young representative of the Manchester waterworks company sent to implement the dam. Hall has talked elsewhere of the strange telluric attraction between characters, which gives great energy to the scenes of physical love. This is the meeting not of like minds but of strange bodies drawn to each other for reasons that can seem inexplicable to both themselves and others.

The writing in the novel also invokes and caresses the landscape. Janet, we are told, could see her way around the fells blindfold and, so, I suspect, could Sarah Hall, who set two more of her novels in this part of the world. Not since John Cowper Powys has a novelist drawn such an intimate connection between the British landscape and the people who live there; nor in the Lakes themselves, perhaps, since her fellow Cumbrian Wordsworth, who was equally disturbed by changes wrought by technology. Although Sarah Hall, in her own words, ‘is more interested in bracken than daffodils’.

She was brought up in a cottage three miles from the reservoir. Some of the locals had once lived in the village of Mardale Green and there was an annual memorial service for its loss. The reservoir is so huge it inverts the usual balance of water and valley. ‘There’s a sense,’ Hall has said of her birthplace, ‘that the mountains are inverted in the water and it’s slightly discombobulating; you can’t quite see where the mountains end and the waters begin.’

I had met Sarah on a writers’ course and been impressed by her determination to create strong heroines to appeal as much to male as to female readers. In her novel, ‘the yawning blue void of the valley, her family and the past’ has a devastating effect on Janet and her family. A series of deaths ensue. It is a haunting, fatalistic tale that leaves the reader, as with some of Thomas Hardy’s work, wanting to intervene to create better outcomes: to make sure Tess gets the letter from Angel; to help Hall’s lovers from losing each other.

Haweswater is still an unnatural place – there are no seiches for a start, the internal waves one might expect on a normal lake. It is less visited than other lakes of the Eastern Fells, like Ullswater or Windermere, both because there is less road access and also perhaps due to this odd, artificial quality.

One road does travel past it: the old Roman one that runs for twelve miles over the mountain ridges from Galava (modern Ambleside) heading east. We joined it now by climbing up to the Straits of Riggindale, high crags that were famous once for hosting a pair of golden eagles – eagles that play a significant role in Sarah Hall’s novel. We did see some raptors circling above but as Jasper said, ‘however much you want those to be eagles, they are almost certainly going to be just buzzards’. Not least because the last golden eagle was thought to have died sometime before.

The light fell on the mountainside in such a way that looking back along the ridge, I could see where the modern path had diverged from the old: the ghost of the Roman road was a shadow on the grass falling away below High Street – a natural if disconcerting name for a mountain that lies on the route of an ancient thoroughfare.

But for most of its length, the old Roman road was still used: an extraordinary achievement for both its engineering and its ambition – especially because the Roman camp it served at Ambleside was not a major one, so this was only a spur; a classical B-road. The broad track rolled ahead along the ridge above Haweswater in a fluid and enticing line for mile after mile. Walking it was like taking one of those motorised conveyor belts at airports where your own pace is artificially accelerated.

I remembered Hardy’s lines: ‘The Roman Road runs straight and bare / as the pale parting line in hair’. Glancing up at one point, I saw a red deer silhouetted against a ridge and thought it possible a Roman legionary might have done the same two millennia ago (and yes, before any pedant raises objections, there would have been red deer then).

Alfred Wainwright loved this road. He devoted one of his last works to it, a small pamphlet called Old Roads of Eastern Lakeland which can be difficult to find. He wrote it when his eyesight was failing and the handwritten text is, movingly, less sure than it once was.

He described the road as ‘a monument to the topographical knowledge of its surveyors, who planned the route across virgin terrain and to the skill of the engineers who gave it a firm foundation in mossy and peaty ground’. He also felt it ‘a testimony to the endurance of the legions of soldiers who, often in mist and cloud, tramped this long march’. By including part of it in his Coast-to-Coast walk, Wainwright has increased its modern use and appreciation substantially.

If we can accept as absolutely necessary the conversion of Haweswater [to a reservoir], then it must be conceded that Manchester have done the job as unobtrusively as possible. Mardale is still a noble valley. But man works with such clumsy hands! Gone forever are the quiet wooded bays and shingly shores that nature had fashioned so sweetly in the Haweswater of old; how aggressively ugly is the tidemark of the new Haweswater!

The experience of visiting the already-deserted village of Mardale Green in the 1930s shortly before it was flooded prompted an elegiac and emotional reaction from a man not given to loose sentiment. In later life, Wainwright would often tell of how he walked down the lanes past the church to the empty pub, the Dun Bull; of the eerie absence of humans even though birds were still singing in hedgerows fragrant with wild roses; of the intimation of death and doom with which the village had left him.

Haweswater supplies the north-west with a quarter of all its water. Manchester needed the reservoir. Mardale Green and nearby Measand were small villages. There was a clear rational argument for their destruction and the creation of the dam. But it has left ghosts in its wake.

For many years, I sailed Chew Valley Lake in the shadow of the Mendips near Bristol, another reservoir created by flooding a beautiful valley. There are tales told by the sailors there of how, on certain days when the water level is low and the sun hits the water at the right angle, you can just make out the tops of an old church.

Similar stories are told of Haweswater when it dried up in the drought of 1979: of the glimpses of the buildings beneath. But usually the lake is full to the meniscus brim, like a bath about to overflow, controlled by a series of sluice gates.

The last ridge-point the Roman road traversed was called High Raise. As we swung along in cheerful and good order, Jethro making the odd grunt of approval, I felt pleased that we had successfully passed through the Lakes, our first big hurdle. The bulk of our journey lay in front of us; you could say we had now climbed the mountain before making the ski jump.

The dramatically steep buttresses of Kidsty Pike fell off to one side of the ridge, towards Haweswater, but from High Raise I could also see ahead for the first time, to the edge of the Lake District and to the plains leading to the Howgills and the Yorkshire Dales.

After days of walking a circuitous route through the mountains, of feeling encircled by them, the sight of the flat land before us came as a shock, as if I was about to enter another country. Which in some ways I was.

Chapter 4

A Tintinnabular Clatter