Walking the Line 3

Legburthwaite

I think we can safely say I'm not walking a straight line here.
After visiting 'the end' of the line yesterday, I was back at the beginning today. I was working in Ambleside this morning and so had a chance to stop off on my way back. I thought I would see if I could see any evidence of the old nursery at Legburthwaite.

This is the view looking up to Castle Rock from the lane linking what was originally the Manchester Corporation's HQ (now United Utilities) to the road that goes across the top of the dam. I reckoned the old nursery was probably on the left of the photo. This is where G said they would bring on trees for planting out on the fellsides around the reservoir and he spent much of his time planting out as well as tree felling with his heavy horse, Charlie. They were advised by a chap called Johnson Edwards who was bought in from the royal estates (Balmoral, I think).

As I was there on a week day I decided to see if the offices were open and see if anyone could help on the whole rain gauge conundrum. A man, who told me I was right about the location of the nurseries, wasn't sure about the gauges and pointed me in the direction of Lindsey who showed me roughly where I could find the Birkside gauge and said they were still read monthly by a local farmer who would report the figures to her, but she also said there was another gauge at Brown Cove. Is this the one G used to up to when he said he went up Helvellyn, I wondered? Lindsey pointed me in the direction of a house where Laurie, the retired first wildlife warden, now lives. Laurie said he also checked the rain gauges for a while (he moved up after G had left the job and so didn't know him) and he said he would walk up to the Birkside gauge and then across to the Brown Cove gauge so that is probably what G would have done too, I guess ... and, as Laurie said, it was in all weathers. That's some serious rough fell walking ... tough guys these. Laurie said he also remembered the last of the heavy horses (Sandy) that was retired by the time he got there but was still in the 'horse fields'.

As I drove through to Ambleside I was struck by that very complex blurring of histories, of all the people that will have walked part of this line at some point or other, in some capacity or other and each having a personal history, largely private and lost, stitched into its fabric. Even those that have been recorded are a version written on one plane and yet there will be so many infinite planes. I was struck by how my own has a choking emotional life that sits alongside a formal narrative of a line that goes back to an idea of one Victorian man to carry water from Westmorland to Manchester. And that it sits alongside the multiplicity of stories of all those others that hook into that line at some point in time and place. It reminded me, with a renewed respect, of listening to Hilary Mantel's Reith lectures.