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قراءة كتاب The English Lakes
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gradually to the vale where the blue coils of Ullswater lie sleeping. Needless to add, this is but a fraction of the prospect from Helvellyn, and to relate what can be seen from it on a reasonably clear day would merely be to compile a chart of the entire mountain system of Lakeland, and for an exceptionally clear one it would be necessary to make many and remoter additions.
To anyone in touch with these things, the summit of Helvellyn is an inspiring spot, commanding in a single glance the entire dominion of a race not merely homogeneous in breed, but till recently unique in situation. Here were a people, ranging as individuals from peasant to yeomen, to put it roughly; four hundred square miles, say, of freehold farmers, who had never known a landlord since the Crown in the sixteenth century held them as tenants on Border service; a complete democracy among themselves, into whose lives the influence of an aristocracy, as exerted everywhere else without exception in Great Britain, never entered. For there was no such thing within all these wide bounds. These primitive conditions passed away by degrees during the last century. But it was such that bred the Lakelander much as you see him now, though inevitably modified by the influx of large landlords who have bought him out, of villa residents and countless tourists. But here he is still, a type who till recently had virtually no experience of what social grades and distinctions meant in his own daily life, though he dispatched from his rugged stone homestead a steady stream of raw lads who rose to power, wealth, and influence in the world. The Lakelander, too, like his immediate neighbours, is of more definitely Scandinavian origin than any other community in England. His country bristles with Norse place-names; his genuine tongue is so full of it, that an expert in old Cumbrian, it is said, can almost read the Norse Bible. His traditions give him an easy and independent bearing. For two or three generations of more or less contact with the outer world and its complications can only modify, not efface, such things. He still remains a cheery, independent soul, but absolutely one of Nature's gentlemen.
THIRLMERE AND HELVELLYN
Now from Helvellyn you can see the Pennines, and across the Pennines lies Northumberland. We have nothing to do here with the Northumbrian, but as an immediate neighbour of these others it is interesting to note that he has less Norse blood in him, and together with his Lothian and Berwickshire neighbours is accounted the purest Saxon of any Englishman. His place-names have the Saxon flavour. Here in Lakeland we have fells and becks and garths and ghylls; beyond the Pennines and the Cheviots they are all burns and laws and tons. The Lakelanders proper were not Border fighters as the word applies to their low country neighbours and the Northumbrians. They were liable to service, and frequently took a hand against the Scots, but their savage country was not tempting to the Scottish freebooter nor worth the risk. Nor when the tide set the other way were they accounted as actually of the following of the great Border houses. When James I. ascended the throne of a United Kingdom, and fondly fancied Border troubles were at an end, that canny monarch thought to make some money by commuting the feudal service nature of the Lakeland statesmen's holding to a money rent. These military tenants of the Crown met to the number of two thousand between Windermere and Kendal and swore that they would yield up their lives rather than their title-deeds, which settled the matter. It remained for the growth of national wealth, luxury, and what we call the march of civilization to destroy by individual land purchase, assisted by local conditions too complex to mention, the greater number of the Lakeland freeholders or "statesmen".
There are still some few left in possession, but otherwise the man himself, though now a tenant, has by no means parted with his qualities because his father or his grandfather parted with his freehold.
KIRKSTONE AND ULLSWATER
Kirkstone Pass looms always large in one's Lakeland memories. For one thing, it is the ladder over which all traffic laboriously climbs from the comparatively populous shores of Windermere into the long sequestered trough of Ullswater, while for the walker it links the eastern block of mountains to the Helvellyn and central group. It is, I think, the highest road pass in England, touching the line of 1500 feet where a lonely inn claims, by a natural inference, the uncomfortable distinction of being the highest habitation in the kingdom. But whatever may be the measure of its winter solitude, the cheery turmoil of the shepherds' meeting in November, attended by some three hundred more or less interested persons, must put heart into its occupants for the ordeal. For on that great day, crowned by a gargantuan feast, the stray sheep that have wandered from their rightful ranges and mingled with a neighbouring flock are handed over, accompanied by ceremonies of immemorial use. Then, too, a hundred or so of collie dogs settle such disputes among themselves as may be of old standing, or more often perhaps excited thereto by such unparalleled opportunities. A hound trail usually completes the long day which begins betimes, for every man upon these mountains is an enthusiast on the chase in its literal sense, and knows as much of hounds and foxes as many an M.F.H. elsewhere.
The steep descent into the narrow, verdant, stone-walled, thinly peopled floor of the head of Patterdale, with its sprinkling of little white-washed, scyamore-shaded homesteads, is not a theme for words but for the brush; above all for the eye itself. Caudale Moor and Hartshope Dodd loom largest above our right shoulder, shutting out the lofty solitudes behind, while on the left Redscrees, Raven Crag, and Harts Crag, and a fine confusion of rugged summits culminate in Helvellyn, which upon this eastern side shows its nobler and precipitous front. Brotherswater, though but a quarter of a mile in diameter, fills the vale, and like a jewel catches every humour of these ever-restless skies; gleaming betimes like molten gold, or on windless noons reflecting the greys and greens of the overhanging steeps so vividly on its glassy surface as almost to efface itself in its own shadows; at other times, torn by the tempests that pour down from Kirkstone, into a sheet of seething foam. For it is incredible to what a fury even a little lake like this can lash itself, when exposed to the concentrated volleys of two or three mountain glens.
The memory of one of these spectacles on Hayswater, but a mile or so distant, is suggested by the little hamlet of Low Hartsop at the mouth of a lateral glen that comes in just where the valley widens somewhat, bringing with it Hayswater beck to join the Goldrill, which last has run through Brotherswater. Hartsop Hall is a plain, rugged old manor house overhung with trees on the Kirkstone shore of the lake, long the abode of sheep farmers, but possessed of the inconvenient disability of a public right-of-way through the centre, now presumably lapsed.
But till a few years ago a venerable champion of popular rights, or perhaps merely a humorist with plenty of spare time, used to make an annual pilgrimage here, and walk in at the front door and out at the back without any ceremony.
Low Hartshope itself is a group of some half-dozen mellow