Unreliable Routes

The road from Windermere to the Kirkstone pass collapsed over the winter and is proving difficult to fix. There is an alternative from Ambleside called The Struggle, a very steep, narrow fell-road with hairpins. I've driven it many times, without difficulty. But then I don't drive a delivery van or a Range Rover.
With the main approach shut and the official diversion being a long detour via Penrith, I guessed there'd be a lot of traffic on The Struggle that shouldn't be there. And I was right. But my little car doesn't take up much room and can squeeze through gaps, when two vans or Range Rovers meeting head on cannot.
I made sure I had an early start, but still only just managed to make way among convoys of careless, and in some case frightened motorists, coming the other way. How the wide-beamed vehicles fared I can't imagine, since reverse gear seems optional these days.
It was a warm one too, our second wave of heat looming, and looking to settle in for a while. I was heading for Patterdale where I'd be setting up for a couple of days in the hotel, some light walking and some thinking in the coming days, hopefully before it became too hot to move. The valley was quiet. I even managed to park at Cow Bridge, normally full by mid-morning. But today it was half empty – the introduction of a pay and display machine perhaps being the culprit – either that or a general reduction in traffic coming over the pass.
I had in mind a short walk up Hayeswater Gill. The plan was to take my time over photographing the numerous falls along the way, a project I've had in mind for some time now. But I also wanted to locate one set of falls in particular that I remembered from way back. It was the tail end of a long walk, and I was coming down off Grey Crags, not much evidence of a path. It was a slow, ache of a descent, on aching legs, and way below I'd spied a lovely looking pool in the gill. There I'd promised myself, if I ever got off the mountain, I'd stick my feet in the cool, clear water until the aches subsided. And so I did.
I remember it as such a beautiful spot – idyllic – a splendid cascade plunging into a deep pool, crystal clear. And I remember just resting there, a feeling of utter bliss upon me, before making the last mile to the car. So, I made my way up the track to find much of the lower reaches of the gill fenced and inaccessible. And each of the falls I saw further along, that were open to access seemed difficult and some of them dangerous. Certainly, these were not the falls I saw that day coming off Grey Crag, none of them inviting of repose.
In the end I climbed the entire length of the ghyll, as far as its source in the outfall from Hayeswater. There I sat a while, feeling as if the entire landscape I'd thought I'd known had somehow shifted over the decades. But then I realised I'd also been carrying this feeling with me for a while now – this general sense of unease at the pace of change, and of an uncertain future. I also realise, I have lived much of this landscape in my head. I wrote about it intimately in my novel The Lavender and the Rose – the setting being a conflation of the valleys off Patterdale, and the remoter reaches of the Far Eastern fells, plus some that did not exist anywhere outside of imagination.
That said, I'm sure I did not imagine those falls, but like the past, like that day coming off Grey Crag, they are simply no longer assessible. The decades have erased them, reduced them in a sense to the story I'm telling now. And I realised too even the long silver arrow of Hayeswater was no longer as it was when I first encountered it, long ago. It used to be much higher, but at some point the dam at the outfall was removed, and the levels have settled back to a more natural level.
The photograph I took of the outfall was the only one to survive the cut, and a place I did not intend photographing at all. The others I deleted for one reason or another – blurred, poor composition, flat light, or simply disappointment at the apparent inaccessibility of the past. Whether that remaining photograph will one day carry the memory of place, or merely record the geography, only time will tell.
I briefly contemplated taking the higher routes back to Hartsop, over Satura Crag and the Angletarn Pikes, but that was a much longer day than I'd planned and not enough time on the ticket anyway. So I made my return the way I'd come, checked into the hotel, sat out on the green with, of all things, a leisurely pint of beer – since beer is not usually my thing.
Surrounded by the beauty of towering fell country, I fingered the maps on the phone, planning the next day's walk. But it was with a feeling the maps I've been carrying in my head are becoming increasingly unreliable for navigating the real world. Yet memory can retain an astonishing clarity our whole lives, accessible at the slightest turn of thought – the ache of a descent, the soothing shock of cold water on tired feet, the feeling of release from an intimidating mountain's grip. But it's the routes back that fail us. Roads collapse. Paths disappear among the swelling, steaming thickets of seasonal bracken. Gates, once open and inviting, we return to find locked against us.
But we keep going by whatever means come to hand, and with a growing awareness those old routes are not always reliable guides to memories of place. And by the same token, the paths we walk today may not be there tomorrow. Yet in some ways that's not important, and once followed, they can be discarded.
Memories of place seem gifted. They come to us with a feeling, with a sense of something having opened, allowing us into a more intimate relationship with our surroundings. It can be a moment of intensity, perhaps brought on by struggle or hardship, but other times that intensity comes out of nothing more than the kind of attention we bring to bear.
So, yes, although the routes we once travelled may prove unreliable, and the destinations themselves altered beyond all recognition, the moments in which a landscape once admitted us into itself remain curiously intact, long after the maps have forgotten how to get us there.