âOur own dear lake Beside the ancient Hall,â
with the beautiful valley of the Crake reaching from its foot to the sea at Greenodd.
[Illustration: GAITS WATER AND DHU CRAGS.]
You will find the descent of Walna Scar worse than the climb, for, on the Seathwaite side, the road is good and smooth, but, on the Conistone side, it is less like a road than a superannuated water-course, and that not of the âgentlest conditions.â After you have safely descended the steepest portions, and crossed by a primitive stone bridge over a brawling brook, pray leave your road for about half a mile, to look at Gaits Water. You will find it to present a scene of savage desolation approaching the terrific, and I know nothing equal to it for wildness in the Lake country. It is an oval Tarn, about half a mile round, on the eastern side of which the Old Man rears his most rocky and precipitous side; at the head is a steep, high pass, connecting the Old Man with Dow, or Dhu Crags, which last rise on its western side, high, barren, verdureless screes, surmounted by a coronet of tremendous black rocks, partly mural and partly columnar, of vast altitude, with rough jagged edges, and bisected here and there with awful-looking chasms, which, with the _borrans_ formed by the accumulation of huge fragments of rock along the south-west of the shore, form a favourite harbour for foxes, against which the shepherds wage a constant war of extermination. They have an extraordinary method of taking the fox, when they trace him to one of these rocky hiding-places; they draw him out with a screw, like a cork from the neck of a bottle. They have a gigantic cork-screw upon the end of a pole, which they sometimes succeed in insinuating into poor reynard's _corpus_, and so ruthlessly screw him to destruction. On the three sides I have pointed out around Gaits Water, the walls of the dungeon come sheer down to the water-edge: the fourth is fortified with a grotesquely-piled accumulation of rocks of enormous size. Altogether, it is a scene to make a man shudder, and wish himself anywhere else;âso return to your road, and prick along under the southern slope of the Old Man to Conistone.
As you approach the village, you have a view of all the vale of Yewdale, shining sweetly in its _setting_ of dark brown hills and moors. You reach Church Conistone by an abruptly-descending road, lined and over-arched by a long grove of flourishing oaks. Of the village itself, through a portion of which you take your way, we will say more anon; meantime, your mindâs eye is doubtless gloating upon the good things awaiting your attack at the Inn.