haw! haw! haw!

Haweswater is the most easterly lake in the Lake District, and also the highest above sea level—if you exclude the upland tarns, which were formed by a different physical process. It was once a natural lake, but its fate was sealed with the passing by Parliament, in 1919, of the Haweswater Act, which allowed Manchester Corporation to build a dam across the outflow from the lake. Construction of the dam began in the 1930s, and it was completed in 1940.

I hadn’t been up the valley containing what is now a reservoir for many years, and Paula had never seen Haweswater, so, given that nowadays I’m constantly thinking about new cycling routes, ones that we’ve never done before, I decided that a ride to Haweswater would be a good idea last Monday. The following map, which is a photo of a section of an Ordnance Survey road atlas with a scale of three miles to the inch, will allow me to describe the day’s ride (because the apparent scale of the photo will depend on the kind of device you’re reading this on, you can get an idea of the true scale from the fact that the village of Askham is about five miles from Penrith).

The first problem that we experienced on the ride was the sheer amount of tourist traffic on the B5320 between Eamont Bridge and Pooley Bridge, but we encountered a much more awkward problem when we reached Askham: a sign proclaiming that the road ahead was closed! The sign also indicated a diversion to the east to the A6, which would not have been any use to us, so we decided to continue on the originally planned route through Helton and Bampton. However, at the fork in the road a short distance south of Askham, we encountered another sign reminding us that the road ahead was closed, so on the spur of the moment I decided to follow the left-hand option, past the hamlet of Whale, which I’d never been along before but had originally planned to follow on the return journey.

I don’t think we’ll come this way again. Not only is this road extremely rough, probably because it carries very little traffic, but we encountered two closed gates, which we could pass through, but having to stop to open and close the gates breaks up your rhythm. However, we eventually reached Bampton Grange, which isn’t marked on the map but is just a short distance east of Bampton. I took a photo here of a bridge over the River Lowther in which you can also see this village’s church tower:

There were also signs pointing to Haweswater—and no indications of any road closures ahead. I took this photo of a second bridge a short distance further on:

I had anticipated a climb up to the dam, but although it is quite long, this hill isn’t particularly arduous. However, the road along the valley is very up and down, although none of the hills is hard work. We had good but intermittent views of the lake, and I made a mental note of where we might stop to take photos. We didn’t stop though, until we reached the top of a long hill and I noted what seemed like quite a steep plunge to the valley floor next.

While we considered whether to continue, we scrambled to the top of a rocky spur between the road and the lake, where I took quite a few photos. The following three photos show the view down, across and up the valley, respectively:

You may notice what appears to be a short series of terraces on the hillside to the right of the small tree plantation in the second photo. These are widely known as ‘sheep tracks’, although sheep have nothing to do with their creation. They are formed by a process known as solifluxion, which is the slow downhill creep of soil under the influence of gravity. The pink/purple colour in the foreground is heather, which is flowering earlier this year than usual.

I then shifted my position and took another photo looking up the valley in which you can see the continuation of the road:

I also shot a short left-to-right panoramic video:

When we finally continued up the valley, I couldn’t help thinking that the hill we were descending would be quite a tough one to ascend, but it turned out to be easy!

One of the sad effects of the construction of the dam was the drowning of the village of Mardale Green. The inhabitants were rehoused elsewhere, and all the buildings were demolished, including the Dun Bull Hotel and the seventeenth-century church of the Holy Trinity, although the interior fittings of the latter, which included a Jacobean oak pulpit, went to other churches. The corpses buried in the churchyard were exhumed and reburied in Shap.

Although nothing now remains of the village itself, the stone walls enclosing fields and marking narrow lanes can be seen when the water level in the reservoir is low, and given that there has been very little rain since we came back to Penrith in June, I wondered whether these features might be visible. They were:

This is a closer look at the area of interest:

There were quite a few parked cars at the road end, but all were likely to have belonged to walkers out for the day. There were no tourists, and consequently almost no traffic, which made cycling along this valley an absolute delight. I took this photo looking back down the valley before heading back home:

And I took this photo of the dam on our way home:

You can see that the water storage is well below capacity.

We returned home through Bampton and Helton and saw no sign anywhere of roadworks or road closures. However, due to the sheer volume of traffic on the B5320, we abandoned my original plan to return to Penrith via Pooley Bridge. Mind you, Eamont Bridge is a notorious traffic bottleneck, with its light-controlled humped bridge over the river, that took a while to negotiate. Nevertheless, another grand day out.