CUMBRIAN GENEALOGY

A great deal of the so-called "folklore" of the lake Country was invented by people who seem to have been determined to gjve a countryside of such remarkable character a remarkable folklore, a factor which tends to confuse those who are genuinely interested in the district

Lakeland did not need such inventions; it already had a genuine folklore, and it had people sufficiently remarkable to fill many books, to be the subjects for writers and poets of such varying character and quality as Wordsworth and Craig Gibson.

John Peel and that vividly-remembered centenary of his death; John Woodcock Graves, who wrote the song; the other John Graves, a Cumbrian who gave Manchester its ideas about Thirlmere; Will Ritson who told tall stories and Ned Nelson of Gatesgarth who was almost Will’s equal at tale-telling and everybody’s master at breeding Herdwicks; Jonathan Otley, the Keswick "clocker" and father of Lakeland geological studies; John Richardson, waller; schoolmaster and poet. There was Betty Yewdale, the archetypal Cumbrian "character", and Mary Robinson, the "Beauty of Buttermere" whose wedding to the scoundrel Hatfield almost certainly gave Samuel Taylor Coleridge a "scoop".

The Borrowdale "gowks" were not such fools after all: there was more to John Woodcock Graves than the song he wrote and the autobiography he wrote for "Songs and Ballads of Cumberland".

Derwentwater has no "bottom wind", but it does have an island which floats, and the Ghost Army of Souther Fell must now come under suspicion because the man who wrote most about it seems to have been somewhat given to exaggeration because, to him, a walk up Borrowdale seemed a death-defying expedition.

Contents

1 Ninian’s valley?

2 A Day To Remember

3 The Singer of the Song

4 The Maid of the Inn

5 Valley of the Black Diamonds

6 Merry Nights and Taffy Joins

7 Heamly Dance, Teun, Teal or Sang

8 A Large Piece of Lawless Patchwork

9 Will the Real Betty Yewdale...?

10 Friends of the Floating Island

11 The Man Who Loved Herdwicks

12 Ghosts, Rank Upon Rank

13 The Vale of St John and Poet John

14 Pearl Rivers and Pearl Fishers

15 Another World

1. Crab apples and mountain ash add to the beauty of the spring scene in Rannerdale
2. Loweswater from Water End
3. A latterday John Peel. Mr C.N. de Courcy Parry in period garb at the start of the hunt which marked the John Peel centenary
4. Sole survivor? An example of the ‘greyhound’ fox hunted by John Peel
5. Never did a bigger crowd see the start of a hunt in Cumberland. Some of the followers of the John Peel Centenary hunt
6. The man himself… the only photograph ever taken of John Peel
7. In old age: John Woodcock Graves
8. Mary of Buttermere: ‘sketched from life’ in July 1800; and sketched, according to the inscription, in 1806 by Lieut. Col. Wylliams
9. Buttermere Church and village with the Fish Inn, once home of Mary, the Beauty of Buttermere
10. Crummock
11. Derwentwater from Brandlehow
12. ‘Camp Six’ of the early Borrowdale explorers: the church at Stonethwaite
13. Wasdale Head Church
14. Wasdale Head and Scawfell Pike
15. Jonathan Otley
16. Jonathan Otley’s mark at the foot of Friar’s Crag
17. Derwentwater’s floating island
18. ‘Crookabeck’ at the head of Buttermere
19. Herdwick rams
20. Shearing Herdwicks at Gatesgarth, 1972
21. From the Febby Nab, Windermere
22. The river Irt at Strands, Wasdale
23. The river Ehen at Wath Brow
24. The ‘Rock of Names’
25. Dalehead Hall, a small Lakeland manor house
26. Thirlmere

Jacket photograph:

Hawse Point, Crummock by the author

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