Borrowdale Sense of Place

Borrowdale, Keswick, Cumbria

Borrowdale – ‘a wild country south of Keswick’ wrote William Gilpin in 1752 and so it must have seemed to the first Victorian tourists to venture through the ‘Jaws of Borrowdale’ into a reputedly wild and lawless land. But today Borrowdale is regarded as one of the most beautiful places in Cumbria, with sheep-grazed uplands and extensive tracts of oak woodland draping the hillsides. The flat valley pastures are divided into neat fields by massive stone walls; ancient packhorse tracks wind their way through the landscape, and through it all runs the clear, sparkling water of the River Derwent and its tributaries.

This is a glacial landscape. Evidence of the ‘recent’ Ice Age is everywhere – classic U-shaped valleys, roche moutonées (ice-smoothed rock outcrops), hanging valleys and abandoned erratics (large boulders dumped by the retreating ice). When the ice began to melt 10,000 years ago, all this eroded material was dumped in the form of moraines (linear ridges) – at least three have been identified in the Rosthwaite area.

The valley of Borrowdale penetrates deeply into the central massif of the Lake District and is a favoured starting point for ascents of Scafell Pike, Great Gable and Glaramara. In the 1500s, wadd (graphite) was discovered here – a highly valuable mineral used for casting cannon balls and making pencils. Seatoller, a cluster of white and grey cottages at the foot of the Honister Pass, once housed miners from the graphite mine and quarrymen at Honister Slate Mine.

The Langstrath Valley leads through the hamlet of Stonethwaite to the open fells where flocks of Herdwick sheep graze on the common pastures. Rosthwaite, in the heart of Borrowdale, clusters around a rocky outcrop called The How. Grange, once owned by Furness Abbey which held monastic grazing rights here until the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536, is approached over a double-arched bridge dating from 1675.

The hanging valley of Watendlath is approached by a single-track road from Derwent Water over the much-photographed Ashness Bridge and the hamlet of the same name is now owned by the National Trust.

The neighbouring valley of Newlands is predominantly sheep pasture, admired by Coleridge for its ‘greenness and pastoral beauty’. Copper, lead, silver and some gold were all worked in the Newlands Valley in the past.

Visit website: www.golakes.co.uk/borrowdale

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