One bright week among the fells: a man with a yard full of history, a circle of stones with a temper, England's deepest water — and the field where a schoolboy photographed a flying saucer.
The route, roughly clockwise round the old counties of Cumberland and Westmorland.
The man who mechanised the fells
Knock on the door —
BillBill Moffat introduces himself the only way that makes sense: from behind a photograph of a tractor. Fifty years an agricultural contractor — the family firm kept half the Lake District's farms running.
His garage is a museum that never meant to become one — paintings of Nortons and Fordsons, photographs of harvests, every nail carrying something.
the gallery
every wall a story
The archiveHands that worked these machines for half a century, sorting photographs of them like family — which, he'd tell you, is exactly what they are.
Field sketch from the yard: the machine the whole story turns on.
Every wall in this country was lifted twice —
once from the field, once into its place.
Slate churches, patient graves
The green crossMoss has claimed the memorial whole — the churchyard's way of saying nothing here is ever finished, only continued.
The cedar keeps the older shade,
and the stones lean into it.
The lake the poets kept
Martindale opens like a hand —
every finger a valley with its own weather.
The steamerA Victorian steamer doing its rounds since the 1870s — green hull, red trim, unhurried as the century it came from.
The audienceTwo people and a dog, watching the boat come in. This is what a big afternoon looks like here, and it is enough.
Into the oaksA young explorer between the old trunks on the path to Aira Force — the wood does something to visitors under twelve; it always has.
Aira ForceTwenty metres of white water under a stone bridge built for exactly this view. Wordsworth walked here the day he saw his daffodils, just along the shore.
The fallLong exposure, long drop — the beck turning itself to silk on the way down.
And her daughters
Plan of the circle, paced in the long grass.
Meg herselfTwelve feet of red sandstone, quarried miles from here and stood at the circle's edge — the daughters are grey granite; Meg alone came from somewhere else.
For scaleA visitor at Meg's shoulder. She has been measuring people this way for four and a half thousand years.
Count the daughters twice
and you'll get two different numbers —
so the legend says.
The daughters at their stations — and beyond the hedge, the newest standing figures in the valley, turning in the wind. Different gods, same instinct.
daughter and mother
meg, looking up
the heavy sleeper
the ring
the road through
the new circlesThe little railway
Gauge comparison, chalked on the platform.
Steam upA miniature locomotive with a full-size boiler's worth of pride, simmering at Ravenglass.
The driverOil can in hand, running a railway you could almost pick up — but wouldn't dare.
RavenglassThe only coastal village in the national park — Roman port, railway terminus, population: not many, all content.
The parish treeOne sycamore doing the work of a cathedral, congregation of sheep below.
The dark water
Section through the valley — drawn from the shore, verified by shivering.
The Screes fall six hundred metres
and keep falling, underwater, to a floor
below the level of the sea.
The head of the daleRock, water, and the road running out — Wasdale is where the Lake District stops being pretty and starts being serious.
The village under the Old Man
The signPlease drive carefully through our village — population small, history considerable, airspace occasionally interesting.
Plate VII: the most famous thing ever photographed above these fields.
In February 1954 a schoolboy stood in a field here
and photographed something
nobody has explained since.
A book, a brew, a proper goodbye
Day twoStraw hat, mug of tea, washing on the line — Bill receiving visitors in the full dress uniform of a Westmorland summer.
The workshopBack among the shelves where fifty years of spanners retired but never quite left.
