Lake District landscapes and features

The eastern face of Dow Crag in the Coniston Fells illustrates many of the features of the Borrowdale Volcanics. The crags rise dramatically from above the rocky mountain tarn of Goat's Water, but they are separated from the tam by substantial scree and boulder slopes, the product of later weathering of the rocks, and the crags themselves are far from uniform in appearance.

Weaker bands of rock have been worn away to produce deeply river gullies, while the harder rock types form the five magnificent buttresses which, above all else on the crag, have attracted climbers for many years.

Lake District landscapes

All across the central band of the Lake District there are supreme landscape features based on the Borrowdale Volcanics. In the west the Wastwater Screes, dropping steeply into the lake from near the summit of Illgill Head, provide the sternest, most intimidating backdrop to any valley level scene, whilst the highest mountains in the district, Scafell Pike and Scafell, dominate the head of the lake in concert with Great Gable, symbol for the National Park and playground for early rock athletes.

The Napes Ridges here soar directly above the wellknown path from Wasdale across Sty Head to the upper reaches of Borrowdale; the Napes Needle, oflittle account to the cragsman nowadays, was the most famous of all the early climbs.

The Langdale Pikes the Lake District

More centrally, the Langdale Pikes, where a particularly hard vein of tuffs was used by Neolithic man to make stone axes, almost overhang Langdale, yet their northerly neighbours are strangely unimpressive. In the east, the Helvellyn range and Fairfield include classic examples of the rugged, knobbly fell country characteristic of the Borrowdale Volcanics, not least with the sharp summit ridge of St Sunday Crag and the wild, craggy recesses at the head of Dovedale and Deepdale. And in the far east, too, the long, lonely High Street ridge is based on the same rock series.

The Coniston Limestone series, separated from the Borrowdale Volcanics by an unconformity, surfaces as a very narrow band running northeast from the estuary of the Duddon through Coniston and across the head of Windermere lake to Shap. Displaced from its true line in places by later faulting, this narrow outcrop nonetheless has a profound local influence on the landscape.

The finest example, and one well known to walkers, is probably that of the Garburn Pass, where the Coniston Limestone has stood up less well to the ravages of time than the Borrowdale Volcanics to the north and Silurian shales to the south, and forms a low col utilised by a rutted, stony track following the old packhorse route from T routbeck to Kentmere.

East of Kentmere the Lake District

East of Kentmere the pack trains negotiated a second col, still on the limestone (which can be seen in the field walls hereabouts), to reach Sadgill in Longsleddale. On the far side of the 18thcentury packhorse bridge crossing the River Sprint is Stockdale Farm, where an old lime kiln in the farmyard is yet another clue to the presence of Con is ton
Limestone.

The oldest beds in the series, coarse conglomerates and grits, were succeeded by fossil bearing beds of limestone and shales, including the Ashgill Shales, blue fossiliferous slates named from the Ashgill Quarry on Torver High Common, west of Coniston.

The characteristically soft, subtle landscapes of the southern Lake District are derived from the Silurian Series of shale’s and grits which were deposited in a sea of fluctuating but increasingly shallow depth. The lowest beds, outcropping parallel to the Coniston Limestone, are the Stockdale Shale’s; above these a truly astonishing thickness of marine sediments was laid down about 15,000 feet of Silurian sediments still remain and an unknown additional layer has been eroded away.

The major beds are the Coniston Flags and the dull grey Bannisdale Slates, neither of them with a plentiful supply of fossils but with a few graptolites.The junction of the Silurian rocks with the Borrowdale Volcanic albeit separated by the thin layer of Coniston Limestone is everywhere dramatic, though nowhere more so than at Torver High Common, where the gentle moorland founded on the Silurian series gives way abruptly to the magnificent mountain scenery of the Coniston Fells, with the broad, rugged southern slopes of the Old Man of Coniston complemented by the plunging cliffs of Dow Crag.

The southern Lake District

The southern landscape is not always totally subdued, however: within the vast thickness of the Silurian beds there are notable variations in resistance to erosion, so that little rocky tors stand out amongst low-lying basins, some of them containing minor tarns. Claife Heights, between Esthwaite Water and Lake Windermere, is typically delightful; the easy but very pleasant walk from Near Sawrey to Wray Castle, for example, passes Moss Eccles Tarn and Tarn and skirts the low rocks of Three Dubs Crags.

The end of the Silurian period was marked by a phase of folding and faulting during the 'Caledonian' period of mountain building. The folding laid the basis for the present day pattern of ridges and valleys, while faulting produced belts of weakened rock which were later eroded to form important through routes such as that over Dunmail Raise or passes such as Sty Head. In addition, in a number of areas igneous rock was intruded into the country rock, with marked effects on the scenery.

Lake District granite

The best known of the igneous intrusions, the Shap granite, nowadays affects the landscape chiefly because it has been voraciously quarried. The Eskdale granite has more subtle effects, producing an uneven, knobbly landscape of hillocks and hollows and, more intimately, drystone walls whose rounded pinkish boulders contrast vividly with the more angular, slaty volcanics.

But the most spectacular contri¬bution is that of the Ennerdale granophyre, a hard, pinkish columnar rock which forms the Red Pike to Starling Dodd ridge above Crummock Water, and also explains Scale Force, the highest waterfall in the Lake District, which drops 50 metres (170ft) in a magnificent single fall over the unusually resistant granophyre. Smaller igneous features are formed by the dykes, narrow sheets of once molten rock.

Where these are more resistant than the country rock they form craggy rock faces; where the surrounding rock has proved less susceptible to erosion, the dykes now appear as gullies or cols. The most remarkable is Mickledore, the dramatic skyline notch separating Scafell and Scafell Pike.

Lake District Attractions

There are plenty of Lake District attractions to keep visitors entertained during their stay, including Hill Top, the former house of Beatrix Potter, Dove Cottage, where William Wordsworth wrote many of his famous poems, and the Beatrix Potter Attraction at Bowness, which is one of the most popular attractions in the Lake District.

Two further periods of mountain building reshaped the geological picture of the Lake District: the Hercynian phase, which uplifted the Lake District into a dome and stripped off the recently deposited Carboniferous limestone, which still surrounds but does not penetrate into the Lakeland fells; and the Alpine phase, which once again raised the mountains and also superimposed the present radial drainage pattern. Still greater changes were to come, however, when the newly uplifted mountains were subjected to erosion by glaciers in successive Ice Ages, the first of them beginning about a million years ago. The results of glaciations are plainly visible in the Lake District landscape, and the next section describes these in more detail.

The Lake District landscape

The onset of the Quaternary period appears to have been heralded by increasingly severe winters, with heavy snowfalls, and summers so cold that the accumulating snow and ice never melted. The result was a series of glacial episodes, perhaps four in all, with the last glaciations occurring as recently as 10,000 years ago.

When conditions were at their most severe it appears likely that virtually the whole of the Lake District was covered by ice, with only the highest peaks possibly escaping.

As the grip of the Ice Ages lessened, the valley glaciers retreated until only the valley heads and in particular the corries immediately below the mountain tops were covered. Finally, the last of the ice in corries on the northeast side of the main mountain systems melted to leave a landscape much as we know it today, save for the more subtle and gradual changes which are still taking place.

The most pronounced effect of the glacial period was to produce deep valleys with steepened sides and, at the valley heads, rock basins below towering cliffs. These deep valleys are characteristically Ushaped in section as a result of gouging away of obstacles by the strong valley glaciers: obstacles such as interlocking spurs were simply eroded away. These ice shorn spurs, steep and craggy, can be seen in many valleys, though perhaps the best scenically drop straight into the major lakes.

Ullswater the Lake District

Kailpot Crag and Silver Crag, jutting prominently into the Ullswater scene, are excellent examples. Representative Ushaped valleys include Great Langdale, where the northern valley slopes cascade some 600m (2,000ft) from the Langdale Pikes to the strikingly flat valley floor, but simpler,shorter and rather less wellknown examples are probably even better representatives of the pure postglacial form.

Maybe the best of all is Riggindale, that cavernous bowl below the eastern ridge of High Street; the bare valley sides reach up to Kidsty Pike on one hand and to the Long Stile ridge on the other, while at the head of the valley steep, unstable slopes run up to the Straits of Riggindale, a narrow col separating Riggindale from the Hayeswater valley on the other side of the main ridge.

We should perhaps start an exploration of the landscape features associated with glaciation at the head of affairs, in the wild upland recesses of the valley heads. Here are the most dramatic glacial features of them all, the corrie basins generally called coves in the Lake District eating back into the heart of the major mountain systems.

A common characteristic of these corries, many of which face north or east, is a tremendous back wall, an almost sheer cliff of naked rock gouged out by the rotational scouring action of the glacier ice. The scouring action also produced over deepening of the floor of many corries, resulting in rock basins which often house a corrie tarn, that jewel of many a Lake District scene.

Red Tarn, tucked into the eastern slopes of Helvellyn, is a good illustration of these features: the rippling waters of the tarn in its rocky holloware hemmed in by steep slopes rising to narrow ridges on two sides, and at the back by a forbidding craggy wall rising to the summit plateau of Helvellyn itself.

Walks in the Lake District range from strenuous climbs to gentle strolls by the side of Lake Windermere, and visitors are spoilt for choice when it comes to deciding what to do. Lake District attractions are among the best in the UK, and hotels in the Lake District offer every luxury to weary walkers. Whether you are planning a romantic weekend in the Lake District or a family holiday, you will find accommodation to suit all tastes and budgets.