Humphrey Head

How does something too small become a fell? When it’s a place of extinctions and exotic new colonists? When the curative powers of its holy waters have been celebrated alike by Roman lead miners and modern celebrities? When it has one foot on land and the other in the sea? When its charms outweigh its diminutive height to the degree that Wainwright felt duty bound to honour it as one? When it’s the outstretched finger of the Cartmel Peninsula, jutting out into the perilous mudflats of Morecambe Bay? Tim and I cross a salt marsh to explore the beguiling mysteries of Humphrey Head—historic home of England’s last wolf.

Twenty years ago, I joined the RSPB in a remote hide in the middle of Riggindale. It was an easy sell. I’d just seen a golden eagle perched on the crags of Riggindale Edge (the slender spine that Wainwright calls the “connoisseur’s route” up High Street). His mate (the eagle’s, not Wainwright’s) circled above Kidsty Pike. When I looked up from the telescope, the steward proffered a pen and the membership form, and I signed without hesitation.

The eagles were the only nesting pair in England. Sadly, the female died a few years later. The male hung on until late in 2015, but has not been spotted since, and the RSPB has now taken down the hide. Fortunately, some of the Society’s flagship work has had happier outcomes. The organisation started life with a campaign to protect another bird, the little egret. During the 19th century, egret feathers, alongside bird of paradise feathers, had become the must-have costume accessory among the Absolutely Fabulous, Vogue-reading fashionistas of the day. Indeed, the feathers became so sought-after that they were worth more than their weight in gold (literally). The social standing of contemporary Edinas and Patsys rose in inverse proportion to life-expectancy of the young chicks, and in 1889, Emily Williamson formed the Society for the Protection of Birds (later the Royal Society…) to campaign against this barbaric trade.

Today, the RSPB website describes the little egret as “a small white heron with attractive white plumes on crest, back and chest, black legs and bill and yellow feet”. Back when I joined, a little egret sighting would have been almost as rare as a golden eagle sighting. The birds first appeared on these shores in significant numbers in 1989 and didn’t breed here until seven years later. Over the intervening years, numbers have grown to the point where they are now quite at home in our coastal areas. Indeed, one has just taken off from the salt marsh in front of us: a flurry of white beating wings and an elegant, aerodynamic profile, rocketing skyward. Tim and I watch in wonder. Such an encounter may no longer count as uncommon, but it’s still a thrill to behold.

We’re on our way to Humphrey Head, one of Wainwright’s Outlying Fells, despite his emphatic assertion that, “not by any exercise of the imagination can Humphrey Head be classed as an outlying fell of Lakeland. Outlying it certainly is: a limestone promontory thrusting from the Kent Estuary coast and almost surrounded by mudflats at low tide but awash at high. A fell it is certainly not, being a meagre 172 feet above the sea and, away from it’s dangerous cliffs, so gentle in gradient and surface texture that the ascent is a barefoot stroll.”

Humphrey Head

Just as you’re scratching your head and wondering whether Wainwright has taken a bump to his, he explains that nevertheless, “it’s isolation, far-ranging views and seascapes, bird life (of national repute), rocky reefs and interesting approach combine to make the place unique in the district, giving better reason for its inclusion in this book than its omission.”

That recent colonists like the little egret have made a new home here feels like poetic justice when you consider that Humphrey Head is traditionally associated with a final act of extinction: it’s the spot where the last wolf in England was slain.

In her book, Tales of Old Lancashire, Elizabeth Ashworth tells a romanticised version of the story…

So determined was Sir Edgar Harrington to rid the Cartmel area of this ferocious beast, he offered his niece’s hand in marriage to the man who could slay the wolf. His niece, Adela, held a candle for Sir Edgar’s son, John, and the feelings were reciprocated, but Sir Edgar disapproved of the match. Besides, John was abroad fighting a foreign foe, and had been gone so long, that even Adela had given him up for dead.

Despite her lack of egret feathers, Adela’s beauty was such that many young men vied for her attentions, and wolf hunt was organised to determine who should wed her.

Her most ardent admirer was a local knight called Laybourne, but on the eve of the event, a mysterious stranger appeared on the Cartmel peninsula, riding a fine Arab stallion. The next day, the hunt raged long and hard, and one by one the competitors dropped out except for Laybourne and the stranger, who rode neck and neck. Eventually, they chased the wolf to Humphrey Head, where Laybourne’s horse pulled up at a vast chasm and refused to jump. The stranger’s horse was braver but failed to clear the distance and plunged to its death. The stranger, himself, managed to cling to the crag’s edge and pull himself to safety on Humphrey Head summit. Here, he confronted the wolf on foot and dispatched it with his sword.

When the stranger claimed Adela as his bride, he revealed himself to be none other than Sir Edgar’s missing son, John, and the couple enjoyed a long and happy marriage.

John Harrington is buried in Cartmel Priory. The church’s weather vane is a wolf, but as Ashworth astutely observes, the grave names his wife as Joan, not Adela.

For me, there is another troubling inconsistency in the story. I will admit to being adept in the art of the “man look”. I frequently spend long minutes looking for what is right under my nose, before giving it up as irretrievably lost. However, I’ve been to Humphrey Head before, and if the way to the summit lay over a gaping chasm, too wide for an Arab stallion, I’m sure even I would have noticed. Besides, how did the wolf get across?

The slightly more prosaic version of the story says the wolf was killed by angry villagers, armed with pikes, after the animal attacked a child in the woods.

As Wainwright recommends, we set off from Kent’s Bank Station. Wooden boards permit pedestrians to cross the tracks, and a little white gate leads out on to a concrete parapet that runs parallel to the line. Wainwright’s descriptions of the shenanigans needed to shin the wall and avoid the eye of the station master are no longer required, it seems. The parapet tracks the line for about a third of a mile and stops before the rocky outcrop of Kirkhead End. Here the path drops on to the mudflats and weaves between the rocks. And it’s here we pause to watch the egret.

Kent’s Bank Station

The Bay fascinates me. Locals call it the watery desert, and it’s an apt description. At low tide, the sands run as far as the eye can see in a beguiling pattern of spiral shapes, carved by wind and water, glittering with the mesmeric shimmer of orphaned puddles and pools. A place of barren beauty and hidden hazards: quicksands proliferate and the tide returns so fast it can outrun a horse.

Humphrey Head Point is the outstretched index finger of the Cartmel Peninsula, and on this side, we look across the Kent Estuary to Arnside Knott. Together with its neighbours, Hampsfell and Whitbarrow Scar, Humphrey Head would once have been part of one long limestone reef, forged over millions of years when this whole area lay below a shallow sea. These vestigial outcrops may lack the lofty drama of Lakeland’s mountains, but they have character aplenty.

Arnside Knott

We follow the path through the verdant grass of the salt marsh, leaping streams and scouting for stepping stones in the soggiest sections. By Wyke House farm we turn a corner and join a section of the Cumbrian Coastal Way heading for the foot of Humphrey Head’s gentler wooded eastern side. Just before the Outdoor Centre, we turn right through a kissing gate and fight our way up a narrow footpath, overrun with brambles and nettles, their extravagant growth nurtured by the same warm spring sunshine that has cruelly encouraged us to wear shorts.

Humphrey Head summit

We join a country lane that leads to the beach, then turn up towards the Outdoor Centre. From here, a path climbs gently beside a fence above the cliffs to the headland’s summit. Stunted hawthorn trees line the route, their trunks bent from years of relentless subservience to the wind. Behind us, over gentle rolling pastures, rise the Coniston Fells, the ominous vanguard of the high ground beyond. Before us is the Bay, a vast wilderness of slowly ebbing tidal waters and exposed silvery sands. Humphrey Head’s abrupt western cliff is a ha-ha, the grassy summit plateau looks to run seamlessly into the sea with no hint of the hidden drop; and a gate appears to open on to the waves.

Humphrey Head summit

Humphrey Head summit

Across the bay, the Lancashire coastline is interrupted by a large unnatural rectangle. The Heysham nuclear power plant dwarfs its surroundings. To the west, over the Leven estuary an army of thin white wind turbines occupies the sea beyond the Furness peninsula. One goal, two very different game-plans, separated by about ten miles of sea and a vast ocean of ideology.

Humphrey Head Point

With the tide running out, we were hoping to make a circular walk—returning via the beach—but a channel of water still laps the foot of the cliff. We descend to the rocks of Humphrey Head point. The water here still looks deep—we can’t see the bottom—and there’s no telling how firm the sand below might be. We take off our shoes and resign ourselves to sitting on the rocks and dipping our feet in the sea before heading back over the headland. A black Labrador is bolder and dives in. When I look over at him, I do a double take. He’s not swimming, he’s standing. The water’s barely up to his waist. I tentatively dip a foot in. It finds the bottom, so I slip off the rock and into the water. It comes halfway up my calf, and the sand is firm.

Humphrey Head cliff face

Laughing at our hesitancy, we paddle back beneath the cliff face toward the beach. As the water clears, it reveals the channel to be something of a marine nursery. Tiny crabs scurry beneath the surface, and a baby fluke, no longer than the tip of my finger, attacks a rag worm nearly twice its size.

Tim crab spotting

Dead crab

Mustard coloured algae cover the rocks, and shrubs and wild flowers shoot from crevices in the crags. As we reach dry sand, a man is telling his grandchildren about the cave in the rock behind them, and how you can clamber all the way through. The boy and girl’s faces light up and they tug at their father’s sleeve. They disappear into an opening in the cliff where mineral strata form eye-catching stripes. Excited shouts and laughter echo from within, and in a matter of minutes, they emerge a hundred yards up the beach.

Fairy Chapel entrance

The big kid in me wants to play too, so I climb over boulders to the cave entrance. It’s a narrow passage known as The Fairy Chapel. Daylight permeates in from the other end, but the width tapers before I reach it, and I’m slightly concerned this might turn out to be a case of Fat Man’s Agony. Would Mountain Rescue come out if I end up wedged firm between the walls? Or would they quote Wainwright at me, “we’re MOUNTAIN RESCUE and ‘not by any exercise of the imagination can Humphrey Head be classed as an outlying fell’”? Fortunately, I prove more svelte than I feared and emerge into the open, where the young lad is demanding of his dad, “AGAIN”.

The Fairy Chapel

Somewhere here is the site of a holy well. The waters were said to possess healing powers, and lead miners from as far back as Roman times would walk here to drink in the hope that the liquid would flush the toxins from their bodies. In 2003, Phil Lynott (a local landowner, not the late Thin Lizzy frontman) launched Willow, a brand of mineral water bottled from a spring in his nearby field.

Humphrey Head

His curiosity was roused when he moved two sick ponies into the paddock and found that each made a remarkable recovery. When Lynott realised that the ponies were drinking from the spring, he had the water analysed and found it contained traces of salicin, a natural anti-inflammatory. Salicin is formed from willow bark and is the natural origin of aspirin. Willow trees were once prevalent, and their remains now form a layer in the earth, through which the water is filtered. Lynott was convinced the water helped him recovery from cancer, and celebrity chef, Clarissa Dickson-Wright, claimed, live on television, that it had cured a benign cyst on her breast and a gungey toe. The company got into trouble with the consumer safety authorities when they went a step further and launched an advertising campaign claiming their product could cure a range of skin complaints such as eczema and psoriasis.

In its heyday, the holy well lay behind a door in the rock. All that remains now is a rusty pipe, but I can’t find it (“man look”, probably).

As the kids lead their dad back to the entrance to the Fairy Chapel, an inscription on a slab of rock catches my eye. It says, “Beware how you on these rocks ascend. Here William Pedder met his end. August 22nd, 1857. Aged 10 years”. It’s a sobering note, like a soulful minor cadence in a feel-good hit of the summer.

We head back past the Outdoor Centre and retrace our steps to Kent’s Bank. From the salt marsh, I cast a goodbye glance at Humphrey Head: a place of endings and beginnings, miracle cures and tragic demises, historic extinctions and exotic new colonists, prettiness and peril; and every bit deserving of the honorary fell status, Wainwright accords it.

Further reading:

The little egret:

https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/wildlife-guides/bird-a-z/little-egret/#f6IlRMpFi3iUhtw5.99

The last wolf

The holy well:

Willow Water

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/working_lunch/rob_on_the_road/2720253.stm

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/miracle-cure-spring-water-to-face-food-safety-investigation-46791.html

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