The Fairfield Horseshoe and the Skulls of Calgarth

In which I walk the fine mountain ridges of Fairfield Horseshoe, tell the spooky story of the Calgarth skulls, bag a free beer in Rydal, become a social pariah in Ambleside, and learn a life lesson from Laurence Fishburne.

The Skulls of Calgarth

As I drive through Troutbeck Bridge, I pass a sign for Calgarth Park, offering two-bedroom supported retirement apartments. Viewings are available. I’m sure both my age and my bank balance disqualify me (although one is depressingly nearer than the other). All the same, I’d be tempted to have a peek—the building has an interesting history, and a sinister backstory.

The house is an elegant lakeside villa—all Georgian pillars and neatly manicured lawns—overlooking Windermere. It was built by Bishop Richard Watson in 1790. In its early years, it played host to such eminent neighbours as Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge. During the First World War, it was transformed into a hospital, and later became a children’s orthopaedic unit, specialising in TB and polio.

When Bishop Watson bought the estate, it already had a hall, but he didn’t much like the look of it. Perhaps it was the cold and austere demeanour. Perhaps he was a forerunner of Kevin McCloud’s Grand Designers and fancied something modern, handsome and hospitable. Or perhaps, he knew about the skulls.

In the sixteenth century, a humble cottage stood on the spot. It was the home of Kraster and Dorothy Cook. They weren’t rich, but they worked hard, and they ran a productive and profitable farm.

Living and working in such an idyllic location should have brought endless happiness, but there was a fly in the ointment. Their land was coveted by a rich and influential justice of the peace, named Myles Philipson. He was a greedy man. His estate was substantial, but it wasn’t enough. The Cooks had something he wanted, and it consumed him. He swore he’d acquire the land by any means.

It proved harder than he thought. Money didn’t work: the Cooks were simple, honest folk, who appreciated what they had and wanted nothing more. Philipson tried bullying, but the Cooks were strong and stood firm.

In the end, their steadfastness paid off. Philipson backed down. Indeed, it seemed he’d had a complete change of heart and deeply regretted his behaviour. To make amends, he invited them round for dinner on Christmas Eve.

Dorothy and Kraster must have felt their troubles were over, but they were rudely awakened the next morning by soldiers demanding to search their cottage—Philipson had accused them of stealing a silver goblet. It was soon found in Dorothy’s bag—precisely where the maleficent magistrate had snuck it.

The Cooks were arrested and imprisoned, awaiting trial. They must have been scared stiff, but they had faith in their own innocence and in the British justice system. Imagine their dismay when they entered the courtroom to find Philipson presiding.

Philipson declared them guilty and sentenced them to death, decreeing that all their land be signed over to him as compensation. He quickly set about demolishing their cottage and building a hall on the same spot.

From the gallows, Dorothy uttered a terrible curse: for as long as the Philipson family remained in residence, Kraster and she would haunt them night and day, and their business affairs would never prosper.

One year later, the hall was complete and the Philipsons moved in, but any celebrations were derailed when they found two skulls on the bottom stair. They had their servants throw them out and retired to bed, but they were kept awake by a terrible screaming and wailing. When they rose in the morning, the skulls were back.

Over the coming months, Myles had the skulls crushed, burned, buried and thrown in the lake. Whatever he tried failed: the infernal screams persisted, and every morning the skulls returned.

Living under such a curse quickly put paid to visitors; the family became reclusive and their business affairs suffered. In the end, Myles had to sell everything but the hall to cover his debts. He bequeathed the hall to his son, but the curse remained. Only once the Philipson family quit the hall for good, did Kraster and Dorothy lie quietly in their graves.

The Fairfield Horseshoe

Each lake has its own character: Wastwater is feral and fiercely beautiful; Coniston, tranquil; Ullswater dark and mysterious (especially when cloud envelopes the fell tops); but Windermere has grandeur. It’s a grandeur that has little to do with her flotillas of yachts or the moneyed mansions that line her eastern shore. A daunting profile dominates her northern skyline, her head cradled by a ring of high fells, a vision of strength and drama. Dressed in snow and reflected in the long mirror of the lake, the Fairfield Horseshoe is a sight to stir the blood and quicken the heart; in the spring sunshine of this May Day Bank Holiday, its slopes are gold and green, softer than in winter but every bit as inspiring.

I park in Ambleside and head up Nook Lane to Low Sweden Bridge, following a wide track that then winds its way up the lower reaches of Low Pike. A dry-stone wall meanders in from the left. The track swings right in search of a gentler ascent, but a narrow path handrails the wall, heading up over steeper ground to Low Brock Crag. This way signals greater adventure.

A short and easy scramble brings me to the crest of Low Brock Crag. Windermere commands the backward view, nestling languidly in a glacial groove—long cool and periwinkle blue.

The summit of Low Pike is further half-scramble, rising in a rocky outcrop like a bouldered earthwork, wedded to the wall, which curves away below like a castle’s outer curtain. Dropping down from this little tower, I land in its shallow moat. The ground between here and High Pike is a soggy morass. In the weeks to come, an extended heatwave will dry Lakelands’ most pervasive bogs, but for now, I have to pick my path with care.

By the time I reach the top of High Pike, the wall is broken down in places, blending ever more closely with the crag, as if born of the mountain, it aspires to revert.

After a long grassy rise, I reach Dove Crag’s summit cairn, and gaze out again over Windermere—its further reaches now visible beyond the headland, stretching out toward a white sheen of Irish Sea, blurring the distinction between earth and sky. In February, I stood on this very spot, when snow, cloud and soft light conspired to blend lake, sky and fellside in an ambient glow of pink and white. Now the soft blue haze of imminent summer inflects the lowland, and the slopes are olive green with young bracken; shafts of sun stage shadow plays across the crags ahead.

This ancient landscape of immutable rock is in a constant state of flux. Pinnacles, crevices, crags and gullies are thrown into sharp relief, then retreat into shadow; hues of red and yellow, mauve and purple streak fleetingly across the slopes, then blur and are swallowed again by dark recesses of green. It’s an animated impressionist painting of ever-shifting ephemera.

Mountains are restless chameleons. As John Berger expresses it so beautifully, in Hold Everything Dear: “There are moments of looking at a familiar mountain which are unrepeatable. A question of a particular light, an exact temperature, the wind, the season. You could live seven lives and never see the mountain quite like that again; its face is as specific as a momentary glance across the table at breakfast. A mountain stays in the same place, and can almost be considered immortal, but to those who are familiar with the mountain, it never repeats itself. It has another timescale.”

From Hart Crag and over Link Hawse to Fairfield’s rocky shoulder, the terrain grows more rugged and dramatic; precipitous crags plunge to Dovedale and Deepdale and I’m compelled to make small diversions to gain a better view.

On reaching one of Fairfield’s summit shelters, I sip coffee from a thermos and stare over at St Sunday Crag, rising like a dinosaur across Deepdale Hause. In sun, its livery is flecked with gold and purple, and streaked with stripes of exposed stone like strips of armour plate. Captured on canvas and hung in a gallery, critics would think it a stylised exaggeration, and yet the reality is more intense.

I head south, following the cairns down the western spine of the Horseshoe to the summit of Great Rigg.

Between 1955 and 1966, Alfred Wainwright published his Pictorial Guides to the Lake District, a series of seven books that document 214 peaks with hand-drawn maps, pen and ink drawings, practical direction and poetic description. The series has been continuously in print, and to climb all 214 has become known as “bagging the Wainwrights”.

The desire to bag Wainwrights now infects my judgement. Where once, I’d have been content to continue directly down the main ridge, the prospect of ticking off Stone Arthur waylays me, and I make a detour to the right, descending rapidly over ground that will all have to be regained.

It’s not obvious where the summit is as it isn’t really summit at all, just an outcrop on the ridge—and there are several. I meet a couple who are asking themselves the same question. We alight hopefully on the first contender (hopefully, because it’s not too far down the slope—but somehow, we know this would be too easy). They check their GPS and confirm the elevation is too high. We carry on together down the incline.

They tell me they’re attempting all the Wainwrights in a year, so the Horseshoe, with the addition of Stone Arthur, is like concocting several syllables from all the high-ranking Scrabble letters and landing on a triple word score—a grand total of nine ticked off for about eleven miles of effort.

When we reach the proper “summit”, the vivid blue of Grasmere beguiles below.

It’s a slog back up the slope to Great Rigg and a great relief to finally descend toward Heron Pike, with the forget-me-not fingers of Windermere and Coniston Water outstretched below. The final stretch down the pitched zigzags of Nab Scar overlooks Rydal Water, glittering like a teardrop in the green of the valley.

When I reach the bottom, fatigue kicks in, and I sit on a wall above Rydal Mount, looking at a sign for the Coffin route to Grasmere (and trying not to read it as a suggestion).

I walk on through the grounds of Rydal Hall where a girl is emptying paper plates into a bin. She looks up and smiles and says, “Do help yourself to a beer if you’d like one.”

I pinch myself to make sure I’m not dreaming, but she’s still here, and she’s gesturing behind me, where three kegs are perched on the wall.

“We’ve had a wedding reception but there’s some beer left over, so we thought we’d offer it to walkers. We’ve no glasses so you’ll have to make do with a jam jar—they’ve all been washed”, she explains brightly.

I thank her and pour myself a sparkling jam jar of Jennings Cocker Hoop. We chit chat for a minute or two, then she heads back inside. As she reaches the door, she turns and says, “take it with you if you want—we don’t need the jam jar back.”

A good cool hoppy ale never tastes better than after a long walk. Sipping this unexpected trophy, I head on down the wide Rydal-to-Ambleside path, where I pass several groups of strollers: not sweaty fell walkers now, but smartly dressed, respectable types, out for a gentle Bank Holiday peramble.

And they’re giving me decidedly funny looks. The third time it happens, I check my flies. Then it dawns on me—I’m carrying a jam jar that’s now about a quarter full of frothy amber liquid. They think it’s a urine sample. And I’m swigging it.

To Have or to Be

As I drive back past Calgarth Park, I notice that the next lane is called Old Hall Road. Out of curiosity, I turn down it. After a few hundred yards the road narrows and a large sign warns, “Private Road—Keep out”. I wonder about continuing and try to think of a cover story, but better judgement prevails.

Later, I’ll wonder if it actually said “no access”, but “keep out” is the message I get, loud and clear, and right now this feels hostile. Perhaps it’s the apparent terseness of the wording or just the abrupt end to the freedom of the fells; or perhaps it’s the recollection of a newspaper article about the scandal of London councils selling social housing to luxury property developers. Perhaps it’s because She Drew the Gun’s Poem has been playing on the car stereo, “How long before they put up a wall and call it a private city?” But all of a sudden, the story of the Calgarth skulls seems very real.

This is when I realise it’s not a ghost story at all but a morality tale about a man haunted to the edge of insanity by his conscience.

In the 1970’s Erich Fromm wrote a book called To Have or to Be. He suggested people are governed by a having orientation—the desire to possess things—or a being orientation—the desire to experience things. Those of us who tread the fells have our walking boots firmly in the being camp. (That said, perhaps our desire to bag summits and tick off Wainwrights betrays an underlying having orientation. Here, I should probably confess I got all this from an episode of CSI. I did buy the book, but I haven’t read it yet, so for now, this is coming via Laurence Fishburne.)

While the being orientation is the likelier path to happiness, Fromm predicts that our western obsession with consumerism means the having orientation will predominate. Forty years on, we’ve already travelled a long way down that road.

Beware the skulls.

Find a route map and directions for this walk at https://www.walklakes.co.uk/walk_42.html

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