A rainy morning’s walk on the shores of Buttermere is the perfect opportunity to try out our new Craghoppers’ AquaDry Waterproof Systems jackets. It’s a tough contest, as we’re just five miles from Seathwaite, in Borrowdale, the wettest inhabited place in England, which gets 11 feet of rain in a year. Most of it this morning.
High Stile looms out of the low cloud as we walk through Burtness Wood on the south-west shore of the lake. High Stile, at 807 m, 2,648 ft, is topped with Eagle Crag Sandstone, a sandstone derived from volcanic rock, from the Ordovician Period, 450 million years ago.
Ennerdale Granite
Sourmilk Gill cascades down the hillside at the lower end of the lake eroding into the medium-grained Ennerdale Granite.
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Felspar crystals give the rock its fleshy pink colour. Shards of dark ‘country rock’ – a geological term for the surrounding rock – were incorporated into the molten intrusion of granite as it forced its way upwards. Some of these fragments appear to be partially melted and the top fragment has a lighter halo around it.
These fragments are called xenoliths, from the Greek meaning ‘strange stone’.
Crottle
Crottle, also known as the salted shield lichen, Parmelia saxatilis, is a green-grey lichen here growing amongst mosses on bark.
If you look closely you’ll see a network of white veins on its upper surface. Crottle was used to produce a reddish brown dye, used in Harris Tweed.
Snockrigg
From the furthest slope in this photograph we’re looking north across the lake towards:
- High Snockrigg
- Low Snockrigg
- High Bank
- and Pike Rigg along the shore of the lake
Snoc is ‘a projecting piece of land’. Rigg means ‘ridge’.
Polypody Fern
Growing amongst polytrichum ‘haircup’ mosses, a polypody fern.
Common Polypody Fern, Polypodium vulgare, doesn’t have glossy fronds . . . except when its raining.
And talking about rain, I’m afraid that the Craghoppers’ Aquadry jackets didn’t live up to their name. Discussing it with a local we feel that the Lake District rain managed to get in via the seams, so an additional improvement might be – in addition of the dual layer waterproof membrane of the AquaDry system – to tape the seams.
Our jackets have always stood up to the worst that Yorkshire can throw at them but Lakeland rain is something above and beyond that.
But we did finish our walk at the perfect place for drying out . . .
Sykes Farm
Wherever you go in the Lake District there’s an opportunity to see the local rocks in the walls. I’m guessing that the opaque white mineral under the tea room sign is fluorite.
Herdwick Wool
Yesterday we caught the opening day of Ian Lawson’s exhibition ‘Native Spirit, The Herdwick’ at the Rheged Gallery which, alongside the stunning photographs, included these samples of Herdwick wool, dyed in colours that you can see all around you in the Lake District landscape.
