A Day On Frozen Derwent-Water

( Originally Published 1902 )

WHEN I woke this morning in the valley of Ketel, son of Ormr, that old Viking who ran his boats ashore at the Wyke, and gave us the name of Ketel's Wyke, which we call Keswick to-day, I thought that he and his sons must have been very much at home in the wintry springs of the days gone by. The sun just risen upon Helvellyn showered golden light on all the mountain peaks to the west. Dark upon Robinson lay the shadow of Hindsgarth, and purple-black upon Grisedale was the image of Causey Pike. All the lower draperies of the hills were grey and white, that only waited for the sun to climb a little higher to flash into dazzling beauty. The heavy snowfall upon Helvellyn and Blencathra had been undissipated by the hot suns of yesterday and the day before, but Skiddaw, with its great flanks facing the south, had in the past two days changed from virgin whiteness into purple russet veined with ivory, and already in middle valley the fields were green again.

As I somewhat impatiently hasted to dress, the air round my hotel seemed full of wings they were the wings of the white doves of the sea, the harmless kittiwake gulls that, ever since a day when, a few years back, a great poisoning of fish took place in the Greta, have frequented the Keswick valley. I made inquiries about these gulls, and found there was hardly a house in the Keswick vale to which they did not come for food day after day in winter weather. As they wheeled, and folded wing, and mixed with the raven-black rooks at their morning meal in front of the hotel, one thought that these children of the sea had given the English lakeland another charm. The heavens were cloudless azure and the sun as hot as middle May, but everyone I met seemed to be bound to the lake with skates on their arms, and I followed. The sight that met me was not soon to be forgotten. The vast sheet of Derwentwater lay like molten gold from end to end beneath the morning sun. Southward, " solid mountains shone," clad in what seemed nothing else than silver mail.

The sun had, I supposed, melted the snows, and these, refrozen in the night time, reflected back with dazzling splendour the beauty of the morning. Out of the sheet of burnished gold at one's feet, the woody Island of St. Herbert and Lord's Island lifted themselves, already somewhat purpled with the spring. Walla Crag swept to the lake in rich brown drapery, and the woods of Brandelhow and Fawe added colour to the white background of Catbels and Swinside. Except the lazy croak of ravens circling overhead, the cry of some wild duck as they went by us, there were few sounds to break the stillness of the scene. But there was one sound which, if it has ever been heard, can never be forgotten the sound as of a multitude mourning that cannot be comforted, unearthly murmurings or whisperings of a host in pain and that sound was simply the thousand resonances of the ringing skates that sighed along the polished icy floor.

But the ringing of innumerable skates in their confused murmuring had one other sound added to them. Over and over again, with no particular reason to account for it, the great ice sheet gave a muffled roar, as though it could contain its grief no longer and bellowed in its agony.

I left the skaters flitting to and fro, these with their hockey sticks, those with their sledges ; I left the cyclists wheeling in and out, and went off on a solitary voyage of discovery beyond St. Herbert's Island to the woods of Brandelhow. Now and again as one looked backward one saw the flashing of the sun upon the swift skates mixing in their rhythmic dance, and when one gained the shade of the hills one noted how the grey ice-sheeted floor of beaten gold was now changed into a mirror of the most exquisite steel blue. The ice when one came to examine it was just a great grey glassy network of bubbles, four or five inches thick, as it seemed. The roughnesses of a day or two ago had been smoothed out of it by the hot sun of yesterday, and nothing could exceed the delight with which one seemed to speed with wings across the marvellous mirror ; for indeed the beauty of the scene lay largely in the glorious reflections of the sun-lit snowy hills, and when one turned one's back on Borrowdale to skate for home, one seemed really to be skating partly on blue sky, and partly upon the gold-lit mountain peaks of Skiddaw.

Beautiful as frozen Derwentwater was at noontide, its beauty grew with every hour of the westering sun, and when, collecting its fire, the sun descended upon Newlands and flashed its low light down the valley on to the lake and Walla Crag beyond, it not only filled the ice with fire, but made the yellow banks of Stable Hills and the golden reeds at Scarf Close Bay burn like molten gold. As one bent forward against the light wind, the woods seemed to move with one in one's forward speed, and one felt that strange exhilaration which I suppose the sudden powers of new speed must give unto the souls of the blessed.

But one was recalled very swiftly from heaven to earth by a cry of alarm from St. Herbert's Island. Tempted by the exceeding beauty of the reflections, one was speeding into the one danger-spot of the lake south of that island, and one's skates had almost touched the water that lay upon the surface of the ice before one was aware that, though this was ice as burnished as water, that was the mirror of an open water lane. Skating round it one again headed for home, and for the rest of the after-noon watched the weird effects which came upon Derwentwater when the sun had set beyond the hills, and the light lay only upon Blencathra's utmost peak. Lilac mists gathered above us in the valley, the frozen lake itself went into lilac hue, and lilac rose up the mountains to the snow, and still there was sound of the ringing skate, when the stars were white and large in the west and only the grey old moon looked down upon our frozen pleasure-ground.

Later on in the eventide, when the whole scene was spectral fair in the moonlight, I visited the lake again, and watched skaters flitting about with Chinese lanterns in their hands ; very beautiful was the intricate dance of these lantern-bearers as they passed to and fro, and spun and wheeled and shot and turned with their flying jewels in the uncertain light.

It had been a great day, truly. Beauty of heavenly light, beauty of light upon earth and light upon the frozen water flood and I went to rest that night strangely weary, as it seemed to me, not only from the use of muscles rarely used, but from sheer excess of joy ; one's eyes ached from the dazzle of the day, one's mind was weary trying to remember so much loveliness, and one's heart ached to think that so few of the thousands of one's fellow-countrymen in prison cities pent, had been privileged to know how near to earthly paradise a fine day on frozen Derwentwater can be.