Bunches of crimson berries hang heavy from the rowan trees, like knuckledusters punching colour along Tarn Hows’s famously photogenic shores. I remark on this to a couple piloting battery-powered mobility scooters past the bench where I’m seated. Why haven’t birds snaffled them? “Not quite ripe enough maybe,” ventures the woman. “But flocks of fieldfares will soon arrive from Scandinavia and scoff them up.” On cue several fieldfare look-a-likes – mistle thrushes with black-speckled mustard-coloured breasts – swoop by, though they ignore the berries.
The scooter drivers disappear along the crushed stone path that guides walkers and cyclists for more than a mile and a half round the tarn. Created from three smaller tarns and landscaped in the 19th century by the industrialist James Garth Marshall, it was later sold to Beatrix Potter, who bequeathed the site with its expanding plantations of spruce, larch and pine in 1930 to the National Trust.
Today Tarn Hows, on the hilltop overlooking Coniston and Yewdale, is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the north-west; made more accessible by the free four-wheeled Tramper buggies that can be booked from the trust.
Not for a decade has a year promised such a richly verdant autumn, partly thanks to these previous warm, damp months, seen to such advantage in this uplands mosaic of varied woodland and rocky bracken-clad hills. Purple heather at its deepest tint robes hillocks, attracting bees, and the sugarloaf tops of Langdale Pikes cut the sweetest silhouette far beyond.
Children bum slide down grassy slopes, squashing each blade flat. Rose-breasted bullfinches land on the pebbled shore as green-winged teals squabble on the water. I make my way by Pacerpole between the benches strategically sited at intervals along the path, pausing to pick luscious blackberries nestling among the rust-tinged bracken. “Hi there!” I whirl around. It’s an approaching Tramper driver. “What a way to watch red squirrels. I surprised a red deer close up earlier. It stood for moments before bounding away. Sorry I gave you a fright. These buggies are so silent.”
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