Seabirds swoop over the three divers standing chest-deep in Wastwater, adjusting their masks. A fourth hoists a garden gnome dressed as Santa from his pickup. “Is he diving?” I call. Apparently he is. “There’s a gnome community about 150ft down. Maybe 15, with a table plus Christmas tree with baubles.” “Can I make out shapes from here?” The diver shakes his neoprene-hooded head. “Pitch-black deep in Wastwater, pal.”
On the ice-rimmed pebble shore a coughing sheep moves aside as the diver stoops to strap on rubber fins before joining his companions in the water. They buddy-check each other’s equipment, then disappear under the surface of England’s deepest lake.
Forty minutes later, at Wastwater’s north-eastern end, I see another four adventurous souls embarking from a van, loaded up with trekking poles, ropes, ice axes and crampons. Their goal is the ice-tinselled buttresses topping Scafell. First, however, they must tackle lower slopes striped black and white with streaks of snow. Overhead, ravens perform mid-air tumbling tricks.
I pause and pull from my rucksack Nowt But a Fleein’ Thing, a book recently published by the Fell and Rock Climbing Club. Mostly photographed and written by Barrow craggie Al Phizacklea, with research by fellow climber Mike Cocker, this covers the 200-year history of rock climbing on Scafell. Coleridge’s Broad Stand descent (1802), Siegfried Herford’s Central Buttress ascent (1914), local hero Dave Birkett’s super-routes: there are diagrams and maps for these and many other climbs.
Resting this magnificent volume on a boulder, I turn pages to better suss out scale. Across the dale head, sunbeams highlight Great Gable’s barcoded hillside like a supermarket scanner at work.
“Nowt but a fleein’ thing cud git up t’crags on t’Wasdale Head side,” said the innkeeper Will Ritson, when told of the ascent of Scafell Crag in 1847. Nearby a shepherd is imploring a collie to “Gitawayoot!” and round up stray Herdwicks in the same broad Cumbrian, rooted in the Old English of the Anglo Saxons.
“Tak care, ol’ fella,” I can hear Ritson warning me. “Divn’t drop yon beeuk on thi feutt.” Phizacklea’s book weighs half a stone.
