Of all the places in Lakeland where you can be guaranteed to find fresh running drinking water, Brownrigg Well is the highest. It graces Helvellyn (950m) 100m or so below the summit and has long assuaged the thirsts of shepherds and fell runners. Knowing its location means there is less need to carry bottled water uphill. Although called a “well”, this is not a place to retrieve water in a bucket, but a spring that flows from the hillside. Always available, whether there has been rain, as in recent weeks, or drought, it is an elixir from Mother Nature’s cooler, with or without ice (in winter). I can testify to this after tasting a bottle of the stuff brought down by friends.
The late Ernie Brownrigg, who was the shepherd for Manchester Waterworks, once took me to task for suggesting the well was named after him. “Don’t listen to the ‘lees’ that folk tell you,” he said, twanging his galuses (braces) while playing dominoes in the King’s Head Inn at Thirlspot by the A591. “Don’t claim I was that Brownrigg. I don’t ken who it was.”
The name Brownrigg in Cumberland, as it was then, was originally spelled “Brownridge”, and is said to derive from the Old English brun meaning brown and hrcyg standing for a ridge. Just like Helvellyn’s crest, which soars high, stretching out from south to north above the well.
Grasmere shepherd Peter Bland gathers sheep along this electrifying ridge. “Mountain becks running downhill can be risky to drink from, because a dead Herdwick riddled with maggots may be lying unseen in the water above,” he warns. “At Brownrigg Well you can fling yourself flat on the ground and sup safely knowing the Adam’s ale has arrived fresh from the bowels of the earth.”
He nods when I remind him that the landlord of the Nag’s Head Inn at Wythburn – now submerged by Thirlmere reservoir far below – used to recommend it, mixed with brandy, to passengers on the Keswick-Ambleside stagecoach, Wordsworth possibly included, pausing there in the 1700-1800s. “Nectar” is his verdict.
Forty Years on the Welsh Bird Islands, the 2015 memorial lecture in honour of the late Country diarist William Condry, will be given in Machynlleth on 3 October by Professor Tim Birkhead. More details at thecondrylecture.co.uk
