The sides of the river Gelt glow with beech leaves, flat ovals of burnt orange sticking to wet ledges. We take the footpath into the woods at Low Geltbridge, crossing the little Powterneth beck where it joins the main course. Vines of honeysuckle drape the trees, their scarlet berries vivid in the flat light. Acorns pummel our shoulders and lie splattered across the path. On hearing voices, a dipper skims downstream.
As the trees lose their cover it becomes clearer how the Gelt twists its way along the bottom of this U-shaped gorge. The very first river here ran as meltwater under ice, carrying with it boulders and debris as it funnelled its way down to the Solway, scouring out the bedrock known as the Triassic St Bees sandstone. During the last ice age there was a massive confluence in this area, with Scottish glaciers moving south, those forming the Tyne Gap lumbering west and those creating the Eden valley pushing north.
The modern river has sunk down into a narrow channel, rushing down the gorge, carving the rock into strange shapes like rolling muscles or slumped candle wax. In places it has formed jutting shelves or scooped out shadowy niches. Where the Gelt bubbles and narrows, the force has washed the sandstone clean, revealing a rich terracotta colour. It makes us wish to try canyoning, to slip and slide down the water chutes, exhilarating in the fast flow.
The beeches give way to alder, ash, oak and birch. As the path winds uphill it passes towering cliffs, made by quarrying the fine-grained stone. Ferns, mosses and saxifrages luxuriate along the vertical faces in Victorian garden abundance. The Romans were the first to work out this area during repairs to nearby Hadrian’s Wall. Their rhythmical chisel marks form herringbone patterns, zigzagging across the red walls. We search in dim light for their inscriptions, collectively known as the Written Rock of Gelt, frustrated not to find the crudely carved face we’d read about. It’s thrilling enough, though, to run our fingers along the damp grooves of chisel marks made so many centuries ago, their outlines barely blurred by time and weathering.
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