Up into the Snow

On Saturday my family and I had one of our best experiences in Lakeland since we moved up here last April: Stickle Tarn in the snow, on a gloriously sunny day. What a privilege…


One of the joys of being a lead ranger up here in Cumbria is the opportunity to occasionally get out of my own patch of South/East Cumbria and Morecambe Bay and head to the middle of the Lake District to meet up with the other lead rangers. Historically, the National Trust managed our vast Lake District estate as a succession of fairly independent properties - each valley or historic house having relatively little to do with each other. Now we come together to make sure that there is a bit more consistency in the way we look, the kinds of activities we get up to, our approach to environmental issues like water quality or relationships with farm tenants, and also we come together on joint projects.

The Ranger Experiences are one such joint initiative (perhaps you have even come to this blog from the website where they are hosted www.ntlakesoutdoors.org.uk ): the idea being that we have a space where we can share with our visitors our local knowledge of what’s special about the places that we live in, work in, and manage. It might be a great place for a picnic or for watching a sunset, a place to go swimming or bouldering, for watching birds or butterflies, seeing leaping salmon or hearing natterjacks.

As a newcomer to these parts, it is exactly the sort of information that we as a family have needed to help us to get to know this incredible part of the world. And more or less every time I meet up with one or more of my lead ranger colleagues, I come away with some great tips. Last Friday it was James Archer, lead ranger for Grasmere and Langdale, who recommended the National Trust’s Stickle Gill car park as a way of getting right up into the middle of the fells without having to drive on the treacherously icy roads that we had encountered the week before near Coniston. It might be well-known to thousands of people, but it wasn’t to us.


We woke up on Saturday morning in our Arnside flat and out of the window there was a ribbon of snow-capped mountains glowing at us, calling to us, from over the fuzzy green and terracotta of Cartmel Fell on the other side of the Kent estuary. The kids, too, were desperate to get up into the snow.

The path up from the Stickle Gill car park didn’t feel like walking at all - to the kids it was a mountaineering adventure, heading for the snows up amongst the Langdale Pikes alongside tumbling waterfalls and ice-blue pools right for summer bathing. Wainwright describes, in typical style, the path as “that steep ladder to heaven [that] stirs the imagination, and even the emotions, and this is especially so whenever the towering peaks come into view suddenly and unexpectedly…the east bank path has a special attraction almost unique on Lakeland paths - a rock stairway requiring continuous hand and foot climbing.”


Writing in 1958, Wainwright also describes the path the severe erosion that had been inflicted by walkers, reducing them to “rivers of scree”. That the paths we experienced are once again a steep ladder to heaven is something for which we must be thankful to the National Trust rangers. For years, rangers working for the Trust’s “Fix the Fells” project, a partnership with the National Park authority expertly led by John Atkinson (now NT lead ranger for South Lakes) has been repairing routes like this. The rangers have been painstakingly building bridges and diverting paths, allowing natural vegetation to regrow, re-positioning the tough volcanic rocks into a surface that can withstand the experience-seekers like us but which blends seamlessly with the mountain itself. Andy Goldsworthy would be proud.

And then, just as my 6 year old (Roddy) and 3-and-a-half year old (Flora) were flagging and the path started getting slippery with rimy ice, the most awe-inspiring view exploded on us from around a cliff. Behind us was the soft, almost springy greenness of Langdale flowing down to sparkling Windermere, and a couple of crag-bound Herdwicks. Ahead an alpine playground of glittering snow, and the black and white enormity of Pavey Ark and Harrison Stickle towering over us from across the surface of Stickle Tarn.

The kids, for a split second, stood like proud mountaineers and took in their achievements at reaching the 480m contour, and then started hurling snow balls at each other and sliding on their tummies over the hillocks - a pair of otters in waterproof trousers. My wife Nancy and I just kept on staring.


Oh to be in Cumbria, now that January’s here! Thank you James for sharing it with me, and thank you John for getting us there. Two sides of the same ranger coin.

The Many Moods of Morecambe Bay

Being a Ranger attached to the Trust’s Morecambe Bay properties is something of a misnomer if you think about it. There are a few locations where we own out as far as Mean High Water (Heysham, Jack Scout and Silverdale Cove, Plumpton) but you don’t manage Morecambe Bay (or “range” it I suppose), or own it, or do anything with it. It isn’t property in any normal sense of the word. It is another place altogether: a true wilderness ultimately beyond the management control of man, and long may that continue.

And vast, it is vast. When the tide goes out it disappears beyond the horizon exposing an extra 100 square miles of not-quite land.


Working and living in sight of Morecambe Bay you see it many different moods.

The most dramatic and extraordinary was surely at Christmas, when a sea of tortured, mangled pack ice came down from the Lake District fells and littered the sands. Our stately Victorian promenades became for a while the decks of a cruise ship looking out over Antarctic wastes.


But in its way last week was just as dramatic too. For a single Wednesday the force of the westerly gales drove the sea towards the land and was strong enough, it seemed, to prevent the tide from going out. The white horses of the waves rolled in and crashed against our rocky coasts. It felt like proper sea, the Atlantic. Usually we only get that feeling of proper sea on the spring high tides when the saltmarsh strips submerge and the sea-sick smell of mouldy salt and vinegar crisps fills your nose, and your daydreams.

The more usual view is of something hovering between land, sea and sky - a flatness of mud and creek that seems too treacherous and insubstantial to either walk on or sail on - emptiness with just the occasional small gaggle of wading birds or black-headed gulls.


But step out on to it (preferably on a Cross Bay Walk if you want to stay safe!) and like a test of faith it doesn’t collapse beneath you but is surprisingly firm and land-like. (On Morecambe Bay you are more likely to see a fisherman’s tractor than a boat). Step out on to it bare-foot and you are rewarded with a range of textures. Out there are hard flat sands (and not just at Sandside, where they bake into a golden beach when the high tides are low and the sun is hot); grey sandy rivulets that press painfully into your arches and where you can leave footprints; powdery silts and sloppy brown muds that ooze between your toes but supports you, ankle deep; soft mud-flats pock-marked with warm, calf-deep basins; rivers hundreds of metres across but only thigh-high where those with the know-how tread for flooks (flounders), pull them out by the gills and strap them to their belts like rabbit pelts. And the infamous quicksands too. Many are air-pockets trapped by collapsing creek banks, wet bubbles beneath dry crusts, ready to trap the unwary. But if you stand in one place for too long and work the mud beneath your feet you can slowly feel the ground loosening, stickily.

And if you do stay in one place for too long, beware! In many places - like Jack Scout where I was today - the sands are so flat that you can watch the tide creeping in at walking pace; turn round and by the time you have it may have already surrounded you.


I love the rushing of the incoming tides. On one of my first weeks living and working here I was lucky to drive along the Sandside road just as the Kent ‘bore’ wave was racing and smacking against the salt-marsh where the estuary turns north towards Sizergh and narrows abruptly: a river flowing the wrong way. But a normal in-tide is even more fascinating. Rivers like the Kent, Keer and Leven flow seawards with their big ripples but either side the wider streams of the muddy tide flow in; rivers of water flowing in different directions. On a windy day or a stronger tide the two opposing currents collide and swirl into great eddies, the silts suspended like dirty paint twirling in a water-jar after a paint-brush has been cleaned in it.

Walk in august along the edges of Morecambe Bay and all you’ll see are the scruffy mauve of the sea asters (the last forgotten flowers left in the florist) but back in June for a glorious fortnight we look out on our own equivalent of a desert bloom, a surprising explosion of sea pink (or thrift), all a-buzz with the excitement of insect life and the coming of summer.


My favourite time of all though is the last few minutes of twilight, before the colours go for another day. On a still evening the mackerel skies overhead are nothing compared to the patterns out on the bay. Dark purple bands of dry sand streak with wet silver; the crests of the dark purple wavelets in the creeks capture pockets of silver and gold. The water pools trapped in the muddy riffles as the tide retreats also reflect the last of the daylight; they are light-pools trapped amongst the darkening sands as the day, too, ebbs away.

Then these eyes in the sand seem to slowly shut, their light fades away, and we are left with the last goodnight peeping of the oystercatchers and the bats swooping out of the trees taking insects off the tide-line.

East of Eden

Our patch of "South and East Cumbria and Morecambe Bay" stretches into some surprising areas, and none more so than Longcrag Farm at North Stainmore, just a couple of miles from the boundary with county Durham.

It is a place with no visitor access, so as I arrived in my car up the long steep stone track off of a dead end country lane, I felt incredibly privileged as well as (if I'm honest) a little like James Herriott on one of his visits. The farm's setting is truly breath-taking. There is a plunging beck by the side, and behind it the ground rises steadily up to the large 'allotment' - a field surrounded by rugged walls and old fences that is essentially no different to the miles of unchanging blanket bog that stretch out to the horizons on the upland commons beyond.

To the right the view is blocked by a stone wall of millstone grit, running along the crag itself that gives the farm its name. It is only the flashes of lighter grey sky between the dark rough stones that show that crag and wall aren't one and the same.


But turn round and look to the south and west and the view is vast. Can there be a bigger view in the whole of England? The wide Eden Valley with ridge after ridge of pennine hills rolling away to the south in a rising limestone sea towards the grittier peaks of Whernside and Pen-y-Ghent. The A66, the little town pockets of Kirkby Stephen and Brough, the old railways, the barns. Westwards the dramatic terraced scarp-line of the North Pennines with its conical peaks and scars, names as terrifying as their appearance. Cross Fell, Cauldron Snout, Wild Boar Scar (not to mention Hell Gill, Black Fell and Hangingstone Scar opposite).

I am here with some of the members of the National Trust's biological survey team, all the way from headquarters near Swindon, a world away. Gordon is mapping the vegetation, Peter is surveying for invertebrates with his large net, and our own John Hooson is identifying everything he sees.


Although I am feeling slightly out of my depth alongside all this expertise, even I can appreciate the bird life on display. Impressive doesn't do it justice - for such a small farm the birds are staggering. Spring comes late up here, with snows often lying into May or even June and today in mid-July it is clear that breeding season is still in full swing - chicks unfledged, adults still displaying. Lapwing - I count over 20 - continuously call and peewit overhead. 2 curlews are constantly on the wing. One repeatedly traces the outline of a square over our heads, nervously staking out the territory in which we stand and in which, somewhere, there must surely be chicks. Suddenly it swoops off in a dummy flight, drawing our attention away...Two red grouse, perhaps seeking sanctuary from the surrounding moorland where the shoots are now only a few weeks away, fly massively across our path. Grey partridge scuttle through the rushy corners and along wall bottoms and once I come across a tiny speckled partridge chick, almost perfectly camouflauged.
John tells me he has seen the daddy of them all: black grouse! but I miss them. I'm too sidetracked by the view, the wheatears flitting busily between the walls, the skylarks overhead, fragmentary snatches of the sounds of drumming snipe which are just as quickly snatched back by the wind.

Wild though this lovely place may seem, it is certainly no wilderness. Walls have been painstakingly built and loving restored. Livelihoods have been eked out of the boggy, wildflower-rich turf. The current tenant tells me philosophically of having been cut off for 6 weeks last winter, but also of her passionate love of rare-breed horses and of her success at breeding one of the rarest of them all: the Cleveland Bay. Only 11 filly foals in the world last year, but 4 born here. The ones I see are curious but aloof, with both the hardness and softness of the summer hills within them.


Back near the house is a huge hole; in fact at some 20 metres across and 20 metres deep it would easily contain the house, and its outbuildings too. It is carpetted with northern marsh orchids of a purple colour so rich that your eyes actually struggle to focus on them; they seem to float and shimmer rather than grow.


There are globeflowers, water avens, devils-bit scabious. As we say our goodbyes, we ask the tenant about the hole. "Oh that", she says. "That fell in one night 20 years ago, made a hell of a racket. It was an old mine that caved in - they're all over these hills. Lead mines, barytes mines".

Everywhere around us here the wild and the people are mingled. Voices that are snatched away by the wind call the horses home. Or was that just the curlews crying?

June 2011: On Police Patrol at Heysham Head

Friday evening of the 3rd June finds me at our site at Heysham Head, known to most people locally as ‘The Barrows’, the most southerly location on our patch. It is a beautiful evening – still too hot even at 8.30pm for the NT-branded red ranger fleece I am wearing – with the sun slowly setting far out over the Irish Sea, and with the Lake District peaks hanging smokily over the huge and deserted brown sands of a low-tide Morecambe Bay. The backdrop gives the place a real blast of the wild and the wind-swept, perhaps surprisingly so given that The Barrows are completely ringed on the landward side by a loop of neat houses that ends with the distinctive outline of the Heysham Power station at the southern end.

I am here to participate in a joint police patrol in order to conserve the site’s population of linnets; in fact as it turns out I also joined up with a fire patrol too, so it was quite an evening. Police and Fire crews to support linnets? It might seem like overkill, so I had better explain...

“We’re lucky to have this here” says Linda, one of the Police Community Support Officers, and on the evening I am here the Heysham Barrows are certainly living up to their role as a vital green lung for the people of Morecambe and Heysham There are quite a few dog-walkers, a group of lads playing with an aerobie, a couple of families having picnic teas and another one paddling in the muddy shallows with nets and buckets, some young mothers meeting up together with their toddlers, a courting couple, a few individuals sitting quietly enjoying their own private sunsets, and a group of teenagers swigging from a couple of enormous plastic cider bottles (more of whom later).

And down at the far end, flitting joyously between the gorse bushes and twittering roughly like a flock of wild canaries on cheap cider themselves, are the linnets. They’re a small finch with an uneven mixture of chestnut brown, black and grey markings that make them look a bit like a small sparrow or a dunnock, except with much longer tail and wings. It is the males that really stand out though, with pinky-red breasts and foreheads that are almost glowing this evening where they catch the last firey rays of the sun. Of course there are other birds too, an evening chorus of songthrushes and blackbirds; a single whitethroat scratching away from the top of a bramble patch.

Linnets were once a bird common throughout British farmland, but like many species they suffered an enormous and worrying decline throughout the 1960s and 1970s that continues to this day, so that they are now described as “red-listed” in this country by conservation bodies. They have been pushed out to more marginal areas, with coastal sites such as Heysham now being their most preferred habitat, with gorse a particular favourite.


And this gorse brings me back to the police and fire patrols. Over the unusually hot and dry Easter holiday period earlier this year,the Fire Service were called out 5 times to put out gorse fires on the Barrows, half the total from the whole of last year. Although some might have been accidental given the dry conditions, we think most were deliberately started. Walking round tonight, with green shoots just visible from the large areas of charred gorse stems and with the last of the bluebells curiously unaffected underneath them, it doesn’t look like any permanent harm will have been done, but to the linnets these fires are catastrophic, and the risk of the fires spreading to the nearby houses is very high indeed.

The joint patrols are something that the National Trust, the police, members of the local community and the fire service have all identified as a way of reducing the threat of the fires; and also the teenage drinking that might be the underlying cause. The patrols, in what has now been designated a “no alcolhol zone”, are about warding off incidents before they occur, but also about simply showing that the place is cared for, and that it needs looking after. We have highlighted a special need for them when nice weather and school holidays combine, as they have done this evening...


In fact it is such a likely evening for “trouble” that although it is the police that I have agreed to meet, it is three members of the local Fire Service who turn up first, in a big shiny fire engine, on a chance visit to see who is around. The fire officers approach is relaxed and friendly and very human, first speaking to a barbecuing couple about safe disposal, and then tackling the cider-swilling teenagers in the woods. Once the kids realise it is “only the firemen” the few who scarpered behind a rock come back, and the remainder remove their bottles from under their jumpers. It is a strangely innocent and comical scene, but also rather sad. But the firemen exchange banter with them, pointing out that they should take their litter home with them as “some idiots can try and use it to light fires”. It is an approach that tries and reach out to the kids’ fundamental goodness, to try and use them as a way of passing on a message to the real trouble-makers, the actual fire-starters.

The Police Community Support Officers approach, when they arrive, is more no nonsense, although to be honest with their luminous yellow jackets, most of the kids have fled back into town at the sight of them. Those few that remain, to groans and protests, have their alcohol poured out in front of them, and are then moved on. It is curiously simple and quick, and despite the first name terms there is an undoubted respect on the part of the kids towards the police.


The drinkers gone, and the night reassuringly quieter than expected, we are just having a chat amongst the lengthening shadows of St Patrick’s Church when a larger and more intimidating group of older teenagers – 16 to 18 – walk up the narrow lane to the Barrows with some crates of beer. “Hey!” shout the police officers, and there is a brief chase as the boys run off onto the beach and follow the sea wall back towards Morecambe. Police colleagues away in that direction are radioed through to, and the Community Support Officers are off. Their night is really only just beginning, whereas mine has now finished.

On Monday, at the “Police and Communities Together” meeting at the Heysham Community Centre I learn that not only were there no fires over the half term weekends, but that the total number of recorded incidents on the Barrows fell from 22 in April to only 9 in May....

May 2011 - New Arrival

Hello, and welcome to my new blog: Tom’s Ranger Diary. My name is Tom Burditt and as of April of this year, I am the new Lead Ranger for the National Trust in South and East Cumbria and Morecambe Bay.

It is a new job, and a new area, both for me and for the Trust: an amalgamation of a number of properties being thought of together for the first time. We take in the land around and beyond the outer edges of the Lake District National Park, stretching far into the quiet emptiness of the Eden Valley east of Penrith, and to the heavily populated coastline of north Lancashire. Since I started in this job I have often heard of people refer to our area as ‘the National Trust in miniature’, and it certainly does reflect the full range of the organisation.

We have historic houses with their gardens and wider country estates, both large (Sizergh Castle, near Kendal) and small (Acorn Bank, in the Eden Valley underneath Cross Fell). We have a country park (Fell Foot) on the southern shore of Lake Windermere, bustling with boats and picnicking families. We have a number of smaller properties like Cartmel Priory, and Dalton Castle, and remote Pennine farmsteads. In Heysham Head we have a vital green lung amidst the houses, factories, power stations and docks of Morecambe and Heysham. And we have incredible countryside: the windswept Sandscale Haws National Nature Reserve with its beaches, towering sand-dunes, rare orchids, chorusing natterjacks and breeding birds; the lunar desert landscapes of Holmepark Fell – all jagged limestones and battered trees; and the homely, soft landscapes of Arnside and Silverdale with their neat drystone walls, coppiced woodlands, grazed pastures and sea views.

Ah, the views. If there’s one thing that helps to bring our area together and to give it an identity it is the views. Everywhere I go in this job I have that Lake District skyline set out before me: Scafell Pike, the Coniston Old Man, Crinkle Crags, Helvellyn, Red Screes, Ill Bell, Black Coombe; the names a constantly shifting poem but that view somehow remaining the same.

This blog will I hope shed some light on what it is like to be a ranger for the National Trust – the huge variety of our tasks and the many ups and downs. But I also hope it will serve as a celebration of this fantastic landscape, of the wildlife that inhabits it and of the people who help to make it what it is. I hope that it will draw you in to our properties if you haven’t already been; and that it will raise a wry nod of recognition amongst those of you who already know them.

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My time so far has been spent getting to know my new places, and the staff, farmers and volunteers who care for them. At the end of last week I visited two neighbouring farms on the ancient Sizergh Estate, which for me confirmed all the richness and diversity of the job, and of the modern National Trust.

East of the A590 is Low Sizergh, set amidst lush green dairy pastures that roll down to the rushing gorges of the River Kent. We looked round the tenants’ farm shop, gleaming shelves of mouth-watering local produce: ice creams, cheeses, meats and pickles; adverts for courses in growing and cooking. It is in many respects a model enterprise: of farms working together to add value to their products and to preserve rural livelihoods, and of the customers desire to help them through eating it all. Out in the rain we talked of utilising the latest scientific research to increase grassland productivity not through the application of chemicals but through the clever use of fencing and by detailed monitoring of stocking densities and timings.

Back across the road on land straddling Sizergh Fell I saw our Ranger team helping another tenant farmer to restore an ancient ‘cop’, an unusual hybrid field boundary consisting of an earth bank topped with a hedge and faced with a low dry-stone wall. The stones have been salvaged from the field - mechanically riddled out of the earth on a digger bucket, but they are the very stones that were hand-scraped out of the ground by estate workers centuries ago. The quarries they got them from are still there, low stone faces in the wooded field corners, now home to a spectacular display of wildflowers worthy of any nature reserve. We saw Solomon’s seal, a carpet of cowslips and five different species of orchid in flower, including more early purple orchids than I have ever seen before, anywhere in the country.

As I stood there in the April showers of early May, it was that view that struck me again. Not the celebrated one north towards the Lakeland fells this time, but the one southward across the shimmering shifting sands of the Kent Estuary and then the treacherous muddier brown tides of Morecambe Bay beyond. Between the two the comforting solidity of Arnside Knott stood out, in whose shadow I am now living. Home; already it feels like home.