ALCOCK TARN

A day is never long enough in the Lakes.

I'm on a walk to Alcock Tarn, and every wind of the path reveals another stunning view of Grasmere. The lake gleams deep black and the grey sky washes down over the hills into mist, making the distant ranges hazy blue.

The tarn outflow babbles over rocks down to the lake. Further down the flow is a cluster of pines, alive with the chirping of coal tits and goldcrests.

It's cool and quiet amongst the bracken. I struggle to pull myself away from each view, my route a stop-start where the breaks are longer than the active time. I've been reading Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard and staring hard at the trees, wondering which are connected, passing each other nutrients and water. I wonder if the ferns are involved.

I could sit on any one of these rocks, at the base of any one of these trees, for hours on end, pausing between pages to soak in the view. In the air, I can smell autumn just around the corner, crisp in the air after the heat of yesterday.

It was raining on the way up, and my clothes are drying in the breeze.

The Lakes are even more beautiful in the rain and cloud. It's weather that does justice to their depth, their sombre magnitude.

On the final push, I stop to catch my breath. As I'm admiring the effect of the haze cloaking the slopes, someone rambles past. I make a comment about the beauty of the view. "Yes" she says "but what a shame about the mist". You can be unhappy with anything if you try hard enough.

When I make it over the crest of the crag, the tarn comes into view. Like the lake, it's still and glassy, darker than the sky. Green reeds tinged pink at the tips cover a third of the surface. The shallow water reflects the hills beyond.

A pair of dragonflies are mating, flying in tandem and rolling and tumbling like a wheel through the air, their dancing reflected, too.

I sit by the edge of the water and watch a lone mallard gliding towards me. She arrives at my feet and stands to feed in the shallow, boggy margin. As I study the tarn, trying to take it all in, she stays by my side, sitting at my elbow and nibbling the moss. Apart from the insects, we're all alone.

A couple come over the hill and march past the tarn, stopping for the briefest moment to look at the view before traipsing on. I wonder how they can breeze past so much beauty.

I'm torn between the details and the scene. The craggy hills reflected below the reeds. The patterns of the mallard's feathers; ovals of dark brown, light tan, and dark brown again. The burnt orange of the thick grass at the edge of the water. The tiny yellow flowers in the marsh.

I take photo after photo, none of them doing the view any real justice. A male mallard appears from the reeds and leaves my side to swim away, leaving a perfect v behind him in the water. All I can hear are buzzing insects, the clicking of a dragonfly's wings, distant bird song and the gentle trickling of the tarn draining down the hillside.

On my steep descent I spot a fallen purple bell. A foxglove flower. I lift back the fronds of a fern and there it is; still in full flower in mid-September. The colour has drawn my attention to its presence, and as I continue further I realise that foxgloves colonise the bare areas in front of the bracken, their thick, fat leaves matt green with a whitish sheen. The brown, dry stems of the foxgloves that have already flowered stand as high as the ferns.

I sit on a bench that's too high and look over the hills. In a ravine, there's a tree so massive it spills out to the hillside. I look through my binoculars at the leaves: some type of maple, I think. When I can't feel my legs anymore because my feet can't touch the ground, I get up to leave and glance back at the bench. There's a small foxglove growing beneath it, still in flower.

When I get down to the river, I scramble over the rocks to find a smooth, flat one in the middle of the flow. I settle myself and put my feet into the water. It's cold and clear.

A bridge arches between the banks in front of me, broadleaf trees on one side and bracken bathed in golden evening light on the other.

The cold of the water makes me feel grounded, and I think about hydrology. Where has it come from, and where is it flowing? I search for it on Google Maps but it doesn't show a name. Is it nameless, or has Google put more effort into accurately adding Shell garages than adding the names of our rivers?

A year later I'll look at an OS map and know that the water is a confluence of Greenhead Gill, Grains Gill and Rowantree Gill.

I lift my feet from the water and place them flat against the sloping rock face. Water drips down from my toes to rejoin the flow. I feel the smooth, weathered rock on the soles of my feet and look at the moss growing in the rock's crevices. What forces brought this rock here, shaped it, smoothed it?

There are hills on all sides. All I can see is steep sided greenery and the water. All I can hear is the bubbling of the river and a deeper sound where it's rushing over a small waterfall behind me. I struggle to read, lifting my head every sentence to try and capture the moment, store it away for when I'm deep in suburbia and I need it.