Keswick
There often seems here in mid-winter to be a pause in time with a few clear days at Christmas followed by a descent into cold damp, and intensified darkness. This pause gives one time to notice small things near at hand and emphasises the differing ways of the rooks who live on St Herbert’s Island on Derwentwater and those in Castle Head wood. The lake rooks go off quietly and purposefully in the half-dark to forage on the high fields and are little seen until they come home to roost after sunset; the woodland ones are about all day going to and from the folds, and enjoying flight for its own sake at noon and in the early afternoon. Today they caught a stately buzzard in their noon-rout and wheeled up with it like black, noisy urchins – quite ignored – until they tired of the game.
Their liveliness is one of the few signs of the turning year but the year has turned and 1970 is European Conservation Year. There will be many useful and important events – but need it all be so solemn? Could the countryside not have its fun too? No one ever forgets water in the Lake District (how could they?) but it would be nice, even temporarily, to overlook reservoirs and barrages and remember, say, wells. There are wells all over Britain, and their legends, founded in cult and continued in Christianity, are as old as time. Well-wakings in Cumberland once had a picnic gaiety like the gathering at St Trinian’s when “Spanish juice” was added to the water, or another at Gosforth, in West Cumberland, when wine took the place of “Spanish.” The wakings died out a century ago because of “mischief,” and while I am not asking for “Spanish,” wine, or even mischief, a little gaiety would suit.
