posted by Charles H. Russo on Feb 17
A glorious day for walking. Clear sky, cool and sunny. We decided to do Great Gable, not from Wasdale as illustrated above, but from the Slate Mine on Honister Pass. Sadly, eventhough visibility was excellent, with the sun came haze and so it was not the greatest day for photographs.
The path up from the slate mine
The purist will say tackling the Gables from this starting point is cheating, as you have won a thousand feet before you get out of the car. But we have been up Gable a fair few times, and this was an ideal day for a family walk across from the Slate Factory, looking down on Haystacks and Innominate Tarn, around which Wainwright’s ashes are scattered:
“All I ask for, at the end, is a last long resting place by the side of Innominate Tarn on Haystacks, where the water gently laps the gravely shore and the heath blooms and Pillar and Gable keep unfailing watch. A quiet place, a lonely place, I shall go to it, for the last time and be carried: someone who knew me in life will take me and empty me out of a little box and leave me there alone.
And if you dear reader, should get a bit of grit in your boot as you are crossing Haystacks in the years to come, please treat it with respect. It might be me.”
(Wainwright)
Open cut mining on the slopes opposite
This walk provides spectacular views over Buttermere, Ennerdale and Wasdale.
Looking down over Buttermere and Crummock
The Gables come into view
We followed Moses Trod and then, after a quick glance down at Wasdale, up Great Gable. On the summit there is the famous Great War Memorial Tablet, now nearly sixty three years old.
UNVEILING THE WAR MEMORIAL TABLET
Great Gable, June 8th, 1924
W. T. PALMER
On Whit Sunday the Club completed its task of a permanent and magnificent memorial to members who fell in the Great War. In October, 1923, the title-deeds of 3,000 acres of high mountain had been handed over to the National Trust. The rocks, buttresses, and recesses of Lingmell, Great End, Allan Crags, Green Gable, Great Gable, Kirkfell and other peaks east and west of Sty Head Pass had been secured, as Dr. Wakefield (the new President) declared, to us and our children for ever.
Geoffrey Winthrop Young, a veteran of the Piave front,pronounced the following eloquent tribute to the fallen:
Upon this mountain summit we are met to-day to dedicate this space of hills to freedom.
Upon this rock are set the names of men-our brothers, and our comrades upon these cliffs-who held, with us, that there is no freedom ot the soil where the spirit of man is in bondage; and who surrendered their part in the fellowship of hill and wind, and sunshine,that the freedom of this land, the freedom of our spirit, should endure.
This bronze stands, high upon the crowning glory of our free land, as a sign between us and them; our covenant that those to whom in the time to come we, too, shall be but as these names,or as less than these names, still hold their freedom of this splendour of height, still breathe its fearless health, the inspiration of its faultless pleasure free still, amid these untrammelled forces, to perfect their own vision of what is beautiful, interpret for themselves their own discovery of what seems true.
By this ceremony we consecrate a twofold remembrance; in token that these men gave their mortality of manhood for a redemption of earthly freedom, this rock stands, a witness, perishable also in the onset of time, that this realm of mountain earth is, in their honour, free. In token that their sacrifice bears witness still, beyond death, to the imperishable ideal of spiritual liberty, we commit to-day, not in bronze, but in unalterable faith, our thought of their triumph in the spirit to these spaces of power and light.
By this symbol we affirm a twofold trust: that which hills only can give their children,the disciplining of strength in freedom, the freeing of the spirit through generous service, these free hills shall give again, and for all time.
The memory of all that these children ot the hills have given-service, and inspiration, fulfilled, and perpetual-this free heart of our hills shall guard.
The Great War Memorial Tablet in 1924
The Great War Memorial Tablet 12th April, 2007
However a number of times I see this Tablet, I never fail to be moved by it.
And then it was the scramble down to Windy Gap, harder on the knees than the ascent, up to Green Gable and then a gradual walk back to the mine, taking in Brandreth and Grey Knotts on the way.
A great day out.Labels: Gable, Lake District, Slate Mine, Wainwright.
Posted by: Dr John Crippen
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