The Story of Mountains

At the end of A Story of Mountains pt. I we left our protagonists in their prime. The mountain range called the Caledonides once stood as high as the Alps, perhaps as high as the Himalayas. Now all that remains are the comparatively smaller ranges of the Highlands, the Lakeland Fells and Snowdonia.

This part of the story is about the forces that reduced this range of mountains to a quarter of its former self and left us with today’s beautifully carved and coloured landscape. In essence it is about ice and what came after. For reasons that will be explained, this story revolves upon Scafell Pike and Wasdale.

Since the height of the Caledonides there were several ice ages and the final (ending roughly 10,000 years ago) left visible marks upon the landscape. As the earth was plunged into the depths of an endless winter the ice advanced from the poles. The earliest human inhabitants of the British Isles; hunter-foragers who had chased herds on the plain and fish upon the coastline were driven out and the ice descended.

I remember camping near Angle Tarn, maybe I was 7 or 8, my Grandpa spread out his hand and told me that all the valleys of the Western and Central Fells spread out from where the rain hammered on our tent. With the other hand he traced his outstretched fingers and thumb; Langdale eastwards, Borrowdale northwards, Buttermere to the north-west, Ennerdale westwards, Wasdale to the south-west. Spokes, he called them, and looking on a map you can see the wheel he described.

At the peak of the Ice Age a 700m-thick ice cap centred on what would become Lakeland’s and England’s highest point; Scafell Pike. From there huge rivers of ice called glaciers had flowed outwards in all directions creating the pattern described to me. Thousands of tonnes of ice pushing downwards bulldozed softer material before it and ground over harder areas of rock leaving them planed and exposed. Many of the valleys in Lakeland possess the characteristics of glacial erosion; steeper sides and a flat valley floor (known as a ‘u-shaped’ valley as opposed to the classic ‘v-shaped’ valley created by river erosion) and the valley over which Scafell Pike stands sentinel - Wasdale - is arguably the grandest of these wonderful exhibits.