WILD BOAR FELL.
THERE is a lively tradition that the last wild boar in Westmoreland was killed on the great fell near Kirkby Stephen which still bears the name of the quarry there slain. The mountain—for its height of 2,300 ft., as well as the peak in which its eastern summit ends, entitles it to the name—is so wild and remote that it might well have been the last refuge of the boar. But there is no need to place this interpretation on the name. The killer of the boar was by general consent Sir Richard Musgrave, whose ancestral estates at Musgrave lay close by, and who died in 1462, and was buried in the Musgrave Chapel at Kirkby Stephen. When the chancel was rebuilt in 1847 two bodies, probably those of the knight and his lady, were found, wrapped in lead, under the tomb ; and beside them lay the tusk of a wild boar, thus giving strong evidence for the belief that it was this Sir Richard who killed a famous boar on or near the fell. It seems more probable that it was a boar of remarkable size or ferocity than that it was the last boar in that wild country, for they survived at Chartley, in Staffordshire, in the days of Elizabeth, and a boar is believed to have been killed by a man called Gilpin at Staveley, in Westmoreland, as late as the days of Charles IL But it must be remembered that Chartley, where the wild cattle survived, must have been more or less artificially pre- served; and the date of Gilpin's exploit is only conjecturaL
These Westmoreland fells, like the more northern part of the Great Divide up by Cross Fell, are not covered with the massed and continuous growth of heather which adorns the north-western moors of Lancashire. There, when you pass through the gate of the "intake," the last and highest enclosure below the summit, the transition from grass and bracken to heather, and nothing but heather, is one of Nature's quick-change scenes. The heather is one massed flower-bed as far as the eye can see, looking in August like damson-juice and cream. But on Wild Boar Fell and its mighty brethren of the Northern Pennines the steeper faces of the mountain are absolutely without heather or heath. The matted bonnets, a grass-like rash growing some eight inches high, with straggling seed-tops, covers all that is not clothed with the taller true rushes, or the two giant mosses which grow wherever there is a soak, a beck, or subterranean waters. For the whole fell is one gigantic reservoir of sponge and rock cisterns and conduits, the mosses forming the sponge, the stone caverns the cisterns, and the becks and burrowing streams the conduits to the lower dales, where the water goes rushing in cascades, cataracts, and chains of pools to make the rivers. For Wild Boar Fell and its gigantic brethren are the very heads and sources of rivers, summoning the clouds which catch upon their summits to deliver up the rain, and gathering ever from the swimming vapours that lightly wreathe their shoulders those unnoticed recruits which in the south fill the little dew-ponds of the downs, and in the Pennines must be for ever distilling their silent output into the surface waters which stud the fell in peat-hole, tarn, and beck. The Lune, the lire, the Swale, the Eden, and further south the Ribble, flow from this bold mass of primeval rocks. Parents of rivers, cloud-compelling, lifting their broad summits into an upper world unseen by man below, it is there that man and his works are part neither of the sounds nor of the sights of the high levels of the hills, except that on all sides, far below, creep silent little caterpillars of white steam, the express trains which are running up all the dales far far below to Scotland and the North, showing how great a system of valleys the heights divide. But it is to the fell itself, rather than to what is seen from it, that the mind inclines as the ascent is made. To the solitary pilgrim up its sides it becomes a living, or at least an individual, thing, something to be considered, to become acquainted with, and in a measure to struggle with. Like a treacherous pool in a river where the fisherman knows that instead of catching a salmon he may lose his life, the great hill has alike its charm and its menace. Alone on the fell, the climber scans its face, and marks the precipice and the march of the mists, and the line along which, if the plague of darkness falls, he may secure his retreat from the forces which baffle and surround him, and where he knows that his voice would never be heard by man, and none could tell him the path ; for there is none to show but the tracks of the mountain sheep. If the summit remains clear and sharp, he rises quickly into a new world, where the stones and water are the only things common to that he has left, and even these stones and water assume strange and primitive forms,—the stones projecting like the bones of the bill, or sometimes, as below the "neb" of the fell, in broad corrugated flats, ground down by ice so as to look like mammoths' teeth, while the waters burrow subterraneonsly, and fall down funnels gurgling from drains that empty black fiat pools like those which stud the moss-hags of the Lapland moors. The course of one of these bur- rowing streams will be his staircase and highway, for by it ran the sheep-tracks where the clever and bright-eyed fell sheep step daintily browsing, and wind upwards to summits where they stand, motionless figurettes, like ibexes, against the western sky. A few fell ponies, always mother and foal together, crop the rushy grass, the tamest of all half-wild animals in England, for the foals will come up to be handled.
But in the autumn the tendency of life, whether of plants or animals, to simplify itself on these remote fells is asserted with striking force. The rushes, the mosses, and on the tops the heather, show but few birds,—a little piping mountain lark, carrion crows or ravens, snipe, grouse, and a few starlings, with the peregrine falcon as general policeman to the bird-life of the fell. The curlews have gone to the coast, the peewits are floating in great shimmering flocks far below in the vale meadows, and only the true mountain birds really keep their home there. The partridges,nowbere common inthese corniess valleys, sometimes visit the high fells. A covey rose, screaming loudly, at a height of 1,800 ft. But at the time of the writer's visit, until the summit was nearly reached not even a grouse appeared. The first grouse seen brings a thousand memories back. There is no other bird so entirely associated with the high uncultivated, really wild lands of the island as this, the only survivor of the old Arctic fauna of Britain, except the mountain hare. The distant " becking " of the moor- fowl, like a series of coughs from a discontented congregation, is first heard as they spy a stranger in their land. Then looking upwards we saw on the very summit of the scar a bird, it might have been a raven at least, stand at attention, and then casting itself into the air, sail away down wind over the abyss as if it were a cormorant or a falcon. It was an old black sentinel cock grouse, the finest game bird in this or any other land. Once over the summit and on the great sloping back of the fell, the grouse rose right and left, skimming away, and one pack, surprised on almost the summit of the fell, and anxious to get back to the heather which covers this more genial western slope, came straight overhead at a great height, like a flock of gigantic starlings, and swept away to the peat and heather below. Swift though they are, a peregrine had killed a bird that morning, and left enough feathers to fill a hat where he had plucked it on the heather.
There is another robber on the fells, the mountain fox. He does not appear to be very numerous as a class, for the exploits of individual foxes and their strongholds are spoken of as excitedly as when a Norwegian mentions the rare depredations of a bear. For what the sheep is to the uplands that the white grass-feeding goose is to the green vales below: goose- g is a semi-pastoral industry, and when the goslings are feathered they are taken high up the hillsides by their free and independent parents, who roam about much as if they were
wild grey-lag geese breeding on the distant highland hills. It is a fact that the grouse line and the goose line are almost conterminous when the former come down on to the " bennets " and low ground to feed, for the shed feathers of both may be found together. Upon these peaceful and respected geese there descended lately a fell fox, not from their own hills, but from Ravenatonedale or some distant crags. He was far too cunning to kill and eat the goose he captured on the spot, but swinging him over his shoulder,—
"He on his beck toward the wood him beer," without arousing any of the hue and cry which led to the rescue of Chanticleer. It was not until the greater part of a flock of these fell geese had disappeared that in the course of market conversation it was remarked that goose feathers in plenty lay about the crags in the next dale some five miles off. Like the ancient robbers of the Border, the Ravenstone- dale fox had gone over the hills to raid foreign territory.
Previous page
