The Corpse Road

If a plan works once it'll likely work twice...so after taxi duty me and pooch headed off to another favouritest place, Haweswater.
I'm not hugely a fan of either crowds or being told what to do, so I parked in a little spot and decided to ignore the sign telling me the path along the old corpse road was closed, we weren't wandering far, and I could see where I wanted to go, so off we set.
We wandered down the steep path to the reservoir's shore. Like most reservoirs it (a) gets very deep, very fast, and (b) you shouldn't really let your dog go in. Pooch just dipped a toe. As an ex-mancunian I felt it was allowed.
We paused a while by the little bridge in the extra. After yesterday's moan about litter in the landscape I felt I couldn't really use my penknife to remove some branches and improve the view, but I thought it a lovely shot anyway and worth recording.
The corpse roads (there are many) are a fascinating part of rural social, political and superstitious history. Up until 1736 in the case of Mardale's corpse road it was used to transport the bodies of the dead to the nearest consecrated ground for burial, in this case St Michael's church at Shap. Seven miles away. Now this might seem odd, arduous and inconvenient, why not consecrate the ground at the chapel in Mardale? Well by not doing so, the Mother Church (amongst many meanings of the phrase it also means religious centre of a district) kept control of the populace and, more importantly, the revenue from burying the dead.
Most corpse roads are remarkably straight (it's not easy carrying a coffin 7 miles...), but they'll often detour to cross water - be it streams such as Rowantreethwaite Beck in extras, or bogs and marshes - superstition held that the spirits of the dead can't cross water - so by taking the body across it was consigned to stay at the consecrated ground and unable to return whence it came and go a haunting. Bridges were said to plague the spirits, stepping stones to confuse and ford's to wash them away. This corpse road has all those and more. To walk it's full length is a fabulous walk, though harder than its length would suggest.

Pushka and I of course saw nothing but wonderful views, and I'm sure that distant cry was just the call of birds carried by the wind...