Thirlmere

This was Countess Ossalinsky's summerhouse above her home, Armboth Hall which was lost during the flooding of the valley to make way for the reservoir that now supplies Manchester with water. Many years ago I was involved in work cleaning out the nearby pond (I was so badly midge bitten the only bit of clear skin was under my watch strap!) and various other conservation jobs nearby. 

G and I used to walk the dogs around here all the time and he managed to terrorise me with tales of the black dog of Thirlmere. It is a place of enormous grandeur, peace and a lot of magic.

After talking to the chap who was making a temporary repair of the next door's holiday cottage fence that had fallen across my garden in last week's high winds I decided, like last weekend, to I head back to see what I felt about a zip wire straddling the lake from Swirls to Fisher Crag just by this spot pictured here. It seems even worse (if that is possible) approaching from this angle with Helvellyn as the backdrop. Curiously the Utilities have put a simultaneous planning application in for an improvement of the infrastructure to enable timber extraction. I smell more rat than dog. And I still feel my blood boiling that any of this got sold off in the first place. When I worked here we used ancient tracks which were lost in time but which are now lost under graded and gravelled roads for heavy vehicles.

I arrived at the hut at the same time as a young couple who were planning to bravely (it'll be cold tonight) spend the night up there. We talked about how the quality of this spot will be lost if the plans go ahead. I wished them a magical, and warm, night and set off down to the lake - extra (feeling very old ... again). As I headed down, I couldn't stop crying. The feeling of the threat of loss was huge and I realise that that is inevitable for me but I know that my place here is as completely woven into this landscape as Countess Ossalinsky's, even if in utterly different ways. I suspect she wouldn't have been so keen on the 'rash assault' of the zip wire either. Needless to say she wasn't chuffed about the reservoir.

The trouble with these applications, and much of what I have read so far, is that it becomes a game of tennis with claim and counter-claim. Yes, this is a very man-made environment and the valley was changed beyond recognition when it was flooded to make the reservoir. And yet, and yet, the irony is, that this has in another way created a rather unique slightly frozen in time quality to this area where there is an incredible quality to the peace that can be found here. It made me think about how very biased we have become to the 'rational' in so many aspects of our lives and how an emotional argument is very often regarded as a weak one but as my friend and retired blipper, craggyt said, it wouldn't feel right to put a juke box in a church - there's no clear rational reason why not but it wouldn't feel right.

My feeling is that this will completely ruin the unique quality of this area and I find it hard to believe that someone could even think of doing so but realise that such a person will not have an emotional connection to the place.