Brief ghosts

Thanks to a gift from a friend, I recently became the proud owner of Tony Walker's spooky volume 'The Ghostly Guide to the Lake District', published back in 1999. As well as being a tireless listener (some of the stories related in the book were 'hours old', he claims, at the time of writing) Walker is highly attuned to the connection between landscape and legend; an idea that formed the starting point for 'A Pint for the Ghost' - Derbyshire and Sheffield ghost stories are very much a product of the industries that once thrived there. In the introduction to the Ghostly Guide, Tony sums it up neatly when he says:

'To our ancestors, the world was mysterious and haunted by spirits of all sorts. On a bright day in a city centre, that might be hard to believe, but when you hear the wind in the trees on a dark night, or see the moonlight on a frozen lake, the Otherworld is much closer."

Ghosts are a symbol of the unseen and therefore unknown - those things that could be explained rationally, but invite a compelling alternative story. To me, ghostly tales compliment our understanding of the world in the same way that poetry coexists alongside science - offering a parallel narrative, relying on intuition rather than seeking to offer absolute truth.

Nonetheless, 'The Ghostly Guide to the Lake District' is a very grounded book which acts as a useful guide to the local area too, encouraging the reader to tour around lesser known spots on the periphery of the lakes. It offers a comprehensive catalogue of legends and popular stories which takes in the whole region. Flicking immediately to the section marked 'Ambleside', I was disappointed to see that Grasmere has one of the most anti-climactic ghost stories you could imagine, reduced to a few terse sentences:

"Grasmere is a pretty and much visited village which has a ghost story from one of the local pubs. Gerald Findler records this from the middle 1960s. He says that some locals were in a pub in the village talking about ghosts. A stranger joined in the conversation. The locals said 'We've been talking about ghosts, but we don't believe in them.' At which point the stranger vanished."

Of course, I immediately threw my book aside and started to wonder which local pub this fleeting exchange might have taken place in... It seems like an appropriate excuse to investigate all the bars in the vicinity, and I've already embarked upon this labour of love, visiting Tweedies at the weekend with Andrew and Chris to sample the Grasmere Guzzler beer festival. A good time was had by all (we think) and Friday's beer didn't stop us completing the beautiful 11 mile Fairfield Horseshoe on Saturday.

We started at Rydal Hall and walked the reverse of the route suggested by Wainwright, who waxes lyrical about the beauty of the round, having a sly dig at fell runners along the way: "Fellrunners will complete the whole round in less than two hours without seeing anything other than the track before them. I admire those who can perform such feats. I envy their fitness but not their achievements; racers and record breakers seem to me to be out of place on the high fells. Mountains are there to be enjoyed, and enjoyed leisurely." That's told us runner types, then. The image at the top of this post, taken half way through the route, is a kind of ghost in itself: the pictured scene never actually happened - Andrew took photos of me and Chris separately and this image is a composite. Mind-bending stuff...

We were lucky with the weather on Saturday and enjoyed unusually clear visibility. I've not experienced that too often in the hills since July! Returning to 'The Ghostly Guide...', Tony Walker manages a stirling defence of the Lake District's miserable climate, observing tactfully "parts of the County do indeed see a little rain. There are also blankets of fog that shroud the moors, blizzards that block mountain roads and sea mists which hang over the coastal marshes. For spotting ghosts, this kind of climate is a distinct advantage." I repeated that to myself last night as I huddled at an Ambleside bus shelter in the driving rain, wondering if the whole street was going to float away in the deluge.