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Article: THE LEGEND OF IRON JOSS
- Article from:
- The Independent (London, England)
- Article date:
- June 9, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 1996 The Independent - London. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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Wasdale has the hardest, most masculine profile of any valley
in the Lake District. At the head of it, a wet little hamlet with
an inn and a field for climbers' tents shivers beneath a horseshoe
of big, bare mountains, Yewbarrow, Kirk Fell, Great Gable, Lingmell
and Scafell Pike, the highest in England. ("Oh my God," gasped
Coleridge, the first recreational fell-walker, pausing here in the
summer of 1802, "what enormous mountains these are behind me!") Its
lake, Wast Water, though only four miles long, has the depth and
gloom of a Loch Ness. One bank of it is formed by the Screes, a
rampart of rock half a mile high, in which broad red streaks are
folded through the grey stone, the whole ...