Jumb Quarry beside the River Kent Thursday was relentless rain and darkness. This morning was a November blaze with strong light on bracken, sedge and rush. How simple and stylish the barn with its larchwood door and its gathered stone, with a backdrop of scree and wooded crags.
Geese were calling, flying high, glinting white, skeins strung out against the blue.
The sound of water was everywhere: becks in spate, tracks awash. Coming steeply off Yoke and the open fell, Skeel Gill and Bryant’s Gill coalesce in culverts beneath the gated road, down to the River Kent, its course outlined with alders. Bracken picks out mounds of glacial debris amongst the rushes of the flood plain. There is a rock-step in the river bed, a waterfall, and the river spreads wide about shoals of gravels, soft rippling silts. The stronger current blocked the weaker and turbulence whipped up a froth of bubbles, caught in a whirlpool, circling and dissolving over water glowing with reflections of the fell and shadowed with alder and Scots pine. The river channel narrows, swallowed up in banks of quarry spoil. The Steel Rigg spoil heaps surround Reservoir Cottages and a causeway of slate launches out toward the river to link up with Jumb Quarry on the eastern bank, but the crossing, like the quarry, fell into disuse over half a century ago and the causeway spills into the river which cuts a deeply eroded channel. And the site looked stunning in strong light and shadow: interlocking cones and plateaus of green slate softened as nature works on reclamation. The quarry is a Site of Special Scientific interest for its geology. Of the Borrowdale Volcanics Group and the Kentmere Pike Formation, quarrying had exposed bird’s-eye tuffs, lapilli, fragments of erupted lava. Water clattered down the spillways of Kentmere reservoir, cloud gathered and as I returned along the eastern bank of the river the moment of transcendence was gone and Jumb Quarry appeared gloomy and forbidding.
Accompanied by his two dogs, farmer Ivan Dickinson stopped his quad bike to chat. He had been checking that the Brockstones ‘ sheep haven’t shifted because of the rain: they’ll come down if it’s heavy.’ He had to move his male lambs from flooded pastures this week. Long Lane was a splash. Fieldfare erupted from a dark hawthorn and a mistle thrush defended his holly berries and warned them off. The light was gone long before mid-day so I was glad I had set out early.
Accompanied by his two dogs, farmer Ivan Dickinson stopped his quad bike to chat. He had been checking that the Brockstones ‘ sheep haven’t shifted because of the rain: they’ll come down if it’s heavy.’ He had to move his male lambs from flooded pastures this week. Long Lane was a splash. Fieldfare erupted from a dark hawthorn and a mistle thrush defended his holly berries and warned them off. The light was gone long before mid-day so I was glad I had set out early.
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