Vistas from Scout Scar

Looking north from St John's Church, Helsington

For a panorama of winter fells  Scout Scar is a good place.  We set out from St John's Church, Helsington, toward a snowscape of  fells gleaming on the horizon and  headed north, along Scout Scar escarpment. 
Bel was returned from a mountain leadership course and our thoughts were on reading landscape and  weather.  From a blue sky, clouds began to form over the fells, until the sea over Morecambe Bay gleamed and dark cloud loured and unleashed hail.

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The fells looked magical: substantial and ethereal all at once. Cloud hugged the snow and shadows suggested mirage-fells that dissolved as we gazed at  them.  Snow settled in gullies highlighted the course of becks.  A few days ago I spent a morning focusing on the Langdales and The Band that descends from Bowfell.  Pike of Stickle and Harrison Stickle were dark, almost free of snow.  Rossett Gill, filled with snow, was unmistakeable. Sunlight gleamed off The Band, defining the ridge.   Nostalgia took hold and I rehearsed every walk I've ever done up there.

Sunday 4 February was chilly, bright and clear.  We lingered over the anthills of Helsington Barrows. I'm amused by the pattern they make against the backdrop of the distant fells: mounds with a mountain backdrop.  I thought upon yellow meadow ants in  wedding flight on a summer's morning-  an ephemeral  cloud of winged insects.

The snow-clad fells have their own micro-climate.   Ethereal and  flowing, a roiling mass of cloud upon cloud, white on white.   All is cloud. The Anglo-Saxons caught this mountain magic in a single word: cloud is fell and the vapour that drifts over the face of the fell.  Cloud for crag or hill is a lost word, almost lost. But it captures this roiling mass of hill and vapour perfectly.  And roiling is almost lost, but how better to express the flow of cloud over snow.