Gents Mag 1900 part 1 p.439
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Gentleman's Magazine 1900 part 1 p.439
of scree slope into it, with here and there a tongue-like benk of tawny grass. The little stream purls and rattles by your side as you force your way over the yielding debris, promising a rocky and picturesque source. Higher and higher you struggle, and the water correspondingly shrinks in volume. The fanlike streams of shale and dust have here invaded the narrow dell, and you may hear the beck grumbling and spouting beneath the feet. Further up the ground seems to rise more abruptly, and your hopes rise, to be quickly dashed, for the stream is now too weak to burrow a course for itself. The moisture from a wide grassy basin percolates through the dank green moss, trickles in thin lines down the inequalities, or in wide glassy sheets slides - it cannt be said to flow - among the steeper rock faces, accommodating itself to all angles without a sound or a splash. And this is the source of the stream you have so laboriously traced. Another fine gully is entered from an old quarry. After carefully negotiating a succession of dripping slabs, on hands and knees, you reach the darkened bed of a chasm. On the right the light is excluded by perpendicular rocks crowned with a plantation of dark firs, on the left a less abrupt slope, covered with dainty oak-fern and evil-smelling "ramps," rises to a thicket of hazel, overtopped by ash sapplings. A couple of these have fallen and form a living bridge high above the stream. Climb carefull here and shun the ferny slope, for the thin bed of leaf mould slides down with the slightest pressure. A misty gleam in front shows that the chasm widens, the noise of falling water proclaims a cataract, and soon its trough is reached. The tiny stream is descending in a succession of mossy steps, now close to one bank, now to the other, wandering as it wills over the wide face of rock. In winter, when the spongy fell is thoroughly saturated, a huge volume crashes through this defile. Then the gorge is impossible to scale, the trough is a churn of angry yellow-brown waters, and the tiny tinkle deepens to a majestic roar. Above the fall the water still descends in picturesque cascades, at one moment rushing pell-mell down a tiny crevice between smooth black rocks, playfully diving into a deep black dub at another. In one corner it divides round a green boulder on which a few whisps of grass and a foxglove find sustenance; further up it passes an abrupt ledge in a pretty spout. The merriment of the brook seems to infect you, and you feel that you have lost a companion when you reach its source in the "Mere of the moorland Boulder-environed." |
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