button to main menu  Old Cumbria Gazetteer
Scalehow Force, Martindale
Scalehow Force
site name:-   Scalehow Beck
civil parish:-   Martindale (formerly Westmorland)
county:-   Cumbria
locality type:-   waterfall
coordinates:-   NY41431902
1Km square:-   NY4119
10Km square:-   NY41


photograph
BZZ15.jpg (taken 27.2.2014)  
photograph
BZZ16.jpg (taken 27.2.2014)  

evidence:-   probably old text:- Clarke 1787
placename:-  Sandwich Force
source data:-   Guide book, A Survey of the Lakes of Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire, written and published by James Clarke, Penrith, Cumberland, and in London etc, 1787; published 1787-93.
image CL13P034, button  goto source
Page 34:-  "... At the end of Birk-Fell is Sandwich Force, the Niagara of our northern brooks. The fall is higher than that at Airey, but wants that obscure gloom which renders the other awfully grand. Here the fall is visible at a distance, and reflects a light too strong for the eyes easily to bear: why it should dazzle the eyes more at the distance of three or four miles than at the distance of as many hundred yards, is a problem not unworthy the contemplation of philosophers; I shall only say that this is literally the case. Its chief beauty is during either a flood or a frost. During a flood its beauties as a cascade are much lightened; but during a frost, the rocks are all encrusted with a sheet of ice pellucid as chrystal; the reflection of the suns rays, from which is a truly brilliant object, and must give us the liveliest ideas of those almost magical beauties related to the glaciers in Switzerland."

evidence:-   possibly old text:- Green 1810
placename:-  Birk Fell Force
source data:-   Set of prints, soft ground etchings, Sixty Studies from Nature, by William Green, Ambleside, Westmorland, drawn 1808-10, published 1810.
image GN14p112, button  goto source
page 112:-  "... Place Fell descends shivering into the lake almost perpendicularly from a vast height; it skirts the lake from Birk Fell Force higher than its head. ..."


photograph
BMY24.jpg (taken 2.11.2006)  

button to lakes menu  Lakes Guides menu.