This feature originally appeared in The Sunday Times
Haweswater curls like a tapeworm beneath the bald, brown peaks of Westmorland. This is the most isolated tarn in the Lake District, edged by a blind road, a gloomy and incongruous art deco hotel and Arctic silence. Horses once carried the east Cumbrian dead along the pass of Corpse Road, which bends east to Shap, the nearest village. A dwindling number of people there still grunt the Penrithian dialect.
Winds have beaten the land to tough grass and dust. England’s last golden eagle, in stately middle age, slices through currents kicked up by the glacial mountains. Few tourists come here and few of those who do realise that Haweswater is bogus, a confection. They don’t see how implacably it captures the tussle between progress and continuity, the urban against the rural, industry versus nature. In 1919 parliament passed an act — sneakily avoiding the need for planning permission — to flood this valley, drowning the village of Mardale Green that had stood here for centuries, perhaps millennia.
One hundred miles away, bloated from the industrial revolution, Manchester needed a new reservoir. So the Dun Bull Inn, which hosted the hunt, the farmsteads, the 19th-century vicarage, the stone chapel, the tiny school where the spinster Miss Forster arrived in 1891 and taught for 41 years — all would be lost. In 1935, when the last person was gone, the army blew up most of Mardale Green. The waters swallowed what was left.
This has been the driest September for half a century. Haweswater has sunk almost to the lees and the skeleton of Mardale Green has risen to the surface. After a long train journey and a half-hour drive, I skitted down the fern-knotted fell to the reservoir’s edge.
A line of stones rears from the water like the grey scales of a sea monster. From the low bank, running down into the lake, are waist-high rows of heaped shale. They are all that is left of the dry-stone walls that marked the edge of the farms: unmistakeably manmade, but with a Palaeolithic primitiveness and distance. Blackened tree stumps splinter from the soupy mud. Two smooth, tall stones, drilled with holes, mark where a gate once swung; the pressure and decades have twisted one away from its neighbour.
This was always a remote community: local nobs, the Holmeses, hid here after a failed rebellion against King John in the 13th century and never left. Mardale’s farmers grew barley and oats, kept geese, drank beer, ate mutton, told old-wives’ tales, tilled, toiled and died. They were evicted without ceremony. Protesting that their families had lived here for generations, that history as well as land would be lost in the flood, they were largely ignored. More than 1,000 people attended the final service in Mardale’s chapel; the building had room for 70.
I cross the slippery, boot-snatching reservoir bed. It gurgles with methane. A spooky red film covers the topsoil: nails, door jambs, ranges and assorted iron Victoriana are settling on the reservoir bed and reaching for the northwest’s water supply.
On the western side are some smashed remnants: a farm, I think, called Flakehowe. Its walls mark the steep road where horses used to clatter into the valley. The outline of the rooms is as clear as the rainless sky. A bent metal pole, caked in rust, turns to powder when touched. Behind is an outdoor store for firewood. It is one of the saddest places I have ever been.
Picking through Flakehowe’s bones, I meet a Yorkshirewoman, holidaying nearby in Ullswater, who heard about the surfacing village on the radio. “I thought it was awful that the army blew it up,” she says.
“But it was different, coming here. You wouldn’t have wanted the people returning when the water dropped, would you, to see what they’d lost? It would be too much. Perhaps it was better just to bury those memories.”