• Alston
• Allonby And Aspatria
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• Appleby In Westmoreland
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• Barrow In Furness
• Bassenthwaite
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• Bowness On Windermere
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• Ravenglass And Eskdale
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• Spa Hotels In Windermere The Lake District
• Hotels With Hot Tubs In Windermere
• Hot Tub Hotels In Windermere And The Lake District
• Romantic Breaks In Windermere And The Lake District
• Themed Hotels In Windermere And The Lake District
• Weekend Breaks In Windermere
• Windermere Attractions And Boat Trips
• Boutique Hotels And Accommodation In Windermere And The Lake District
• Windermere In The Rain
• One Way Ticket To Windermere Por Favor
• Horse Riding In The Lake District
• Walks In The Lake District
• Windermere Boutique Hotel Bedrooms
• Holiday Accommodation Wanted In The Lake District

Lake District walks Scandale Tarn

One walk strenuous or reasonable depending on where you turn back is to Scandale Tarn via Sweden Bridge. From the Salutation go l00yds N up North Road for the Unicorn, a pleasant inn with many Lake District memorabilia. Fleur Adcock's poem 'In the Unicorn, Ambleside' (1983) celebrates colorful (and unreliable) Wordsworthian gossip here: 'He drank in every pub from here to Ullswater and had half the girls. We all know that ' Continue L up the precipitous Sweden Bridge Lane, then at fork go R (signed Ellerigg Road, Kirkstone); the road continues to the gate of Eller How. Anne Clough sister of the poet A H Clough, ran a girls' school here. Her pupils included Mary Arnold (later Mrs Humphry Ward) An account of the school is given in T C Down's 'Schooldays with Miss Clough' (Cornhill Magazine, 1920), a delightful essay which deserves to be better known, with its glimpses of Mary Arnold and a school friend down in the cellar counting the bottles of hated gooseberries 'to see how many more there were for us to eat', practicing the piano in a bitterly cold room by candlelight, and (Miss Clough mysteriously summoned to Florence, where her poet brother was dying) sleeping in her huge, curtained featherbed and having 'a high old time making Hest Bank Ambleside St John's in the Vale tents and playing Red Indians'. Anne Clough was a pioneer of women's education and later became first Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge.

Turn back to the junction and continue N up Sweden Bridge Lane, which soon becomes a stony bridle way running parallel with Scandale Beck. After roughly 1m it emerges from a small wood and reaches High Sweden Bridge, a picturesque packhorse bridge. Mrs Humphry Ward recalled how in childhood, as a boarder at Anne Clough's school, she had sometimes been rescued for an afternoon by her father, Thomas Arnold and his friend Arthur Clough. They would walk up the lane to the bridge, while she went 'wandering, and skipping, and dreaming by myself  every rock along the mountain lane, every boggy patch, every stretch of silken, flowers own grass, every bend of the wild stream were to me the never ending joys of a 'land of pure delight' It was a point of honor with me to get to Sweden Bridge before my companions; and I would sit dangling my feet over the unprotected edge of its grass grown arch queering it there on the weatherworn keystone of the bridge, dissolved in the mere physical joy of each contented sense.

At this point you can honorably turn back. Alternatively, continue N 2m to the top of Scandale Pass (stone wall with stile). Go L along wall after crossing stile; when wall is joined by iron fence posts, go due w a few yds for Scandale Tarn, a tiny funnel shaped pool (good picnic place). You may like to hunt for an inscription said to be carved on a boulder overhanging the water at the tarn's N side, reading 'Harry Boyle and Percy Laidlaw stocked this tarn with gudgeon fish on 5th July, 1878'. The inscription is under the overhang, so you have to lie on the rock and look over the edge to see it. I failed to find it, but Boyle's widow says in her life of Boyle (who lived at Eller How and became a prominent diplomat) that it was clearly visible in 1937.

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