The New Romantics

We woke early and gathered in the kitchen of Greta Hall in Keswick, where, between gulps of hot coffee, toast and fried eggs, we passed around a small volume of poems, searching for lines to express our nervous excitement about the swim ahead.

We don’t usually start swims like this. Most adventures start with a long drive through the dark or an uncomfortable scramble out of a tent. But Greta Hall is a beautiful, historic house, once a meeting place for some of Britain’s most celebrated poets – William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey – who, despite better instincts and subsequent regrets, helped turn the Lake District into a must-see destination for Victorian tourists.

These poets first became known as ‘the Lake Poets’ when a spiky review attacked their ‘whining and hypochondriacal’ tone, but whatever the original intention, this name still captures their intellectual and imaginative curiosity about the Lake District.

It was here, at Greta Hall, perhaps in the large, elegant drawing room upstairs, where Robert Southey wrote ‘The Cataract of Lodore’, a playful celebration of Lodore Falls, just a couple of miles from Keswick, which gathers speed and power from verse to verse, evoking the rush of water through the woods. In the same year (1820), Wordsworth republished his Guide to the Lakes with a new collection of sonnets which follow the River Duddon from its source at Three Shires Stone on Wrynose Pass to the Irish Sea.

How does the water
Come down at Lodore?
…
From its sources which well
In the tarn on the fell;
From its fountains
In the mountains,
Its rills and its gills;
Through moss and through brake,
It runs and it creeps
For a while, till it sleeps
In its own little lake.
…
Rising and leaping,
Sinking and creeping,
Swelling and sweeping,
…
Turning and twisting,
Around and around,
With endless rebound
…
A sight to delight in;
Confounding, astounding,
Dizzying and deafening the ear with its sound.
(Robert Southey, ‘The Cataract of Lodore‘)

After a rushed recital, we packed our kit into two cars and drove out of Keswick, past Derwentwater and Bassenthwaite, before turning off the main road and climbing up into the fells where the clouds began to darken overhead. I turned up the heating and shuffled some feel-good music, reluctant to dwell on Coleridge’s description of these mountains as ‘Monsters’ performing ‘deeds of darkness, weather plots and storm conspiracies’, when he made the same journey from Greta Hall to Wast Water in August 1802.

After an hour or so, we dropped down out of the clouds, towards Wast Water which Wordsworth described in his Guide to the Lakes as ‘a long, narrow, stern and desolate lake’, but as we unpacked the cars and took in the epic views of Great Gable, Scafell Pike and the Screes, we felt anything – everything – but desolate.

The surface of Wast Water was still, despite the clouds and strong chance of rain. In fact, this could have been the exact same view which Coleridge found on 4 August 1802 when he reached Wast Water and discovered the ‘glory of reflections’, ‘a whole new world of images’ reflected back at him.

We unpacked the cars and started to get changed, a chaotic process which involved squeezing cold feet through leg holes, zipping each other into wetsuits, packing tow floats and so on. After years of practice, you might think we’d be better at this, huddled in dryrobes with our clothes flung across the hillside, like a flock of colourful, eccentric sheep.

But amidst the talk of Terrapins vs. Silvertips and whether we should pack gels or Haribo for the swim, I realised no one seemed surprised to see us here. Over the years, we’ve all become used to bemused onlookers who point and ask, ‘You’re not going to swim, are you?’, but here, we were as much a part of this landscape as all the hikers, cyclists and the kayaker packing up his Defender who asked if we’d like a photo.

We scrambled down the hill and took our first steps into the lake. Wast Water is known as not only England’s deepest lake – 258 feet to be exact – but also one of the coldest. Despite being the middle of June, the temperature was still somewhere between 11 and 12 degrees. Those of us who could wore thermal wetsuits. The rest of us hoped for the best.

Kate and Kari went first. Simon and Lance were close behind. Meanwhile, Nathan and Amanda, our two fastest swimmers, had set off through the woods to look for another start point further down the lake. I waited for Cameron, who stopped to take photos of the red OSS swim caps amidst these epic scenes, but once the camera was back in his tow float, we stumbled out across the jagged rocks, took a deep breath and started to swim.

Water is where we go to challenge ourselves. For some, it’s the cold, perhaps the conditions, perhaps the distance, but for me, it’s the eerie sense of what’s down there, in the gloom.

Fear was an important part of the Romantic poets’ fascination with the natural world. During the late 18th and 19th Centuries, there were repeated attempts to distinguish between beauty and the ‘sublime’ – a popular but complex and changing concept which starts with an experience of awe or perhaps even terror in the natural world before sparking internal reflections on the power of imagination itself.

And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns
And the round ocean and the living air;
And the blue sky and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of thought,
And rolls through all things.
(William Wordsworth, ‘Tintern Abbey‘)

And when I gaze on thee
I see as in a trance sublime and strange
To muse on my own separate fantasy –
My own, my human mind, which passively
Now renders and receives fast influencings,
Holding and unremitting interchange
With the clear universe of things around.
(Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Mont Blanc‘)

As we swam further out, watching the rocks and weeds below fade to black, I asked myself if this mix of fear and exhilaration could be the same sensation Wordsworth and Shelley describe.

I swam for a while with my eyes closed, opening them with each breath to glance up at the indomitable, timeless Screes, but I soon remembered there is great comfort in swimming with friends – Cameron just behind me; Lance just ahead; Simon, Kate and Kari in the distance – and gave myself up to the experience.

I’m not sure how far we’d come when I felt a twinge of cramp in my foot. For a moment, I panicked, looking around for the others, but the conditions had become much worse so that all I could see were the mountains. I tried to reason with myself. It’s just cramp. It’ll soon pass. Kari and Simon won’t be far behind. If you just wait here … but I was worried about the cold and wanted to feel solid ground again, even if just for a moment.

I decided to swim back to shore, with a strange one-legged breaststroke, reluctant to let the cramp spread while still determined to move forwards. I struggled to make progress with this diminished stroke, but as I approached the shore, my eyes started to adjust, so that I could see cars, trees and hikers in bright-coloured anoraks.

I climbed out onto the rocks where I realised just how bad the conditions had become. The waves obscured any sign of the others and I began to feel anxious for the first time. We were together but we were also alone.

I clambered up onto a fallen tree and let my eyes adjust to these new proportions. There was still no sign of the end point, but there, what is that? A bright pop of red and the familiar swoop of arms. Kari and Simon. I glanced ahead. And there. Is that Kate in the distance?

I jumped down and stumbled back into the water where I began to swim a more aggressive stroke, hugging the shoreline this time in case the cramp returned.

How far is there left to go? One km? Two, at the most? I began counting to 100 strokes over and over again in my head to remind myself, yes, you are still moving forwards, but each time I reached 100, I paused and switched back to breaststroke, still determined to make the most of this experience.

There is a well-known moment in Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem, ‘The Prelude’, where he reflects on the power of memories:

There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence, depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse, our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.
(Wordsworth, ‘The Prelude’)

I wonder now if this swim, perhaps even this moment, will itself become a spot of time, cold and tired, the sun just starting to break through the clouds, while listening to Simon, somewhere behind me, whose voice echoed around the fells.

Who is that? Kate. I could see her standing on the shoreline. Is that the end? Yes. She waved. I got my head down and swam the last 100 metres. ‘I’m so glad to see you,’ she called out as I staggered and stumbled across the rocks.

I wanted to celebrate but we were in the wrong place, surrounded by thick brambles and a vertical slope back up towards the road. ‘Where’s the car?’ Kate asked. I pointed in the opposite direction. ‘Over there.’ I struggled to speak, I could see Kate trembling with cold, but we splashed back into the water and swam in short bursts of crawl towards a longer stretch of beach where a farm track led to the car park.

We clambered out all over again, but where was everyone else? I could hear Simon’s voice not long ago. Is this the end? Has something happened? I jumped a wire fence and climbed up onto a metal gate where suddenly I could see them – Kari, Simon, Lance, Cameron, Nathan, Amanda, – all lined up, like airplanes coming into land.

And so, from the sublime to the ridiculous, we limped and hobbled up the farm track, as though taking our first steps on dry land, past all the hikers who had just descended Scafell Pike, towards the car park, the comfort of our dryrobes, the promise of a pub lunch and, yes, the next adventure.

• For more adventures inspired by the Romantic spirit, Chasing The Sublime is a short film written by Kate Rew about why we put ourselves on the path of discomfort and risk.