The Road to Little Dribbling (44 page)

In June 2014, the UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, an ominous-sounding body if ever there was one, announced that the cost of cleaning up the nuclear waste at Sellafield would be £79.1 billion. John Clarke, the group’s chief executive, told the
Financial Times,
“Now we have to figure out what’s in these facilities and how to get it out.”

I think I can help you there, Mr. Clarke. It’s half a century’s worth of lethal, irradiated gunk that should, at the very least, have been recorded as it was being deposited. Clarke described the process facing him as “a journey of discovery,” which is not exactly what you want to hear with a nuclear cleanup operation.

The upshot is that whatever benefits Sellafield gave the nation during its relatively short working life, the economic costs have been vastly greater, with the additional consideration that we now have heaps of lethally polluted materials that will remain dangerous for, oh, millions of years. I am no expert, but it does seem on the face of it that human beings are not quite grown up enough yet to be entrusted with nuclear fuels.

When I filmed the
Notes from a Small Island
television series in the late 1990s, we went to the Sellafield visitor center. It was a smart, high-tech museum confidently extolling the safety, reliability, and excitement of atomic energy. I remember it as being a fun place, if a little heavy on the propaganda. It was perhaps the only place in the world where plutonium was portrayed as lovable. At the time of my visit, Sellafield received two hundred thousand visitors a year, but those numbers evidently dwindled away in the following years. When I drove up to Sellafield’s main gate now, hoping to refresh myself on the wonders of atomic energy, the man in the booth told me that the visitor center closed in 2012.

Nonplussed, I drove on to St. Bees.

—

St. Bees is the name of both a village and a private school occupying handsome buildings on spacious grounds in the village. I had always envisioned St. Bees himself as a kindly soul in a beekeeper’s veil—adored by his insects, the patron saint of honey—but in fact St. Bees was a woman, an Irish princess, who fled to this corner of Cumbria to escape an enforced marriage with a Viking. She had nothing to do with bees. Her name was really Bega, and it just became corrupted over time. Some authorities believe she didn’t actually exist.

The village of St. Bees is the western end of the famous Coast-to-Coast Walk across the width of northern Britain from the Irish Sea in the west to the North Sea in the east, and so tends always to have at least a few hikers about, looking either fresh and keen or slightly shell-shocked, depending on whether they are beginning or ending their trek. The only other time I have been in St. Bees was in 2010 when I went on a charity hike across the Lake District organized by my friend Jon Davidson. Jon is a professor of geology at Durham University, but not at all boring about it. (Well, actually sometimes he is a little boring about it, when he spies a novel schist or something.) In 2006, Jon’s son Max, who is my greatest hero on earth, got leukemia at the age of four. Not long afterward, Jon got leukemia, too. Jon didn’t contract his leukemia from Max or anything like that—it was a different strain altogether—so it was just a magnificently unfortunate coincidence. How unlucky is that? Happily, and wonderfully, both have recovered and in 2010 Jon set up something called the Max Walk to raise funds for leukemia and lymphoma research. The idea was for Jon and his old friend Craig Wilson to do the 190 miles of the Coast-to-Coast Walk from west to east, and for other of their friends to join in for all or part of it. I could only fit in the first three days, but that took us right across the Lake District from St. Bees to Patterdale—42.4 miles. It was a murderous slog over craggy hills, but the weather was glorious and I don’t think I have ever encountered so much continuous beauty while clutching my heart and begging for mercy.

I went to the sea now to revisit the setting-off point, and walked a way along the breezy headland toward an old lighthouse, but it was getting late and I was hungry, so I returned to my guesthouse and had a shower, then repaired to the Queens public house in search of refreshment. The Queens was agreeably quiet as it was a weeknight. A couple sat at a table with silverware, obviously waiting for food to come, and two men were perched at the bar, but that was about it. I ordered a beer and then asked if I could order food, too. The man behind the bar made a grave face. “It’s going to be at least an hour. We’re a bit stretched tonight.”

“But there’s nobody here,” I said with a hint of sputter.

The man nodded grimly toward the kitchen. “Chef’s on his own out there,” he said as if he were crawling on his belly through enemy fire. Some other people came in and inquired about food but were sent away. What is it with pubs and food these days? I drank my beer, then went across the road to the Manor House Hotel, which was really a pub, but it was very busy and there didn’t seem to be anywhere to sit. So I walked into the village where there was one other option, a bistro called Lulu’s, and I dined there. I don’t know quite what to say other than that the food was beautifully described on the menu and filled me up.

Afterward, reluctant to turn in, I went for another stroll and liked St. Bees no less by night than by day. Every little cottage emitted a cozy glow of light through drawn curtains. The one discordant note was that the village shop had heavy security shutters over the door and windows, as if they felt they might need to repel a raid by Rommel’s tank corps. I gather shops are given a better insurance rate if they install shutters, whether they are really called for or not. It is a great shame because nothing gives a more crushing air of distrust and decline—of a place gone to the dogs—than a shop battened down under metal. It is bad enough seeing it on the streets of inner London or Liverpool, but it really shouldn’t be allowed in a country village. It just shouldn’t.

—

In the morning, I returned to the coast road, high above the Irish Sea. Few visitors to the Lake District bother to go to the coast, but it is an interesting experience. On one side, you have long views down to the sea; on the other, steep lakeland fells (as northern hills are known; it’s an old Viking word) of immense and daunting beauty; and in between you have some of the most straggly and depressed-looking villages you have ever seen—like little fragments of Barrow-in-Furness that have somehow drifted off and washed ashore here. The problem is isolation. Apart from Sellafield, which is being wound down, work in the area is scarce. But on the plus side, if you are going to live a life of bleak prospects, you do at least get some stunning views.

I was bound for Keswick by way of Cockermouth when I came to a sign pointing down a side road to Loweswater. I thought I knew the Lake District pretty well, but here was a lake that I had never heard of, as far as I could recall, so I made a sharp turn and went to investigate. The road was cramped and slow but breathtakingly gorgeous. The Lake District, when it is fine, and it usually is at least that, is about as beautiful as Earth can get, and this was as sumptuous a corner as I had ever come across. I had it to myself. Apart from a couple of farmhouses it felt as if no one had been here for years. The road was so narrow that I needed constant vigilance to avoid scraping the stone walls on either side. Eventually I abandoned the car altogether in a lay-by and walked about half a mile between the bottom of Loweswater and Crummock Water, a neighboring lake, through the most sumptuous valley, beneath towering hills, all bathed in sunshine. I never saw another soul. I could have left the car in the middle of the road.

I was now in the heart of the Lake District National Park. From an American perspective, a British national park is an oddity since it isn’t really a park at all, but just an area of land deemed special because it is lovely to behold and has exceptional amenity value for Britain’s three principal countryside activities: walking, cycling, and sitting in a parked car having a nap. Whereas American national parks are wilderness areas in which no one is allowed to live (apart from a few rangers), national parks in Britain are just normal chunks of countryside with farms and villages and market towns, but with the addition of large numbers of tourists—and in the case of the Lake District it is very large numbers.

In 1994, I did an article for
National Geographic
on the Lake District. Then, the Lake District received 12 million visitors a year. Now it is 16 million. Ambleside, one of the main towns, then received up to eleven thousand cars per day. Today the number can exceed nineteen thousand. All these people are packed into an area of exceedingly modest dimensions. The Lake District National Park is only thirty-nine miles long from top to bottom, and thirty-three miles across at its widest point. Put another way, the Lake District gets four times as many visitors as Yellowstone National Park in America in an area just a quarter the size. On the busiest days, a quarter of a million people pour in.

And yet it handles it remarkably well, on the whole. Most of the crowds go to just a few places—Ambleside, Grasmere, and Bowness primarily. If you walk just a couple of hundred yards up any path you can easily get a whole hillside to yourself. That’s what I did now. Just beyond Buttermere, I came to a roadside parking lot with only two cars in it (in one of which, honestly, a couple were having a nap) and decided to park and go for a little walk. The landscape looked oddly familiar, then I realized from my map that I was on the lower slopes of Haystacks, a hill I had walked over with Jon Davidson and his friends in 2010. It looked positively enormous from below. The hills of the Lake District are not terribly high—the very highest, Scafell Pike, only a mile or so from where I stood now, is just over thirty-two hundred feet—but they are muscular and steep. If you climb a Lake District hill, you know it.

An old riddle is how many lakes are there in the Lake District? The answer is one because only Bassenthwaite Lake has “lake” in the title. All the other bodies of water use the terms “mere” (as in Windermere and Buttermere), “water” (as in Crummock Water and Coniston Water), and “tarn” (as in you get the idea). There are hundreds and hundreds of tarns, some not much bigger than puddles. So the answer is that there are sixteen lakes and hundreds of what any sensible person would call ponds. It is impossible to say which is the loveliest, but I do vividly recall once looking down on Derwent Water from the side of a rugged eminence called Skiddaw, and thinking that heaven really must look like this. I had never been to the lake itself. I decided to correct that deficiency now.

Keswick is the main community on Derwent Water and I think is the most pleasant town in the Lakes. The main street had been pedestrianized since I was last there, and was much improved for it. I was pleased to see that Bryson’s Tea Room (est. 1947) is still going strong. I walked down to and then partway around the lake. It really is quite sensationally lovely, with clear, sparkling water spread beneath a backdrop of craggy mountains of stone and sheep-nibbled grass. A couple of hundred yards offshore is a wooded island, called Derwent Island, with a grand house on it. An information board from the National Trust informed me that an eccentric eighteenth-century owner named Joseph Pocklington held a regatta every year “where he challenged the people of Keswick to attack the island while he shot at them with his cannons.” They certainly know how to have a good time in the Lake District, it seems. I would love to have seen the island, even without cannon fire, but it is not generally open to the public, so I contented myself with an hour’s ramble at the lake’s edge, then went back to explore the town.

Part of the reason I like Keswick is that it is full of outdoor shops. This is a place for people who just can’t get enough Gore-Tex into their lives. I went into an emporium called George Fisher’s and was so enchanted with its range of packs and water bottles and rustly waterproofs that I felt moved to buy something. I picked up a smart metal clip that you could use to hold together two objects—a water bottle to a rucksack, say—and never mind that I didn’t have two objects to hold together. One day I may, and when that day comes I will be ready. The man at the till gave me a nod of respect, recognizing me as a member of the fraternity, albeit one from the more waddly end of the spectrum.

“Doing some walking?” he said.

“Headed for Cape Wrath,” I responded solemnly.

“Long way,” he said, impressed.

“Yes,” I agreed, still solemnly, hoping he would recognize me and that for the rest of the day he would be saying to people, “Bill Bryson was in today. He was stocking up for an expedition to Cape Wrath,” and that they would reply, “Goodness. He’s brave. I think I’ll go and buy some of his books.” But he didn’t recognize me, so that fantasy was stillborn. On display by the till was a book called
Peter Livesey: Stories of a Rock-Climbing Legend
. I knew Pete Livesey. He lived a mile or so from us in Malhamdale, in North Yorkshire, when we were there in the 1980s and ’90s. I knew that he was a dedicated rock climber, but I had no idea that he was a legend—but then he was an admirably modest fellow. I bought the book and took it with me upstairs to a small café at the back of the shop, where I sat with a sandwich and read, impressed with Livesey’s skill and courage. I hadn’t realized, but he died of pancreatic cancer the year after we left Malhamdale. He was just fifty-four, poor man.

The café had one other group of customers, a party of four made up of two couples of early retirement age who seemed to be on holiday together. They were well dressed. Their accents were southern and educated. They each had coffee and cake, so their bill must have come to something like £20. When I got up to pay, a woman from their group got to the cash register just ahead of me. She received her change and dropped a tip into a bowl by the till labeled “Tips.” The bowl was a little high for her to see into and I am guessing she assumed that it was full of coins already and that hers would disappear among many others, but when I stepped up I could see that the bowl had a solitary 10p coin in it.