Ruskin And The Water Babies

Quite the best descriptions of the scene below us are in Ruskin's Proserpina and in the Water Babies

. The latter is more familiar. Most of us remember the headlong flight of the poor little sweep. Tom, from the house in Vendale, his journey over the high fells, his coming to the top of a great cliff which he descended leaving a coal black smudge on the white rocks as he did so, a mark to be seen to this day . We came to valley level by a trod down the west side of the Cove, a zigzag progress through bushes and stunted trees, but Kings ley's description fitted it perfectly. He must have used this path many a time between Malham Tarn House, where he was a guest, and Malham village.

Three hundred feet of steep heather mixed up with loose brown grit stone as rough as a file . . . down three hundred feet of limestone terraces, one below the other, as straight as if a carpenter had ruled them with his ruler and then cut them out with his chisel. . . . All the details are true . . . the slopes in summer sprinkled with rockrose, saxifrage, thyme, basil, and sweet herbs, steps and ledges overgrown with grass and flowers and narrow clints full of ferns, and always the crystal clear stream threading the dale floor a deep, deep, green and rocky valley very narrow and filled with trees.

One early summer day we stood at the Cove foot, just where the water emerges from its ways of darkness (still something of a mystery to geologists who would dearly love to blast a wider entry and explore the subterranean passage beyond) and saw a scene which might well have come from the Water Babies. In the trembling sunlight were dozens of dragonflies glorying in their newly formed wings.

Long ago men folded their animals in the secret dale below the cove; the enclosure walls are still there, tumbled boulders, half grown over by grass. Our path, well trodden by the thousands who yearly come to gape at the wonder of the cliff, runs near the stream, near the merry cascades known as Pan Holes Falls. A pretty spot and quite unspoilt. I was surprised to read Dr. Whitaker's remarks about spoliation of one hundred and fifty years ago when, he wrote, it was polluted by one of those manufactories of which it would be trifling to complain as nuisances only in the eye of taste. A small cotton mill had been built here. Not a sign remains now, but I think the learned doctor's words are worth while rereading today.

There are streams sufficiently copious and valleys sufficiently deep which man can neither mend nor spoil. These might be abandoned to such deformed monsters without regret but who, that has either taste, or eyes, can endure them when combined with such scenery as the environs of Malham or the banks of Wharfe.' Who indeed?So we entered Malham, crossed the stream at Beck Hall and came into the little lane where the modern Youth Hostel (designed by John Dower in 1937 on behalf of the King George Jubilee Trust) fits in so well with the existing houses that even the fastidious Dr. Whitaker, could he return, would not complain. It is one of the most popular hostels in the country, and well deserves its popularity.

by: Adrian Vultur

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