Myths and legends of the Lake District: the prints and the stories behind them
Everybody comes back from the Lake District with a photo of a lake. Very nice. Very wet. But nobody comes back with a photo of the thing in the lake, do they?
Our Myths and Legends of the Lakes series is a small collection of four Lake District art prints devoted to the region's more questionable residents. Cryptids, ghosts, visitors from elsewhere, and one bird that really ought to know better. Each one is a giclée print, available in A5 and A4, and each one is based on stories that have been told around campfires and are as old as the hills.
The Bow-Ness Monster
England's largest natural lake has a monster, and the locals gave it possibly the best name in cryptozoology: Bownessie. Reports have been trickling out of Windermere since 2006, when a journalist described a creature with a line of humps moving fast across the water. Photographs followed. Kayakers had opinions. Scientists mostly suggested otters swimming in single file, which is either a reasonable explanation or exactly what they would say.
Our print gives Bownessie the dignity of a proper portrait, humps and all, out on the water where the ferry ought to be.
Skiddaw Sasquatch
The hairy hominid is one of the few pieces of folklore the entire planet seems to agree on. North America has Sasquatch, the Himalayas have the Yeti, Australia has the Yowie, Mongolia and the Caucasus have the Almas, and Sumatra has the Orang Pendek, which is short, ginger and reportedly rather shy.
Britain went with the woodwose, a wild man of the woods who turns up carved into church pews and painted onto coats of arms from the medieval period onward.
Which brings us to Skiddaw. The fell itself is bare, but its lower slopes are not: Dodd Wood, Thornthwaite and the great conifer plantations running toward Bassenthwaite are dense, dark and quiet, the sort of woodland where the light goes green and sound stops behaving properly. If something large and shaggy wanted to avoid people in England, it would struggle to find a better address. Ospreys managed to nest there for years before anyone noticed. Make of that what you will.
Langdale Invasion
In 1964 a Carlisle fireman named Jim Templeton photographed his daughter on Burgh Marsh and, when the film came back, found a figure in what appeared to be a white spacesuit standing behind her. Nobody has satisfactorily explained the Solway Firth Spaceman since.
There is also a more earthbound explanation on offer. Cumbria sits inside the RAF's low flying training system, and the Lakeland valleys are prime terrain for it. Typhoons, Hawks and visiting top-secret NATO aircraft thread through the fells at a few hundred feet. Some of this training happens after dark, down low, with navigation lights on. If you are standing in Great Langdale at dusk and something fast and lit shoots between the Pikes you could easily think it was a case for Mulder and Scully.
Aira Force Dodo
Aira Force is already haunted. The legend goes that a sleepwalking Lady Emma fell to her death at the falls, watched by her returning knight Sir Eglamore, who then carved out a cell beside the water and stayed there.
Our print offers something more cheerful. A dodo, extinct since roughly 1681, nesting happily on the cliffs below the falls near Ullswater. It is a nice thought. Somewhere out there, a bird got the memo late.
Four prints, four stories, and no proof whatsoever. Take your pick, or take all four for your gallery wall.