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Laura Wilson Taylor nee Barker 1819-1905
Kirkstone Road Caudale Moor from above Stock Gill sun Jun 28 1875

inscribed and dated "Kirkstone Road Caudale Moor from above Stock Gill sun Jun 28 1875" and signed with initials "LWT"

pencil and watercolour
16 x 23 cm.
Provenance

Tom and Laura Taylor and thence by descent

Notes

Also known as Stony Cove Pike, Caudale Moor is little known by name but is a significant fell, with two north and two south ridges. It is joined by Threshthwaite Mouth to its neighbour, Thornthwaite Crag

Stony Cove Pike (alternatively known as Caudale Moor  is a fell in the Far Eastern part of the English Lake District. It stands on the other side of the Kirkstone Pass from Red Screes, and is on the end of a ridge coming down from High Street. It is separated from its neighbours by the deep col of Threshthwaite Mouth, so is a Marilyn (a hill with topographic prominence of at least 150m) – the sixteenth highest in the Lake District.

There is considerable variation over use of the alternative names for the fell. The Ordnance Survey maps name the main summit as 'Stony Cove Pike', the second top to the west as 'Caudale Moor' and 'John Bell's Banner' is reserved for the south west ridge descending to St Raven's Edge. Alfred Wainwright in his Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells uses Caudale Moor for the fell as a whole, John Bell's Banner as an alternative to this and Stony Cove Pike as a name for the (main) summit. Bill Birkett prefers the Ordnance Survey scheme, but with John Bell's Banner as a second name for the subsidiary top.

The fell is wide and sprawling, with six ridges leaving the summit area. The main summit sprouts four to the points of the compass. Eastward is the rocky descent to Threshwaite Mouth, followed by an equally steep climb to Thornthwaite Crag. Northward is the grassy ridge to Hartsop Dodd and westward the plateau narrows slightly toward the second top of Caudale Moor/ John Bell's Banner (2,477 feet; 755 m). To the south of the main top a short spur juts out into the head of the Trout Beck valley, before falling steeps over Doup Crag.

From the lower top the narrow descending ridge of Rough Edge drops north west toward Caudale Bridge. The extensive Caudale Quarry is hollowed out about halfway down the edge, reached by what was once believed to be the steepest working track in Lakeland. There is also evidence of deeper mining here.

A broad ridge also descends south from the Caudale Moor top. This passes over Pike How before dividing around the head of Woundale. The south western branch descends down St Raven's Edge to the Kirkstone Pass road at Woundale Raise, before climbing again to Wansfell. The south eastern spur is much shorter, dropping over Hart Crag and Great Knott into the Troutbeck valley.

The summit area is grassy, with a number of small tarns between the two tops. Walls follow the ridges to Hartsop Dodd, St Raven's Edge and Threshthwaite Mouth, making navigation of the complex ridge system easier. Both tops have cairns and there is a further cairn topped by a wooden cross to the south west of Caudale Moor. This is named Mark Atkinson's monument by Wainwright. Despite the somewhat dreary nature of the top, considerable areas of crag surround the plateau. Caudale Head between the northern ridges is one, and more crag lies north and south of Threshthwaite Mouth at the heads of Pasture and Trout Becks. The flatness of the top leads to a somewhat restricted view of the surrounding fells, although all of the major groups are in sight from the summit.

The most common way of ascent is to make a small circuit from the Patterdale valley, going up the steep north ridge to the top, then across Threshthwaite Mouth and up to Thornthwaite Crag. From there the circuit is completed via Thornthwaite Crag's north ridge, known as Gray Crag.

The southern ridge from Wansfell and Ambleside provides a longer alternative route of ascent. The quickest way up is from the top of Kirkstone Pass via St Raven's Edge: this route was described by Alfred Wainwright as the "dullest way up". .

Caudale Moor Slate Quarry was active from the mid 1700s to the 1930s. The slates were transported down the mountainside on sledges - a highly skilled and dangerous task. It is described in James Clarke's 'Survey of the Lakes', published in 1789: 'The slate is laid upon a barrow which is called a Trail Barrow.

 

Stock Ghyll, also known as Stock GillStock Gill Beck and Stock Beck, is a stream in South Lakeland, in the ceremonial county of Cumbria and the historic county of Westmorland. It flows about four miles from Red Screes through the town of Ambleside to the River Rothay. Its course includes two long-popular tourist attractions, Stockghyll Force and Bridge House. Stock Ghyll has been painted by J. M. W. TurnerJohn RuskinKurt Schwitters, and many others. Its name derives from Old English stocc, 'tree-trunk', and Old Norse gil, 'a deep glen'.

Bridge House

Stock Ghyll rises on the southern slopes of Red Screes, near Kirkstone Pass, and then runs in a generally southern direction, subsuming Snow Cove Gill and Grove Gill. Its course turns first south-westerly then westerly, at which point it enters woodland and descends 70 feet in a waterfall called Stockghyll Force. Up to this point the ghyll runs roughly in parallel with Kirkstone Road. It then flows canalized through the town of Ambleside in a series of low waterfalls falls and rapids, and passes under several bridges, notably that carrying Bridge House, a tiny 17th- or 18th-century house, said to be the most photographed building in the Lake District, now used as an information centre by the National Trust. A final canalized stretch takes it through Rothay Park, at the end of which it empties into the River Rothay.

Stock Ghyll reacts quickly to heavy rain events because so much of its catchment comes from steeply-sloping fellsides. In December 2015 heavy rainfall produced by Storm Desmond resulted in Stock Ghyll breaking through various informal flood defences and flooding a wide area between the A591 and the River Rothay. In July 1998 a flash flood almost cost the lives of two children playing in the ghyll behind the Salutation Hotel. Stock Ghyll is also recorded to have flooded in July 1873, June 1910, July 1929, June and November 1931, September 1950, and June 1953.

Stock Ghyll Force

Stockghyll Force, about half a mile east of Ambleside town centre, is a waterfall in a series of cascades totalling 70 feet in height. Stock Ghyll divides into two channels at the top of the waterfall, and then into three, all of which are finally reunited. The falls are surrounded by woodland composed of mixed trees in which beech predominates; in spring many daffodils can be seen at the bottom. There is a railed viewpoint from which the waterfall can be seen. Stockghyll Force can be accessed from Ambleside by taking first Stockghyll Lane and then a well-signposted footpath.

Thomas West's pioneering Guide to the Lakes (1778) advises tourists to visit Stockghyll Force on account of its "singular beauty and distinguished features" even in dry seasons. Joseph Budworth devoted a chapter of his A Fortnight's Ramble to the Lakes in Westmoreland, Lancashire, and Cumberland (1792) to Stockghyll Force. He was particularly struck by the "rocky, yet verdant, island, which separates the upper fall, and makes two distinct flushes", and assured his reader that, having made the short walk to the falls "you will be repaid by too impressive a sight ever to leave your memory, and which is calculated to remind you of the softest moments of your life". In 1818 John Keats visited the falls, and in a letter to a friend described the streams into which Stock Ghyll is here divided:

At the same time the different falls have as different characters; the first darting down the slate-rock like a rocket; the second spreading out like a fan—the third dashed into a mist—and the one on the other side of the rock a sort of mixture of all these. We afterwards moved away a space, and saw nearly the whole more mild, streaming silverly through the trees. What astonishes me more than any thing is the tone, the coloring, the slate, the stone, the moss, the rock-weed; or, if I may so say, the intellect, the countenance of such places. The space, the magnitude of mountains and waterfalls are well imagined before one sees them; but this countenance or intellectual tone must surpass every imagination and defy any remembrance. I shall learn poetry here.

Restored waterwheel in Ambleside beside Stock Ghyll
J. M. W. Turner The Old Mill, Ambleside (1798)

William Wordsworth, writing in 1835, recommended visitors to Ambleside to spend three minutes looking at the course of Stock Ghyll through the village, adding that "Stockgill-force, upon the same stream, will have been mentioned to you as one of the sights of the neighbourhood". Victorian writers confirm that the waterfall was the standard sight of Ambleside, the first that any tourist went to visit. Indeed it was so often and so easily seen that the writer Harriet Martineau reported that "it is the fashion to speak lightly of this waterfall", familiarity breeding contempt, though she herself thought it an "exquisite waterfall...Grander cataracts there may be—scarcely a more beautiful one".

Stock Ghyll formerly powered a series of fulling mills and bobbin mills in the centre of Ambleside, most of which still survive, though repurposed, and give some idea of how the stream looked in the 19th century. One such, called the Old Corn Mill, was originally built as the manorial mill in 1335, rebuilt in 1680, and finally converted to shops in the 1970s. The Horrax mill was one of the best known of the Lake District bobbin mills, built around 1840 to supply the Lancashire cotton mills with bobbins made from local coppiced wood, though it also produced a wide range of other wooden objects. It has since been converted to holiday flatlets.

Various scenes along Stock Ghyll have long been popular with artists. Bridge House has been painted by J. M. W. Turner and John Ruskin, and in the 20th century by Kurt Schwitters.

Harriet Martineau noted that "The view of the mill and the rocky channel of the Stock on the left of the bridge is the one which every artist sketches as he passes by; and if there is in the Exhibition in London, in any year, a View at Ambleside, it is probably this". A notable example is Turner's watercolour The Old Mill, Ambleside (1798), which includes Stock Ghyll. The same subject was painted in oils by Thomas Miles Richardson[29] and in watercolour by Alfred William Hunt.

Though the influential writer William Gilpin, apostle of the picturesque, condemned Stock Ghyll Force as "the most unpicturesque we could have", others differed. His contemporaries Joseph Farington and Francis Towne, for example, painted the Force twice and three times respectively. More recently, Jeremy Gardiner's Stockghyll Force (2011) forms part of a series of paintings of Lake District waterfalls.

Artist biography

Laura Wilson Barker (6 March 1819 – 22 May 1905), was a composer, performer and artist, sometimes also referred to as Laura Barker, Laura W Taylor or "Mrs Tom Taylor".

She was born in Thirkleby, North Yorkshire, third daughter of a clergyman, the Rev. Thomas Barker. She studied privately with Cipriani Potter and became an accomplished pianist and violinist. As a young girl Barker performed with both Louis Spohr and Paganini. She began composing in the mid-1830s - her Seven Romances for voice and guitar were published in 1837. From around 1843 until 1855 she taught music at York School for the Blind. During this period some of her compositions - including a symphony in manuscript, on 19 April 1845 - were performed at York Choral Society concerts.

On 19 June 1855 she married the English dramatist, critic, biographer, public servant, and editor of Punch magazine Tom Taylor. Barker contributed music to at least one of her husband's plays, an overture and entr'acte to Joan of Arc (1871), and provided harmonisations as an appendix to his translation of Ballads and Songs of Brittany (1865).

Her other works include the cantata Enone (1850), the violin sonata A Country Walk (1860), theatre music for As You Like It, (April 1880), Songs of Youth (1884), string quartets, madrigals and solo songs. Her choral setting of Keats's A Prophecy, composed in 1850, was performed for the first time 49 years later at the Hovingham Festival in 1899. The composer was present.

Several of Barker's paintings hang at Smallhythe Place in Kent, Ellen Terry's house.

Barker lived with her husband and family at 84 Lavender Sweep, Battersea. There were two children: the artist John Wycliffe Taylor (1859–1925), and Laura Lucy Arnold Taylor (1863–1940). The Sunday musical soirees at the house attracted many well-known attendees, including Lewis CarrollCharles DickensHenry IrvingCharles ReadeAlfred Tennyson, Ellen Terry and William Makepeace Thackeray.

Tom Taylor died suddenly at his home in 1880 at the age of 62. After his death, his widow retired to Porch House, Coleshill in Buckinghamshire, where she died on 22 May 1905, aged 86.