Beneath the crystal-clear, alien world of water lie the great piscean survivors of the Ice Age. The Lake District is a fish-spotter’s paradise.
I confess that this is a fishy story. I was driving to Crummock Water, one of the Lake District’s less tourist-mobbed destinations (if you want a tip, Thirlmere is another), but stopped on the north-east bank of Windermere for a breather. Parked the car near the village of Troutbeck, walked to the stony shore, admired the spirograph patterns of the raindrops on the gin-clear water, childishly stepped out along a row of black stones into the lake, looked down and there was an Arctic charr. The Ice Age fish. I am convinced of it. At first slanting glance, I thought ‘club-shape of trout’, but then the fish carouselled in the water: witch-mouthed; sinister streamlined corporeality; U-boat Type VII; gold pollocking belly catching coal fire as it fled.
Charr derives from the Gaelic name for blood, ceara/cera, referring to the fish’s red belly. Cold irony. Salvelinus alpinus is a remnant from the white time; 13,000 years ago during the last Ice Age, when the Lake District was entombed in deep cold. Frozen. Arctic came south wearing its ice mask, wedding white, but on embrace, suffocating. Death disguised.
But, then, on some unseen joyous day, the earth, in a new springtime, warmed and the glaciers retreated, sluggishly. The ice did not go quietly; it contested every scraping, screaming inch, scarring the land, giving the Lake District its characteristic high fells, deep lakes and spating mountain rivers. As the gouging glaciers retreated, they left rivers to the sea and in came invading marine fish through the floes, curious, home-wanting. One such fish was Arctic charr. The fish was in time and out of time. One day, in the time of rising land, sinking sea, there was no way back to the ocean. The Arctic charr were marooned in the freshwater lakes of northern England, Scotland and Wales and there they have remained, the great piscean survivors. Glacial relics stranded by shifting climate.
‘A multi-segmented annelid worm, the medicinal leech boasts no fewer than 10 stomachs, nine pairs of testicles and 32 segments, each with its own brain fragment’
There are other time-stranded fish species here. The schelly, a salmonid, scientifically Coregonus stigmaticus, is found only in Ullswater, Haweswater, Brothers Water and Red Tarn. Vendace, England’s rarest freshwater fish, herring-silver and deep-lurking, inhabits Derwent Water and Bassenthwaite only, bodies connected by the River Derwent.
The Lake District. Under the chocolate-box, Swiss-lake charm, the Wordsworthian daffodil-nodding tourist brochure, Jurassic Lake. Still. One looks out on the flat liquid Lakes, and there could be anything living down there. Such as the Arctic charr. Monsters, even. The marvellous thing about Crummock Water — my personal favourite Lake, not least because it is bordered by the dramatic mounts of Mell-break and Grasmoor — is that you can actually see Orwell’s ‘things, down there under water’. Crummock is ‘oligotrophic’, meaning it has low nutrient levels, meaning it is least productive of flora and fauna. Meaning, as in other oligotrophic lakes, the water has extraordinary clarity, with a water column transparency (Secchi depth) of more than 13ft. Fish and other creatures may be sparse, but you can view them. It is a fish-spotters’ paradise.
A pair of Arctic charr, survivors of the Ice Age. Linda Pitkin/2020VISION/Naturepl.com
Fish never really get their due from Nature-lovers do they? Fish. Scaly things. Cold-blooded. From the alien world of water. Devious, unknowable (‘fishy’ being suspicious, a ‘red herring’ a diversion from truth). Yet seemingly emotionless; ‘cold fish’ synonymous with unfeeling imperturbability. My conversion to appreciation of fish came at Crummock, on a vitalising spring morning in mountainland because, of course, ‘Lake District’ is actually Alpine; the grass on the sheep-freckled high fells finally greening, a month behind the lowland and the streaks of snow-provendered streams pouring down the shale-skinned pyramid of Mellbreak … and I looked down into the water, and there, basking, a pike a yard long. Shovel-snout, leopard spots of gold, wolf-grin. The pike showed no inclination to move.
I had not been cold before, but I was cold then. I had the prey feeling of being sized by an ancient mind, tuned by time.
The pike in Crummock Water that morning was calculating, utterly self-conscious. Sentient. After several minutes of eyeballing me, it moved off with contemptuous, lazy flexes of its body. I remembered, across the decades, the cry of cabin boy Roger in Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons ‘It’s a shark! It’s a shark!’ on mistaking Esox lucius for the finny sea predator. Understandably.
Pike are generally solitary, except on spring days like that day, the water temperature above 6˚C, when they come into the shallows to breed, the female of the species laying as many as 500,000 eggs. The birth of the pike is death in the lake. Esox lucius is an apex predator; ‘pike’, by the way, comes from the weapon used in medieval combat, a pole with a metal blade on top.
The steep slopes of Great Langdale. Credit: Tom Mackie/AWL Images
The things down there in the Lakes. I give you the rare medicinal leech, Hirudo medicinalis, the Lake District being one of the few places the vampiric invertebrate is to be found. Sinister and shape-shifting as it emits from the sedge, a momentary dark leaf caught in an absent-minded current, then a 4in pull of chewing gum, tapping a chill finger on the spine. A multi-segmented annelid worm, the medicinal leech boasts no fewer than 10 stomachs, nine pairs of testicles and 32 segments, each with its own brain fragment. Hirudo medicinalis has teeth, too, 300 in three sets of jaws, which leave a distinctive circular serrated bite mark when sucking blood from humans. In Victorian days, Britain used more than 42 million leeches a year for phlebotomy, or bloodletting.
Sometimes, simply standing on the shore of Crummock with its shingle floor of ancient geology, the grey and iron-toned stones, all thin rectangles and squares, fixed together in a million-billion piece mosaic is sufficient pleasure. That water creatures should drift over it is merely a bonus.
John Lewis-Stempel has twice been crowed winner of the Wainwright prize for nature writing, and was the 2016 BSME Columnist of the Year. His new book, ‘England: A Natural History’, explores 12 distinctive habitats of England
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