A 450 MILLION YEAR WALK
YOU KNOW those science fiction movies where several different worlds are all there at once in the same place? And you confusingly slip from one to the other? I’m thinking The Matrix; I’m thinking Sliding Doors. None of these films so far has been set in the Lake District. And I have to wonder why not…
For as I’m heading from Buttermere into Warnscale Bottom, the world I’m walking through isn’t really there. Or it is, but it’s just one of many different worlds all occupying the same little patch of space. Any minute now I’m going to slip through into somewhere else – somewhere that’s a grey, empty place of ashes, or at the bottom of the sea, or in the middle of an icefield…
As I take the grassy track from Gatesgarth, under the dark crags that are the toenails of Fleetwith Pike and into the stony hollows of Warnscale Bottom, I’m happy indeed to be in the early 21st Century, in the most beautiful corner of England, walking through the world of the present. But why walk in just one world when at any moment I could slip into one of the
