Outdoor Talk - Mardale Green reappears as drought warnings start

Six months of dry weather, the driest since 1929, are starting to have a dramatic effect on the scenery around Britain. Wild fire warnings are going out as uplands become tinder dry, and water levels in the reservoirs of the Lake District are dropping fast.

As water levels drop the lakes hamlets of Mardale Green and Measand are once more emerging from Haweswater. Once considered amongst the Jewels in the Crown of the Lake District the small hamlet of Mardale Green was flooded in 1935 for the construction of Haweswater Reservoir. Alfred Wainwright, commenting on the changes in his Pictorial Guide to the Far Eastern Lakeland Fells said "Mardale is still a noble valley. But man works with such clumsy hands! Gone for ever are the quiet wooded bays and shingly shores that nature had fashioned so sweetly in the Haweswater of old; how aggressively ugly is the tidemark of the new Haweswater!".

Mardale Green in the drought of 1996
© Copyright Janet Richardson and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

Originally, Haweswater was a natural lake about four kilometres long, almost divided in two by a tongue of land at Measand, with one side of the divide called High Water and the other Low Water. Despite strong and vociferous objections the land was bought under compulsary purchase orders and resident evicted to make way for the new reservoir. Water levels increased by 29 metres once the dam was created, and Mardale green was lost - seemingly forever. The chuch and other buildings had been dismantled prior to flooding, with their stones used in the construction of the dam, but every now and then when levels drop in drought you can still see the old bridge, the roads and boundary walls.