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A striking outcrop of Watson Dodd, Castle Rock of Triermain is named for a local superstition and a legend of King Arthur, popularised by Sir Walter Scott. It was a favourite of rock climbers until a recent event that bore an uncanny resemblance to the story. On a crisp and frosty morning, I go in search of Merlin in the Vale of St John.

A sheer wall of white rock, marbled with indigo and mauve shadow, rises over stark winter branches. Spindly rowan saplings extend white twigs like spectral fingers, and burgundy berries hang in clusters over copper bracken. I climb over littered boulders to the foot of a crag that looms like the ruin of a colossal fortress. The earth is crisp with frost and the air hangs still but for the staccato croak of ravens. These giants of the crow family have kept guard, since time immemorial, over this natural castle in the Vale of Saint John.

The Vikings believed ravens to be the eyes and ears of Odin; the Greeks considered them associates of Apollo, god of prophecy, and ill omens in the mortal world; native Americans thought them tricksters. Collective nouns for ravens include: an unkindness, a treachery, and a conspiracy.

Deceptive spirits are associated with this crag. In 1773, William Hutchinson published perhaps the first real Lakeland guidebook, An Excursion to the Lakes in Westmoreland and Cumberland. In its pages he gives rein to a local superstition, and in doing so, helps cement a change of name for this towering outcrop of Watson Dodd, once known as Green Crag. Hutchinson writes:

“In the widest part of the dale you are struck with the appearance of an ancient ruined castle, which seems to stand upon the summit of a little mount, the mountains around forming an amphitheatre. This massive bulwark shows a front of various towers, and makes an awful rude and Gothic appearance, with its lofty turrets and ragged battlements; we traced the galleries, the bending arches, the buttresses. The greatest antiquity stands characterised in its architecture; the inhabitants near it assert it is an antediluvian structure.

“The traveller’s curiosity is roused, and he prepares to make a nearer approach, when that curiosity is put on the rack, by his being assured, that, if he advances, certain genii who govern the place by virtue of their supernatural art and necromancy, will strip it of all its beauties, and by enchantment, transform the magic walls. The vale seems adapted for the habitation of such beings; its gloomy recesses and retirements look like the haunts of evil spirits. There was no delusion in the report; we were soon convinced of its truth; for this piece of antiquity, so venerable and noble it its aspect, as we drew near changed its figure, and proved no other than a shaken massive pile of rocks, which stand in the midst of this little vale, disunited from the adjoining mountains, and have so much the real form and resemblance of a castle, that they bear the name of the Castle Rocks of St. John.”

In Susanna Clarke’s novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, the Raven King is the custodian of English magic and the builder of the King’s Roads, the realm behind the mirrors that affords access to other worlds. Clarke’s figure is a fiction, but a Raven King does exist in Celtic mythology. He was Brân the Blessed, a Welsh giant, and high king of Britain. Brân’s sister, Branwen, was due to marry the Irish king, Matholwch, however, resentful that his permission had not been sought, their brother, Efnysien, mutilated Matholwch’s horses. Matholwch was incensed, but Brân placated him with the gift of a magic cauldron which could bring the dead back to life.

Back in Ireland, Matholwch began to brood afresh on Efnysien’s affront, and banished Branwen to the kitchen where she was beaten daily. In retaliation, her brothers waged a vicious war which only seven of the Welsh and none of the Irish survived; the Irish were initially indomitable as they could use the cauldron to resurrect their fallen, but Efnysien dived in and destroyed it from within, sacrificing himself in the process . Mortally wounded in the foot, the Raven King instructed his seven survivors to cut off his head and carry it with them. The head continued to talk. Eventually, it instructed them to carry him to England, to White Hill, where the Tower of London now stands, and to bury him facing France so that he could forever ward off invasion. To this day, six ravens are kept at the Tower. Should they leave, superstition says, the kingdom of Britain will fall.

A Celtic king whose spirit is eternally entwined with the fate of the realm has an Arthurian overtone. Indeed, in one Cornish version of the Arthurian legend, the dying King Arthur transforms into a raven. King Arthur has a direct association with the Castle Rocks of St John, courtesy of Sir Walter Scott’s epic poem of 1813, Bridal of Triermain. The poem was in part, inspired by Hutchinson’s account, and it is set right here in St. John’s in the Vale, where Gategill fell, that steep pyramidal buttress to Blencathra, dominates the northern skyline, and the Helvellyn massif is a high eastern rampart.

Scott’s poem intertwines three stories. The first is that of the narrator, a lowly musician attempting to win the hand of his high-born sweetheart, Lucy. Afraid that Lucy’s head may be turned by a rival with greater wealth or breeding, he recounts the tale of Roland De Vaux, the twelfth century Baron of Triermain, as a cautionary tale against maidenly pride. In the story, the Baron has a vision of a maiden so fair, he swears he will wed none other than she. He dispatches his faithful page to Ullswater to seek the advice of the Lyulph, a sage whose ancestry stretches back to King Arthur’s time (and who gave his name to the lake: originally, Ulph’s Water). The Lyulph recognises the girl from the page’s description:

“That maid is born of middle earth
And may of man be won,
Though there have glided since her birth,
Five hundred years and one.
But where’s the Knight in all the north,
That dare the adventure follow forth,
So perilous to knightly worth,
In the valley of St. John?”

He goes on to recount “a mystic tale… handed down from Merlin’s age”. In the Lyulph’s tale, King Arthur rides out from Carlisle and reaches Blencathra (which curiously, Scott calls Glaramara). Arthur passes Scales Tarn and descends beside the fledgling Glenderamackin river until he reaches the Vale of St. John, where he spies a formidable castle. Arriving at the gate, the castle appears deserted: it is silent, no banners flutter, and no guards patrol the battlements. Arthur sounds his bugle, and immediately, the portcullis is raised, and the drawbridge lowered. The king rides in to find a castle inhabited entirely by fair young maidens and their beautiful queen, Guendolen, in whose seductive company, he wiles away the next three months.

Guendolen has an ulterior motive for seducing the unsuspecting king:

“Her mother was of human birth,
Her sire a Genie of the earth,
In days of old deemed to preside,
O’er lovers’ wiles and beauty’s pride,
By youths and virgins worshipp’d long,
With festive dance and choral song,
Till, when the cross to Britain came,
On heathen alters died the flame,
Now deep in Wastdale solitude,
The downfall of his rights he rued,
And, born of his resentment heir,
He train’d to guile that lady fair,
To sink in slothful sin and shame
The champions of the Christian name.”

While Guendolen’s charms hold sway over Arthur, his kingdom languishes, ravaged by Saxons and Vikings alike. Eventually the king remembers himself and resolves to return to Camelot, but mindful of a lover’s responsibility, he first swears an oath to Guendolen: if, as a result of their union, she should bear him a son, the boy shall be heir to Arthur’s kingdom. Should she bear him a daughter, Arthur will hold a tournament, where the best of his knights will battle for the girl’s hand in marriage.

With the king mounted on his charger, Guendolen offers a parting drink: “not the juice the sluggish vines of earth produce”, but “the draught which Genii love”. She quaffs from a goblet and hands it to Arthur, but as he raises the cup toward his mouth, a drop falls on his horse’s neck and burns it so badly, it leaps twenty feet in the air:

Dropping the goblet, Arthur returns to Carlisle, resumes command of his knights, and defeats the Saxons in a series of twelve bloody battles. Fifteen years pass, then during an extravagant feast at Camelot, a fair young maiden appears on a white charger. At first, Arthur thinks it is Guendolen, but quickly realises he is wrong. This is Gyneth, his illegitimate daughter by Guendolen, come to claim her birthright.

Arthur is true to his word and organises a tournament, offering Gyneth’s hand together with a handsome dowry of Strathclyde, Reged and Carlisle to the victor. However, fearing the cost to his army should his knights battle to the death, he instructs Gyneth to stop the combat before any blood is shed. But Gyneth is her mother’s daughter, and she refuses.

As one by one, Arthur’s knights begin to fall, and their hearts’ blood stains Gyneth’s sandals red, Merlin appears from a cleft in the ground and orders a halt the proceedings, condemning Gyneth for her pride and sentencing her to unbroken sleep in the Castle of St. John…

“until a knight shall wake thee,
For feats of arms as far reknown’d
As a warrior of the Table Round”
To make the quest more difficult, a spell will hide the castle from mortal eyes.

The musician’s tale has the desired effect, and Lucy marries her humble lover, but following their wedding, she presses him to tell her what becomes of Gyneth and whether Sir Roland De Vaux goes in search of her…

…Of course he does. Sir Roland spends many long days and nights in the Vale of St. John, searching in vain for the castle. Then one night, he is awakened from his wild camp by a strange sound echoing around the fells. A meteor passes over, and by its ethereal light, he glimpses the castle, but such is the enchantment, that by the time he reaches its walls, they once again resume the form of a shattered crag. In frustration, Sir Roland raises his battle axe…

“And at the rocks his weapon threw,
Just where one crag’s projected crest,
Hung proudly balanced o’er the rest.
Hurl’d with main force, the weapon’s shock
Rent a huge fragment of the rock”

In response to the blow, the rocks come tumbling down, and when the dust has settled, a fractured and mossy staircase is revealed that leads Sir Roland up to the castle’s entrance. He swims the moat, and enters the castle where, in successive chambers, he runs a gauntlet of ferocious tigers, declines the offer of untold riches, resists the charms of wanton maidens who declare themselves slaves to love, and declines offers of power and influence. Having thus conquered fear, pleasure, wealth and pride, he proves his worth and dissolves the spell that holds Gyneth in perpetual sleep. On awakening, King Arthur’s daughter happily agrees to wed her rescuer, and they leave the castle to lead a long and happy life together.

However, in their absence, the enchantment on the castle resumes:

“Know too, that when a pilgrim strays,
In morning mist or evening maze,
Along the mountain lone,
The fairy fortress often mocks
His gaze upon the castled rocks
Of the valley of St. John;
But never man since brave De Vaux
The charmed portal won.
‘Tis now a vain illusive show,
That melts whene’r the sunbeams glow,
Or the fresh breeze hath blown.”
~

Today, Harvey maps name Castle Rock, the Castle Rock of Triermain, in reference to the poem. Until recently, it’s north face offered popular rock climbs with names like Zigzag and Overhanging Bastion. But in 2012, a large crack was discovered in the buttress; a block the size of bungalow threatened to splinter from the main cliff, and climbers were cautioned to keep away. Could it be that a succession of ice axes had torn the fabric of the spell, just as Sir Roland’s battle axe had done, nine centuries earlier?

On 18th November 2018, in an uncanny echo of the poem, the block finally detached and came crashing down, disfiguring the cliff face and littering its foot with shattered rocks. I climbed over its remnants to get here, and now, I stand gazing at the jagged spot from which it cleaved. A steep irregular gully climbs behind it, carpeted with green moss and fractured rock. It ends in a vertical wall. Yet, however hard I stare, it refuses to resolve into an ancient staircase and a castle gate.

A loud croak comes from a raven perched on the crag; its beady eye fixes me in cool appraisal. A raven’s stare is quizzical; it’s easy to see why our ancestors thought these birds prophetic, or spies for the gods. It could be a genie bent on trickery. Its demeanour is haughty, and the raucous cackle of its call sounds like mockery. Is it laughing at me for something it knows, and I don’t? That I am staring blindly at a faery castle? I see only ruptured rock—the will of Merlin perhaps, or an unkindness of ravens.