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“There’s a lake,” commented one of the party of loud teenagers, “I wonder if it’s Windermere.”
“It’s Wastwater,” I informed him. “Windermere’s behind you, but you can’t see it for the mountains.’’

The scene was the summit of Scafell Pike on a sunny Easter Sunday. Several dozen walkers jostled for position around the cairn and trig point. Cameras clicked. Mystified faces stared at newly-bought maps. Mountain empathy seemed in very short supply. I should not complain. Everyone has a right to the hills. But sunny Bank Holidays always bring out the worst in me.
“What’s that pond over there?” asked another voice. “Are there any goldfish in it?”

I stood up and walked away, without even taking the time to close my rucksack.

The ‘pond’ referred to by the last speaker was the distant Styhead Tarn, a small sheet of water that reflected the sky from a point near the top of the pass between the Borrowdale and Wasdale valleys. The young man had probably passed it that morning without even seeing it, for it is one of those unsung, seldom photographed and rarely visited sights for which the Lake District is not known.

The tourist’s sphere of discovery contains less than twenty pieces of water that are generally classed as lakes. These receive an excessive number of visitors in any year. There are, however, several hundred tarns or mountain lakes, most of them tiny, but some unexpectedly large. They remain hidden and are often only discovered with some surprise, as you step over a ridge or round a craggy outcrop. Yet the surprise is always pleasant, for these brief afterthoughts have their own individualities, and give their discoverer the feeling of having come upon a rare secret.

The word ‘tarn’ comes from the Old Norse ‘tjorn’ meaning ‘tear-drop’. The metaphor is apt. The heavy Lakeland rain soaks into the spongy peat and sinks to igneous bedrock, through which it cannot escape. So the water backs up until it fills a glaciated hollow, from which it weeps into a chattering beck, and trickles down to the valley, perhaps helping to replenish a larger, better-known lake.

The lower altitude tarns like Loughrigg, Mockerkin and Tarn Hows, are Lakeland miniatures - picturesque, wooded and with an impressive mountain backdrop. The high tarns are something different. They do not lie against a backdrop of hills, but rather are an integral part of that background. As the visitor stands by one of these dark pools, he feels, not as though he is looking at a view, but has jumped right into the centre of the picture.

By common consent, Wastwater is regarded as the most starkly beautiful and atmospheric of the lakes. The mountain tarns, however, take one's understanding of stark beauty into a new realm altogether. Generally treeless and often rocky, they appear bare, grim, forbidding, yet strangely compulsive. They are far removed from the traditional idea of beauty, and yet are extremely beautiful.

Devoke Water, the largest tarn, bigger than Elterwater and perhaps even than Rydal, lies on the western edge of Birker Moor, just where it falls away to the narrow coastal strip and the Irish Sea. Wind-whipped and spray-blown, it catches the full force of the gales that race in from Ravenglass and funnel between the low hills rising above the shores.

Scales Tarn, in contrast, lies deep inside a hollow beneath the eastern precipice of Blencathra. Almost entirely enclosed by crag and steep hillside, it hides from winds. In high summer, it bakes in trapped sunshine. In winter, the same sun hardly finds it, and the temperature plummets, even on a still day.

Goat’s Water and Low Water, which fill the floors of hanging valleys on the east and west flanks of the Old Man of Coniston, have an eerie blueness which has nothing to do with reflections of the sky. It comes from copper salts leached out of the mountain rocks by the rains.

By their very nature, the tarns tend to evoke feelings and memories which are far more personal than those one associates with the lakes. This may be because the essence of a particular tarn is encapsulated in such a small area. The fact that one rarely shares it with other visitors, may also help.

Mention of Greendale Tarn above Wasdale, makes me think of warm, peat-brown waters, and a lazy swim on a hot June day. Of Scoat Tarn, its near neighbour, I remember the slow descent of summer mist, which swallowed the water into a silence from which even the soft lappings on boulders could no longer be heard. Stickle Tarn, Langdale, also reminds me of mist, but this time of a parting, to reveal the tarn from an eagle’s viewpoint as I clung to the rock face of Pavey Ark, several hundred feet higher. The picture I have of Dalehead Tarn is again one of occlusion, as I rested from the icy winds on a summit above Honister Pass and watched the crags of the Newlands Valley dissolve into snow. Blaeberry Tarn, on the other hand, gives a recollection of clarity. Nestling on a high step above Buttermere, it forms the prelude to what is, to my mind, the finest view in the whole of Cumbria - that from the summit of Red Pike.

The tarns have, perhaps inevitably, entered the literature of Lakeland. Wordsworth refers to the two immortal fish that are said to live in Bowscale Tarn. He and Sir Walter Scott both wrote poems paying tribute to the dog that stood guard for three months over the body of its dead master, above the shore of Helvellyn’s Red Tarn. In the first of his Herries Chronicles, Hugh Walpole has David Herries kill an enemy by throwing him into Sprinkling Tarn. In the second novel of the series, ‘Judith Paris’, the tarn at Watendlath is so dominant as to become almost a character in the story.

Following my encounter with the noisy teenagers on Scafell Pike, I moved off in a south-westerly direction for about half a mile, then sat down to finish my lunch. The summit crowds were well out of earshot. Several walkers crossed the ridge of Mickledore, while a number of rock climbers inched up Scafell’s East Buttress. A very gentle breeze blew up from Eskdale, but did nothing to ripple the surface of the tarn. Too small to appear on most maps, and with a maximum depth of around three feet, this minuscule, rocky pond lies hidden from all who do not actively seek it. Yet it is uniquely distinct from other tarns. At 2746 feet above sea level, Broadcrag Tarn is the highest piece of permanent standing water in the whole of England.

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