Water: always the same, never the same. It’s February 2016, the harsh winter storms have run amuck in the Lake District. It’s been eight months since completing a cold-water swim every day for a year to, as an artist investigate what it actually meant to be in a landscape and exposed to its elements. For my trouble I have a fine collection of water from different locations, many a vague map, some rocks and a weighty diary. Prior to this I had barely dipped a toe in open water. If I’m honest, it freaked me out. The dark depths created a deep angst about what is loitering within them, but over the course of a year I managed to get a grip of myself and become comfortable with dipping in very cold lakes, rivers and had even affronted some long distance sea-swimming.
The new bounty was the elusive Innominate Tarn. Alfred Wainwrights favourite and last resting place. I had heard of Innominate (formerly Loaf) Tarn and knew that it fell off the back of Haystacks at an altitude of 1,784ft, but that was about it. Little did I realise this was the start of a marginally larger project.
The Lakes is a truly variable place: the British weather can catch us out, but a window of opportunity awaited to root out the infamous Innominate Tarn. A tarn (or corrie loch) is a mountain lake, formed in a cirque that is excavated by a glacier when either rain or river water fills the cirque.
The etymology of the word is derived from the Old Norse ‘tjörn’: a pond or tear drop.
It is commonly used in Cumbria when referring to a mountain lake and the unnamed tarn seemed like the perfect place for investigation. Especially in a time where I feel that I have become dislocated from the natural world, from the wild environment and the inexorable rawness of nature and this, in turn, is a fundamental part of my making. The translation of experience, coupled with immersion in the environment and the encounters that occur whilst out there are paramount to my further investigation of landscape.
I believe that we crave escape. In our ever more mapped, surveyed and digitised world it’s becoming harder to find places that are off the map. Enter wild swimming. A plethora of secrets in the landscape await. Swimming allows us to be within our bodies whilst we innately go through the motions of exercise, leaving our minds to swim off, free to think without being completely preoccupied by thought.
With this in mind, I took the tent and yomped up Haystacks via Scarth Gap as the last of the daylight left the hills arriving at the fabled Innominate after witnessing the rocks glow bright rose as the sun melted over Wainwrights favourite peak. The sky was clear. The moonrise was early. It’s fragile moon blade caught on Innominate. The midnight frost walked over the crags, over the hills penetrating every whisper of heather and bloom of moss. Not a blip of air moved. Stillness descended and a misty inversion flowed up the valley. A lone owl hoots and the night chews its way into the tent as I shiver into dawn.
First light brings a perfect piece of sky that splits Haystacks raw. The tarn with its small chain of islands and peaty floor beckons. I slink into the clear black as dawn breaks. The water gnaws my feet until they are no longer my own. My body bruises cold as the arms of the tarn embrace me. I feel completely dismembered; gasping for breath I drink it in. The waters are sapid with gritty iron and peat. It remains on my palette as I swim across and back through the window of sky reflecting Kirkfell, The Gables and Pillar. Soon enough I feel exhilarated. I ponder about the circumnavigation of life and death and Wainwright returning to the earth at this place makes me feel grounded. These landscapes live in our memory and we in turn belong to the mountains mind in some way.
On previous expeditions to the Lake District it seemed natural to include at least one summit. Now I needed to frame landscape not to dominate it by ascending the peak, but to be in it. Really in it. What if the summit, rather than the peak, became the tarn. A definitively different way to conceive a landscape. Tarnbagging, as it’s called is not a new past time.
It is said that bodies of water can possess the hearts and minds of men. The silvery tarns that blink in the afternoon sun are possibly the most alluring dynamic of the Lake District. Covering 2, 362 km2 and carved out by the power of glaciation in the last Ice Age, the Lake District is England's largest national park. How many of these tarns are there, you ask? Well, it turns out somewhere between 224 and 486 depending on whether we excluded the unnamed, man-made ones, private tarns or only the permanent ones.
The Nuttall’s identified 335 tarns in their bookabout Lakeland, but I imagine, for myself, it will be a working figure. And so an idea was born to swim the length of all the tarns, fly for fun one way and freestyle back. From each tarn I’ve been collecting water, this marvellous, yet mundane substance as an ever-scarce resource to make bespoke illustrations of the tarns, forming a collection of water, rock and images with some words. Aware that with 335 plus ‘eyes of the landscape’ to explore there is a difference between knowing about a place and knowing the place: I had better get swimming.
The following Lakeland adventures proceeded to involve a classic mixture of Cumbrian weather that on occasion tested the navigational skills. Mid-March was stunning. Kirkfell, provided a steep ascent to Kirkfell Tarn at 2,460ft that greeted us as a frozen steely-blue swathe of ice. That’s a repeat hike of Kirkfell for me. Following that a shallow swim across Beckhead Tarn at the foot Great Gable, then Styhead Tarn where the dregs of snow on the tops melting into the tarn from the South East felt as though it got colder by the second. The water temperature, 4.7°C to be precise, causes my skin to become monstrous, pimple purple and violent pink. We wandered gratefully down to Wasdale with frozen feet to find shelter in the pub.
The following day proceeded with much bog hopping up to the oasis Scoat Tarn, lying in a shallow combe and set in a natural amphitheatre it offered a deafening silence as the wind danced across it’s surface. Tarns hold their location a secret until the last moment, especially when apprehended from below and this was no exception, hidden by large freestanding stones that framed the edge of this chilly deep tarn. Occasional wellum of trout burst on the surface as I swam the 450m each way. The fish took me by surprise as the depth of this pool is masked. My memory fades and my entire focus is in the now of the heated cold as I lump myself out with frozen stubby hands. We then descend a gentle ridge finding Low Tarn, on the southern side of Red Pike, the source of a clattering Brimfall Beck. Swimming here is like swimming into infinity. Wispy weeds weave their way into my view of Scafell Pikes. Yewbarrow smiles from the southeast whilst the sun shines bright. Over the following days the weather turns and I collect a few more tarns, the remote Stony Tarn that comes and goes with the seasons, Eel Tarn that holds the will-o-wisp or foolish fire of folklore at night time brings its peaty orange water, a large toad leaping and a delicious swim in the rain. Each place is different and I realise that in a fully explored world, exploration does not stop it just gets reinvented, whilst swimming heightens the senses and wandering cultivates the mind. A sublime notion.
Place is protean and a defining dynamic of what it is to be human. Topophilia of place might be considered passé, but a placeless world is a dystopian prospect.
Not everything about tarn swimming, that landscape and the shrieking cold flush can be articulated. There is a beauty in that we keep a small piece of that silence for ourselves each time we swim, but yet that small piece of silence is a knowing shared silence that all open water swimmers cling onto. It is what unites us however and whenever we swim in these landscapes and as an artist it is that which I hope to capture. American geographer Yi Fu Tuan notes ‘it is precisely what is invisible in the land that makes what is merely empty space to one person, a place to another.’ A swimming wayfarer in the wilderness, linking the blank watery spaces and creating a new cartography. This is surely swimming for glee.
The tarns water is older than time: always the same, never the same.
References:
Blair, D., Exploring Lakeland Tarns (1992), Keswick, Lakeland Manor Press
Cooper, W. H., The Tarns of Lakeland (1960), London, Butler & Tanner Ltd
Lopez, B., Artic Dreams (1986), London, Random House
Nuttall, A. & J., (1995) The Tarns of Lakeland, Milnthorpe, Cicerone Press
Tyler, D., Uncommon Ground (2015), London, Guardian Books
You can find more information about Sam Mould’s engagement with landscape www.sammouldpainting.com or illustrative practice www.sam-mould-illustration.com