Bowscale Tarn is on the swim circle and therefore (roughly) the same distance from Blea Tarn – the centre – as all the other tarns. Yet try as we may it felt like we were going to some sort of extremity. True it was the furthest north but there was an emotional distance here that transcended previous swims.
That intuition was confirmed when we arrived to find that the tarn had retreated behind a frozen screen and would refuse, for the moment, its part in the performance.
While I mused on the way natural processes had conspired to cause Bowscale Tarn to ‘opt-out’ of our project, I had become aware of our determination to press on round the circle and this feeling became lodged in an image of Paul’s posts – an image of the posts back through the months at various tarns – arranged in a way that each was almost superimposed on earlier posts – I saw them forging forward round the circle.
When I got back I started work on the image.
13th March 2010 Bowscale Tarn
We approach Bowscale Tarn from the northeast, from outside the circle, having driven up the M6. The tarn sits on the north side of Blencathra on Bowscale Fell and it’s the most northerly point of the swimcircle. Facing north, it gets very little direct sun and we know it will be cold.
As we near the mountain, the landscape is very different than in the central Lake District. Here it’s more open with more distant horizons and the large mountains of Blencathra and Scafell dominate.
At the tarn side, we find it completely enclosed in five inches of ice. The only loose water is where the outlet releases a small beck down the hillside. Its clear there will be no swim today, so we symbolically immerse feet and hands and splash our heads in the icy water. This swim is still to be done but it will have to wait until later in the year. It owes us a swim.
I set my post with a stone from Loweswater beside a large rock, out of immediate siight of walkers and take film of the water surface and photos of the frozen tarn.
Walking down afterwards, the sense of knowing the body of water by swimming in it is missing. To some extent it remains a stranger.
Paul
