Lily Tarn

... on the Loughrigg massif. I thought this poem of Sorley MacLean's sums up some of the charm of Loughrigg which offers views and variety in every direction. I have been up it, round it and over it many many times but had never seen Lily Tarn before today. Watched a couple of Goldcrests feeding and working their way along a line of coppiced hazels on the way down.

Kinloch Ainort - Sorley MacLean

A company of mountains, an upthrust of mountains,
a great garth of growing mountains,
a concourse of summits, of knolls, of hills
coming on with a fearsome roaring.

A rising of glens, of gloomy corries,
a lying down in the antlered bellowing;
a stretching of green nooks, of brook mazes,
prattling in the age-old mid-winter.

A cavalry of mountains, horse-riding summits,
a streaming headlong haste of foam,
a slipperiness of smooth flat rocks, small-bellied bare summits,
flat-rock snoring of high mountains.

A surge-belt of hill-tops,
impetuous thigh of peaks,
the murmuring bareness of marching turrets,
green flanks of Mosgary,
crumbling storm-flanks,
barbarous pinnacles of high moorlands.