It may not quite be Atlantis rising majestically from the ocean floor, but the driest spring in England for more than a century has unveiled a small Cumbrian village that was once thought lost forever.
Mardale Green in the Lake District disappeared in the 1930s when Haweswater valley was deliberately flooded by the Manchester Corporation to create one of Britain’s largest reservoirs. The 85 billion-litre lake – which took the best part of a year to fill – has been supplying water to the people of Manchester and parts of Yorkshire ever since.
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However, the lack of rain this year has left the reservoir around half full when it should be at about three-quarters capacity. As a result, the village has felt the wind upon its remains again – visitors have reported seeing dry stone walls, roads and sections of a bridge.
One might imagine that the decision to flood the Haweswater valley – swallowing up not only Mardale Green but fellow village Measand – was an unpopular one. However, according to Helena Bailey, a vicar’s daughter from near Kendal whose family took annual holidays in Mardale Green, ‘No-one else protested, we were the only ones.’ This may sound strange but she went on to explain why she thought no one else had objected. ‘There had been a world war… and this proposal also meant jobs, for hundreds of men.’
Despite her assertion, we do know that one Alfred Wainwright made his views known, albeit to no avail. Writing much later in A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells, the author and walker lamented the effect the reservoir had had on the landscape:
‘Gone for ever are the quiet wooded bays and shingly shores that nature had fashioned so sweetly in the Haweswater of old; how aggressively ugly is the tidemark of the new Haweswater!’
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Work on a dam began in 1929. Six years later, all the valley’s inhabitants had been forced to leave and the buildings largely demolished. Mardale Green’s greatest losses were its tiny church and popular pub, the Dun Bull Inn, both of which had served for centuries as active social hubs for the remote communities. The church was apparently the only building spared the indignity of being used by the Royal Engineers for target practice or as a test-bed for laboratory-fresh plastic explosives. It was instead carefully dismantled. You can still see bits of it today because some of its stones and windows were used in the construction of the reservoir’s water take-off tower which, rather incongruously, resembles a small castle keep.
It was not only the living who were driven from the valley. No fewer than 97 corpses that were lying in Mardale Green’s churchyard had to be dug up. Most were found a new resting place at Shap, about six miles away as the crow flies. There they joined earlier generations of villagers, for before Mardale Green’s churchyard was consecrated in 1729, the deceased had had to be carried to Shap on pack ponies to be buried.
It’s a common feature of so called ‘drowned villages’ that, if you visit on a certain day or in certain conditions, you’ll hear the toll of ghostly church bells ringing out from the deep. That doesn’t appear to be the case at Haweswater, whose only eerie feature is the nest of a golden eagle on what is now a huge RSPB reserve.
However, with droughts becoming increasingly frequent – it’s only three years since the village was last uncovered – the chances are that we’ll be hearing far more of Mardale Green than Manchester Corporation would ever have dreamed possible.
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Main image: the former road to the former Mardale Green (taken in 2018). Credit: James T M Towill, Geograph.
