Mardale Green

Mardale Green emerges during a drought

Mardale Green lies sunken beneath the waters of Haweswater, in Westmorland. Once this was a village in Mardale, the dale of the Haweswater Beck, but in 1935 the population was evacuated and the dale was dammed to create the Haweswater Reservoir, whose rising waters drowned the village.

In severe droughts, when the reservoir waters fall dramatically, the remaining walls of the village may reappear from the water.

History

King of Mardale

In 1209, Hugh Parker Holme was accused of involvement in the Canterbury Conspiracy, a plot against King John, and fled the King's wrath towards Scotland. The legend tells that on the flight, benighted amongst the fells, Hugh and his men sought shelter in a tiny cave, which was to serve them well in the days ahead, high upon Rough Crag, in the most inaccessible part of Riggindale, a cave now known as Hugh's Cave. Hugh and his family lived in the cave, setting out for supplies each day, until they learnt of King John's death (in 1216), when Hugh felt safe enough to emerge, the family eventually settling in the village. Hugh bought lands here and built his own home, high upon the Rigg and over the years to come, Hugh gained the villagers' trust and goodwill. They valued his counsel so much that they eventually awarded him with the title, 'the King of Mardale'.

In the centuries that followed, every first-born male of the family line, were dubbed the King, the last male passed away in 1885 with Hugh Parker Holme, his memorial can still be seen in the new churchyard, just up the road from the old church in Shap village, the very last line of the family ended with one Mary Elizabeth Holme who died in 1915 at the age of 90.

Church

Anciently, the village belonged to Shap Abbey. It had no church but in the fifteenth century the monks founded an oratory in Mardale, at Chapel Hill. Towards the end of the 17th century a small church was built on this same site, at the demand of the Holme family, but until 1729 the church had no right of burial and so the dead of Mardale were taken in their coffins strapped to the back of a pack horse by the Corpse Road over Mardale Common and down Swindale for burial at Shap.

Flooding the valley

Main article: Haweswater

In the 1920s, the need for water in the growing cities became acute, and ther Corporation of the City of Manchester obtained a private Act of Parliament enabling them to flood Mardale to create a reservoir. The construction of the Haweswater dam started in 1929. There was public outcry as the work would destroy the villages of Measand and Mardale Green and flood a dale known as one of the most picturesque in Westmorland.

The dam raised the water level by 95 feet and Mardale green sank beneath the waters.

At the last service in the village church, a congreagation of 75 people gathered, amongst them the Lord Mayor of Manchester and the Bishop of Carlisle, who pronounced the final blessing within its walls, and the people sang Psalm 121: "I will lift up mine eyes into the hills." It is said too that over a thousand people gathered upon the hillside beside listening to the service via loud hailers fastened to the church tower, by a local radio expert from Penrith, many there having Mardalian connections or just a love of old places, the general atmosphere was reverential, for there was something very moving about the service, all be it a simple one. It was still to be many months before the church was swallowed beneath the new lake – the final position for the dam footing had not yet been determined – but the life of the village was at an end.

All the farms and houses and the Dun Bull Inn were pulled down. Mardale church was taken down and even the coffins were removed from the graveyard and re-buried at Shap.

Alfred Wainwright wrote:

Mardale is still a noble valley. But man works with such clumsy hands! 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.

—Wainwright

Reappearance of the village

At times of drought, the level of the reservoir goes down, and when the shoreline is exposed, so are some of the walls of Mardale Green. It has attracted visitors in years past, to see what is left: dry stone walls that once separated the lush fields emerge from the water like skeletal fingers stretching from the deep.

Outside links

• Mardale Green