Innominate Tarn
Innominate Tarn is a small tarn which lies 1,706 feet above sea level, near the summit of Haystacks in Cumberland. The name Innominate means "without a name".
The tarn may be reached by way of the footpath which crosses Haystacks, climbing from Buttermere, Gatesgarth or Honister to the north or Ennerdale to the south. Some 800 feet below, to the south, is Black Sail Hut, the most remote youth hostel in the United Kingdom.
Wainwright
Alfred Wainwright used to come here frequently and he soliloquised on the place. After his death, his ashes were scattered by the Innominate Tarn, as he had expressed this wish in A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells Volume 7: The Western Fells, and in other publications:
"All I ask for, at the end, is a last long resting place by the side of Innominate Tarn, on Haystacks, where the water gently laps the gravelly shore and the heather blooms and Pillar and Gable keep unfailing watch. A quiet place, a lonely place. I shall go to it, for the last time, and be carried: someone who knew me in life will take me and empty me out of a little box and leave me there alone. And if you, dear reader, should get a bit of grit in your boot as you are crossing Haystacks in the years to come, please treat it with respect. It might be me."
- Alfred Wainwright - from "Memoirs of a Fellwalker" (1990)
Name, or none
This tarn was formerly known as Loaf Tarn because the clumps of peat in it resemble risen bread.
The tarn is remote though from everyday footsteps and the name "Loaf Tarn" was lost to folk memory, it so it became nameless. Eventually the Ordnance Survey mapping this nameless tarn called it just that: "Innominate Tarn", and so it remained. There were proposals to rename it Wainwright's Tarn as a memorial to the late Alfred Wainwright since Haystacks was the great fellwalker's favourite mountain and his ashes are scattered at Innominate, however those who knew the old man argued against it. AW himself had said "Innominate Tarn is a nice name and should be left."
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