97 
Walter Scott, in his poem entitled “Helvellyn,” would never 
have written :-— 
‘¢On the right, Striding Edge round the Red Tarn was bending, 
And Catchedecam its left verge was defending, 
One huge nameless rock in the front was impending, 
When I marked the sad spot where the wanderer had died,” 
-if he had not actually visited the place and asked, as was his 
wont, a thousand and one local questions of the shepherds who 
bore him company. 
Wordsworth too is very particular in his description :— 
‘It was a cove, a huge recess, 
That keeps till June December’s snow ; 
A lofty precipice in front, 
A silent tarn below 
7? 
He had evidently in his mind a tarn deep-bosomed in the 
mountain, from which the rocks rise sheer; he calls them further 
on “abrupt and perilous rocks.” And when he adds :— 
‘“Thither comes . .. .« 
the sounding blast, 
That, if it could, would hurry past, 
But that enormous barrier binds it fast.” 
he makes one feel how near to the Tarn these ofty precipices are. 
Now, anyone who knows Keppelcove Tarn, will remember that 
it does not lie under lofty precipices that stand up straitly from it, 
or hem it in with abruptness; while on the other hand, as the 
traveller approaches Red Tarn from the east, he sees the “enor- 
mous barrier” of the “Cove Head” rocks rise up for several 
hundred feet, dark and fearfully, above the Red Tarn, and the 
“arms of Helvellyn and Catchedecam” fairly seem to clasp the 
steel-white water-jewel of the Tarn to the rugged mountain breast. 
The modern guide-writer was perhaps unaware that an older 
writer of guides, one Forbes, the then curate of Wythburn, who 
would have every chance of being accurately informed, had written 
7 
