OVERWATER TARN - The Herries Chronicles
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Drive-by on the road around Overwater (the smallest of the Lake District Lakes). There are magnificent panoramas all along the 10 minute drive from Keswick to the cache including the back of Skiddaw - an area perhaps less frequented but extremely picturesque.
In October 1935, Hugh Walpole (1884 – 1941) wrote the following remarks in his diary: "Shall I have any lasting reputation? Like every author in history who has seriously tried to be an artist, I sometimes consider the question. Fifty years from now I think the Lake stories will still be read locally, other-wise I shall be mentioned in a small footnote to my period in literary history." Perhaps he was rather harsh and pessimistic in this prediction, but of all his works only the Lake stories or the Herries Chronicles have consistently remained in print.
“However, Walpole, is beginning to attract the Lakeland literati once again and that revival of interest may prove attractive to film makers, particularly when it comes to the Herries Chronicles, which have been described as the area’s own Forsyte Saga”.
In 1923 having led a restless life, Walpole took a short holiday in the Lake District, and became enchanted with the area, feeling that at long last he had found a place where he could settle. The following year, he moved into Brackenburn, a hillside house overlooking Derwentwater, and it was there that he wrote the majority of his remaining output. Over the ensuing months, he absorbed the atmosphere, scenery and history of the Lake District, and as early as 1925 he was mulling over the idea of a series of Lake novels.
These ideas evolved over the coming years until Walpole had worked out a grand design for four large novels setting out 'the history of the Herries family over a period of two hundred years, from the 18th century to the depression of the 1930s.
The first book in the series, "Rogue Herries", was published 'in 1930, and Hugh Walpole reckoned that "it was the most important book of my life so far". The three sequels, "Judith Paris", "The Fortress" and "Vanessa", followed annually, and each one was duly showered with critical accolades.
Following the completion of the Herries Chronicles Walpole planned to enlarge it with the addition of four more novels. The plan was to begin with an Elizabethan Herries, and then continue the family saga up to the start of "Rogue Herries". In his diaries, Hugh Walpole even planned six later novels which would continue the history beyond the 1930s.
In reality, he wrote the first in the new series, which was published in 1940 under the title "The Bright Pavilions", but only managed to complete half of the next novel, "Katherine Christian", before his untimely death.
Walpole uses nearby Uldale as the location for David Herries farmhouse. He would walk around Borrowdale and Uldale looking for the right place for the buildings, characters and events he had in his mind. Walpole’s characters were set in different historical periods including the Jacobite uprising in 1745 and the capture of Carlisle.
Hugh Walpole quote on Uldale:
''You and I have this country in our blood. You don't know what that means now, but you will one day. Everything you ever do will be affected by this country, and however far you travel you'll never find any other country so beautiful nor any other that's in your bones as this one is. You'll come back to it. Be sure of that.''
Legend: Overwater Hall, now a hotel, was built in 1811 and purchased by a Mr. Gillbanks who made himself a fortune and a marriage in Jamaica. Unfortunately he also dallied with a poor Jamaican woman, who followed him to Overwater Hall when he returned. He took her secretly out to the middle of the tarn and threw her overboard and as she clung to the boat, he ruthlessly chopped off her arms. His secret was not discovered during his lifetime, but it seems the girl's armless ghost has been seen on numerous occasions, especially at New Year and particularly in Room 3 of the hotel. The severed arm of the Jamaican woman is said to prevent ice forming on the tarn - as the temperature drops, the arm punches upwards and breaks apart any frozen water.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Cbfg, pbirerq jvgu fgbar.