Swim Circle

Bleaberry tarn, Buttermere 1st December

After a considerable gap we are underway again – but it’s necessary to adjust to a new situation. Health problems have beset both of us but for me it means I won’t be able to swim until it gets warmer again. So the swims are down to Paul to do on his own while I will do what? That was a question we needed to resolve – how the new balance of involvement would work.

At once when we set off from Buttermere the feeling of being ‘back on the trail’ lifted us as we walked across recently flooded tracks to woods in the wintry light. Once in the woods we ascended steeply to the concealed hanging body of water above. We caught no glimpse of it until we stood on its very edge.

Having so thouroughly engaged in the performance/swim on previous trips, I now had the chance to observe ‘from a distance’. So as Paul got ready to enter the tarn, I climbed on up to a shoulder high above to get a veiw of the whole show – minute figure, tarn and the big picture beyond.

It was far more awesome than I had anticipated – to see this (now) tiny, fragile figure, launch into the lake and begin to paddle across the surface, making painfully slow progress, surrounded by immense arms of rock and more distant snowy summits. It was easy to see it in heroic proportions: ‘ humanity dwarfed by the forces of nature defiantly pressing on’ – a Turner painting of the sublime come alive.

And for me the conflicting desire to be both part of that performance, that art, and yet also to simultaneously witness it – the perennial conflict of how to be inside the adventure and to see it from the outside – one or the other not both.

Was my new role to be solely a witness?

I hastened down the hill to reengage in the performance.

Richard

Bleaberry Tarn 30^th November 2009

After delays in the project caused by periods of sickness for both Richard and I, followed by the Cumbria flooding, we finally made it out to Buttermere for the ascent to Bleaberry Tarn.

Last year, during our Swimming Home project, we had seen the fold of the high ridge that holds Bleaberry Tarn high above the surface of Buttermere. We had imagined it dark and cold – unforgiving in its north-eastern aspect. It was then that we decided to swim this tarn and now, finally, we were climbing the 45 degree zigzag path that kicks upwards from a corner of Buttermere where two men watched a third operating a small digger removing stones and flood debris washed into the outflow towards Crummock Water.

We started the climb at midday. At last a clear bright but cold day after what seemed like months of rain. The sun was already past its highest point, scarcely cutting much of an arc in the sky with a full moon hot on its heels. The snow-clad tops were electric in the clear sunlight, although our entire walk up was in the shade of the peaks to the south.

Above the tree line, we looked round and could take in the whole of Buttermere and Crummock Water below with snow tipped Grasmoor straddling above them timelessly.

I had been thinking about swimming in Bleaberry Tarn for over a year and it had gained epic proportions in my mind, yet, on coming face to face with it, it was both a surprise and a delight. It was smaller than anticipated despite having seen it on maps and on Google Earth and not as bleak and unforgiving as imagined, but sitting snugly below Red Pike, almost welcoming.

The air temperature was dropping fast and the water in the shallows barely 5 Celsius, the deeper water even colder. But the water, though cold when swimming, was so clean it was invigorating to drink.

On the ascent, Richard and I had continued developing our ideas for a public art application we intend to make in the New Year – the energy from this stage of the Swim Circle project feeding ideas for hopefully our next.

I planted a post with a stone from Greendale Tarn into the almost frozen ground by the side of the tarn and took a film of the water’s surface. As we started to walk away, two honking ravens flew back into the amphitheatre to reclaim their territory.

Paul