The yew tree in the churchyard of St Martin's is about 1,300 years old, which makes it one of the oldest living things in the Lake District and considerably older than the church it stands beside. St Martin's — the Old Church — was first recorded here in 1220, though the building you see went up in the late sixteenth century. Its roof was replaced in 1882, after a storm violent enough to take the old one off.
This is a valley of fewer than fifty permanent residents, reached by a single-track road that climbs over the Martindale Hause and then stops. There is no through road. There is no pub, no shop, and no bus. What Martindale has instead is red deer.
They have been here a long time. The Nab, the high ground around Martindale Common, has been a deer park for over 800 years — the last surviving medieval deer park in the Lake District, and home to the only truly wild red deer herd in the region. They roam the open fell freely. You do not go looking for them so much as notice, at some point on a walk, that they are there.
The road delivers you first to St Peter's, the New Church, built in 1880 higher up the valley. It has five south windows of modern stained glass by Jane Gray, and among them a memorial to the officers and men of HMS Glorious. Glorious was a Royal Navy aircraft carrier sunk by the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau off the Norwegian coast on 8 June 1940, with over 1,500 men lost — one of the worst naval disasters of the war. It is a large thing to find commemorated in a small church at the end of a dead-end valley, and the ship had local connections.
Behind St Peter's rises Hallin Fell, 388 metres and steep, one of Wainwright's Outlying Fells. It is a short climb for the view it returns: the whole length of Ullswater laid out below you. If you do one walk here, do that one.
The longer day is the Martindale Skyline, a 16-kilometre circuit with a thousand metres of ascent over Beda Fell, Steel Knotts and the surrounding tops — a classic eastern Lake District ridge walk, and quieter than most because getting here takes effort.
Getting here does take effort. There is no railway. The single-track road runs in from Howtown on the eastern shore of Ullswater, and the nearest thing to public transport is the Ullswater Steamers, which call at Howtown pier two miles off, sailing from Pooley Bridge and Glenridding across the lake.
The yew has been standing in that churchyard since before the church, before the deer park, before the road. It will likely outlast the lot.
