Rusland

Ransome and the scattered valley

In a quiet corner of the churchyard at St Paul's, Rusland, lies Arthur Ransome, who wrote "Swallows and Amazons" and eleven sequels, alongside his wife Evgenia. The books have taught generations of children to sail, camp and explore, and the Coniston Water landscape that inspired them is a few miles west. Ransome could have been buried anywhere in the Lakes. He chose here, which tells you something about the valley.

St Paul's itself was built in 1745 and largely rebuilt in 1868. It sits in an agricultural valley scattered rather than clustered — Rusland is less a village than a stretch of the map with a name.

No amenities, woodland in abundance

There is no pub in Rusland. The nearest is The White Hart at Bouth, two miles off, or you carry on to Haverthwaite. There are no shops in the valley either. If you are staying here, you bring what you need.

What Rusland has instead is woodland. The valley runs between Coniston Water to the west and Windermere to the east, densely wooded, and the floor is a mosaic of oak woodland, hay meadows, mosses, tarns, fens, upland moor and lowland raised bog. It is one of the most biodiverse valley landscapes in the Lake District, and one of the least disturbed. It is also one of the least visited parts of the National Park, which follows from the roads.

Narrow lanes and two levels of walking

You reach it by minor lanes from Ulverston or Haverthwaite, very narrow ones. No railway, no regular bus. That is most of why it stays quiet.

The walking divides in two. On the valley floor you go through coppice woodland, past the mosses and tarns and meadows, some of the least disturbed woodland in the southern Lake District. Climb onto Rusland Heights, the moorland above, and the views open out wide over the Furness area.

How coppice shaped the woods

The woods are worked land, not wild. From the twelfth century until the Dissolution in 1537 this was Furness Abbey's lordship, and the broadleaved woodland was managed as coppice for charcoal, feeding the iron smelting furnaces, from the medieval period right into the twentieth century. The rich patchwork of habitats that survives now is not accident but the legacy of centuries of cutting and regrowth — the same trees felled and left to grow back, over and over, until the cutting shaped the wood.

It makes the place quietly deceptive. What looks like ancient forest is a thing people made and then walked away from, and the mosses and meadows and tarns filled in behind them. You would not know any of it standing on the valley floor. You would just think it was very old and very still.

A final return to Ransome

Ransome spent his life looking for the right stretch of Lake District. He is still here, in the corner of it, a few miles from the water that put the maps and the sailing dinghies into a century of children's heads.