What a fabulous autumn it has been with nature’s colours truly magnificent.
A 20 minute walk from where I live along a farm lane, across a field and up into the woods brings you to Lake Gourmire, a natural lake formed as a result of glacial action during the last ice age. Surrounded by trees and sheltering beneath the cliffs of Sutton Bank it is also a place of legends and stories.
Supposedly there is a lost village in its bottomless depths and a hidden undercurrent which once deposited a witch into a well some 9 miles away and a goose 12 miles away completely stripped of its feathers……
And then there’s the story of the local knight and the white horse.
The knight coveted the white arab mare of the Abbot of Rievaulx and one evening came across the abbot in an Inn. He asked the abbot to swap horses so he could tend a dying farmer and the two rode off. But the knight could not control the white horse and it bolted as if the very devil was after him taking horse and rider over the edge of the escarpment and into the lake. As he plunged to his doom the knight heard a mocking laugh and twisting round saw that the abbot was suddenly transformed into the devil himself.
Whether you believe the tale or not there is no disputing the family of swans currently residing there. Usually they are at the far side of the lake and when you walk round they are…at the far side of the lake! Today the swans were at my side of the lake so I followed them. Most of the time they were feeding, heads down, bottoms up in the air.
It certainly amused the ducks, they were cackling away like dirty old men laughing at a rude joke.
A Shimmering of Northern Light 