You are high on the pass now, where the green road runs between crags and the wind never quite stops. All around you the mountainside is grey and scarred and glittering, and somewhere under your feet, deep in the rock, men are still cutting slate. This is Honister — the last working slate mine in England. Slate has been won from this pass since at least 1728, and probably long before the records begin.
What the miners take here is the prized green Westmorland slate, a fine, hard-wearing stone with a subtle sea-green cast that has roofed grand houses and clad famous buildings far beyond the Lake District. Through nearly three centuries the trade rose and fell, boomed and very nearly died, and yet the mine survives — the only place in England where slate is still quarried and split in the old country.
It sits astride Honister Pass, one of the steepest and most dramatic road-passes in Lakeland, ringed by high fells. For the walker on the long crossing of England, the mine is a startling thing to meet up here: raw industry set in wild mountain grandeur, human graft written straight into the bones of the hills.
There is a bracing honesty to it, too — after the soft beauty of the lakes, here is a mountain that people have worked, argued with, and made a hard living from for three hundred years, and are working still. Here is what to look for. First, the great fans of slate spoil that spill down the fellsides, loose grey scree of broken stone tipped over generations, still shifting and clinking underfoot.
Second, the mine buildings and the old inclines — the tracks and winding gear that once hauled the wagons up and down the mountain, some of it working still. Third, the pass itself: stand and feel how the land pinches to a high, narrow saddle, with the road falling away steeply on either side into the dales below.
Fourth, look for the thin steel cables and rungs of the via ferrata, the cliff-edge climbing route that lets visitors clip on and cross the sheer rock face where miners once worked without a rope. Fifth, lift your eyes to the encircling summits — Fleetwith Pike close at hand, Dale Head and the ridges beyond — and understand that everything you see was shaped first by ice, and then reshaped by the pick and the blast.
Watch, too, for the visitor tours heading down into the floodlit underground workings, where the mountain has been hollowed into a maze of dripping tunnels and vast dark chambers. Think, for a moment, of the men who made this place. Splitting slate is a craft of the hand and the eye, learned over years.
A skilled river takes a block straight from the mountain and, with a broad chisel and a wooden mallet, coaxes it apart along its natural grain into leaf after thin, flat leaf, each one true and even. Too heavy a blow and the stone shatters and is wasted; too light and it will not part.
Generation after generation of Lakeland families made their living up here in the cold and the damp, riving and dressing stone that would go out to roof the world, while they lived plain lives in the valleys below. When you next see a green slate roof, you may think of Honister. From here the Coast to Coast leaves the high pass and drops back into softer, wilder country.
Ahead lies Ennerdale Water, the most remote and untamed of all the Lakeland lakes — no road along its shore, no village on its banks, only the mountains leaning over the water. Pull your collar up, take the pass steadily, and go carefully on the loose ground. Walk safe.
