Coledale Beck is a minor

river A river is a natural flowing watercourse, usually freshwater, flowing towards an ocean, sea, lake or another river. In some cases, a river flows into the ground and becomes dry at the end of its course without reaching another body of wate ...

running through

Cumbria Cumbria ( ) is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in North West England, bordering Scotland. The county and Cumbria County Council, its local government, came into existence in 1974 after the passage of the Local Government Act 1972. Cumb ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

Course

The beck rises north east of

Eel Crag Crag Hill is a mountain in the North Western part of the English Lake District. It was formerly known as Eel Crag; however, the Ordnance Survey now marks Eel Crag as referring to the northern crags of the fell. It is not to be confused with an ...

, where Pudding Beck meets Birkthwaite Beck. From there, Coledale Beck runs east north east through Coledale, between

Grisedale Pike Grisedale Pike is a fell in the Lake District, Cumbria, England, situated west of the town of Keswick in the north-western sector of the national park. At a height of 791 m (2593 feet) it is the 40th-highest Wainwright in th ...

and

Causey Pike Causey Pike is a fell in the English Lake District. It is situated in the Newlands Valley, 5 km south-west of the town of Keswick. Even though it has a modest height of 637 metres (2,090 ft) it is one of the most distinctive fel ...

. Emerging from the valley, the beck runs through the

village A village is a clustered human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet but smaller than a town (although the word is often used to describe both hamlets and smaller towns), with a population typically ranging from a few hundred to ...

Braithwaite Braithwaite is a village in the northern Lake District, in Cumbria, England. Historically in Cumberland, it lies just to the west of Keswick and to the east of the Grisedale Pike ridge, in the Borough of Allerdale. It forms part of the civ ...

, before feeding

Newlands Beck Newlands Beck is a minor river of Cumbria in England. The beck rises on Dale Head and flows northwards through the picturesque Newlands Valley, past the settlement of Little Town and between Braithwaite and Portinscale before flowing into Basse ...

, on the way picking up Barrow Gill (running north from Barrow). Wainwright singled out the latter stream for its exceptional ravine, which he described as “a gorge of amazing proportions for so slender a stream and deeper even than Piers Gill”.

Literary associations

David Wright David Allen Wright (born December 20, 1982) is an American former professional baseball third baseman who played his entire 14-year Major League Baseball (MLB) career for the New York Mets. He was drafted by the Mets in 2001 MLB draft and made ...

in his poem ‘Storm’ (about the exceptional cloudburst of 1966) wrote of the Beck how “I didn’t expect the animal under our bridge...the livid rapid/ That lipped the bank and, reared on hind legs, battered/ the stone arch, hurtling missiles…. The beck had its dander up, and wonderfully….”.N Nicholson ed., ''The Lake District'' (Penguin 1978) p. 154

References

Rivers of Cumbria 2Coledale {{England-river-stub