Aira Force, the waterfall that draws walkers down from the Ullswater shore near Lyulph's Tower, carries one of the Lake District's more romantic legends, and unusually for a story of this kind, its origin can be traced with real precision. In 1799, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were staying near the tower when the painter John Glover, also a guest there at the time, told them he had once been woken in the night by a woman's shriek. The explanation, when it came, was entirely ordinary: an occupant of the house who walked in her sleep. Wordsworth took that small, undramatic anecdote and, setting it against an Arthurian backdrop entirely of his own invention, built it into his 1835 poem The Somnambulist.
In the poem, Lady Emma lives at the tower, engaged to a knight, Sir Eglamore, who leaves on campaign and does not come back. Distraught, she begins sleepwalking from the tower down to the force at night, drawn back again and again to the water. On the single night Eglamore finally does return, he finds her walking in her sleep beside the falls; reaching out, he touches her, she wakes with a start at his touch, loses her footing, and falls to her death in the water she had walked to so many times before.
The tale is often retold locally as though it were age-old tradition, a legend stretching back to Arthurian Britain itself, but its real history is considerably more recent and considerably better documented: a poet's literary invention, built in 1835 on a single anecdote about an ordinary sleepwalker, and its Arthurian dressing was Wordsworth's own addition rather than anything inherited from earlier folklore. It is recorded here honestly as Romantic-era literary folklore, a beautiful and genuinely moving story, but one whose roots lie in a poem rather than in any earlier tradition of the place.
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