It is a wildly inconvenient moment to develop vertigo. I crouch, paralysed, clinging onto some cold brown heather growing out of the turf beside me, on a narrow ledge-like path that seems to be right on the edge of a sheer abyss hundreds of feet up – my head is definitely swimming.
How could this place have inspired so much sublime poetry, so many lovingly written guides? How did such a landscape change from being regarded as stern and harsh up to the eighteenth century to being an area now renowned the world over for its subtle charm and beauty? And how can this be the place that suddenly became the totemic destination for so many millions of post-war walkers? If I look down, I can see not merely the steep gully stretching beneath me but also, if I turn my head a little, a distant lake and some fields that seem extraordinarily far down. It is like looking out of an aeroplane window; the prospect is one of mountain tops and deep, deep valleys with tiny wriggling roads and speck-like cars. I had never quite expected this from the Lake District. You hear of such things in Scotland, but here? The mountain whose side I seem to be clinging to is near Haystacks, which lies behind the high ground of Honister Pass, near Derwent Water.
More vexingly, this was one of the favourite spots of Alfred Wainwright. I try to get a grip of myself, and continue to clamber up a narrow, slate path that is moist with last night’s sleet, while imagining the disdain that Wainwright would have felt for me. A little further up this slippy, unsteady path, with that vertiginous drop just one step to my right side, I now realise that I am one of these walkers that you read about; the ones who think every landscape, every path, is feasible, and available. Wainwright knew better; he knew that there were days when these hills could kill the unwary.
In 1930, Alfred Wainwright was a young clerk, gangling and ginger-haired, working in the Municipal Treasury office of Blackburn Town Council. The air of this town was dense with factory chimney smoke. Every day, in the soporific routine of the office, Wainwright and his young colleagues would intersperse poring over accounting figures with discussions about the girls that they ‘most wanted to give it to.’ Aged twenty-three, Wainwright and his cousin, Eric Beardsall, decided it was time for a hiking holiday. He had never before been to the Lake District. The first goal was Orrest Head. ‘It was a moment of magic,’ wrote Wainwright in his autobiography,
a revelation so unexpected that I stood transfixed, unable to believe my eyes. I saw mountain ranges, one after another, the nearer starkly etched, those beyond fading into the blue distance. Rich woodlands, emerald pastures and the shimmering waters of the lake below added to a pageant of loveliness, a glorious panorama that held me enthralled … There were no big factories and tall chimneys and crowded tenements to disfigure a scene of supreme beauty, and there was a profound stillness and tranquillity. There was no sound other than the singing of larks overhead.1
Ten years later, in 1941, now married to Ruth and with one child, the Wainwright family moved to Kendal, where he worked at the Borough Council, in a senior accounting position. By 1952 – at the age of forty-five – he embarked upon writing and illustrating the Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells, books that would confer upon him a form of immortality. They were, and are still, adored by countless readers.
To pick up one of these volumes now is to marvel not only at exquisite artistry and vivid, honest prose, but also at the sheer, supernatural levels of care and patience that must have gone into their production. Each of the seven books in this sequence – hardbacked, pocket-sized – contain carefully handwritten text, laid out around detailed contour maps and extraordinaily evocative and accurate drawings of each of the mountains and lakes. Book Seven contains a perfectly illustrated ‘Ascent from Honister Pass’, the very path that I am currently paralysed upon. ‘This is a remarkably easy walk,’ remarks Wainwright blithely in that perfect handwritten print. ‘All the family will enjoy it, irrespective of age.’ It was also the case almost as soon as these books were first published that they were enjoyed by families, irrespective of age.
Wainwright’s name and the Lake District are now absolutely interchangeable. And now, as I am half standing, half crouching, on the edge of a mountain not far from Wainwright’s favourite spot, and where his ashes were scattered, I can’t help wondering both about the enthusiastic cult around his writing, and the cult of the Lake District itself. Why, among so many other dramatic landscapes in Britain, is this one so favoured by walkers? And why does Wainwright’s work continue to resonate? The answer to both questions is to do with an unconscious narrative of landscape: even for those who have never been, these dark fells have a similar hold on the rambler’s imagination as the fantastical landscape of Middle Earth. We are aware of these mountains and ice-cold lakes as a region, compact, delineated. There is a sense of apartness, unsulliedness and also, curiously, of a kind of innocence. Preposterous, really, when one considers the reality of the teeming lakes and gridlocked roads of summertime; but the Lake District and Wainwright now give the most resolutely un-poetic among us the licence to experience a tightly-regulated, highly linear form of romanticism. Walkers are encouraged to clamber around these bunched, towering, snaggletoothed crags; to sit like Wainwright upon their summits and survey patchwork views; but not to get soppy about them.
Enthralling and evocative though Wainwright’s deceptively simple prose and rich illustrations are, there was underneath it a rather more complex and strange character. It was not that he was solitary; he was always happy when his son Peter accompanied him on his treks through the Fells. And indeed he had good friends and an especial partiality for attractive women walkers with pretty bottoms. These excursions were to an extent the journeys of a man turning his back on a world that he did not much care for.
You might say: who can blame him? Surely anyone who had left the lung-coating air of Blackburn would be grateful for the music of running streams and the wide expanses of constantly changing sky? And who wouldn’t become rather indignant if they clambered all that way up a mountain only to be greeted with the sight of other walkers guzzling ‘crisps and fizzy pop’ (particular Wainwright dislikes) and paying scant attention to the glories of the views all around them? It went a little further than this though. Wainwright had a sort of acutely intelligent autodidact gruffness that in an unfavourable light might equally have been termed arrogance. This was coupled with an aversion to direct contact with strangers. He hated telephone calls, and would certainly never conduct any kind of business, even making appointments, over the phone. Even if the BBC wanted to make contact, they were advised that it was best to do so by letter. Domestically, he was more hopeless than any caricatured northern male. He did not know how to cook an egg; he did not know how to make tea. ‘Not knowing’, of course, means never having had to find out. But when you read his carefully calibrated prose, his evocations of the charms of Ennerdale, the soaring beauty of the view from Hay Stacks, even when you admire that calligraphy (a skill of his since schooldays), you wonder if a reluctance to engage with a wider world is a trait common to other walkers?
The fact that his wife Ruth was driven to leave him in the mid-1960s compounds the sense that here was a man who had allowed his love for the hills to crowd out everything else. Heartbreakingly, as they discussed what sort of modest financial settlement Alfred should make with her, Ruth suggested that she might pop back to the house one day a week to do his housework. The antipathy ran deep. In his later years, he donated quite a large amount of his income to animal welfare charities – always the clearest indicator of someone who has little time for humanity.
As Wainwright’s friend, Molly Lefebure, told his biographer Hunter Davies, ‘I gathered from stray remarks he had an empty married life. He was very lonely, communication with others could never have been easy for him. He felt secure with his pen, his typewriter and the knowledge that the postbox was between him and the recipient of his letters. At a safe distance, he could relax and let himself go.’ She went on, ‘what I didn’t like about him was his conceit, which got worse as he got older. I don’t mean as a person, but as a writer. He did begin to think he was God, or Moses, laying down the law on Lakeland, telling his readers, “You will be treading in my footsteps.”’2
Those footsteps! There has been continuing controversy in recent years concerning the popularity of those footsteps, and how they are now leading to erosion on Wainwright’s favourite footpaths. His supporters dismiss this, first with the assertion that a certain amount of erosion would be natural anyway, thanks to the sheep. Secondly, they argue, the sheer level of attention means a concomitant level of care. Even the path that I am clinging to uncertainly right now, my fingers numb from holding on to the cold, cold rock, is one of the most lovingly preserved and tended in the world.
Writing all seven volumes of the Pictorial Guides would, Wainwright calculated in 1952, take thirteen years to complete; miniaturist masterpieces. And he was exactly right. What he did not imagine was that these cleverly produced books would so very quickly become huge national hits, going through countless reprints, new editions and millions of copies. He was an amazing stickler for layout, and variety, and ensuring that each right-hand page ended with a full stop, so the reader would not have to turn over and lose focus on the illustration.
Fundamentally, what he did somehow was to snatch the Lake District away from the romanticism of William Wordsworth. If anything other than a helpless love of this part of the world linked the two men, it was a certain prickliness of temperament. As difficult and shirty as Wainwright could be, Wordsworth could be worse, and on a much more magisterial scale. Wordsworth had almost single-handedly drawn the public’s attention to the wild wonders of this previously neglected part of the country – through the soaring poetry of the Lyrical Ballads, written with Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1798, the epic Prelude of 1805, and not least, his own specially written guide book to the Lakes of 1810. Wordsworth some years after that bitterly complained about the coming of the railways that would bring hordes of visitors to the area. As the Kendal to Windermere line was prepared for construction in the 1840s, Wordsworth argued that urban holidaymakers would not benefit. ‘The good is not to be obtained by transferring … uneducated persons in large bodies to particular spots,’ he wrote. Instead, he argued, such folk would perhaps derive more from ‘little excursions with their wives and children among neighbouring fields, whither the whole of each family might stroll.’3
Wordsworth went rather further in a letter to the editor of The Morning Post in 1844, when work on the railway line had been suspended. He had been listening to the argument that standing in the way of the railway was a grave injustice to the labouring poor, denying them all that natural beauty. Wordsworth didn’t see it that way. ‘The directors of railway companies are always ready to devise or encourage entertainments for tempting the humbler classes to leave their homes,’ he wrote, ‘we should have wrestling matches, horse and boat races without number, and pot-houses and beer-houses … The injury which would thus be done to morals, both among this influx of strangers and the lower class of inhabitants, is obvious.’
I wonder what Wordsworth would think now? Obviously Coniston and Grasmere are not, as yet, renowned for their wrestling matches or beer houses; none the less, in the high summer, when the roads are clogged, and the waters of the lakes are filled with chugging boats, it is quite difficult to see what Wordsworth described as the area’s ‘character of seclusion and retirement.’ Glossy brochures in local Lake District hotels point not to walking routes, but to a whole mini-economy of specialised museums, art galleries, shopping centres, restaurants, and child-friendly indoor attractions, some centred around Beatrix Potter, another famous Lake District inhabitant. You can see why Wordsworth would yearn for purity; but is it reverse snobbery to point out that one poet’s purity is another family’s rain-trudging boredom? Is it so very awful that the local economy now seems so heavily geared towards the less active sort of visitor?
More than anyone else, William Wordsworth created the Lake District; by which I mean through the force of his language, he turned a landscape previously regarded as forbidding, gloomy and barren, into an airy and innocent realm where the spirit might find freedom. ‘Fair seed-time had my soul,’ as he was ‘wandering half the night among the Cliffs/And the smooth Hollows’. And even the charge of menace that these vast dark hills might be seen to carry is transformed by Wordsworth instead into a form of magical awe, such as the passage in The Prelude when his younger self iceskates beneath a darkening winter sky, and the noise finds an answering echo in those blackened hills that ‘tinkle like iron.’
Wordsworth was not the first walker to have noticed the singular beauty of this harsh land. In the mid to late-eighteenth century, the area became fashionable among the smarter cognoscenti. In 1768, the roaming Reverend William Gilpin, who had walked Snowdonia and other challenging regions, declared that the Lake District had ‘that kind of beauty which is agreeable in a picture.’ Some time before Wordsworth wrote his lines on Tintern Abbey, Gilpin had got there first; on another of his tours, he pointed out the pleasing aspects of that melancholy decay. While in Arthur Young’s Six Month’s Tour Through the North of England, published in 1770, Young enthused over the ‘sublime’ and the ‘picturesque’ aspects of the scenery. Thomas Gray was very detailed in his walks through Helvellyn, Grasmere and Ambleside, comparing dramatic rockfaces and waterfalls favourably with the Alps.
It was not merely the romantic poets who proclaimed this hitherto unacknowledged wild beauty; it was artists too. Among them were Gainsborough and Joseph Wright of Derby, vying to produce the most suitably dramatic canvases of such sublime landscapes, often in lurid lights of bronze or darkest blue, with wind-torn trees and violent gushing waters. So among the monied class, tourists started heading for the region, and even by the 1780s, there were pleasure boats ploughing up and down the lakes.
When Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wordsworth’s collaborator in the Lyrical Ballads of 1798, was living in Keswick, he viewed this procession of the well-off and the artistic with a faintly jaundiced eye, though he expressed the hope that they did at least keep ‘their hearts awake.’ According to writer Jenny Uglow, this fashionable parade of visitors slowed with the outbreak of the Napoleonic wars. However, it might equally be asserted that the same wars brought a halt to the continental Grand Tours, and thus left a lot of rich young British men travelling instead to the remote corners of the British Isles in search of the sublime. Whatever the case, it was really left to the nascent genius of Wordsworth to bring this particular branch of romanticism out to the full. Unlike the metaphysical poets, or the Georgians, the Romantics looked at nature in her extremity and found that such sublimity could awaken a soaring spirituality in the beholder; as long, that is, as that person was completely alive to what he was seeing. Wordsworth and Coleridge drew their deepest inspiration from the darkness of the hills.
Keats was another of the Romantics to find that rigorous walking helped one to appreciate the profounder beauties of nature. On one occasion, in 1818, he walked from Lancaster to Inverness, roughly a distance of 600 miles. Such a journey at that time was fraught with risks to health, and indeed Keats came down with throat ulcers. He managed to negotiate a wild landscape, with Highland roads that had only recently been set in order by the English military, with the help of their mapmaking department the Ordnance Survey.
Meanwhile, Wordsworth, having done so much to influence the spirit of the age, was later at pains to point out that a romantic sensibility was not necessarily a natural one, somehow implanted at birth. He was also extremely aware that the completeness of his own approach had been pioneering. He quoted the eighteenth-century poet John Gray’s dismayed reaction to the crags of Borrowdale: ‘Let us not speak of them, but look and pass on.’ He also quoted a woman with whom he had sometimes lodged at Keswick. ‘Bless me!’ she said, ‘folk are always talking about prospects: when I was young, there was never a thing neamed.’
Wordsworth was quite clear in his Guide to the Lakes on the point of how the humbler classes might look at things:
A vivid perception of romantic scenery is neither inherent in mankind, nor a necessary consequence of even a comprehensive education. It is benignly ordained that green fields, clear blue skies, running streams of pure water, rich groves and woods, orchards, and all the ordinary varieties of rural nature, should find an easy way to the affections of all men, and more or less so from early childhood till the senses are impaired by old age and the sources of mere earthly enjoyment have in a great measure failed. But a taste beyond this, however desirable it may be that everyone should possess it, is not to be implanted at once; it must be gradually developed both in nations and individuals. Rocks and mountains, torrents and widespread waters, and all those features of nature which go to the composition of such scenes as this part of England is distinguished for, cannot, in their finer relations to the human mind, be comprehended, or even very imperfectly conceived, without processes of culture or opportunities of observation in some degree habitual … it is noticeable what trifling conventional prepossessions will, in common minds, not only preclude pleasure from the sight of natural beauty, but will even turn it into an object of disgust.
Wordsworth seemed to be saying that only a very few could genuinely appreciate the soul of this place. So, 150 years after that, what was Alfred Wainwright saying? His approach right from the start was in many ways the very opposite of poetry. His aim was not to excavate soul or spirit from the hills, to imbue the mountains with a sense of brooding majesty. His aim was simply to capture, as exactly as he could, the myriad of details from rocks to flowers to glittering tarns that could trigger delight in others. Beauty there was, certainly, but it was beauty that he sought to catalogue, yard by yard, in intense, microscopic exactitude.
Many of Wainwright’s perceptive and sharply observed pen and ink illustrations in the guide are, in part, self-portraits; depicting him, back to the frame, seated against a boulder, and looking out over distant ranges of hills. These illustrations helped to persuade countless thousands of people to come to this part of the world, to drink in such views themselves. And now here I am. The start of my attempt to follow in Wainwright’s steps – to try to see this landscape as he saw it – is very different to the Wainwright image of the peace and stillness to be found at the tops of those hills.
You can get a bus to the village of Seatoller, just south of Derwent Water, and begin the walk from there. The village itself is not much more than a road and three or four whitewashed houses. Immediately the road points upwards, first through some trees, and a small gushing valley of icy fresh water and overhanging branches. Quite quickly, you are above the tree line, and the gradient isn’t letting up. Now you see a prospect before you of white and black hills; the white being last night’s snow. This is the road zigzagging up to the Honister Pass; now you are in a tree-less land of yellow-grey grass and mossy tussocks. You are reminded of all those eighteenth-century figures who gazed at views like this and shuddered with horror. But when you are swaddled in a waterproof and jeans and great thick boots, with great thick socks, the urge to climb as far as you can is extremely strong. There is a magnetic power in these hills; you cannot help but be drawn upwards.
This bleak road is often impassable in the winter. I am on it in early March and even now, at the cusp of spring, there has been sleet and hail that will not budge. I approach the entrance to the Honister slate mine, and the car park is adorned with fancy slate carvings and signs. Here too is a brilliantly sparse looking Youth Hostel – single storey, grey, the bunk beds visible through the windows. Unlike many others of its type, this construction seems a proper 1930s throwback; the basic comfort of shelter, and very little else.
It is here, as I leave the road and start climbing the stony path, that I am reminded forcibly that this is no uncharted wilderness I am heading into: both the tastefully carved wooden sign, pointing to Haystacks and Grey Garth, and the carefully constructed stone path itself, tell you that this route has been put here for your benefit. Still, I currently have this spot to myself, and this in itself sweeps away one of my Lake District preconceptions: that every path and every hill would be jammed with walkers, saying ‘good morning’ to one another.
The incline on the path at first is a little sharper than I expected, but there is the corresponding pleasure of hearing the slate stones beneath my feet grinding together. Soon I find that I have been climbing one side of a vast valley; the other side of it looms enormous and dark, scattered with flint. None of this seemed apparent from the road. But then I am over the first brow of this hill, and suddenly, everything is changed again. The valley behind has now disappeared from view. What lies ahead looks rather more rugged than anything I had expected from the Lake District.
There is the first sense of the unheimlich; really, what this amounts to is a gelid pool of water on the grey slate path; the water is milky, half frozen by the sleet. It also gathers in the hollows of brown moss and the darker slate around. Ahead lies more slate; further on is a rugged bothy of stone, with an unexpectedly ornamental front gate. The roof of this property is half off. No one can shelter here now, and it looks as though no one has done so for years.
A new, shallow valley presents itself, framed by looming peaks of bright white and jet black and brown. It is the angles that are a little unexpected; whereas most hills have their softer, rounder edges, here are perpendicular points of Gothic sharpness touching the sky, upright and somehow clustered, pressed together like the striations in the limestone beneath my feet. Around me, the lichen on the grey stones and vast boulders seems luminously green; a trick of the constantly changing light, perhaps, as the clouds swarm and bustle overhead. Then there is the apparent absence of any animal life. I have not seen a thing; not a hare, nor a bird. It is apparently just me up here, all alone. There has not even been the scaly flash of a newt in a tarn. At this point, I am standing on a sort of undulating stony plain, framed by these cathedral-like hills. The path ahead dips down into a hollow, through which rushes what is no doubt some of the freshest water in the world. Then the distant path climbs again, up a hill of dark brown, dotted with grey boulders.
Now the ascent is much easier, but the wind is maddening, chiefly because of its irregularity. For a few minutes, it will blast icily, steadily; but then disconcertingly it will stop and the cold air will be still and suddenly the ringing ears are able to pick up other noises, such as the faraway rush of falling water or even the occasional overhead military plane. The wind gusts gruffly again and there is a curious smell – could it possibly be the sea? There is a disconcerting hint in the scent of salt and (this really cannot be so) seaweed. Then the wind stops abruptly, and once again the silence is filled with a constant gurgling. I have now climbed to a further level, stonier yet, and the clouds above are moving with supernatural speed.
It is now that I approach a tarn. The surface riffles as the wind, without warning, starts blasting again. Apparently newts make their homes in the water up here, though as I get close to the water, I find the moss and heather that I am standing upon are already half submerged, and so it’s rather tricky to get closer for a proper look. In this shrewd wind, and with my footsteps in the sleet behind, I have no wish to get my feet wet. It would take them a very long time to warm up again. Onwards, across another tumbling stream, and here is where I seem to have entered a realm of optical illusion. The path that I see before me leads upwards once more – a trail of big, loose stones and coarse dark brown heather and turf, poking out of the wall of the hill. So I am upon it, and walk steadily upwards for a few hundred yards. Then I turn my head slightly from the path before me. And that is when the vertigo hits. Where exactly did that astounding, severe drop materialise from?
It is all fabulously unsettling. I climb a little further, my feet feeling for reassurance among large, moist stones, looking up at the dark crag rising above me. I try to reason it out. The path is perfectly wide enough to walk up without clinging pathetically to cold stones and unruly sprigs of heather. Just avoid looking to the right, that’s all. Of course, it is impossible not to see that vast valley, and the grey lake, so far below. Then the wind starts buffeting again. It feels aggressive. I think to myself, absurdly: ‘I bet Melvyn Bragg wouldn’t stop here.’ Then, after another shockingly strong gust, I give up. I have recalled the recent newspaper story about the man who fell off a hill and bounced pretty much all the way down. He survived, miraculously, with minor injuries. The indignity, though, must have been spectacular. That frustrated itch – when one curtails a walk – is extraordinary. You can almost feel it physically, at the back of your brain; that sense that turning back is wrong, and that one must simply press further and further forward. Even as I begin my crab-like descent of this steep path, I hesitate again, look back, and think: how can I leave this? How can I turn away without having seen what lies over the hill? It is the thread that pulls all walkers; that irrational need to see the valley beyond.
However, sweet reason wins. The minute I am back at that tarn, just a few hundred yards away, any sense of vertigo dissipates. I do notice, however, that I am lighter on my feet. The relief of getting off that ledge has added a literal spring to my step. And now there is intermittent sunshine, I can now see the most extraordinary thing happening to some of the slate on a hill in the distance. Before it was grey-black; now it is a deep sea green. The colour is mesmerising, all the more so for seeming illusory. Is it a trick of the Lakes light? As I draw closer, I see that this must be slate that has been hewn from the mine below and taken for whatever reason up the hill. That very dark green seems to give the stone an almost metaphysical depth. I could stand here and look at it all day. In fact, later on, back down in Keswick, I see a few of the local buildings have been constructed from this very slate. The colour has worn a little but it is no less arresting.
As I walk back, though, down through these damp, stony hollows, hemmed in by all those sharp spire peaks, I can see how this sort of landscape mirrored something in Alfred Wainwright’s soul. Fresh and open and beautiful though it is, there is something unyielding and intransigent in the landscape here, a lack of forgiveness.
At the turn of the last century, these parts were much favoured by the Oxbridge educated liberal intelligentsia – men such as Raymond Asquith and Herbert Samuel. They used the hills to play a human version of ‘hare and hounds’; in other words, they would hunt each other down. The game would involve serious climbs, and even more dramatic and fast-paced descents. I am not sure Wainwright would have looked kindly on tomfoolery of this sort. The land was there to be taken seriously, not to be used as a playground. ‘All I ask for, at the end,’ wrote Wainwright in 1966,
is a long, last resting place by the side of Innominate Tarn, on Haystacks, where the water gently laps the gravelly shore and the heather blooms and Pillar and Gable keep unfailing watch. A quiet place, a lonely place. I shall go to it, for the last time, and be carried: someone who knew me in life will take me there and empty me out of a little box and leave me there alone. And if you, dear reader, should get a bit of grit in your boot as you are crossing Haystacks in the years to come, please treat it with respect. It might be me.
Wainwright died in 1991. His remains have been crossed and recrossed countless times by countless walkers since. The area is, to many, a form of shrine.
Both Wainwright, and Wordsworth a century before him, could see the paradoxical results of their work. The secluded paths that had provided their inspiration were now sought out by countless others. In Wordsworth’s 1810 Guide to the Lakes, he ruefully reflected ‘It was well for the undisturbed pleasure of the Poet that he had no forebodings of the change which was soon to take place.’ This was the influx of walkers that he had unwittingly encouraged. He continued: ‘It might have been hoped that these words, indicating how much the charm of what was depended on what was not, would of themselves have preserved the ancient franchises of this and other kindred mountain retirements from trespass; or (shall I dare say?) would have secured scenes so consecrated from profanation’. But no, the vulgar travellers insisted upon coming. ‘The lakes had now become celebrated,’ he added, ‘visitors flocked hither from all parts of England; the fancies of some were smitten so deeply that they became settlers; and the Islands of Derwent-Water and Windermere, as they offered the strongest temptation, were the first places seized upon, and were instantly defaced by the intrusion’.
Today’s walkers in the Lake District might hear very precise echoes of this cry. Defacement and intrusion are the accusations that have been ceaselessly thrown at ramblers. Many ramblers might stop to consider that even if Wordsworth’s anguish was primarily aesthetic, it was still obviously coloured by a form of snobbery. There are also passages in his Guide which again amusingly mirror modern day stances. Whereas many hillwalkers today loathe the spectacle of vast white windfarms, the huge blades scything circles through highland air, so the poet was infuriated by another white addition to the landscape, new to his generation: that of the whitewashed cottage.
These are now so much part of the Lakeland and northern landscape that it is possible you have never even especially noticed their whiteness before. From a distance, a whitewashed cottage nestling at the base of a vast green hill seems as organic and perfectly placed as the white specks of sheep wandering all over the grass. This, however, is not how Wordsworth saw it:
The objections to white, as a colour, in large spots or masses in landscape, especially in a mountainous country, are insurmountable … In Nature, pure white is scarcely ever found but in small objects, such as flowers: or in those which are transitory, as the clouds, foam of rivers, and snow … white destroys the gradations of distance … Five or six white houses, scattered over a valley, by their obtrusiveness, dot the surface and divide it into triangles, or other mathematical figures, haunting the eye, and disturbing that repose which might otherwise be perfect … it is after sunset, at the coming on of twilight, that white objects are most to be complained of. The solemnity and quietness of Nature at that time are always marred, and often destroyed by them.4
Yet for all his complaints, these sorts of passages also serve as a useful illustration of just how little the Lakes have changed, in essence, since his time. The white that Wordsworth would find most jarring now, I suspect, is the white of the fat contrails left crisscrossed over the pure blue sky by jumbo jets flying silently 24,000 feet above. Go just a few miles to the west, though, and we have another outbreak of whiteness in the landscape, and I am not at all sure how Wordsworth might have reacted to it: this is in the form of the nuclear power station Sellafield, first known as Windscale when it opened in the 1940s. Parts of this colossal coastal structure were pure white, and silver, and would have contrasted strongly with the dark green of the Irish Sea. Then, just a few miles to the east, there is that other great standby of post-war Britain: the motorway.
The curious thing about the writings of Alfred Wainwright is that the land he loved was – at the very time he was popularising it for millions – bordered by these two vast symbols of jet-age modernity. The motorway has enabled millions of people, inspired by Wainwright’s writing, to drive to the Lake District with the greatest ease, thus ensuring in the summer months that very few may wander lonely. And the looming bulk of Sellafield is that other great totem from the post-war years: the belief when it was built that science and technology – the ability to wrestle with the atom – pointed to a new future. Our lives would be cleaner, brighter, with less manual labour, more leisure hours – and indeed, more time to explore newly appreciated areas such as the Lakes.
It might be suggested – as Wainwright’s books started appearing during a time of Conservative government – that the political complexion of a lot of walkers had transformed by the mid 1950s. Instead of being broadly socialist in outlook, eager both for fresh air and a sense of reclaiming the land, many new walkers had a measure of affluence; among them would have been the middle classes who had voted for Attlee in 1945 in their moment of radicalism, but then began reaping the huge upswing in material wealth that came during this time.
The Lake District was set aside as a National Park in 1951; then came the essentially conservative writings of Wainwright, which involved free movement across a landscape, no conflict with landed interests, and the slightly ironic commodification of the entire area. The Lake District became a place, in a sense, for walkers to consume, as they would consume anything else. In contrast to the struggles of Tom Stephenson and the Kinder Scout pioneers, Wainwright’s eager readers did not want to push for more access, so much as to simply enjoy a land that seemed completely open already. In doing so, and in writing these books, Wainwright has now conferred upon the Lakes an entire industry.
We can’t talk about Wordsworth and Wainwright without giving at least a fleeting acknowledgement to Withnail. In the cult comedy film Withnail and I (1986), set in 1969, the eponymous out-of-work actor and his friend Marwood escape London and go to a cottage in the Lake District owned by Withnail’s Uncle Monty. Almost instantly their notion of a tranquil retreat from druggy urban squalor is destroyed by a fresh, rural nightmare. The locals are grim, the countryside is wet, the men are faced with the prospect of killing a chicken to eat. Even when they have done so, things aren’t straightforward. ‘Shouldn’t it be balder?’ enquires Withnail, looking at the badly plucked bird. The local pub is frequented by a sinister poacher with an eel down his trousers, Marwood is cornered by a ‘randy’ bull and Withnail wails ‘we’ve gone on holiday by mistake!’
The film had tremendous resonance among many committed townies: the farmer, his leg tied up in polythene; the glowering distrust on both sides; the unwritten rules of the country. Unlike Wainwright and Wordsworth, Withnail makes this landscape alien and hostile, and inimical to ideas of civilisation. It is very much a town-dweller’s view of the countryside and, what is more, a countryside that is emphatically not there for the convenience of tourists. The unexpected arrival of Uncle Monty brings a whole new nightmare for Marwood: ‘I mean to have you, boy – even if it be burglary’. Though it seems that, otherwise, the predatory Monty is actually rather at home among the lakes. There is only one moment of relative rural tranquillity: when Marwood takes off alone to explore, and finds himself gazing down on Ullswater. He smiles gently. He has found a moment of genuine peace. Later on, after the village pub chucking out time, and in the darkness, Withnail desecrates this view with a repeated holler of ‘Bastards!’ across the valley. The fundamental comic point is that it is a dreadful error for town-dwellers to think that they can ‘rejuvenate’, as Marwood puts it, in the country. Earlier in the film, by London Zoo, Withnail exclaims ‘What’s the point of the country? I’m in a park and I’m still half-dead.’
Perhaps a little ironically, one of the film’s greatest lines – when a drunken Withnail, in a village tearoom, demands ‘We want the finest wines available to humanity. And we want them here, and we want them now!’ – has become a self-fulfilling prophecy: the Lake District is these days something of a foodie paradise, with no shortage either of expensive vintages or venison in jus. Again, it is possible to see the ghosts of both Wordsworth and Wainwright pursing their lips.
The clouds are still gliding fast across the sky and I am grateful for my big black cagoule. There are some other walkers now, over the far side of the slope, picking their way up the path through the heather. They are wearing bright red, high-visibility jackets, as indeed were so many of the walkers around the lake. By contrast, I am wearing what might be described as a low-visibility jacket. Why would walkers want to be quite so conspicuous against the landscape? And how did this fashion sub-genre – walking gear – develop?