The ordinary distance of which mule transport is capable is 20 to 25 miles a day, carrying 160lbs and the saddle.
The War Office, Animal Management (London, 1923)
IT WAS LATE afternoon by the time we got back to Threlkeld. The October sun was going down over Derwent Water. From our position in the Northern Fells, we could look south across the whole of the Lake District. Line upon line of summit ranges receded away from us, all with different shades and densities from the way the light was falling on them, like the soft blurrings of a Japanese watercolour. I thought of Alice Oswald’s wonderful lines about how ‘you can feel by instinct in the distance / the bigger mountains hidden by the mountains, / like intentions among suggestions’.
In the foreground, the much softer green of the fields and the forest fell away from the skyline where, as if pencilled in, a thin file of trees strode across the horizon.
It was the sort of view that gave a man a thirst. We were in the right place. The Horse and Farrier was an old drovers’ pub in Threlkeld that still had a dismounting block outside for getting off a horse. I was only sorry that I was leading not riding Jethro – although he would not have taken kindly to having me aboard; to swing off a mule and enter a pub would have been quite an entrance.
And I would also have had an audience. At 4.30, so the earliest of ‘early hours’ by any standards, the large, long pub was already packed.
‘Well,’ said Jasper as he stood at the bar in his best Irish manner, ‘they have an excuse to be drinking. They’ve been up on the fells like us. And once it starts getting dark in autumn, there’s nothing to do but drink.
‘And we’ve all started early, come to that,’ he added. ‘If you start at first light, you should end at first light.’
This was a cue. I got the drinks in, buying a pint of ‘Sneck Lifter’ for myself, partly on the grounds it was the strongest and darkest beer they had, partly beguiled by the absurd name. Jasper thought it had something to do with the latch on a gate: ‘you know, the type you pull up from above’. But with the benefit of Google, I discovered that ‘sneck lifter’ was Cumbrian dialect for ‘one who goes from door to door, first footing, on New Year’s Eve. A burglar or ghost’. How did pub arguments ever get settled before the internet and mobile phones? Either by the landlord or a fight.
The etymology of ‘sneck lifter’ resolved, we got to talking with the girl behind the bar, as you do. Although she was more interested in Jethro than us; he had already attracted a gaggle of admirers outside by the horse box.
As everywhere in Britain, the bar conversation soon turned to property and the difficulties of finding any on a lower wage.
‘A lot of local flats and cottages have local occupancy clauses – both for buying and renting,’ the barmaid told us. ‘Which at least keeps the prices down. But it’s a real problem. When I started working at the pub, I had to travel for miles each day to get here.’
The first pint of Sneck Lifter had inspired me, along with our meeting with Sarah the previous day.
‘Why don’t you buy our horse box when we’ve finished the journey and convert it? You could just keep it outside the pub. A lot cheaper to live in. There’s plenty of space inside a five-and-a-half ton lorry. And it’s easily big enough inside to take a wood-burning stove.’
Converting the Dodge was something Jasper and I had already discussed. A garage owner near Bassenthwaite had taken one look when we’d driven up in all the van’s mock-Tudor glory and suggested we had not realised its potential. And that he was the man who could. I had to explain that we needed it to get a mule across England.
But ever since, I had been imagining the van as a fine writer’s mobile shed, with its fold-down ramp at the back for unloading horses – or in our case, a solitary mule. You could drive up somewhere with a view, lower the ramp and reveal a writer’s desk permanently installed in the back of the lorry – from which you would have no excuse but to describe the landscape in all its glory. Indeed, so integral could it be to a travel writer’s craft that I could probably put it down against tax.
‘Depends if you’d throw in the mule as well?’ asked the barmaid, and laughed.
What was it about women and mules? Everywhere we went, Jethro got a horde of adoring female admirers, both equine and human. Whereas Jasper and I would be lucky to get a second glance.
We went to sit by the fire with Jeff and nurse our drinks. As I looked into the flames, lulled by another Sneck Lifter, I remembered that I had been here before. And that this was one of those rings of memory I wanted to reclaim.
Thirty years ago, I had come here with a friend called Fred who was a blacksmith. We had bought some meat pies from the butcher in Keswick and climbed Blencathra so fast that the pies were still warm when we ate them on the summit. Just as now, we had drunk at the Horse and Farrier when we came down, although in those days there was little food on offer. All the barman could suggest was a Ploughman’s lunch, the ubiquitous default option.
‘What sort of cheese comes with it?’ I had asked, knowing that a Ploughman’s could appear in all shapes and sizes, some of them shrink-wrapped and unappetising.
The barman looked puzzled by this question. ‘Not sure I can tell you. All I know is that one of the cheeses is red and the other one yellow.’
We were in the Lake District on a quixotic mission: to buy up a blacksmith’s forge so Fred could transport it lock, stock and anvil back down to Bristol, where he and I were then living. Fred was my age, in his twenties, and about to be married to my cousin Rachel.
He was an American who I had become fond of, not least for the way in which he had transformed himself from his East Coast preppie origins into a blacksmith working in England. I liked a man with a true obsession. And Fred had become captivated by metal. He showed me round the wrought ironwork galleries at the Victoria & Albert Museum. When we went for country walks in the Mendips, where he had his first forge, he deplored the understandable tendency of farmers to go for cheap cast-iron gates instead of properly forged blacksmith’s ones. Increasingly, his business came from artisan pieces for interior design rather than agricultural use: fire-tool implements, club fenders and wrought-iron brackets.
One thing Fred did have going for him was the perfect name for a blacksmith: Fred Brodnax. You could see the sparks flying off that surname as if it was hammered from the hearth.
Now he needed a bigger forge, so we were visiting some north-country smiths, who had maintained standards and a robust tradition of independence. At one of them, near Castle Barnard, a small boy called Ivan was being washed in the kitchen sink; none of this soft southern nonsense about a bath.
Fred found what he wanted at a blacksmith’s place near Thirlmere. Loading a whole forge into a van back then proved to be much harder work than getting Jethro into one today. In helping, I felt both noble and altruistic, unaccustomed emotions for me – and that I thoroughly deserved the pint of Theakston’s ‘Old Peculier’ he bought me at this same pub. But I was also envious of him for tapping into such an old tradition, with real tangible products.
This was the 1980s, not long after the end of the miners’ strike, so such work was becoming rarer. We were moving inexorably towards a service-driven economy.
It had been noticeable driving through County Durham, as we passed from one blacksmith’s workshop to another, how polarised the area was becoming – and that this polarisation often ran along old mine seams. Some villages had big, stone-built detached houses around the long wide village greens so characteristic of the North – houses much in demand from commuters to the big cities which lay within reach. Others had narrow, terraced houses lined right up against the main road; these communities were still recovering from the long attrition of the strike, and the heart had been ripped right out of them.
I had seen the same pattern emerging in a less extreme manner in counties further south, between ‘pretty’, desirable villages and more down-to-earth agricultural ones. It was a divide that has grown even wider over my lifetime, but one that has been little noticed.
The wave of affluence that began in the eighties has carried a large property-owning middle class into a comfortable lifestyle of shopping at Waitrose and holidaying abroad. It has left behind, meanwhile, a significant proportion of the population who that middle class rarely see, screened out in separate, undesirable villages and the sink estates at the back-end of decaying market towns: a benefits culture which they deplore, but seldom witness.
Britain’s service-based economy inevitably means cultural fragmentation; people working in small offices, or at home from computers. The internet has accelerated that process. It has become ever easier not to see how the other half lives: all of us with our heads down, on mobile phones or tablets; the couple with the second home in the country who have no idea what is happening in a village they may have adopted, but which has not adopted them.
Back in the eighties, this was still merely a glimmer, lost in the sparkle of what seemed like an entrepreneurial revolution – in the same way that politicians, with a wave of the hand, assumed the miners would all get new jobs in a world of bingo and silicon chips. One of the best British films of the 1980s, The Ploughman’s Lunch – so called because the dish is a marketing invention that has never been near any self-respecting ploughman, with either red or yellow cheese – brilliantly dissected the low dishonesty of that particular decade. There is a telling if didactic moment in Ian McEwan’s script when one of the characters remarks, ‘If we leave the remembering to historians then the struggle is already lost. Everyone must have a memory, everyone needs to be a historian. In this country, for example, we’re in danger of losing hard-won freedoms by dozing off into a perpetual present.’
While Fred drove back down south with the forge in his van, I headed over to Manchester to see friends who were, like me, trying to get careers going in film, in the buzz of the media. I found Manchester all sharp, padded-shoulder suits and attitude: ‘My Filofax is bigger than yours’; far more so than the slacker vibe of the laidback Bristol to which I was accustomed, or even London. Perhaps it was the brisk cold air that funnelled down the wide streets; the mercantile energies that have always fuelled Manchester. The old warehouse blocks had been scrubbed clean and colonised by post-production houses, and by the designer retail shops which we are now so used to, but back then were still as exotic as the bananas on the first ships in after the war.
The sales were on. I felt underdressed and found myself trying on a suit for the first time in years, persuading myself that I might need one for a job interview. This was pure self-deception. I had already learned enough about film to know that any work that came along would never come through such formal channels.
High-street retailers had just started experimenting with commissions for sales staff. Used to the bored inattention characteristic of the 1970s, when you almost had to take a ticket and wait before being served, I was an easy mark. Sharp Mancunian shop assistants were all over me with flattery and advice.
‘I’ve this one left in your size. Double-breasted. Italian. Perfect for you. Why don’t you try on the jacket first?’
A Cerruti suit, with soft blue and purple lines against the grey and made from linen. I knew it was crumpling already as soon as I looked at it; that the padded shoulders would qualify me for a role in Dallas or Dynasty; that it was as hopelessly impractical as the faux leopard-skin jacket I had bought in the heyday of punk.
But clothes can have a siren call. For years, the suit hung in my wardrobe as a reproach. Unworn, unloved. A blacksmith would never have bought it.
We stayed that night with Jeff at the house he shared with his partner Fiona in the Northern Fells. Fiona had several horses, so Jethro felt at home. In fact, like us, very comfortably at home, as Jeff and Fiona had lavished care and attention on accommodation for both humans and horses. Jethro had a comfortable pasture to himself, within sight of Fiona’s small herd, while Jasper and I enjoyed en-suite guest bedrooms in the beautifully converted farmhouse. Large picture windows gave sweeping views out to the fells.
This wasn’t quite the spartan lifestyle of tents and youth hostels I had originally envisaged for the trip, but I wasn’t complaining. There were plenty of hostels ahead anyway. Although would readers feel short-changed that we were not bivouacking on the open hillside? Any such readers could put up and shut up – while Jeff opened a bottle of his finest vintage.
Fiona was away on business; a shame, especially as everyone kept reminding us that she was one of the best cooks in the Lake District. Jeff was unable to boil an egg. Jasper took a muleteer’s view of food (‘anything will do’). He had already burned a pizza to a cinder: ‘Must be something funny with the oven.’ So cooking duties fell to me, happily, as I enjoyed both food and the kitchen.
While I concentrated on what Jasper and our mutual friend Chris Stewart described as ‘man food’ – in this case, sausages, mash and treacle pudding – Jeff spread his maps out on the kitchen table to get in my way. Having done the 214 Wainwrights several times, quite enough for one lifetime, he was now attempting all the mountains over 2,000 feet in Ireland, so needed Jasper’s local knowledge.
Jasper made the mistake of asking Jeff if he could see his collection of mountaineering books – mistake only in that I knew sausages would be burned and much wine consumed by the time we’d seen the entire collection. Jeff had been building it up for years, with one novel twist. Whereas most collectors wanted a copy signed by the author, Jeff tried to get his mountaineering books signed by every single member of an expedition. Given those members could live continents apart, this was a considerable undertaking. But the resulting ‘association copy’, as it was known in the book-dealing trade, had financial as well as memorabilia value – particularly if one of the mountaineers then died, on or off a mountain.
After dinner, we visited his local pub, the Old Crown in Hesket Newmarket. I suspected most of the regulars had signed books for Jeff. I’ve rarely seen such an assembly of mountaineering talent. Because the Northern Fells are less visited – and so cheaper – than the rest of the Lakes, many climbers have chosen to live there, including Chris Bonington and members of his various expeditions. Within short order of arriving, I found myself discussing Changabang, the remote ‘Shining Mountain’ I had seen near Nanda Devi. A white granite icicle along the Himalayan skyline, it is often described as one of the most beautiful peaks in the world. Few people in Britain have been there, and most of them seemed to be in the Old Crown that night.
Along with many of his neighbours, Jeff owned the pub – one reason, perhaps, why it was so full. There’s nothing like buying your own beer. In 2003, the Old Crown became Britain’s first co-operatively owned pub, with 150 supporters: the prototype for many others across the country as villages saw the brewery axe falling. I wondered if the initiative had something to do with the mountaineering ethos of teamwork. That, along with the mountaineering ethos of consuming unfeasibly large amounts of alcohol.
They had taken the self-supporting philosophy further by brewing their own beers – all named, as one might expect, after local summits. Ten thousand pints of the various Hesket Newmarket beers were sold a week, both in the Old Crown itself and to other outlets, an extremely respectable amount. One of the locals, Keith Bridges, gave me a tour of the brewery behind the pub so I could taste my way across the hilltops.
‘Black Sail’ was a dark stout made from chocolate malt, with ‘complex flavours of coffee and liquorice’ – a bit like the treacle pudding we had eaten for dinner. Whereas ‘Haystacks’ was a pale-coloured, zesty ale, ‘late hopped to give a hint of grapefruit’. I didn’t like to ask if the slight residue I noticed was to remind the drinker of Wainwright’s ashes.
Keith took me round ‘Blencathra’, ‘Skiddaw’, ‘Helvellyn Gold’ and ‘Great Cock-Up’, the provocatively named mountain outside Jeff’s window. The last beer I sampled was ‘Doris’ – which even I knew was not one of the Wainwrights. Apparently, she had been the mother-in-law of an earlier publican. It was their biggest seller.
Late that night when we got back, Jeff announced with a sheepish look that he had started collecting something else as well as mountaineering books, not entirely to Fiona’s pleasure. He led us out to what was not so much a shed as an air-conditioned storage facility. Behind a set of racing bicycles were rack upon rack of ice axes, from early wooden ones to modern aluminium models.
We murmured admiringly, as you should with any collection, and Jeff let us handle a few. They were easy things to fetishise. The older axes had long shafts, as their primary purpose, before the advent of crampons, was to cut steps into the ice. Modern ones were shorter and lighter, made from metal and with aggressively curved picks and adzes. Even the shafts were bent. A compromise had to be made with the pick as to whether you wanted to be good at ‘self-arresting’ – digging into the ice if you fell down a slope – or at climbing a steep ice wall.
‘You can easily tell the ones which are hot forged,’ said Jeff. I hadn’t a clue which ones were hot forged. Nor, I suspected, had Jasper. But we both nodded in agreement.
‘That way the manufacturers get a thinner, more accurate pick.’
Some of them had been signed by mountaineers for Jeff, just like his books; several were autographed by the great Joe Brown, one of the first men to set foot on the summit of Kanchenjunga.
‘You can pick them up on eBay,’ said Jeff. ‘Lots of antique ice axes going. Although they won’t be signed of course. Or as nice as some of the ones here. I’ve got a rival in Japan who keeps buying them. Pushes the prices up.’
I had not started off the evening needing an antique ice axe in my life. But sampling the entire range of the Hesket Newmarket Old Crown Brewery had impaired my judgement. Ten minutes in front of a laptop later and I was the proud owner of a vintage wooden Stubai ice axe from the Tyrol. I was only sorry I wouldn’t be at home to see my wife’s face when it was delivered.
Radio Cumbria rang me up first thing in the morning. This was not unexpected. But neither, after a night at the Old Crown, was it welcome.
They had arranged the interview some time before. ‘We hear you’re taking a mule across the country. Would you mind talking to us on our breakfast show? And will your tent have mobile reception?’
Jeff injected some much-needed black coffee to get me ready.
‘That was “Mule Train” by Bo Diddley. And there’s a reason for playing it, because on the line we have Hugh Thomson, who has taken it upon himself to cross Cumbria with a mule. And then Yorkshire as well, but we’re not so interested in that, are we?
‘So Hugh, how does it work? Are you riding the mule?’
I was practised at this particular answer by now. ‘No, he’s just a pack animal. And his name’s Jethro.’ I bridled at him being referred to as ‘the mule’. Jethro was a name, not a number.
‘OK. So Jethro carries everything, does he? Your tent and everything – your supplies.’
As has already been duly recorded, Jethro carried so little it was embarrassing. Our standard muleteers’ lunch. Perhaps some water. And the symbolic three pebbles for each of us that Jasper had loaded on the beach at St Bees. But it felt disloyal to let him down in public.
‘Well, that’s the idea …’
‘And where do you sleep at nights?’
In luxurious accommodation courtesy of Mr Jeff Ford, who was even now getting my second espresso of the morning ready.
‘With friends sometimes. We’ve got a tent, and there are hostels along the way.’
‘So what gave you the idea for this? I mean, it seems a very odd thing to do, doesn’t it?’
‘Maybe. But I’ve travelled a lot in Peru, where they use mules a great deal. I really enjoyed walking with them. So I thought, why not do it back home, and explore some of the old pack-animal routes that cross the north of England?’
‘Best of luck, Hugh. I hope listeners will carry a carrot in their pockets, just in case they meet you. And let me ask something that everyone else will – have you bonded with Jethro yet?’
This was a good question. And also the last. I replied as well as I could (‘It’s early days’ or something equally vague) but realised I needed to answer it for myself.
Jasper was still in bed. He had drunk even more than I had. I wandered out to see Jethro, who did his usual trick of standing sideways in the field so he could keep me in vision without having to acknowledge that he was doing so.
In some ways, looking after Jethro was like having a teenager – and given I had three teenage children of my own and two teenage step-daughters, I felt well qualified on this subject. You can spend weeks with a teenager and get no response, love or thanks; but precisely because of that, when you do, it’s so unexpected, it can feel like an almost sublime moment of transfiguration.
I knew Jethro had lived through a troubled past. Although the RSPCA were circumspect, I had learned that in his original home, before they rescued him, he was unloved and misunderstood – enough to make any teenager rebellious. As so often, it sounded as if he had been the unwanted consequence of leaving a donkey in a field with a mare. Just as the English had such startling levels of teenage pregnancies due to lack of sex education, so they seemed blithely unaware that donkeys could procreate with horses. And the result would be a mule. Given all the ignorance and prejudice about mules – that they were stubborn and hard to deal with – it was not surprising that Jethro could be difficult at times. It was more surprising that at times he wasn’t.
Jasper had been patiently teaching me the business of muleteering: from setting up the electric fence at each place we stopped to how to box him into the horse lorry. But one thing I didn’t enjoy was having to catch Jethro, which is what needed to happen now. Despite weeks of training at home and on the road, this wasn’t getting any easier.
Usually I was the sous-chef in this particular operation. Jasper would hold out a bucket of pony nuts and make peculiar noises that sounded like Mongolian throat singing. We would then both close on Jethro until he consented to let Jasper attach the lead rope.
Today, however, he got bored of the usual procedure and trotted over to me meekly to present his neck. It was one of those rare moments when we had indeed bonded.
I was doing a correspondence course in handling mules.
An old girlfriend of mine called Annis had decided, with some justification, that I needed instruction if I was going to have any hope of getting Jethro across the country in one piece.
She had started to send long, detailed emails – 10,000 words in all by the time we had finished – with advice that was as frank and direct as only an English horsewoman’s can be.
One of her first missives had set the tone: ‘So who is going to look after the mule – You? – I don’t think so!!’
She had continued, perhaps to soften the blow a little, ‘The thing is, you aren’t an experienced horse person but you aren’t totally stupid.’ (I knew from long experience with sisters, wives and girlfriends that this was about as close to a compliment as I was ever likely to get in the English equine world.)
‘You can learn if someone tells you what to do. There is a right way to do all this stuff. If you do it wrong, the mule will get nervous that you’re inexperienced. Quite apart from picking up on your “I’m not entirely sure I know what I’m doing” pheromones.’
Annis had several horses herself and lived in the middle of Exmoor with her partner Jeremy. As she reminded me, she had been around horses all her life: ‘I was off the leading rein at three years old and I don’t really remember ever being on it.’ Her own pheromones were so horsey, wild Exmoor ponies probably camped outside her rambling farmhouse to be near her.
She had once bred Doberman Pinschers, along with four children and plenty of other livestock. With a frankness that only an old romantic attachment could bring – we had dated when we were teenagers for some years – she proceeded to get down to business, adding some bare-knuckle jabs at my lack of suitability for the enterprise at hand.
From: Annis Sokol
To: Hugh Thomson
Subject: Grooming Jethro
I think you don’t know enough about equines to look after Jethro properly – so here is a crash course in grooming and pony care. This email is all about grooming a small pony and I imagine that small mules are much the same.
This needs to be done every morning.
If he is in a stable, go to the door and say, ‘Hello Jethro’. I always say, ‘Good Morning Ponies’, and they all neigh back.
Jethro and I had yet to build up a call-and-response routine; nor was it that sort of relationship. More like men arriving at the same workplace and briefly acknowledging they were in the same room before getting on with it. But I could see what Annis was driving at.
Make sure you have the head collar in your hand, open the door a bit, slip in and then bolt the door behind you. Some ponies think it’s funny to push you out of the way and vanish. Put the head collar on (he DOESN’T sleep in it) and tie him up using a pony knot. DON’T tuck the end of the rope in, so you can untie him quickly if you have to.
The capitalisation hurt. It became more and more prevalent as the letters continued. Along with the assumption that I was starting at ground zero, and that Annis needed to make sure I really did work through each job step-by-step, or in some cases, hoof-by-hoof.
Find the hoof-pick and pick out his feet, starting with the near fore, then the near hind, then the off fore and last the off hind. Put the pick BACK in the box.
Annis’s need to include this sort of detail stung. What did she think I was going to do with the hoof-pick? Throw it away?
Next use the Dandy brush all over his body, starting at the nearside head end of his neck and sweeping backwards and ending at his tail.
If he’s in the paddock, bring him in to do the grooming. You should take a bucket with about 4 oz of sliced carrots as a present for being good and coming. You may have to walk up to him to catch him. Unless you are very sure that he’s fine about catching [which Jethro absolutely wasn’t], use a VERY SMALL paddock like a quarter of an acre at first.
This, like much of Annis’s advice, was all good and useful. Although I wasn’t about to start weighing my carrots.
REMEMBER you use the body brush on his mane and tail – NOT the Dandy brush, which is to get mud off. Do it gently from the side so he doesn’t get annoyed and kick you. You separate the long hairs and brush them. It is soothing and he’ll like having a cuddle. If you love him, he will love you back. You don’t have to wash his bottom or for that matter his penis – that is ok left on its own.
Well, thank God for small mercies. She ended this particular email with a little note about what to do if, for any reason, Jethro lived up to a mule’s reputation and refused to budge when we were hiking across country.
Don’t turn round and stare at him – ponies hate that and mules aren’t likely to be different. If he stops, check to see that there isn’t something wrong first, e.g. someone hiding in the hedge or a nasty dustbin. If not, then just say nicely, ‘What’s the matter Jethro? Walk on, Jethro. Walk on.’
If he still doesn’t go, then look again and say, ‘Is there anybody there? You’re upsetting my mule, so come out please.’
The wretched person will usually emerge.
If not, get out your supply of carrots and try again. Hopefully Jethro will then carry on. He might have stood on something, so if his ears are back, have a look at his feet and make sure he’s not lame. He’ll be doing a lot of walking, so he may get sore feet. He doesn’t have shoes, does he?
Annis, with her usual perspicacity, had pinpointed a problem that was going to be of growing concern to Jasper and me over the coming weeks. Jethro was unshod when I took charge of him and at his age, the RSPCA thought it best he should remain so. As they were still his legal custodians, I needed to respect that decision. But the bridleways of the wild parts of England were not all grassy verges. Some were rocky enough to present a potential problem. As many commentators have remarked before, the geography of the Lake District does not lend itself to straight and easy routes.
I know not how to give the reader a distinct image of this [the main demarcation of the country] more readily, than by requesting him to place himself with me, in imagination, upon some given point; let it be the top of either of the mountains, Great Gavel, or Scawfell; or, rather, let us suppose our station to be a cloud hanging midway between those two mountains, at not more than half a mile’s distance from the summit of each, and but a few yards above their highest elevation, he will then see stretched at his feet a number of Vallies, not fewer than nine, diverging from the point, on which he is supposed to stand, like spokes from the nave of a wheel.
William Wordsworth, Select Views in Cumberland,
Westmoreland, and Lancashire (1810)
How Wordsworth came to write a guide to the Lake District I found endlessly fascinating and revealing. For many years he refused to do so, on the grounds that 1) he wrote poetry, not prose, and 2) as he said in a letter of 1808, after ten years in the Lakes, he now knew them too well ‘to know where to begin, and where to end’.
But only a year or so later he changed his mind, partly out of financial necessity – the poems weren’t selling – and because an opportunity fell into his lap. A painter called Joseph Wilkinson had been a neighbour of the Wordsworths before moving to Norfolk. The flat landscape made him nostalgic for the Lakes, so he embarked on a book of Select Views in Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Lancashire. He asked Wordsworth to write the accompanying text.
As the art-book was being sold by subscription, at a hefty price – £6 6s, so over £200 today in real terms – this was a good commission. When it came out in 1810, the publishers declared the paper so luxuriously thick ‘it would admit of tinting’, should subscribers want to add their own colour to the engravings.
A few years ago I contributed the text to a monstrously large illustrated tome called 50 Wonders of the World: a book so big, I liked to say, that if you attached legs to each corner it could have become a coffee table in itself. One unforeseen result was that bookshops refused to stock any copies because they took up too much space. Commercially, it was a disaster. Yet while my initial reasons for doing it were, like Wordsworth’s, both financial and opportunistic, I found the project engaging once I had begun.
An unexpected commission can be liberating for a writer: to lay aside the imaginative necessity – or burden – of creating your own work ex nihilo, and instead craft to order. W. H. Auden enjoyed his time in film cutting-rooms because editors would force him to re-write the verse commentary ‘to picture’.
I can’t also help thinking Wordsworth was liberated by knowing that what he was doing would be accompanied by illustrations. Or rather, the illustrations, which were very much the main event, were accompanied by his text; when the book was advertised, it hardly mentioned his name. The words didn’t have to work so hard.
Necessity forced Wordsworth to find a way of writing about the Lakes. And his way of doing so was what today we might call psychogeographical: by dividing the district into a wheel, with each valley one of the spokes, giving unity but also variety, he could isolate the tone and character of each valley, and suffuse them with personal experience. As a contemporary critic put it in the Monthly Review, the strategy was ‘as topographically useful as it is poetically picturesque’.
Moreover, Wordsworth tried to address the Lake District as a holistic experience. Previous guides – and there had been many of these in the eighteenth century – broke down the Lakes into a series of views, like a modern tour that only lets you off the coach at designated moments. They even recommended travelling with a special viewing instrument, called a Claude’s Glass, a convex fold-up mirror. Named after Claude Lorrain, whose paintings of Arcadia had done so much to shape British theories of the picturesque, these devices framed and tinted the landscape. To use one, the viewer had to turn their back to the natural scene and hold up the mirror – much like a modern tourist taking a selfie.
Wordsworth provided the interstices: the people and incidental detail along the way that could make the journey a more lived experience. Although that didn’t stop him, like any good poet, from getting bored at writing so much prose. Close to the end, he persuaded his sister Dorothy to ‘compose a description or two for the finishing of his work for Wilkinson’ as, she recorded, he had started to find it ‘irksome’. And there is a fine bohemian swagger to the way he disdains the ‘humble and tedious task’ of providing any directions; and the way, familiar to today’s sensitive travel writers, that he resists all attempts to call it ‘a guidebook’.
Nor is he above a little helpful cross-promotion. When moved to quote verse by the sublimity of any scene, the poetry he most often remembers is invariably his own.
Only in 1822 did Wordsworth finally issue the guide as a standalone volume: A Description of the Scenery in the North of England, with a map that folded out and a new section of ‘Directions and Information for the Tourist’. Dorothy added an account of climbing Scafell, then the most tantalising of Lake peaks for the visitor, being remote and not easy to summit. The many editions that followed were a steady earner throughout Wordsworth’s long life. Given he had done so much to attract tourists to the Lake District, it seemed only fair he should profit from them.
On one particular point, Wordsworth was absolutely right: trying to negotiate the Lake District was exactly like crossing the spokes of a wheel – awkward to do at the best of times, let alone with a mule. I needed all my not-very-well-honed navigational skills to find the appropriate bridleways that would weave us across.
I had a current incarnation of the guide with me as we drove to the start of the next stage of our walk from Borrowdale, one of the most beautiful of all the valleys. The view of it over Ashness Bridge is a favourite picture postcard, and would often have been framed by a Claude’s Glass in the past. It had been much hymned by Wordsworth’s predecessors – so perhaps he was too intimidated to write much about it. Instead he came up with a magnificent cop-out:
It would be an endless task to attempt, by verbal descriptions, to guide the traveller among the infinite variety of beautiful or interesting objects which are found in the different reaches of the broad Valley itself, nor less so to attempt to lead him through its little recesses, its nooks, and tributary glens. I must content myself with saying, that this Valley surpasses all the others in variety.
Thank God, his first publisher must have thought, for the illustrations.
At the Rosthwaite hotel in Borrowdale, our large old horse lorry looked incongruous beside the walkers’ cars: as if a small suburban mock-Tudor house had dropped into the car park.
We attracted a modest crowd of fleece- and anorak-covered spectators as we tried to get Jethro out of the horsebox. ‘Be careful,’ said one. ‘I’d hate to see what he’d do to my wing mirror.’
Although startled at emerging to such a large audience, Jethro behaved impeccably as he strolled down the ramp, frisky and ready for another day in the hills.
I was not sure I could say the same. The night before I’d had two pints of the fearsome Sneck Lifter, spot-checked a range of Hesket Newmarket beers for quality control and shared a bottle of red wine with Jasper and Jeff over dinner, so my head was a little clouded. I also felt annoyed with myself. Surely Robert Macfarlane never set off on one of his walks with a hangover? He would have been up at six and writing a lyrical description of the dawn. As would Wordsworth. Where was my professionalism? At least Jasper looked equally the worse for wear.
We joined forces for the day with Jannicke Wallace, a Norwegian woman Jasper had met in the pub the previous night. Jannicke had lived in the Lakes for the past thirty years, so most of her adult life. She told me they reminded her of Norway, because of the landscape and the Viking heritage – the names like Threlkeld and Thwaites.
‘But it’s so crowded now. And you can’t stop people coming here. That does spoil it for me. Also, I think the parking charges are just ridiculous. Seven pounds to park for the day!’
Like everybody else we’d met in the Old Crown, she was an experienced fell-walker and we set off at a brisk kill-or-cure pace from Rosthwaite. The bridleway was initially good and grassy, and Jethro had his ears alert as he powered forward with Jasper while I chatted to Jannicke. (Readers may notice a curious tendency for every other person – and mule – in this story to have a name beginning with ‘J’; this is purely accidental and what happens in a non-fiction book where characters cannot be corralled.)
Even if car parking was not on his agenda, many of the local issues that concerned Jannicke had also preoccupied Wordsworth back in the nineteenth century. His suggestion that the Lake District be seen as ‘a sort of national property, in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy’, was the first clarion call for the creation of a national park. That decision has brought in its wake all sorts of issues as to whether to conserve or develop. Wordsworth was already huffing and puffing about insensitive new buildings near Ullswater and what he described as a ‘spirit of tasteless and capricious innovation’. He would not have approved of the zip-wire on the Honister Pass.
He also made the subtle and interesting point that builders of new houses in the Lake District were too conscious of the beauty of the landscape; they tried too hard, and were ill-equipped to do so. Rather than settling for modest conventional houses, there was ‘a constraint or warping of the natural mind arising out of a sense that, this country being an object of general admiration, every new house would be looked at and commented upon either for approbation or censure. Hence all the deformity …’
And instead of building in the sensible valley, they positioned their houses on exposed positions, ‘the summits of naked hills’, from which they could enjoy the view but also reveal more starkly any failure of architectural ambition. Mr Pocklington of Nottinghamshire felt the full wrath of the poet for ‘playing strange pranks by his buildings and plantations’; while a Mr English had the temerity to build a high garden wall on Windermere Island, ‘as exclusive as it was ugly’. Wordsworth could have a surprisingly sharp and satirical tongue when he got going.
In 1844, now Poet Laureate and a figure of some weight, Wordsworth wrote a long letter to the Morning Post: a letter for which the editor would have needed half the paper. He complained about a proposed new railway between Kendal and Windermere to let in yet more tourists – many attracted, it must be said, precisely by the view of the Lake District he had done so much to promote. Just in case this swinging right-hander didn’t work, he followed up with a second letter for the knockout punch. Taken together, they form a magnificent piece of invective. He conjures up the spectre of a railway line being built right through Furness Abbey and thunders that the Sabbath day will be disrupted; he also quotes from no fewer than three of his own poems in supporting evidence. The railway was never built.
The two letters were signed from ‘Rydal Mount’. Wordsworth was speaking on behalf of those who lived in the Lake District. The title page of his guide’s definitive fifth edition advertised a work ‘for the use of Tourists and Residents’; and he anticipated the current concern for the balance between ‘incomers’ with their second homes and the more permanent inhabitants.
‘Yes,’ said Jannicke, ‘I hope it’s not going to become a chocolate box, tied up with a ribbon. We need to see the people who actually work the land get consulted. There are sheep farmers whose families have been here for centuries. That’s what I’m worried about. Look at all this bracken we’re walking through. They want to take the sheep off the fells, so they can go back to being wild, like this. But that has consequences.’
The bracken looked beautiful up the hillside in the autumnal sun. Yet that was from afar. Walking through it was less enjoyable.
In some ways, what I found remarkable was that the Lake District had stayed so relatively unspoiled. You might not want to be in Grasmere during the height of the summer coach season, but plenty of those 214 Wainwright summits would be deserted. On this October walk from Borrowdale over to Grasmere, a central thoroughfare of the Lakes, we met no one for hours.
We did, however, run into trouble. Jasper had been trying to keep Jethro on the grass, but once past the magnificent buttress of Eagle Crag, our own path started to climb, and became one of flint and stone. It began to be difficult to avoid punishing rocks, which were doing Jethro’s feet no good. Although traditionally a bridleway, and marked as such on the map, we suspected few horses – let alone mules – had come here for many a year.
At Lining Crag, we realised it would be impossible to get Jethro any further. The crag jutted out from the side of Greenup Edge; to get over the pass, you had to climb over its shoulder. The path up was not only steep, but had been broken down by the boots of walkers into a precipitate jumble of stone.
It would be stupid to end up with a lame mule at this stage of the journey, argued Jasper forcibly, scratching his head under his beret. He was short-tempered about it, perhaps because, like me, he was suffering the effects of our partying the night before. It was frustrating. This was a key section of our walk across the Lakes. Just over Lining Crag lay the descent to Grasmere.
We agreed that Jasper and Jannicke would head back with Jethro towards Rosthwaite and find him pasture, while I headed over the pass to prospect and at least see what lay on the other side.
I recognised that this was part of the point of travelling with an animal. You had to listen to their needs and adapt. And it was good to do some walking on my own. It cleared my head. This was a path I had never taken before – one reason I had not realised it would be a bridleway in name only.
Once over Lining Crag, a stride over boggy country that Wainwright complained had ‘too many cairns’ to guide the walker – although in mist, I’m sure no one would object – brought me to Greenup Edge. As visibility was good, I could see a tantalisingly easy descent ahead of me rolling down Easedale Gill to Grasmere. Jethro would have cantered down.
A short detour to the nearby summit of High Raise brought the sweep of the southern lakes around Langdale into focus; an enticing sight as, while I knew the Western Fells, the Southern Fells were new to me.
I am not someone who wears frustrations for long, and my mood quickly changed from irritation to elation. To the north-west, from where we had come, a shaft of light was picking out the distinctive profile of Fleetwith Pike in splendid isolation. ‘My mountain’, as I liked to think of it proprietorially. The mountain I had run off once with the hounds chasing behind me.
There is something about mountains that encourages a brief moment of Nietzschean excess in the heart of the mildest man. The illusion, however false, that for a brief moment you have at least conquered something on a summit.
But over the years, I realise I’ve come to value crossing a pass more than ‘conquering’ a peak. I love the feeling that there is a new valley to explore; for entering a whole new world is surely what mountains and life and literature are about. And Grasmere had plenty of all those waiting for us.