Hunter Davies - A Lakeland Miscellany

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I dont know any tract of land in which in so narrow a compass may be found an equal variety of sublime and beautiful features. So said the poet Wordsworth of Englands Lake District, an area as rich in cultural associations as it is in beautiful scenery.

Hunter Davies, who has spent every summer in the Lake District for nearly half a century, takes the reader on an affectionate tour of the lakes, fells, traditions, denizens and history of Englands most popular tourist destination.

From the first discovery of Lakeland by tourists in the eighteenth century, to the tale of the Maid of Buttermere, to the poet Coleridges ascent of Scafell Pike, to such enduring local traditions as Cumberland wrestling and hound trailing, Hunter Davies brings Englands Lake District memorably to life.

A loving couple (we hope...) on Windermere c. 1870.

To my dear wife Margaret, a true Cumbrian, and the best thing that ever happened to me

Surely there is no other place in this whole wonderful world quite like Lakeland? No other so exquisitely lovely, no other so charming, no other that calls so insistently across a gulf of distance. All who truly love Lakeland are exiles when away from it.

ALFRED WAINWRIGHT

O VER THE LAST FIFTY YEARS I HAVE WRITTEN MORE THAN a dozen books which in some way have been about the Lake District and Cumbria. Nothing to boast about, really. During the past 300 years I estimate there have been around 50,000 books devoted to the same small subject. The Lake District National Park may be small in size just fifty miles across and with only 42,000 people living there yet writing about it, painting it and photographing it has always been a rather crowded occupation in these islands.

But now, hold tight: this will be my last Lakeland book. Please dont cry it will upset the Herdwicks that I am looking at in the fields beside our house in Loweswater. My very first book was a novel, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush , which came out in 1965 and was set in Carlisle (though the town was not named). I did another novel, The Rise and Fall of Jake Sullivan , also with a Cumbrian background. Eventually I gave up writing novels altogether, without any public clamour or anyone even noticing.

My non-fiction books have included biographies of William Wordsworth, Beatrix Potter and Eddie Stobart, plus books about walking round the Lakes and along Hadrians Wall. For many years I published my own guide to the Lake District, The Good Guide to the Lakes , which went into many editions and sold 100,000 copies. Meanwhile I have produced endless articles about Lakeland and have been writing a column in Cumbria Life magazine for the last few years.

During all this time, I have collected about 2,000 Lakeland books, booklets, maps, postcards, posters and ephemera any old thing, really, to do with Lakeland. It is paper stuff I like best, with some sort of content, which I can read and study and think about.

Which is roughly what I have been doing for the last year. Lakeland: A Personal Journey represents a lifetime of collecting, reading and writing, living in and loving Lakeland. I admit that in one way it has been a simple matter of clearing the decks, searching through five decades of junk sorry, I mean treasures . But in another way, it is a distillation of what I like to think is my accumulated wisdom and knowledge, or at least the knowledge which I have gathered around me, groaning on all the shelves and cupboards, halls and walls.

What I have done here is to put together the Best Bits from my Lakeland Collections, from books I have read and enjoyed and learned from, letters and material I have accumulated, and also from my own writings over the years.

During this year I have found material I had forgotten I had ever written, such as an interview with Wainwright in 1978, and also the story of a chance meeting I had with Beatrix Potters shepherd, who scattered her ashes. I have also been surprised to find stuff I never knew I had and have no memory of acquiring. Such as an interesting series of letters, described as being translated from the German, from a German tourist to Lakeland in 1818 who tells how he managed to doorstep both Southey and Wordsworth. It is just a little booklet, with the cover missing, for which I see I paid 1.50. I dont know where or when I bought it; I just found it at the bottom of one of my drawers, covered in mouse droppings. When I wrote my own biog of Wordsworth in 1980, I was not aware of these letters. But now, in deciding to include it in this miscellany, I have found out who actually wrote them.

The purpose of this book is to share with you some of the many pleasurable snippets, and a few larger pearls plus odd bits of information, facts and fascinating figures, interesting quotations and descriptions which I have picked up along the way during a lifetime of loving Lakeland.

Hunter Davies, Loweswater, 2015

An engraving of a view of Winander Meer, near Ambleside, by William Bellers, 1774.

I was walled on both sides by those inaccessible high rocky barren hills which hang over ones head in some places and appear very terrible.

CELIA FIENNES , 1698

C OLUMBUS DID NOT DISCOVER AMERICA IN FOURTEEN hundred and ninety-two. It was already there, if perhaps crouching, keeping its head down as far as most Europeans were concerned. Columbus didnt even get to America, despite what millions of American schoolchildren have been led to believe over the centuries. The nearest he got to the United States of America was Cuba.

The English Lake District was not properly discovered till around the 1770s; at least, thats when the first tourists ventured into the area. That has been the received wisdom since, well, the 1770s. But of course Lakeland was always there, looming in the mist and rain and murk of this remote and rather scary-sounding corner of northwest England.

It sounded scary because the mountains, rocks, snow-clad peaks, torrents and deep, dark lakes filled the early visitors with awe (hence the true meaning of the word awesome). It was thought that guides were needed to take the traveller safely through such a monstrous and beastly landscape.

The Romans had managed quite easily, some 1700 years earlier, to march through Lakeland, creating some half-decent roads, settlements and fortifications, the remains of which can still be seen today, though they did not really hang around to build many major forts or settlements in Lakeland itself, and why should they? They were more interested in pushing further north.

Before them we had Celts and Gaels, probably some Picts and Scots though we still argue about their precise names and characters and origins and after them we had assorted Vikings and Anglo-Saxons, who cleared a lot of woods and plains and left a lot of place names, if not much else.