Review
On one of those beautifully cloudy Lakeland days, Ian Thompson’s father parked his car, a split-screen Morris Minor at the side of the road on a steep pass, walked some twenty yards up the hill and took a photograph of the smiling bonnet against the backdrop of the distant valley. He was just one of a succession of tourists who, over a period of two hundred years, had been searching for a Lake District of their imagination. Early tourists rejoiced in the multiple echoes of cannon reverberating around the Ullswater hills. Just a few miles from their noisy barge was Gowbarrow Park where some decades later William and Dorothy Wordsworth would see their restorative daffodils. Eighteenth century tourists who ventured into Keswick would be assaulted by the crashing of drums as Peter Crosthwaite sought to attract trade to his imaginative gallimaufry of a museum. The more contemplative might seek out Thomas West’s stations where they could frame the horror and savage grandeur of the landscape until it was as picturesque as a painting. At Claife Station on Windermere the genteel tourist could gaze out from a castellated turret and colour the view to match his emotions.: “The glass in its various windows was tinted to provide a variety of experiences: green to convey the verdancy of spring, yellow to suggest a warm sunny day, orange for autumn tints, blue to cast a cold, wintry spell and purple to conjure the sense of an impending storm”. Wordsworth paced out his verses as he walked the roads and Coleridge, for the brief time he remained in the Lakes, ranged dangerously across the high fells. Denied the grandeur of the Alps by the Napoleonic Wars, artists and tourists turned to our lesser hills. Turner painted a spectacular, arching rainbow over Buttermere and Constable sought to capture the restless skies. A one-armed rambler found another beauty in the Maid of Buttermere and that Beauty was almost destroyed by the villainous John Hatfield. As more tourists came and as Britain urbanized the innocence of the landscape was threatened by cultivation and cottages and by railways and reservoirs. The National Trust protected and preserved the countryside that walkers and rock-climbers and other less-adventurous types claimed as their playground. The playground became the home of Squirrel Nutkin and Tabitha Twitchet and the menagerie that flowed from Beatrix Potter’s magical pen. It was a world of safe adventure for all Swallows and Amazons. The infinite variety of the mountain paths would be retraced on cold winter nights by a lonely Alfred Wainwright as he found his own solace in transforming his days on the fells. Since the early eighteenth century, the Lake District has been seen as a special place, jealously guarded by those who already have access. But there has been “a gradual opening up to mass enjoyment, and,” as Ian Thompson adds, “no one who cares about social justice can see this as anything but a good thing”. The beauty we see around us is a complex thing. Ian traces the way our perception of the Lakes has changed over the years and the way the tensions of our society have worked to produce the Lake District we know today. The book is superbly illustrated with paintings and prints and some of Ian’s fine landscape photographs. There are also one or two black and white photographs taken by his father.
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