William Wordsworth and the Lake District

Wordsworth arrived atop Scafell for the first time in 1818, though by this time his Lake poetry had gripped the imagination for more than two decades and his Guide to the Lakes was already in print.

William Wordsworth Dove Cottage and Rydal Mount

Wordsworth, born in Cockermouth and educated in Hawkshead, returned to the Lake District in 1799, living successively at Dove Cottage, Allan Bank and the Parsonage during a fourteen-year interlude in Grasmere, and then settling at Rydal Mount from 1813 to 1850. His writings, though unquestionably both moving and compelling in places and often aptly descriptive of his native landscape, are highly embellished and romantic in style and certainly give little indication of the tenor of Lake District life; his sister Dorothy supplied unique insights into this aspect of the contemporary Lake District in her fascinating and extremely valuable Journal.

Dove Cottage and Rydal Mount, in particular, have become Wordsworthian shrines and are seriously overcrowded in summer. Indeed the Wordsworth industry is now so prevalent in parts of the Lake District that it can be difficult to escape the commercialism and achieve a due sense of proportion in relating the poet to his landscape. Wordsworth's landscape was, after all, his own mental picture, a deliberate abstraction of reality rather than a detailed guide faithful to the precise pattern of fell and dale.

Wordsworth's decision to settle in the Lake District set the pattern for the poets of the picturesque, and he was soon followed by Coleridge and Southey, though neither attempted to capture the spirit of the region in their poetry. Coleridge lived only four years at Keswick, returning from time to time thereafter, but Southey stayed for forty years from 1803; he became Poet Laureate in 1813.

Others to tread the fells included Thomas de Quincey, who succeeded Wordsworth in Dove Cottage, John Keats, who climbed Skiddaw, and Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, whose rather more modest target was Carrock Fell. Sir Walter Scott's poem The Bridal of Triermain is set around the Castle Rock of Triermain, the remarkable rocky bastion at the southern end of St John's Vale. Amongst the painters to visit the district were J, M. W. Turner, whose Morning Amongst the Canis ton Fells is a masterpiece, and Constable, who visited Borrowdale in the early years of the nineteenth century.

John Ruskin and the Lake District

A much greater influence was that of John Ruskin, who regarded Keswick as 'a place almost too beautiful to live in' and eventually settled, in 1871, at Brantwood on the eastern shores of Coniston Water where he was able to paint and sketch, write and philosophise whilst retreating in horror from the despoliation created by industrialisation. The house at Brantwood, with its spectacular view across the lake to the Old Man of Coniston, is open to the public and contains a considerable collection of Ruskin's paintings and other memorabilia.

Another social reformer to settle in the Lake District was Harriet Martineau, whose Description of the English Lakes, published in 1858, had an enthusiastic audience. Novelists with a true feel for the region are rare even the Herries Chronicle, the creation of Sir Hugh Walpole, who lived at Brackenburn on the slopes of Catbells, fails in this respect and for the real flavour of the Lake District in fiction it is probably better to turn to the children's books of Beatrix Potter, whose Peter Rabbit series is quite clearly modelled closely on the immediate environs of her home at Hill Top in Near Sawrey.

This intellectual invasion in search of the picturesque and the aesthetically pleasing, spawning as it did a secondary invasion of tourists following in the footsteps of the guidebook writers, eventually prompted the realisation that landscape of the highest quality needed to be protected. External events played their part, too, with proposals for reservoirs and railways in the mountain core affronting the sensibilities of the Victorian environmentalists.

Wordsworth's Guide had put forward the notion of the Lake District as 'a sort of national property', and threats to the right of men to enjoy that property, posed by proposals such as that to raise the level of Thirlmere to provide water for Manchester, saw an increasingly organised defence of the Lake District's landscape. The Thirlmere Defence Association, formed in 1877, lost its fight against the Manchurians but its founder, Canon Rawnsley (the incumbent of Crosthwaite parish near Keswick) went on to help establish the Lake District Defence Association in 1883, and later became a cofounder of the National Trust in 1895.

The Lake District Defence Association

The formation of the Lake District Defence Association was prompted largely by the proposal to build a railway along the length of Ennerdale an idea which would surely be laughed out of court in these more cost conscious days. In fact the Ennerdale Railway Bill was lost largely because of financial problems, but the Buttermere Bill, possibly a more viable proposition, also fell in the face of concerted local opposition.
Yet despite the growing realisation that control of develop-ment was urgently needed to conserve the Lake District, the area did not become a National Park until 1951, Since then the Park authority, the Lake District Special Planning Board, has sought to achieve its twin, and sometimes conflicting, aims of conservation and provision' for recreation, in the face of pressure for development and for increased access, and despite periodic threats including those of greater afforesta¬tion and the further development of reservoirs.

The Lake District National Park

Always in the background, too, is the rapid growth of tourist pressure, in places now so intense that it can threaten to destroy the special features which attract tourists in the first place, Throughout all this, the authority has had to recognise its limitations, not just in terms of resources but in respect of land ownership (most of the National Park is privately owned) and lack of adequate control measures.

Preeminent amongst the major threats faced by the National Park was that of increased a forestation, following the excesses of the Forestry Commission in the interwar period in locations such as Ennerdale, which was cloaked with an appalling shroud of conifers in the 1920s and is only now recovering.

The outcry caused by this insensitive planting of great swathes of conifers has now largely died down as a result of major changes in outlook by the Forestry Commission which have greatly enhanced the quality of the landscape for present day visitors. Most important, perhaps, was their acceptance of a ban on further planting within a widely defined area covering virtually the whole of the central fells an agreement drawn up with the Council for the Preservation of Rural England in the 1930s and since policed very closely, to the great benefit of the landscape.

There have been other significant concessions from the foresters. Oldstyle planting in geometrical blocks has been largely superseded by amenity planting taking more account of the lie of the land and with a greater variety of species, and the increasing demands for recreational use of forests have brought a surprisingly willing and imaginative reaction, with visitor centres and forest trails in profusion.

Grizedale and Whinlatter the Lake District

The centres in Grizedale and at Whinlatter are exemplary, and some of the forest walks are adventurous and full of interest, notably the Silurian Way in the Grizedale Forest Park. So although the ghost of earlier mistakes lives on, and obtrusive conifer plantations still mar the hill slopes above Thirlmere and to the north of Grisedale Pike and Hopegill Head, for instance, there is great hope for the future, and the opportunity given by clearfelling to improve the landscape has often been taken.

The reservoirs of the Lake District have been with us since 1885, when the Thirlmere dam was competed and the waters of the natural lake began to rise and envelop hamlets and farms such as Waterhead, The City and Yew House. Manchester's thirst for water was only temporarily slaked by this scheme, however, and in the 1930s Haweswater became the next target of the water engineers.

The consequences for the quiet and secluded valley of Mardale, described by Bradley in the early twentieth century as 'unforgettable for the charm of its romantic beauty', were disastrous, for the level of the lake was raised by some 30m (95ft) and the village of Mardale Green and its former common field disappeared beneath its waters.

Amongst the casualties were the church and the venerable Dun Bull Inn, twin focal points for the entire dale. The new landscape comprised a lake doubled in length and capable of unparalleled ugliness around its shores when its level was drawn down. Worse still, there is now no life in the dale, since the hotel which succeeded the Dun Bull is too far from the dalehead and the village itself was irreplaceable.

Things may have changed in the Lake District since the days of William Wordsworth, and visitors will be met with a wide choice of places to stay in Windermere, Ambleside and Grasmere, including luxury hotels and bed and breakfast accomodation.