AND ANOTHER THING
The Lake District is a world where time has had to stop
PAUL JOHNSON
We arrived in the Lake District last week to find it has been having the wettest summer for 60 years. In the Cumberland News there were sad tales of ruined har- vests, distressed tourist trade and coura- geous flower shows. But bad weather is what this vigorous part of the world is about. It has more gloomy meteorological sayings than any other region I know. Thus:
If t'Helm Wind blows and foxes bark Bar thy doors afore it's dark.
And — a reference here to the feast of St Mary Magdalen, 22 July:
Morlan flood Ne'er did good.
And: If ice at Martinmas bears duck, Rest of Winter's slush and muck.
Many rhymes have it both ways:
If t'sun in red should set, Next day surely will be wet. If t'sun should set in grey, Next will be a rainy day.
However, the rain clouds miraculously disappeared soon after we got there and the sun revealed a land of spectacular beau- ty — fields, woods and mountains in radi- ant green, every beck full to bursting, slash- ing the fellsides with deep, milky wounds, the waterfalls in tumultuous uproar and the rivers bounding with blue and white energy over their dark brown stones. Skiddaw, the burly stumbling giant of the North, spread his huge limbs, touched with the first pur- ple of the heather, in luxurious content in the warm sunshine. We drove over Dun- mail Raise into the Vale of Grasmere, emerald heart of the District, to look in at its greatest treasure, the Wordsworth Museum. There we wandered round its lat- est show, Tintem Abbey ingeniously arranged round Wordsworth's wonderful poem, and the director, Robert Woof, showed me new rarities: autograph letters from Hazlitt, on business, written in his cus- tomary succinct, direct and powerful man- ner, which have been generously presented by Hazlitt's greatest living champion, Michael Foot.
I also called in at the Grasmere Studio, where the works of three generations of Heaton Coopers, all of whom devoted their lives to painting the Lake District, are on display. I love these families of hereditary regional painters, like the Widgeries of Dartmoor. There is a fine life of Alfred Heaton Cooper, founder of the family, written by the art historian Jane Renouf, who lives at Ambleside. I read it recently and was distressed to learn that Alfred, though an outstanding landscape artist and a most industrious man, found it hard to make a living and feed his family. His son William, who died aged 90 some years ago, was more commercially minded. He found- ed the studio, where he sold high-quality prints of his water colours to tourists who could not afford to buy the originals. The business flourished and continues under his grandson, selling artists' materials. It is an active shrine of traditional painterly skills, crowded with visitors, and a defiant gesture against the Rosenthal-Saatchi- Serota cultural dictatorship.
What the Heaton Coopers demonstrate again and again in their work is the sheer elegance of form of the Lakeland moun- tains, which is unmatched anywhere else in the world. Blencathara and Helvellyn, Seat Sandal and Great Gable, Pike o' Blisco and Mellbreak are as handsome and distinctive as their names, their silhouettes and folds, responding perpetually to ever-changing sun and cloud, tracing lines which artists delight to draw. The hills of Scotland and Wales, admirable though they are, do not attain to these summits of linear distinc- tion. I stood for some moments last week in Little Langdale, overlooking Blea Tarn that most exquisite of small lakes — gazing up at the Langdale Pikes, whose immortal names carry me back to the choicest moments of my childhood: Pike o' Stickle `Honey, the cat bathers are here.' and Pavey Ark, Harrison Stickle and Gim- mer Crag. They are only 2,400 feet at their highest, but does any group of summits in the entire world epitomise more compre- hensively the majesty and beauty of the mountain?
What pleases me when I return to the Lake District, which I first visited in 1940, is the care and success with which their essen- tial secrets and mystery have been pre- served. We drove up Wrynose and over the spectacular Hard Knott Pass, the latter a stern challenge even to a rally driver. These twisting, single-track roads have been kept in good repair, but they have not been changed, enlarged, rationalised or other- wise 'improved' in the 60 years I have known them. Remote farms and cottages, entire panoramas of 20 miles or more, are exactly as I remember them at the time of the Battle of Britain — an event as remote as Agincourt to my grandchildren. That is quite an achievement in the restless, destructive 20th century.
At the top of the Hard Knott we wan- dered round the splendidly preserved Roman fort, home to an entire cohort, with its parade ground, bath-house, granary and armoury, its HQ building and its comman- dant's house. Nearly a thousand feet up, it is brilliantly sited, commanding a vast stretch of territory, including the entire Scarfell range and the valley leading to the Irish Sea. How those warriors from the far- flung empire, from Cyrenaica and Cap- padocia, Apulia and Illyria, must have shiv- ered in the January Helm wind! We drove down veridian Eskdale, sleepy and silent in the sun, to where the Duddon river pours into the sea in a series of still lagoons, haunt of strong, wide-winged birds, who think nothing of flying to Galloway or Armagh or the Isle of Man for an after- noon. There is a single-street fishing village called Ravenglass, with modest, white- painted houses overlooking the wide waters, where we had scrumptious rolls stuffed with hot crackling bacon. Nearby is a deserted chapel, still with its untouched 17th-century box pews of polished walnut. It was as though an entire world, which elsewhere has been untimely wrenched into modernity, had been prismed in amber. So we drove back home, to the castle where we are staying, its tumbling river and dark sandstone walls exactly as they were painted by Turner nearly 200 years ago.
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