Blencathra

Impassioned debate this year over the management of the Lake District reveals strong opinions and not a little antagonism towards The National Trust. I am a mere fell walker, a grockle. Here is my two penn’orth and my celebration of a favourite mountain.



Buttressed like a slate cathedral Blencathra was formed 360 million years ago. It has stood watch in the northern fells of Cumbria, eying Celts, Romans, Angles, the Scots, the English, Urien Rheged and me. All came to make a living on, or explore, the northern slopes of the Lake District. It gave passage for packhorses and coffin carriers; provided inspiration to the laudanum-stoned Lake Poets. From 1879 it provided employment for a hundred lead miners and for over six hundred years its grassy upland has sustained generations of shepherds. Writing about the Lake Poet Robert Southey in 1839, the essayist Thomas de Quincey said the view from Southey’s house “was closed for many a league by the vast and towering masses of Skiddaw and Blencathra – mountains which are rather to be considered as frontier barriers.”

Photo by Helen Brooks

Photo by David Hall

I first set eyes on Saddleback (the other name) in 1967, from my seat in an airliner bound for Canada. I marvelled at the proud stature in, what was to me then, an alien landscape. Not setting foot on it until 1981 (via Hall’s Fell in the early days of my peak bagging odyssey) a further fifteen years passed before I felt the mighty mountain at it’s February fiercest.

The late, great Alfred Wainwright – a bean counter turned fell discoverer, writer, visionary and grumpy old man – wrote in 1962: “Blencathra is one of the grandest objects in Lakeland”. And with a mixture of awe and grudge a local foxhunter said: “there’s a terrible lot of unseen ground up there”. Only the eleventh highest fell in Lakeland, for me above every other it symbolises all that is essential to knowing the Lake District. AW concluded: “This is a mountain that compels attention, even from the dull people whose eyes are not habitually lifted to the hills”. He liked to get a grump in.

This ‘noble mountain’, as my bête noir at English A level John Stuart Mill wrote, has provided wonder to artists, photographers and painters and inspiration to many a writer. The parents of the poet W.H. Auden owned a holiday cottage at the foot of Blencathra at Wescoe just outside Threlkeld. Auden visited regularly in the 1920’s and 1930s. On returning exhausted and confused by the politics of civil war in Spain in 1937 I like to think he became refreshed by opening his back door and climbing Blease Fell, then to ponder life’s meaning from the summit – as countless walkers did before him and do today.

Photo by Helen Brooks

It is the sense of isolation and separateness of the Blencathra landscape, beyond the frontier with the rest of England, which is both endearing and attractive. Some visitors and local inhabitants feel entitled to protect it as it has always appeared. I used to think that a good trip to the Lakeland fells was one when I met nobody – when I had a mountain to myself. After I began to meet some of the farmers and shepherds any sense of entitlement in me gave way to one of curiosity about their part in the seasonal cycle of mountain life. Climb Blencathra in summer and you will see sheep lazily grazing the emerald green slopes and swallows dashing over the trickling streams. Ascend Sharpe Edge and then the side of Foule Crag in sub-zero February temperatures, with snow and ice under foot (as I did when Barrie, a friend, said “you just saved my life”), and you might just forget that shepherds make their living here.

A recent addition to the substantial literature of the Lakes is worth reading. James Rebanks’ The Shepherd’s Life provides the testimony of a fourth generation hill farmer who, with validity, challenges ‘outcomers’ whose wish for “the future of our landscape would be tourism and wildlife and trees and wilding”. Maybe AW was right back in 1962 when he wrote “roads into Lakeland are being widened, straightened and enlarged to improve access for visitors, commerce and faster traffic.” He argued that Lakeland should be left “as we found it, as a haven of refuge and rest in a world going mad…as a precious museum piece.”

I would loathe the idea of Blencathra – or any mountain – being frozen as an antiquity. It withstood proudly the Celts and it just about commands walkers today. It certainly has had the awe of all the Rebanks, and Terry Abrahams in his new film The Life of a Mountain. For me farmers, tourists, painters, poets and sheep can co-exist, so long as self drive cars, lorries and the military are held at bay, no nearer than the M6.

Hill farmers struggle to make a living, putting the farms, the people, the way of life and their custodianship of the fells I love at risk. The Lowther estate still owns the fell. It owes James Rebanks’ descendants and my fell-walking grandchildren by not gambling with the future of a living, vibrant, working giant of a mountain. All with a love for Blencathra and the fells must listen to each other’s viewpoint (as a contributor to Abrahams’ film says “no we don’t have Wi-FI, talk to each other”) and ensure this unmodified landscape is sustained.

Photo by David Hall

If you would like to share your thoughts on the landscapes and ideas discussed in this blog please record them in the Comments section.

Books by all the authors referenced above can be bought at: https://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk

Wild Cumbria, W.R. Mitchell.  Robert Hale 1978

The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Liberty Fund Inc. 2006

A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells: Book 5 The Northern Fells, A. Wainwright. Westmoreland Gazette 1962

Recollections of the Lake Poets, Thomas de Quincey. Penguin 1970

The Shepherd's Life, James Rebanks. Allen Lane 2015

Blencathra: Portrait of a Mountain, Ronald Turnbull. Frances Lincoln 2010

Auschwitz

Auschwitz. The word screams torments whenever I hear it or see it. Just as Treblinka, My Lai and Aberfan do and now there’s another, Aleppo. Can there be any among us for whom Auschwitz does not symbolize cruelty, depravity, horror, destruction and tortured death?

In 2013 I visited the Nazi concentration and extermination camps near Oswiecim. A short holiday in the beautiful city of Krakow impelled a visit. Oswiecim is a typical, modern and commercial central European town situated 44 miles west of Krakow. But a short walk away is a landscape tenaciously linked to man’s inhumanity to man. For here are Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the notorious death camps where 2.5 million people died at the hands of the Nazis as part of Hitler’s Final Solution to the Jewish Question. As Ota Kraus wrote, “Auschwitz was the scene of the greatest crime in the history of mankind”*.

After liberation in 1947 the two camps reappeared to the world as a museum and memorial site. 

There followed growing numbers of fascinated visitors, no doubt ghouls amongst them, but also writers and filmmakers who found a counter culture in which they could delve for artistic interpretation. Who has not watched with horrified fascination movies such as “Marathon Man”, “Schindler’s List”, “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas” and “The Odessa File”? These films and many others are nerve-wracking to watch. Yet, for me, the novel “Sophie’s Choice” by William Styron published in 1979 is the most shocking and heart-rending account of the effects of the death camps in 1940s Poland.

So on my visit I was unprepared for the initial reaction on walking over that ground at Auschwitz II-Birkenau and the feeling on entering the preserved buildings at Auschwitz I. Horror at what Jews and other misfits in Hitler’s Europe suffered in the camps was not what I felt. Maybe too much exposure to TV documentaries and Hollywood’s take on the Holocaust over the years, plus still being in thrall to Styron’s depiction of Sophie Zawistowska’s ‘Choice’, has inured me to more recent accounts of Nazi horror. (By the way, you have to reach thirty pages before the end of the novel before you discover what the Choice was. It is a stunning book.)

No, it was not horror I felt; on this visit what coursed through me was overwhelming anger. Anger and frustration on behalf of firstly the 140 escapers from the camp and then all the soldiers and families left to sort through the aftermath. A few escapers took with them samples of a pesticide called Zyklon B. Here was proof of Nazi atrocity. Some, like Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, took their testimony (later known as The Vrba-Wetxler Report) to the Vatican, Downing Street and Washington in the summer of 1944. Yet, for various reasons little was done to stop the appalling treatment of European Jews. What horrified me was how the officers and staff at the camps got away with their crimes for so long. And still the exterminations went on into 1945. And still, seventy years after the Russians liberated the camps, for me the landscape of Auschwitz was too horrible to look at.

Does history repeat itself? I think sometimes it does. In 1944 politicians, generals and priests equipped with the knowledge of what was happening in Auschwitz did not act to stop it for numerous reasons. Overabundant credulity regarding German atrocities in the First World War resulted in sceptism during the second war. This played a part. Also secrecy was a big factor in the Nazis’ success in keeping the world ignorant of their genocide.

In 2016 no brutal regime in the world can hide their atrocities for long from press, social media and its own mobile citizens. Think of  Aleppo. Today’s politicians, generals and priests are failing to stop the atrocities in Syria.  This time, sceptism and secrecy cannot be blamed. This time Obama’s US has vacated the hot seat of global power. There is a vacancy for a diplomat whose force of personality will bring Putin, May, Assad and Hillary to talk, not bomb… and talk, and talk. Then, the landscapes and citizens of Syria and Iraq could be saved.

Krakow today

*For those interested in how the world reacted to Auschwitz then and afterwards, (rather than accounts of what life was like inside) the following books may be of interest.

 I Escaped from Auschwitz by Rudolf Vrba. Robson Books 2006                                                                      Auschwitz & After: Race, Culture & the Jewish Question in France. Ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman. Routledge 1995                                                                                                                                          Sophie’s Choice. William Styron. Jonathan Cape. 1979. (1)                                                                                 A Theology of Auschwitz. Ulrich E. Simon. Gollancz. 1967                                                                                The Death Factory: document on Auschwitz.  Ota Kraus and Erich Kulka. Pergamon Press 1966.            Escape from Auschwitz. Andrey Pogozhev. Pen and Sword. 2007.                                                                  The Man Who Broke into Auschwitz. Denis Avey. Hodder & Stoughton. 2011.

(1)  Available in paperback at Blackwell's Bookshop  https://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk

If you would like to share your experiences of any of the landscapes discussed in this blog please record them in the Comments section.