Around northern hills

Trampers in Langstrath

If, like me, you were born a Piscean then you will be reminded constantly of the opposite directions in which your waking brain pulls you. It really is entertaining, even distracting, and this facet of a Zodiac birth sign keeps me forever wondering at the complexities and irrationalities of human thought. Take thinking about trees for example. Since growing up with a stand of magnificent beech trees visible from my bedroom window I welcome springtime when the young leaves of beech, sycamore and larch have a softness and lightness that gives way to darker tones as the months roll by. Of all the trees in the English countryside, beech and Scots Pine are my favourites. One joyous weekend this summer I planted an oak and a walnut in our Yorkshire paddock, not far from five Scots Pines I had planted previously. The walnut is a seventieth birthday present from my two sisters who were each recipients of a tree on their three score and ten years.

Now the humbling aspect to planting trees at my late stage in life is that I shall probably not be around when they reach maturity. Certainly I am thinking that the walnut may wait until I am sharing the earth with it before it produces a worthwhile crop of edible nuts. Nonetheless I am providing the next generation with a beautiful, living thing and that gives me a glow of satisfaction.

So here’s the rub. We are in danger of planting too many trees in the wilderness of north of England. In Swaledale this June my fellow trampers and I see spread before us moors and hillsides free of trees. The dale has a scattering of woods and copses but the landscape is open green space with grazing for sheep (but these are in declining numbers), dry stone walls, isolated stone barns underneath huge skies. There is the occasional village such as Low Row, Gunnerside and Thwaite. This is as it has been for several hundred years and must remain as it is. For this land provides grazing for sheep who crop the grasses low. It provides nesting places for a wide variety of endangered birds. It also provides a glorious wonderland of nature for hikers and botanists. The sheep and birds (especially the grouse) in turn sustain people employed in farming, conservation and tourism. These people live in small communities with schools, pubs and village halls that underpin an enduring English social structure worthy of continuing and celebrating. Let the ‘rewilders’ in to impose their philosophy of reducing the very things that an environmentally conscious country should be preserving – self-sufficiency (oh, that wonderful 1970s phrase) in food and clothing – and they will plant trees everywhere. They don’t want sheep and cattle – they believe these pollute the atmosphere and over graze. They would have us all turn vegan and import our exotic foodstuffs and clothing from India, Singapore and the Americas – at a frightening environmental cost and increased carbon footprint.

Swaledale looking east

The dale lying south of Swaledale is Wensleydale in which I walked the same month. High on a southern slope of Wensleydale Middleham Castle has stood since the twelfth century. It is renowned as the refuge for King Richard III who, as the Duke of Gloucester, first visited in 1461. This summer in pouring rain, typically atmospheric for this windswept northern hill, my elder son and I went visiting to remind ourselves of this massive and impressive castle with walls twelve feet thick and a dominant view over the dale. To the south of the castle we could see the outline of moors meeting the leaden sky, just as Richard would have done five hundred and fifty years ago. This view has changed little in those years. Richard, with his friends Robert Percy and Francis Lovell, found tranquillity in these hills, far away from the anarchy and political intrigue in London. Likewise, my son and I could forget the modern day madness in Westminster. Separated by five centuries we too were figures moving in a solid landscape, a place trusted, known and dependable.

Further south still lies Ribblesdale. The dying village of Horton (the school has closed, cottages lie empty, there are few jobs) sits astride the river between three mighty hills, favourites of mine for nearly forty years. Eighteen times I have tramped round The Yorkshire Three Peaks in under twelve hours, for this is one of the best one-day walks in the county. Pen-y-ghent, Whernside and Ingleborough stand menacingly above Horton and the Ribble yet almost every weekend in the summer they withstand the boots of hundreds of walkers, come to raise money for their chosen charities. The Yorkshire Three Peaks challenge is tough, yet no one making the attempt will leave without a sense of awe at the wildness and rawness of the landscape. This is a grey land manifesting the power of mountains to exert their magnificent domination over mankind. There are not many trees here either. They would not survive in the stony and poor soil. The day of my latest circuit this summer dawned bright but my companion and I expected rain later. Starting from Horton at 7:15 a.m. we noted the gently trickling Ribble low in its bed, gently swishing past the stones and banks. Atop Pen-y-ghent the world looked calm. On Whernside a wind picked up and the sky to the south had darkened. Claps of thunder were sounding every minute. By the time we had descended to the valley rain was falling and grew heavier with every yard we walked. By the time we reached the eagerly anticipated Hill Inn at Chapel le Dale, (where my companion - a most convivial fellow who draws strength from a pint or two and maybe a glass of red - said we would rest). We were soaked. We looked up at Ingleborough as terrified children do a grumpy grandfather. But, oh dear. The Hill Inn was closed. There was nothing we could do but press on.

On the summit of Ingleborough the wind and rain had ceased. To the west lay Morecambe Bay twinkling in the sunshine. But to the south the sky over Horton was black and streaked with horizontal threads of lightening. This was a time to get down off the hill. It was dangerous to be exposed above the skyline in such electric conditions. The rain started falling once more. The streams began to overflow the path. At Sulber Nick the way was submerged and we could only walk in the water. We tried walking on it but we had too little faith. The scene at Horton had changed dramatically in the eleven hours since we left. Filthy, brown water was cascading down the river, appearing above the banks with foam crested waves and now only a few feet below the humpback road bridge. However, The Crown Hotel was open and we got our two pints – and a glass of red to celebrate.

If ever we needed a symbol of the violence of storms and the helplessness of man in his landscape, this was a perfect example. This was the day Swaledale was hit by an even mightier flood, when sheep and cattle were washed down river. Residents of houses in Reeth were invaded by the torrent. Businesses were ruined in ten minutes.

And so, at last I came next to my favourite northern hills and landscape, the Lake District. I was here to walk the Cumbria Way with friends; my fellow Coast to Coaster from 1985 and two Cumbria residents, one the chair of Cumbria Community Foundation. We pondered how his  community was threatened; by ‘re-wilders’, by loss of work and by climate change. This was my latest journey on foot amongst the fells, lakes and tarns that I discovered with my wife forty-six years ago, a land that I have come to love, treasure and wonder at.

Derwentwater from UnderSkiddaw

The Lake District was not always a tourist attraction, only since the late eighteenth century did tourists come. Before that the land had been farmed for centuries by wise men that knew how to manage this wild country and hand it on to the next generation. They knew how to tend flocks of tough Herdwicks and Swaledales, make money by selling the wool and meat. They knew how to sustain their flocks by the judicious acquisition of new tups and keep a strong and healthy stock. They provided employment for local people, enhanced and protected the community by maintaining houses, walls, riverbanks and coppicing in the woods. They also loved cock fighting, hound trailing and hunting foxes on foot. The latter pursuit was not a socially divisive activity as it is in the south and Shires today, but a necessary one that involved all the locals in the community to reduce the vermin that killed their livelihood. Apart from the cock-fighting most of the old activities thrive because that is what happens in a well balanced, (if poor compared with Surrey and Sussex), economy.

More books have been written, more poetry penned and more pictures painted of The Lakes than anywhere else in Britain. John Ruskin, Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, W.H. Auden, Mary Lamb, Thomas de Quincey and Alfred Wainwright are the most famous writers who felt the magical spell that Lakeland casts on visitors. They wrote some of their finest work here. The rock faces hereabouts have provided a stiff training ground to mountaineers such as Chris Bonnington who went on to conquer the Alps and Everest. Bonnington still lives near the fells. Donald Campbell won world water speed records on Coniston and died there in 1967. I celebrate all these famous people, many of whom were visitors or incomers. On this latest tramp through the Lakes I was keen to find locals born and raised amongst the fells, unsung and unknown outside Cumbria. They are the soul of the place, they are the past, the present and the future – if they feel they can stay and not move out to look for work.

When I met David Weir he was brushing the dog ends from beneath the tables in front of our overnight resting place in Coniston. David is 63 years old and the handyman at The Black Bull. His workshop is a redundant red telephone box round the back of the pub; it neatly holds his brushes, cans and tools. With a ready smile for me, a stranger who stopped to talk to him, he knows all about the town and its people. The Ruskin Museum, St. Andrews churchyard where the body of Ruskin lies and the municipal graveyard where Campbell is buried are all familiar to David when I asked about them. He talked of the local people who maintained these landmarks. Then he volunteered the fact that in 2001 he had dug the grave for Campbell’s body and went on to describe how he had to clear the headstone of hundreds of cards from visitors – yet found one the next morning from Campbell’s widow. He talked of a Mr Blackburn who bought the bed of the lake and gave it to the residents who formed a Bed of the Lake Trust that still operates today. What became apparent to us as we walked through this landscape is that each town and valley is its own community. The Lake ‘District’ is a misnomer. This is not a single district. Lakeland is made up of dozens of distinctly separate social and economic units.

In Borrowdale we met a friendly and loquacious man at the core of Lakeland society, a sheep-farmer. He holds a first generation agricultural tenancy from the National Trust. (This means the tenancy can pass on to the next two generations in his family without the Trust taking it off him, thus ensuring continuity of both careful land management and employment). In common with the farmer I encountered in Kentmere - who had to fight the National Trust, successfully, to keep his agricultural tenancy - and another in Swaledale, he is critical of the Trust. Meeting these folk, I am convinced the Trust does not understand farming. The National Trust and Natural England are paying farmers very large sums of money to reduce the number of sheep on the fells by as much as sixty per cent in some areas. These organisations believe that the pastures on the fells are being overgrazed. What they appear to fail in grasping is that the fells are good for no other type of farming; that if the grass grows too long, not only will the sheep not eat it but the indigenous birds will not be able to reach the grubs they live on so they will move elsewhere; and that for a farmer who once had 10,000 sheep on the fells now has less than half that number it will not be worth shepherding them.

Derwentwater and Blencathra

Since Natural England started interfering with the way generations of farmers have instinctively come to regard as best for the sheep, best for the wildlife, best for the visitors who come to enjoy the scenery and wildness, this London based non-departmental public body has failed to provide evidence that its huge expenditure is actually protecting Lakeland’s nature. Locals tell me that more likely it is destroying habitats and a way of life that has endured for many centuries. Lakeland farmers have been successful and trusted key influencers in whatever happens in each small community that is made up of people and land.

My interest in northern hills is not to describe the beauty of Lakeland and The Dales. As with every other place I visit it is the role of the landscape in shaping lives that matters to me. The converse is equally critical; how is mankind managing the landscape? This year a Swedish teenage climate activist has stirred millions of people around the world to look at the places in which we live. She wants us to be alarmed, even angry, at what is happening. My grandchildren are right to be concerned about the natural world in which they are growing up. I hope that sane heads in national governments and world organisations such as the United Nations will come up with some strategies.

My immediate fear is that Lakeland, the Yorkshire Dales and other northern hills of England will pay the price of foot dragging by politicos in Westminster, Washington, Moscow, Beijing and Brazil. Climate change has been taking place for decades, but even now some grey suits in London are ‘re-wilding’ these hills, removing sheep and planting trees to make them feel they are taking action. Again I say, where is the evidence their policies are effective? The thirteen farmers in Borrowdale alone will tell them they are making big mistakes.

The position I take on this issue is admittedly an emotional and instinctive one. There is evidence that the eradication of the consumption of all red meat would have a significant positive effect on the rate of climate change. Nevertheless, allowing large commercial companies and The National Trust, who are major landowners in Lakeland, to enact policies that are contrary to the innate passion and feel for the landscape that farmers have seems wrong. The meat produced from Cumbrian sheep is infinitesimally small; the wool has potentially far more value if imports of clothing materials are to be reduced. From my visits I detect that most farmers, walkers and locals wish to see the fells, valleys and villages left looking like they have done for hundreds of years.

Carrock Fell from Skiddaw House