As the modern world closes in, what we need is wilderness
The Lake District is “a place of dreadful fells, hideous wastes, horrid waterfalls, terrible rocks and ghastly precipices” wrote Ralph Thoresby in 1697. How times have changed. This week it was awarded Unesco world heritage status on account of its “harmonious landscape in which the mountains are mirrored in the lakes”.
More than 16 million people visit every year. What are they seeking? Certainly some go for the scenery and literary heritage. But the best of the Lakes is really what Thoresby described: its wilderness.
The great Romantic poets knew this well, finding the sublime in rawest nature. “Wildness is a necessity,” wrote Scots-born John Muir. Today, as the modern world creeps in on every side, his attitude to the outdoors is ever more compelling.
Swimming “wild” – that is in lakes and rivers, not chlorinated pools – is increasingly popular. So is “wild” camping; and it only takes a moment to grasp the thrill of spending a night under the stars, well off the beaten track.
Our island may be small, but it is home to great many other wild places. Finding them doesn’t always mean camping in the Cairngorms or visiting St Kilda. Fewer than one in five of us live in rural areas. For the other 83 per cent, seeking the wild is still possible.
When I lived in east London, seeing the tawny rust of an urban fox was a jolt of wildness I craved. Now I live in a town in Hampshire, watching a buzzard above a shopping mall or train station is pure, wild excitement. I might be in Basingstoke but the red kites are wild, willing their way back into our towns. There’s an idyllic river 10 minutes up the road. I have to beat a path through the nettles and clamber down a muddy bank to enter the cold, clear water, swimming beside an abundance of banded demoiselles – the damselflies with wings like inky fingerprints – and clouds of meadow brown butterflies. It feels wild, though of course it’s managed by human hands.
Our concept of the wilderness is a mutable thing, after all. Until the 19th century, people were simply appalled by it. The poet Charles Cotton wrote in 1681 that travellers were advised to “keep your coach blinds drawn while traversing the region so as not to be shocked by its ugliness and wildness”. When I travel by train through the Lakes, the reverse is true. I am compelled to put down my book; the vast hills just demand to be looked at. I am shocked by their beauty and scale, not their ugliness.
Wilderness is, above all, a state of mind. Perhaps, as the geographer and historian William Cronon has suggested, it is really “otherness”. A jar of pond water is a mini wilderness, after all, with its rotifers, pulsing ciliates, protozoa and protists. A handful of soil is, too: see the ants and spiders, mites and worms. As are the starlings in the garden or the spiders on the stairs.
And what, then, is the precise power of the wild? What is it that sees so many of us yearn for the outdoors, even if means stomping through closed-off hills and moorland, like those taking part in the “Mass Trespass” of Kinder Scout in 1932? Ultimately, it’s alchemy. Poets understand this transformation best, like Nan Shepherd: “Or in a drab season, and feeling as drab as the weather, I stand on a bridge above a swollen stream. And suddenly the world is made new.”
Lucy Jones is the author of ‘Foxes Unearthed’ READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion