Walk this way
Wainwright is inextricably linked with the Lake District, but the author and walker had a lifelong love of Scotland, reveals film-maker Richard Else in his book about the reclusive man of the hills
Wainwright loved Scotland, says author Richard Else
For generations of walkers Wainwright is forever associated with the English Lake District. Yet for a man who had Scafell Pike, Skiddaw and Helvellyn engrained in the soles of his boots, it may come as surprise to learn that he had another great passion – Scotland. That love affair lasted over 50 years, until his death in January 1991, but for a man who could not drive, it was a difficult relationship. His day job as Borough Treasurer of Kendal only allowed two weeks annual leave, so any trip north of the border was less of a holiday and more of an expedition. For years he was frustrated by lack of progress and I remember him recalling how long he had taken even to reach the Isle of Skye: “I was so anxious to come here that from about 1947 onwards whenever I got a new diary, every year I opened it at random and wrote a note in it: ‘Have you been to Skye yet?’ And of course I came across this during the course of the year but I never came until 1954.”
Wainwright – who kept his first name, Alfred, a secret for years and only allowed a few people to call him the slightly less formal ‘AW’ – became captivated by Scotland after his first visit to Arran in 1936 when he still worked in his home town of Blackburn. These journeys became an annual event from the 1950s onwards, yet with limited time away from his office desk, AW had to maximise every hour and after an initial train journey was extremely resourceful in taking maximum advantage of Macbraynes’ bus timetables to reach the mountains.
Wainwright was a one-off. To many people he remains an enigma: a shy, intensely private man who spent 13 years writing seven hand drawn books that meticulously map almost every square foot of the English Lake District’s fells and summits. These hand drawn volumes cost Wainwright his first marriage and, printed by a local firm in his adopted home town of Kendal and without any real publicity, sold over million copies. Now in the hands of a London publisher, sales of his books (they total more than 50) have effortlessly passed the two million mark and there is a Wainwright industry, selling everything from named beer to a literary award commemorating his achievement. Those books, with their
Victorian sounding title, A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells ,are, i believe, nothing less than a literary masterpiece and, after a public campaign, earned him an MBE. Wainwright is so umbilically linked with this one landscape, people even talk of completing the Wainwrights – the 214 summits featured in his classic work – in the same way we tackle our Munros.
Yet Scotland remained unfinished business for AW. Even after almost half a lifetime he could never classify Scotland in the way he had tamed Lakeland, where he listed every line of ascent up a mountain and sometimes devoted over 30 pages to a single summit. Scotland was simply too big for that approach, so instead he settled for drawing all the Munros together with other summits like Stac Polly, Foinaven and that Queen of the Scottish mountains, Ben Loyal. Late in life he produced six volumes of Scottish Mountain Drawings . In this project he was helped by an encyclopaedic memory. He could recall the time he walked almost 30 miles from Ullapool to Lochinver and didn’t see another vehicle or person all day. Another year he arrived in Shieldaig when the only road came from Lochcarron and then ground to a halt. There were no guesthouses and even the inn had closed. Thinking he would have to spend a night under the stars, he eventually met a Mrs Lewis, a widow, who found a bed for him and cooked a meal. Years later he still recalled her with great affection. For a man never comfortable on exposed ridges, it took two attempts before he could conquer his fear of heights and claim the summit of Sgurr nan Gillean in the Cuillin. This was a rare occasion when AW had persuaded a colleague to act as a chauffeur and also accompany him up the mountain. “The first day we got within 30 yards of the top and it was getting decidedly airy because it’s like climbing a spire and the top of it is almost like a needle. We shirked it about 30 yards from the top and I kicked myself all the way back. We should have gone on. There was no great difficulty. We were just getting precipices on each side. So I persuaded him to come again the next day and we did it and it’s a wonderful place to be.”
It’s been said that Wainwright had no friends, so nothing was more surprising than our relationship. He was Britain’s most famous guidebook writer, I was an inexperienced documentary maker less than half his age. Many well known names had previously tried to persuade him to appear on the small screen. All had failed. Likewise he refused all interviews and personal appearances. We bonded over a shared love of mountains and from a tentative start, AW let me into his life and, for the first and only time, worked in a collaborative way with an outsider. In almost 10 years we travelled over 5,000 miles together and the resulting documentaries turned him into Britain’s most unlikely television celebrity (a word he would have hated) with films that had an audience of millions and effortlessly entered BBC2’S top 20. Nothing did more to ensure that success than Wainwright in Scotland when, over the course of 1987 and at the age of 80, we travelled to places he had given up hope of ever revisiting. That made our filming all the more poignant. We found the rugged, rock-
AW let me into his life and, for the first and only time, worked in a collaborative way with an outsider
scoured landscape of Sutherland had hardly changed from his original visits. Later we made an emotional return to Skye with the island bathed in glorious days of long sun and few clouds. Included in our itinerary was Glen Coe – where, not surprisingly, the weather was less kind – and our Scottish trip finished with three fine, but very different mountain ranges – those of Torridon, Kintail and the Cairngorms. AW, always a romantic at heart, described it as “a very sentimental journey”. We recreated part of those original journeys by setting off on the train. After checking I had got a third off the fare by showing his Senior Railcard, AW needed little prompting: it was, he said, “a reminder of the years after the war when I used to come regularly in May and September, getting on at Oxenholme and heading north”.
This most enigmatic of men was shaped by forces he did not fully understand himself. He preferred animals to people; could be socially awkward and cruel to those trying to help him. In spite of our friendship, I often felt that at the start of each day I was negotiating our relationship anew. Nonetheless for someone often described as curmudgeonly and solitary, AW could, and often did, surprise. Filming high in the Coulin Forest above Achnashellach, he summed up half a lifetime exploring Scotland, “I thought it was wonderful. There is nothing like this in the Lake District. It’s far wilder, far grander than the Lake District but it hasn’t the romantic beauty of the Lake District which appealed to me first of all. I couldn’t live here. I’m fond of solitude and loneliness but here you get rather too much of it.”