Now everyone can see what Turner saw
PAINTED LANDSCAPE Tom Ough visits the Lake District to study one of the most significant views in British art
The gamut of human experience includes few peaks so dizzying, it turns out, as buying a historic hill for the National Trust. “You get physically excited,” says Tom Burditt. “It’s hard to explain. The adrenalin starts flowing and it just kind of clicks.”
He and I are taking a walk up Brackenthwaite Hows, which is a lowslung, semi-wooded, anonymous sort of hill in the North Lakes. By the end of our 30-minute round trip to the top of the hill and back down to the banks of the River Cocker, I will understand, even share, his excitement. Yet unless you’re a scholar of JMW Turner, you’d have no idea from looking at it that Brackenthwaite Hows is one of the most significant hills in British art.
Like everything in the Trust’s care, Burditt tells me, it will be maintained “forever, for everyone”. We’d met a short time ago at the foot of the hill. Burditt, who had the fleece and short sideburns you’d expect of a Trust general manager with an affection for romantic art, is a calm 42-year-old. He led me on to a poorly signposted path through some ragged trees. As the path got steeper, it got stonier too. Dark, lichen-speckled
rock, both jagged and smooth, reared out of the bank beside us. Slender silver birches shaded our way. We walked through the woodland until we reached a tall wooden gate. This gate, Burditt explained, marks the beginning of the land that the Trust had just bought, and it’s at roughly this point in the walk that the silver birches lessen and the wild flowers increase. Amid the grass there were yellow tormentil, dainty white bedstraw and purple foxgloves. We reached rock that came up through the grass like a dais. The view was fantastic: Grasmoor to our left, another hill, Mellbreak, to our right, and the glassiness of Crummock Water in front of us, with Buttermere beyond. Sound familiar?
This is where Turner comes in. Brackenthwaite was one of several pretty Lakeland spots that the Georgians liked to visit, Burditt explained. “It’s similar to one of the things that people like about it today. You get an incredible view for a short walk.”
Many Georgians used to bring a gadget called a Claude glass, essentially a sepia-tinged mirror. They’d turn away from the view and look at its softened, mellow reflection in the glass. They did this to cultivate a picturesque atmosphere, mostly, just like we use Instagram filters, but another, sillier reason has been put forward. “Apparently,” says Burditt, “the views were considered too beautiful for women to look at, and
they were fainting. So by looking at it in the mirror it kind of calmed you down so you weren’t so awed by the beauty of the landscape that you fainted. I think it had more to do with heavy corsets.”
The artists of the time produced the sort of stylised, over-saturated landscapes you’d expect from tourists using Claude glasses. Then Turner arrived, at this point an unknown 17-year-old. He didn’t use a Claude glass, and he scrambled down from the usual viewing point to find a perspective he liked better. The result was Crummock Water,
Looking Towards Buttermere (1797), which is the view that makes Brackenthwaite famous. We pull up a picture of it on my phone. There it is; foggy, with specks of green, and the same mountainous silhouettes as today. “You can see the colours now,” says Burditt. “They still feel very real, and before him it all feels a bit staged.”
Turner’s visit to the Lakes put him “at the vanguard of a new way of painting, thinking, moving through the landscape,” as Burditt puts it. “The moment when Turner leaves the established viewpoint, and goes and has his own perspective and paints this view, is like the first modern English landscape painting, and actually the way that we still experience the landscape.
Burditt continues: “A lot of people are still absolutely following a picturesque view around the Lakes. You get out of a car, you go to the viewpoint, you take a selfie, you get back in the car, and you go to the next one. I think, however, if you’re going out into the landscape and you’re
having a picnic or you’re going for a swim in the lake or you’re standing on a fell at sunset on your own, that’s romanticism. That’s a romantic way of engaging with the Lakes, and Turner started that.”
Other artists, such as the poet William Wordsworth, swiftly followed Turner in making the Lakes the focus of powerful, naturalistic work. In this vein, Wordsworth and his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge published the first edition of Lyrical
Ballads, a collection of their poetry, in 1798. Wordsworth had been writing about the Lakes before he would have heard of Turner, but he would go on to praise the painter’s work in A Guide to the District of the Lakes.
So I can see why Burditt and his colleagues were so excited to secure the land. It satisfied the Trust’s criteria of it having merit, offering opportunity, and being under threat. Although the hill was already legally accessible to the public, few visitors to the Lakes were aware of it. As for the threat criterion, it could plausibly have had a telephone mast put on it, and the pathways could have fallen into any state of disrepair.
After months of surveying and negotiation, both within the Trust and between the Trust’s lawyers and the landowners, the hill’s 77 acres were sold at the beginning of June. The fee was £202,000; the news came to Burditt’s office via a phone call. “It’s almost like on Location, Location,
Location,” he says, “where they phone up the person and they say: ‘You’ve got it!’.” His colleagues cheered. Someone brought out cake.
The Trust won’t make many visible changes, Burditt says; they’ll improve the paths, and they’ll maintain the flora and fauna that live here, and they’ll encourage tourists to visit. And if those tourists turn away from the view to take a selfie, they won’t be the first.
‘Turner’s visit to the Lakes put him at the vanguard of a new way of painting and moving through the landscape’