IN LOVE WITH THE LAKES
Struck by the beauty of the Lake District, Terry Abraham set out to record the life of three of its famous hills on film. As he completes the trilogy with his new film about Helvellyn, Terry reveals how he first fell in love with the fells
Few photographers are as committed to their subject as Terry Abraham. Fall in love with his stunning images of the Cumbrian fells.
“I wanted to capture one mountain through the seasons in the best possible drama and light”
Aparaglider soars majestically over snow-covered spines of rock. Two off-piste skiers launch themselves over a cliff edge and go hurtling down the mountainside. A wildlife expert scans a rock face for rare Arcticalpine plants. These are just a few of the scenes from a new documentary. Is it about the Alps? No – the subject is England’s third highest mountain, Helvellyn.
Life of a Mountain: Helvellyn is the final instalment in a film trilogy looking at a year on three Lakeland peaks, the other two being Scafell Pike and Blencathra. The project, which has taken up a decade of film-maker and photographer Terry Abraham’s life, was born out of frustration. “Production companies put all their big money into programmes all over the world, but not here; you never see places like the Lake District at their best on TV,” he says. Because Terry thinks nothing of wild camping on top of a mountain in the direst weather waiting to capture just a few minutes of spectacular sunrise, he knew he could get the shots many programme-makers were missing. “The time doesn’t mean anything to me; I just enjoy being out there.”
In 2013, when he started work on his first film – about Scafell Pike, England’s highest peak – he had no idea it would make it to DVD, let alone cinema and TV screens, viewed by hundreds of thousands of people. He’d just been made redundant from an internet security firm in the East Midlands and had time on his hands.
“It was a passion project; I was doing it for me,” he explains. “I just wanted to capture one mountain through the seasons in the best possible drama and light – the way I see it when I’m out. There’d be no narrator; I wanted the authentic voices of the people who live and work there.” In each documentary, interviews with
farmers, rangers and walkers are interspersed with aerial footage, time-lapse imagery and other breathtaking landscape photography.
CONSERVING COMMUNITIES
The Helvellyn film addresses several conservation issues, subjects that Terry – a patron of the landscape charity Friends of the Lake District – feels passionately about. He fears the National Park Authority has “completely lost sight” of its role. “It should be more about conservation and green infrastructure. But that’s all left to local charities such as Friends of the Lake District and Cumbria Wildlife Trust.”
Terry believes the authority, along with some businesses, is obsessed with bringing more visitors to the area, leading to “over-tourism”. Communities are being “killed off”, he says, as holiday cottages and second homes fill Lakeland villages, causing local families to be
priced out of the housing market and facilities such as GP surgeries and schools to close. “We could very easily kill the goose that lays the golden egg.”
When it came to filming Helvellyn, Terry – a self-proclaimed perfectionist – allowed himself two years, so that he’d have two chances in each season to get the shots he envisaged. By this time, he’d achieved the dream held since he was a teenager, to move from Nottinghamshire to Cumbria. Living in the picturesque Eden Valley, squeezed between Lakeland and the North Pennines, he had easier access to the fells. “If the clag [mist] was down, I’d be home checking the footage, making notes, thinking of ideas,” he says. Otherwise, he was out every day.
“Sometimes, I’d be on what I’d call a ‘dawn raid’. I’d give my wife a gentle kiss at two in the morning and say, ‘I’m going out’. ‘What? Now?’ ‘Yeah, it’s gonna be good.’ And I’d be out the door.” Terry doesn’t drive, so he uses an electric mountain bike to get around. “I can peg it round to Glenridding, leave my bike at a friend’s house and get out on foot on the fells, ready for sunrise. With sunset, though, I tend to camp out.”
RISKING LIFE AND LIMB
Camping out means lugging a massive rucksack, weighing as much as 70kg, up and down steep slopes, often in heavy rain or ferocious winds. “It’s horrible going so slow up the fells, and it’s knee-breaking coming down,