Stuart Maconie in the Lakes
Alfred Wainwright immortalised the Lake District in a series of books that has never been bettered. Stuart Maconie tells his story, and heads back to the first ‘Wainwright’ he ever climbed…
PHOTOS: TOM BAILEY
BACK IN 1979, most weekends would find us round at my mate Dylan’s place. For teenagers, it had everything. A big pond you could fish for tench and carp in, a record collection full of Kate Bush, Buzzcocks and Elvis Costello, a freezer full of food, a cabinet full of booze and shelves groaning with cool books, nearly all which belonged to Dylan’s mum and dad who were (obligingly) often away in the Lake District walking.
Dylan’s dad was an English teacher, and on those groaning shelves amongst the Audens and Brontës and Keatses were several small handwritten volumes that intrigued and delighted me. Anyone who’s played Pictionary with me will know that art is not my strong suit. But even I could see that these were little masterpieces of design. It didn’t matter that I had no clue what or where the places they described were. For all I knew, Robinson and Hindscarth were solicitors in Bolton, and Dale Head was a new signing for Wigan Warriors. They were beautiful, and even a 17-year-old boy covered in tench slime and cider stains could see that. And eight or so years later, when I began to explore the fells of the Lake District in earnest, I felt the thrill of recognition when I saw those books again in Sam Reid’s bookshop in Grasmere. I bought The Central Fells that day and one or other of them has rarely been out of my rucksack since.
The seven volumes of Alfred Wainwright’s Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland fells were written roughly between 1952 and 1966. Thirteen years in which this recalcitrant, opinionated Lancastrian devoted pretty much every free waking hour to them, either climbing the hills by every conceivable route for research, or at his desk producing the meticulous pen and ink drawings and lettering that make them so unique (he threw away the first 100 pages after deciding the text should be ‘justified’, with no hyphens).
At the start of this epic undertaking, he was unknown. On the publication of the final volume, a devotee sat at the summit of Great Gable collecting signatures for a petition to win him an OBE. Wainwright was predictably horrified. ▶
We have to be cautious in how we analyse his character: some say his persona of dour irascibility was just that; a persona, largely self-created through the writings. But there’s no doubt that it was an effective one. His second wife Betty said that he was ‘a sensitive, shy man who sought anonymity, hiding himself behind a gruff exterior’.
Whatever his true nature, there is no doubt that the Pictorial Guides are magnificent. Once famous, he wrote 45 other books of varying tone and quality. But these are his masterpieces. The Independent
said that they are ‘arguably among that period’s supreme British cultural achievements’. Given that the same period also includes The Beatles’ Revolver,
the late Ealing Comedies, the British New Wave films, the classic poems of Larkin and Hughes and winning the World Cup, that is high praise indeed for those seven delicious, lapidary volumes.
Mine are now in a right old state. The ones I use on the hill are anyway, as like many AW devotees I have several sets, including ‘one for the fireside’, as he liked to put it, and one for the pack. The Bakestall pages in The Northern Fells feature an irregular teak-coloured stain where a boisterous Westie knocked my flask over somewhere above Dash Beck. Nearly all would be described by booksellers as ‘bowed’, ‘chipped’, ‘foxed’ or, in the case of The Far Eastern Fells, practically ‘disbound’. One volume never leaves the house; the first edition Northern Fells volume that I was bought on completion of my 214th and final ‘Wainwright’, an ascent which was featured in this very magazine. Hunter Davies, Wainwright’s biographer, has first editions of all seven. I cannot claim this. But every one of my ‘rucksack’ copies has something that makes it precious and conjures a memory: stains and rips, jotted notes, tickets and photos jammed in as bookmarks, names of companions and dates of ascent, the earliest of which says, on the first page of the Loughrigg chapter of The Central Fells in red biro, ‘Whitsun 1990’. More on that in a while.
In the same piece in which it lauds his supreme cultural achievement, the Indy states that Wainwright was the first person to climb and record ascents of all 214 Lake District fells. Technically true I suppose, but misleading. He was the first. But that’s because he devised the list and decided that there were 214 of the blighters, for reasons that even fans like Hunter Davies admit was as much to do with the elegance and uniformity of the volumes’ design as it was for geographical reasons. Bill Birkett, in his fine book of the fells, lists all over 1000ft. Others have different criteria. AW’s were as much to do with taste and whim as anything else. But his have become canonical, a testament to their brilliance.
And they are brilliant. Yes, some of his attitudes are ‘problematic’. He can be (deliberately) curmudgeonly and reactionary. But at his best, which he usually is, there’s something to delight on almost every page. A lovely sketch, a witty, often self-deprecating aside, a gag about the difficulties finding a place to wee on the ascent of Ard Crags or a piece of lyrical writing that captures exactly what I feel about these places. I can never read the closing words of Volume Seven without feeling a tightening in the throat and a prickle in the eyes: ‘The fleeting hour of life of those who love the hills is quickly spent, but the hills are eternal. Always there will be the lonely ridge, the dancing beck, the silent forest; always there will be the exhilaration of the summits. These are for the seeking, and those who seek and find while there is still time will be blessed both in mind and body.’
Alfred Wainwright was born in Blackburn on 17th January 1907 into the penurious family of an erratically employed stonemason. A brilliant scholar, he nonetheless had to leave school at 13 to bring in vital income, but studied at night school and worked his way up through the ranks of the borough treasury. Aged 23, he made his first trip to the Lake District by bus from Blackburn to Windermere with his cousin. There they climbed the small, popular summit of Orrest Head above the lake. It was a transformative moment; in that overused word, an epiphany. ‘…a revelation so unexpected that I stood transfixed, unable to believe my eyes ... Orrest Head cast a spell that changed my life’. ▶
”| stood transfixed, unable to believe my eyes… Orrest Head cast a spell that changed my life.” ALFRED WAINWRIGHT ON HIS FIRST VISIT TO THE LAKE DISTRICT
From then on, his almost monomaniacal obsession was to be nearer the Lake District, an ambition realised in 1941 when he joined Kendal’s Borough Treasurer’s office. Wainwright had always drawn and composed caricatures, comics for friends, projected guidebooks of trips to the Alps and such, and as his passion and knowledge of the fells grew, so did the idea for the Pictorial Guides. On the evening of 9th November 1952, he drew and wrote the page describing the ascent of Dove Crag from Ambleside. It was the first of thousands of pages and the beginning of a literary career and a kind of stardom. The next 13 years of evenings, weekends and holidays would be spent exploring every nook, cranny, gill, arête, ridge and pass of the Lake District fells. No breathable Gore-Tex or GPS for AW. He scorned even a compass as an unworkable gadget – I have some sympathy there – and wore, at least for the first few years, a tweed suit, shirt and tie, stayed in B&Bs or sometimes out on the hill, existing on pipe tobacco and chip shop teas.
As his love of the mountains deepened, so his attachment to his wife Ruth and son Peter cooled and grew distant. Within a year of the publication of the last volume, he had separated from them. Whilst his marriage to his second wife Betty was blissful, some feel that his effective abandonment of his first family – he gave all the money from the Guides to animal charities and left Peter nothing in his will – speaks of coldness. Richard Else, a TV director who worked with him during his period of late-life celebrity, said of him: “He spent much of life almost being solitary and because of his mental health issues could be quite cruel to people, but not out of malice… you could have a marvellous day filming, then the next day, it would be like he was meeting you for the first time. He devoted 13 years of his life writing seven guides to Lake District fells while his first marriage disintegrated around him, which shows his priorities were different to others.”
Another who knew him well in his later life, broadcaster Eric Robson, speaks of “dark patches, or memories of past darknesses. He was a complex man. He was shy, and he engaged his brain before opening his mouth. He liked solitude. But he could be very generous, and, even when he was older, cooped up somewhere inside him there was also a bit of a Jack the Lad. I would have loved to have known him when he was younger.”
When I was younger, I worked for the New Musical Express. My weekly routine would often involve transatlantic flights, sweaty, smoky clubs, Transit vans and sound checks. Great fun of course, but when I had free time, the last place I wanted to be was standing at a baggage carousel. Thus, if you open my copy of The Central Fells (Book Three of the series), at the page for Loughrigg Fell, you will see that inscription ‘Whitsun 1990’.
Let me take you there. The Stone Roses have just played their huge outdoor gig at Spike Island. ‘Madchester’ is at its peak. Italia 90 is underway and World in Motion by New Order is number one. British music and pop culture is on a high. And I
was setting out in from Luchini’s ice cream van in White Moss Common car park between Grasmere and Rydal Water to head for the summit of Loughrigg Fell.
Twenty one years later, I’m back to renew old acquaintance.
Photographer Tom and I are headed for the same circuit I made on that hot summer day in 1990; ascend via Loughrigg Terrace, traverse and explore that wonderful shaggy top, then pick a way down to Rydal Cave and back via the shore of the pretty lake. If you only get as far as Loughrigg Terrace, as many do, it’s still well worth pulling your boots on. The Terrace, a gently undulating track, is a delightful spot beloved of many. From here you get a real sense of the landscape around you and, as I did two decades ago at the start of my love affair, the hills and lakes and valleys that were to become fast friends and much-loved places. From here, you can look across at the inviting but daunting slopes of the Fairfield Horseshoe. Northwards, across Grasmere lake, lies the natural pass of Dunmail Raise, with Seat Sandal and Stone Arthur rising above. And looking into the heart of the fells, there’s blue and hazy Ullscarf. ▶
”Twenty-one years ago, when first arrived here, felt that same sudden sense of exhilaration that Wainwright must have done…”