Wainwright’s secret love
The great walking writer Alfred Wainwright was famously besotted with the uplands of the Lake District. Less well known was his passion for the hills of Scotland, reveals Richard Else, his friend and collaborator
Wainwright. A name synonymous with the Lake District and idyllic days spent roaming its fells. It’s a name rightly revered by generations of walkers grateful for the expert knowledge of the landscape that Wainwright – first name, Alfred – so brilliantly presented in his books.
Wainwright’s writing career began in 1955 with the publication of The Eastern Fells, the first of the sevenvolume classic, Guide to the Lakeland Fells. With Wainwright’s own intricate pen-and-ink maps and drawings, the books were highly distinctive, but might have looked quite different. He showed typical determination when, as an unknown author, he insisted that the first of his books was printed exactly as he had created it: handwritten, rather than typeset.
The guides aren’t simply beautiful to look at; they are the product of 13 years of devoted work spent annotating illustrations of the Lake District in minute detail. They contain a level of accuracy that, more than 50 years after the final volume appeared, remains breathtaking.
SECRET LOVE
The Lake District may have been Wainwright’s first love, but he had another lesser-known but equally long-term passion: Scotland.
Every year for almost half a century, Wainwright made pilgrimages north of the border. These journeys began just before the Second World War with a trip to the Isle of Arran. It was there that Wainwright was first smitten with the Scottish landscape. He spent a week climbing the hills and the highlight was an ascent of the 2,867ft (874m) Goatfell from the island’s main town, Brodick.
And Scotland provided Wainwright – AW to his friends – his proudest achievement: scrambling up Skye’s formidable Sgùrr nan Gillean, to its 3,162ft (964m) peak. “Everyone should do this once,” was AW’s comment.
Yet AW was often reticent on the subject of the Scottish hills. Why? “I’ve climbed many of the mountains in Scotland,” he wrote, “and never been able to tell anybody because I couldn’t pronounce the names.”
HIGHLAND ADVENTURES
Most of Wainwright’s Scottish journeys were undertaken by train and on MacBrayne’s buses, within the strict confines of a week’s holiday. Time was precious, but when he first travelled through these remote corners of Scotland, a missed bus connection could mean a wait of 24 hours or more.
There were also ferry crossings, such as the one at Kylesku, where the sea pushes far inland into the twin lochs of Gleann Dubh and Glencoul. AW considered this “the most romantic place along the west coast of Scotland”, and while the modern road bridge saves hours, he didn’t mind the wait. “There was magic about the ferry boat. I’ve spent hours here waiting and not regretting a moment of it. The landscape is superb around here. We’re looking at a scene that hasn’t changed for thousands of years.”
AW was no slouch on foot, though, once walking more than 26 miles from Ullapool to Lochinver in Sutherland, through a landscape that is little inhabited. He also didn’t begrudge the 10 miles from the village up the estate track past Glencanisp Lodge to one of his favourite mountains, Suilven. After scrambling up Bealach Mòr, he strode across the northwestern ridge before finally arriving at Suilven’s summit, 2,398ft (731m) above sea level. AW always preferred to let the landscape do the talking, so he simply described that walk as “the sort of day you never forget… a wonderful experience”.
In spite of his mastery of public transport timetables, some places remained out of reach and the most annoying of these was Skye. Eventually, AW persuaded a colleague to act as chauffeur for him. “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.”
Once in Skye’s Black Cuillin mountains, Wainwright was
“There was magic about the ferry boat. I’ve spent hours waiting for it and not regretting a moment”
determined to climb Sgùrr nan Gillean, the sharp peak that dominates the northern skyline. A first attempt at climbing it with his friend/chauffeur ended in failure. “We got within 30 yards of the top but it’s almost like a needle. We shirked it and I kicked myself all the way back. So I persuaded him to come again the next day and we did it. It’s a wonderful place to be.”
These journeys brought their own frustrations, however, with Wainwright complaining about the Gaelic names. So irked was he by the variations in spelling – Ben, Beinn and Bheinn were among many that annoyed him – that he suggested a Royal Commission should be convened to settle the matter once and for all.
Another problem for AW was the sheer number of hills. In the Lake District there are only four mountains over 3,000ft (914m); in Scotland there are nearly 300, known as Munros. AW wanted to emulate his achievements in the Lake District and climb them all, but like his self-confessed “pipe dream” of summiting Everest, it was an ambition that remained unfulfilled. He was thwarted by the sheer distances involved and a lack of time. Surprisingly, for someone who loved walking, he spent days viewing the mountains from trains and buses, rather than devoting every possible moment to climbing them. The result of all this viewing was over a thousand photographs that formed the basis for his Scottish Mountain Drawings,
published in five volumes in the 1970s. Wainwright would never say exactly how many he actually climbed.
THE REAL WAINWRIGHT
So what do these Scottish adventures reveal about the man? The common view is of a curmudgeonly, anti-social individual, someone who loved animals more than people; he once said that “murderers and terrorists and rapists and muggers” should be substituted for animals in medical experiments.
I spent a lot of time with AW during the last 10 years of his life, only a fraction of which was devoted to the films we made, yet he could still puzzle me. Every time I met him, I had to renegotiate our relationship from scratch. I believe AW found in the hills the love and companionship he lacked for most of his life, at least until he met his second wife, Betty. His life was rooted in an overriding need for order and planning; his books allowed him to enter a world he could control. The work gave his life a structure that continued until his death in 1991.
Today, I have little doubt that he would be, to use the current terminology, on the spectrum, probably diagnosed with Asperger syndrome. I often saw a man governed by forces that even he didn’t fully understand. He could accept the unquestioning devotion of animals, but struggled with the friendship of people. So I was surprised when, towards the end of our last visit to Scotland, he turned to me and said, “Thank you. Our journeys have been an unexpected bonus. They are a return to places I’d never thought I’d see again and I’ve enjoyed every minute. There is nothing like this in the Lake District. It’s far wilder, far grander, but it hasn’t the romantic beauty of Lakeland, 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.”