Lake District knowledge

On one of the Ordnance Survey maps which covers the Lake District, there is a single tree symbol placed in the middle of what is otherwise a large and featureless grassy area. Reference to the map's key reveals that the symbol indicates a wood or forest.  But there is no forest or wood at this particular point; there is just a single tree, the only one for miles around.  Clearly some cartographer was so moved by this vision of the solitary tree that he or she cast professional restraint aside and commemorated the fact with the spurious symbol.

The Lake District commonly inspires such acts of affection. It must surely be one of the most cherished natural areas in the country, possibly the world.  What sets it apart from all the other great parks or open spaces, the mighty Yosemites and soaring Alps, is the sheer density of named and recognisable features within it.

The Lake District is small, certainly compared to its international equivalents. And yet by some miracle of sympathy, the whole scale of perception has been reduced in proportion.  Whereas the unsurpassable Himalayas form a huge jagged sea of peaks, some barely named or known, the Lake District has been notated down to the tiniest outcrop of rock, the slightest bump of contour, the merest trickle from a tarn.  The Lake District is thus perhaps the most knowable and known landscape on earth.

Returning there is like visiting an old friend.  Every feature is immediately familiar; gazing across a valley at the close-cropped grass blanketing the soft curves of the hills, and seeing the fine mesh of intersecting streams is like scrutinising a loved face with all its subtle contours and minutely-etched lines.

This natural tendency to anthropomorphism is made easier by the scale of the place.  However grand and sublime the vistas may be, they never lose touch with the human.  In a day you can walk from one end of the Lakes to the other, or climb several of its loftiest peaks. In a day you can sample all its delights; the shimmering tarns hidden away on the hip of a mountain; the dizzying drops of the sheer scree-falls; the velvet-like valley floors; the labyrinths of frothing streams as they cut through the rocks; the huge distant glimmers of the great lakes themselves, reflecting back the rounded lines of the hills in their infinite autumnal gradations of browns and purples and greens.

No wonder then that the area has inspired so many. The Romantics may have been the first to articulate its wild beauty, but for millennia people were hymning it in their own way. The very names which are sprinkled prodigally across the hills are a paean and a tribute to its glory: Bassenthwaite, Skiddaw, Glaramara.  It is like some forgotten ancient language; the Lake District is its greatest poem, one which is sung by walking it, a poem such as another timeless people, the Aborigines, sing as they walk their own world into existence. And walking that poem today it is clear that the language is prelapsarian, that the Lake District is a tiny Eden.  Could it be that the solitary, miraculous tree marked in the middle of this land by an inspired cartographer is in fact an apple-tree?

(2.8.87)

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