On Cambrian and Cumbrian Hills: Pilgrimages to Snowdon and Scafell

by Henry S. Salt

Such is the latter state of this Welsh mountain, of which it used to be said that “whoever slept upon Snowdon would wake inspired.” The inspiration which to-day awaits those who wake upon Y Wyddfa is the sight of a hostel “standing where it ought not,” with the usual appurtenances of civilization—post-office, railway-station, refreshment-rooms, cigar-ends, urinals, hordes of trippers, to whom the mountain means no more than the pier at Margate or the terrace at Windsor—almost everything that is civilized except a police-station, and who knows but even that may come? If there is still any “beauty born of murmuring sound” among the dwellers on Snowdon, it must be born of the slow-panting locomotive, or of the gurgling of whiskies in the hotel. And the view? In clear weather, we are told, it embraces the coast of Ireland. I have seen it embrace a line of “washing,” hung out to dry on the edge of the Glaslyn precipice.

In Cumberland, thanks to the efforts of a few faithful defenders and the powerful sentiment aroused by the Lake poets, there has been much less desecration, and the recent attempts of vandalism on these remaining strongholds of Nature have been mostly repulsed; indeed, it might be thought that the immediate danger in this quarter comes in part from overzealous friends, and that it is time a limit were put to the well-meant but mischievous practice of building memorial tablets in record either of personal associations or of fatal accidents. That the guide-books should tell us how Scott’s “pilgrim of Nature” lost his life on Helvellyn, and how Matthew Arnold took a meditative walk there, is well enough; but to erect stones in memory of these events, and marble crosses on the various spots where rash cragsmen have fallen, seems rather indiscreet; for it is not fitting that a wild mountain should be plastered, like a lecture-hall or a cemetery, with epitaphs and inscriptions.

But it must not be supposed that Lakeland has not suffered even as Wales has done, though in a less degree, from the ravages of commercialism. Coniston is a sad proof of the contrary, where that once beautiful mountain, the Old Man, has been so ruined by the copper-mines that, as has been said of the gold-fields of Colorado, “the hills have been flayed of all their grass and scalped of all their timber; they are scarred and gashed and ulcerated all over from past mining operations—so ferociously does little man scratch at the breasts of his great calm mother when he thinks that jewels are there hidden.” I was told by Ruskin, whose windows at Brantwood looked westward across Coniston Water to the Old Man, that he thought the very sky above the mountain-top was poisoned and clouded by the mines.

Take the case of Thirlmere, too, that once wild and winding tarn, so narrow at the middle that it was spanned by a rustic bridge, but now enlarged into a Manchester water-tank. It is true that in this case—unlike the majority—a useful purpose was attained; but are we to believe that the general interests of the country are promoted by such feats of engineering, by which Thirlmere was “improved” into what we now see it—a formless sheet of water, with a large dam at its lower end, some ornamental water-works on its banks, and a few submerged homesteads below its waves? No wonder that the coachmen who ply between Keswick and Grasmere are never weary of pointing out to the passengers these triumphs of human skill. And now Haweswater is to suffer a like fate.

The desecration of our mountains is but part of the widespread contempt for natural scenery which may be seen from end to end of the land; but it is among mountains, where Nature is at her wildest, that it strikes us the most. From what filthy-mindedness comes the strange conviction that a clear, swift stream is the right and proper receptacle for the rubbish of human homes?[22] I know a Welsh village, the type, alas! of many villages in Wales, and elsewhere, in which from the houses built on the steep bank of a pure mountain torrent there dribbles down into the river a tributary river of filth—dust, broken bottles, paper, old boots, decaying vegetables, and all kinds of refuse—for thus it is that the country-folk muse on the gifts of Nature,

And pore upon the brook that babbles by.

Nor is it only on the natives of these districts that such reproach must fall; for, unhappily the state of some of the well-known peaks and gullies, both in Wales and Cumberland, proves that many visitors also forget their duties to the hills. I have seen the famous Needle Gully, on the south flank of the Gable, literally lined with sandwich-papers and other mementos of climbing parties, whose members would be ashamed to treat St. Paul’s or Westminster Abbey with the like disrespect; and if the skilled cragsman can be guilty of such sacrilege, can we hope that the ordinary tripper will be more reverent in his ways?

Such acts are at least indications of a barbaric mood in the public mind, which, when expressed in the form of commercial enterprise, is capable of wreaking more damage on the mountains than a waterspout or an earthquake; and the question presents itself: Will this mood pass or be abated before a fatal mischief is done? For bad as things are now, there may be worse to follow. “Thank God,” said Thoreau, “they cannot cut down the clouds.” But can they not? With aeroplanes once perfected, will not the cloud, that “mountain o’er a mountain,” share the fate of the hills? No mountain, assuredly, will escape. “As to the loftiest peaks of the Andes and Himalayas,” said Reclus, “too high in the regions of cold for man to go to their summits, the day will come when he shall be able to reach them. Balloons have already carried him two or three thousand yards high; other aeronauts will bear and deposit him on Gaourisankar, as far as the ‘great diadem of the dazzling heaven.’”

The danger lies not so much in the accessibility of cloud or mountain as in the reckless and irreverent spirit of the man who attains them. To soar to “the great diadem” is no harm; but if we turn the great diadem into a great muck-heap, shall we be the gainers by our flight?

Nor is it only the mountains that are being ruined by man’s brutishness; the extinction of the wild life of the mountains is also threatened. It has to be remembered that these remote ranges are almost the only haunt where certain rare animals can still, to some extent, hold their own. Scarcely more than a hundred years ago the eagle was breeding in Borrowdale, as it still breeds in parts of the Scottish Highlands; and whether the present century shall witness the extermination of the buzzard, the kite, the peregrine, the raven, and other rare species, must depend partly on the protection afforded them by law against the sporting naturalist or “collector,” mainly on the preservation of the mountains themselves from the commercialists’ greed. Shall we ever have the wisdom to make each such district into an asylum for bird and mountain alike? At present the lover of wild Nature, himself somewhat of a rara avis, must be thankful for what is spared in his time; but it is his duty to think of the future also, and to avert, if he may do so, the ruin which he clearly foresees.