On Cambrian and Cumbrian Hills: Pilgrimages to Snowdon and Scafell

by Henry S. Salt

Eastertide is now a popular week among the mountains, but fifty years ago the hotels were practically empty at that season. I well remember how, as an undergraduate at Cambridge, I planned my first Easter visit to Cumberland, and was gravely warned by a learned Fellow of my College, the librarian, Henry Bradshaw, that it would be a very rash undertaking to go at that time, for “the passes,” he said, “would not be open.” He had in mind, possibly, a sentence in Gray’s account of his trip to the Lake District in 1769, where it is stated of the gates of the Styhead Pass, at Seathwaite, that “all farther access is here barred to prying mortals, only there is a little path winding over the fells, and for some weeks in the year passable to the dalesmen; but the mountains know well that these innocent people will not reveal the mysteries of their ancient kingdom.” If my monitor could now stand on the Styhead on a fine Easter Monday, he would see a sight to surprise him!

Nor is it strange that the mountains should attract their worshippers at all seasons of the year, for the passion, once acquired, is insatiable; you may tire of the hills for awhile, but if you have once felt their power you will assuredly return to them; and that perhaps is why we think of them as holding some inner secret of their own. Who that has sympathetically studied them will deny it? There are moments when, as we stand in the presence of a great mountain group, we are almost overwhelmingly conscious of the brooding watchfulness, the sphinx-like reserve and expectancy, with which these silent sentinels confront us. What is the source of the strong yet mysterious attraction that draws us again and again to these wildernesses of rock and cloud, this “builded desolation” which might seem so antagonistic to human sympathies? Why is it that we find even a humanizing influence in wastes where our grandfathers could see nothing but what repelled them as “savage” and “ferocious”? The charm that binds us is as inexplicable as it is real. If human love is “of the valley” and calls us down, there is another and wilder love that is of the mountain and calls us upward.

There are unfrequented ranges, such as the Eskdale side of Scafell, or the Aber side of Carnedd Llewelyn, where one may walk for twelve hours together without meeting a human being; indeed, the loneliness of the Welsh hills is now even greater than it used to be, since the “hafodtai,” or upland farmsteads, where the herdsmen camped out during the summer months, have been abandoned; and the present concentration of both tourists and climbers on certain favoured spots makes the silence all the deeper elsewhere. Thus it is that the pilgrim who is neither tyro nor expert, and therefore not dependent on the companionship of others, on account either of his own incapacity or of the arduous nature of his task, is able on the mountains to profit by a rare form of intercourse which, in the hurry and bustle of modern life, has become increasingly difficult; he can exchange ideas (if he has any) with himself. His surroundings are such as to quicken and foster such self-converse, not by the morbid introspection of the solitary—for, rightly regarded, there is no such thing as solitude among the hills—but by the liberating influence which these scenes exert both on the body and on the mind.

Nor must it be supposed that there is any taint of moroseness or misanthropy in this mountain seclusion; the contrary, rather, is the case, and the human sympathies are perhaps all the stronger because they are not expressed but implied. Tender relationships need space to grow in, and the self-withdrawal which allows a fuller, because a freer view of them, does not lessen but rather fosters their tenderness, even as we may understand the hills themselves the better if we sometimes watch them from afar; and it is just this gift of space and freedom that we find in mountains as nowhere else. Therefore it is true, in Muir’s words, that “the darkest scriptures of the mountains are illumined with bright passages of love that never fail to make themselves felt when one is alone.”

Again, if the mountains can teach us to feel more deeply, they can also help us more effectively to think. I have heard mountaineering deprecated by a learned scholar as having too much of the “animal” in it. The mountains certainly are not a thinking-shop; we do not go to them to follow a train of thought, or to solve a mathematical problem, but when we return from them we should be able to think the better, for in their company we have stood face to face with those great natural forces which are the best and most elemental educators of heart and mind alike. As Wordsworth’s “Solitary” said of the “two huge peaks,” that overlooked his hermitage:

Thoughts are not busier in the mind of man

Than the mute agents stirring there.

For, rightly spent, what we call “a day upon the mountains” is in truth an eight or ten hours’ enfranchisement from a mortal obsession. Our chains fall from us—the small cramping chains of lifelong habit—and we go free. We awake out of the deadly torpor of our everyday “occupations,” and we live. And excellent as is the physical exaltation of climbing—the toil and triumph of the ascent—there is also an intellectual and spiritual element in the mountain-passion, which can lift us out of ourselves, and show us, from a higher plane of feeling, as no mere book-knowledge can do, the true proportions and relations of things. One cannot walk in such regions, consciously, without enlargement of thought. There are heights and valleys which, to those who seek them in a sympathetic spirit, are better “seats of learning” than any school or university in the land; there are days when the climber seems to rise into a rarer mental as well as visual atmosphere, and to leave far below him the crass cares and prejudices of commonplace life.[7]

In this sense the humanities of thought do not wither, but rather are fostered and strengthened, in the loneliness of the hills, and the hills themselves, when approached in a fit spirit, become a living inspiration, which enables us the better to know and value our fellow-beings of flesh and blood. “Would that I could give the world some clue to apprehend these strange weird companions of my life, in their higher teachings and ideals. Painters give them up in despair, as impossible, unrenderable; and they have yet to be described in their subtle powers of thought-giving and helpful teaching.” So wrote to me a friend who had dwelt for many years under the shadow of a mighty mountain range.[8]