Seventy Years Among Savages

by Henry S. Salt

It so happens that as I have known the mountains of Carnarvonshire and Cumberland rather intimately for many years, the process of spoliation which, as Elisée Reclus has remarked, is a characteristic of barbarism, has been there forced on my attention. It is close on half a century since I was introduced to some of the wildest mountains of North Wales by that muscular bishop, Dr. G. A. Selwyn, of whom I have spoken in an earlier chapter, when, as tutor to his nephew, I was one of an episcopal party that went on a summer holiday from Lichfield to Penmaenmawr. There the bishop relaxed very genially from the austere dignities of his Palace: and having procured an Ordnance map, was not only taken with a desire to find his way across the heights to Llyn-an-Afon, a tarn which nestles under the front of the great range of Carnedd Llewelyn, but insisted on being accompanied by his nephew and his nephew’s tutor. Mountaineering, as I afterwards saw, could not have been one of Dr. Selwyn’s many accomplishments; for we had to make more than one expedition before we set eyes on the lake, and in the course of our first walk he slipped on a steep ridge and put his thumb out of joint, to the secret amusement, I had reason to fear, of my pupil, who, greatly disliking these forced marches into the wilderness, regarded the accident as a nemesis on an uncle’s despotism. But to me the experience of those bleak uplands was invaluable, for it was the beginning of a love of mountains, both Cambrian and Cumbrian, which led me to return to them again and again, until I had paid over a hundred visits to their chief summits. Thus I could not fail to note, now in the one district, now in the other, how the hand of the desecrator had been busy.

Recent discussions in the press on the subject of the proposed Sty Head motor-road have been useful in two ways: first, they called forth so strong and general an expression of opinion against that ill-advised project, as to render its realization extremely unlikely for a long time to come; and secondly, they drew attention to the wider and deeper under-lying question of the preservation of British mountain scenery against Vandalism of various kinds. The attempt on the Sty Head was in itself a significant object-lesson in the dangers by which our mountain “sanctuaries” are beset. A hundred and fifty years ago the poet Gray could write thus of the hamlet of Seathwaite, where the famous Pass has its entrance on the Borrowdale side:

“All further 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 the mountains held that belief, it was they, not the dalesmen, who were the innocents, for the little path has been found passable at every season of the year; and Mr. G. D. Abraham, himself a distinguished climber, and a native of the district, was so willing to reveal the mountain mysteries as to plead in his book on Motor Ways in Lakeland for the construction of a highroad from the very point where all farther access used to be barred. “The quaint little old-world hamlet,” he said, “will doubtless recover its glory of former days when the highway over Sty Head Pass becomes an accomplished fact.”

The love of mountains, itself a growth of modern times, has in fact brought with it a peril which did not exist before; it has opened the gateway and pointed the path to the shrine; but where the worshipper enters, what if the destroyer enters too? What if the pilgrim is close followed by the prospector?

Some years ago Mr. C. P. Trevelyan, M.P., introduced an “Access to Mountains Bill,” which while safeguarding the interests of land-owners, would have permitted pedestrians to indulge their love of highland scenery by making their way to the summits of uncultivated mountain or moorland. All nature-lovers must desire that such a measure may become law; and it might be hoped that landlords themselves would not persist in opposing it, for consideration should show them that it is impossible permanently to exclude the people from the hilltops of their native land. Even now, since it is the difficult and the forbidden which attract, there is a certain relish in the attempted ascent of those heights which in the landlord’s sense (not the climber’s) are still “inaccessible”—just as the cragsmen find a pleasure in striving to surmount the obstacles of rock-face or gully. Who has not longed to cross the lofty frontier into some deer-stalking or grouse-shooting Thibet, where, beyond the familiar lying sign-post stating that “trespassers will be prosecuted,” all is vagueness and mystery? What mountain-lover has not at times sought to snatch an “access to mountains” where access was denied?

I still recall the zest of a raid, albeit unsuccessful, on one of the summits of the Grampians, when our small party of climbers, starting from Aviemore, and passing the heathery shores of Loch-an-Eilan, fell in near “the Argyle Stone” with a number of deer-stalkers, who groaned aloud in their fury when they heard by what route we had ascended, and insisted on our going down to Kincraig. We had spoiled their day’s sport, they told us; and we, while regretting to have done so, could not refrain from saying that they had equally spoiled ours. We were consoled, however, in some measure, during that inglorious descent, by the sight of an osprey, or fishing-eagle, hovering over the river Spey: doubtless the bird was one of a pair that for years haunted Loch-an-Eilan, until the cursed cupidity of egg-collectors drove them from almost their last breeding-place.

One of the most inaccessible heights in England at the present day is Kinderscout, the “Peak” of Derbyshire, a triangular plateau of heathery moorland, with rocky “edges” broken into fantastic turrets and “castles.” Here only do the Derbyshire hills show some true mountain characteristics; and the central position of the “Peak,” which is about twenty miles equidistant from Sheffield, Manchester, and Huddersfield, would seem to mark it as a unique playground for the dwellers in our great manufacturing towns. In reality, it is a terra incognita to all but a very few, a place not for workers to find health in, but for sportsmen to shoot grouse; and there is no spot in England which is guarded against intruders with more jealous care. I speak advisedly, for I once tried, with some friends, to “rush” the summit-ridge from the public path which crosses its western shoulders, only to be overtaken and turned back by some skilfully posted gamekeeper.[36] The loss to the public of a right of way over these moors, as over many similar places, is deplorable; and here, as elsewhere, the compromise that has been arrived at has been greatly to the landlord’s advantage, for while the grouse-shooter excludes the public from a vast area of moorland, the wayfarer finds himself limited to the narrowest of roundabout routes, and is insulted, as at Ashop Head, by a perfect plague of notice-boards threatening all the imaginary pains and penalties of the law for any divergence on to the hillside. Certainly an Access to Mountains Bill is urgently required.

But there is one thing which is even worse than too little access to mountains, and that is the concession of too much. It were heartily to be wished that such districts as those of the Lakes, Snowdonia, and others which might be named, had long ago been made inaccessible, in this sense, to the railway-lord, the company-promoter, and all the other Vandals who for commercial purposes would destroy the sanctitude of the hills. We have, in fact, to consider what sort of access we propose, for just as there is all the difference in the world between the admission of the public to see a grand piece of statuary, and the admission of the man who has a design to chip the statue’s nose, so we have to distinguish between those who come to the mountains to speculate on the beauties of Nature and those who come there to speculate in a baser sense. Access to mountains is in itself most desirable, but what if we end by having no mountains to approach? In this respect the Bill might be strengthened, by making it withhold from the Vandal the access which it would bestow on the mountaineer.