Already much that was of inestimable value has been lost. The Lake District has in this respect been more fortunate than some other localities, because, owing to the powerful sentiment aroused by the Lake poets, there is a considerable public opinion opposed to any act of desecration. For this we have to thank, in the first place, the great name of Wordsworth, and, next, the faithful band of defenders which has stood between the enterprising contractor and his prey, as in the case of the once threatened railway to Ambleside and Grasmere. But even in Lakeland no little damage has been done, as by the mining which has ruined the scenery of Coniston, and by the permission granted to Manchester to turn the once sylvan and secluded Thirlmere into a suburban tank—Thirlmere first, and now the ruin of Haweswater is to follow.
Mention has been made in an earlier part of this book of a visit which I paid to Coniston in the winter of 1878-79. It so happened that a spell of severe frost and cloudless skies had then turned the Lakeland mountains into a strange realm of enchantment, the rocks being fantastically coated with fronds and feathers of snow, and the streams and waterfalls frozen into glittering masses of ice. I was the only visitor in the place (it was before Mr. Harrison Riley’s arrival), and for several days I had been scrambling over the range of the Old Man mountain without meeting a human being, when one afternoon, on the shore of Levers Water, a solitary figure came suddenly round a buttress of the hill and stalked silently past me as if wrapped in thought. I knew at once that it was Ruskin, for what other inhabitant of Coniston would be on the fells at such a season?
A few days later, when I went to Brantwood with Harrison Riley, as I have described, Ruskin talked a good deal of his favourite mountain haunts, as he showed us his wild strawberry beds, and terraces on the hillside made like Swiss roads; also a small beck running through his grounds to the lake, which he said was never dry, and was as precious to him as a stream of pure gold. The Lake scenery, he said, almost compensated him for the loss of Switzerland, which he could not hope to see again; his feeling for it was one less of affection than of “veneration.” But the sunsets had been a disappointment to him, for the sky above the Old Man was often sullen and overclouded, and this he attributed to the poisonous influence of the copper mines.
At present the chief danger to the quietude and beauty of the Lake district seems to be the motor-craze, especially that form of it which has been called “the fascinating sport of hill-hunting,” a game which has turned the Kirkstone Pass into a place of terror, where noisy machines pant and snort up one side and scorch furiously down the other, and which is now craving new heights to conquer. If not on the Sty Head, why not make a motor-way of the old track from Langdale to Eskdale over the passes of Wrynose and Hardknott? Such was the “compromise” which some mountain-lovers unwisely suggested, forgetting, first, that even this surrender, though less deadly than that of the Sty Head, would involve the destruction of a wild and primitive tract, and secondly that, as there is no finality in such dealings, it would only whet the motorists’ appetite for more. It is generally overlooked, too, though the point is a very important one, that the invaders have already got much more than their due share of the district; for the making of many of the roads now in existence would have been strongly opposed years ago, if it had been possible to foresee the riotous use to which they would be put.
But it is when we turn to the mountains of Snowdonia that we see what inexcusable injury has been done by the rapacity of private enterprise, connived at by the indifference of the public. It is a somewhat strange fact that, while there is an English branch of the League for the Preservation of Swiss Scenery, no organized attempt is made to preserve our own mountain scenery, not from desecration merely, but from destruction.[37]
Take, for example, the case of the River Glaslyn, which flows from the heart of Snowdon through Cwm Dyli and Nant Gwynant, till it finds its way by the Pass of Aberglaslyn to the sea. Visitors are often invited to admire the “power works,” erected some years ago at the head of Nant Gwynant, and other signs of enterprise; but from the nature-lover’s point of view there is a different tale to tell. The once shapely peak of Snowdon has been blunted into a formless cone by the Summit Hotel, which has since added to its premises a battlemented wall built of red brick; both Glaslyn and Llyn Llydaw, two tarns of flawless natural beauty, have long been befouled with copper mines; and more recently the glorious waterfall, through which the stream dashed headlong from Cwm Dyli to Nant Gwynant, has been replaced by a line of hideous metal pipes, by which the whole hillside is scarred. As for the far-famed Pass of Aberglaslyn, defaced as it is by railway works and tunnellings, remorselessly begun and then temporarily abandoned, its state can only be described as one of stagnant devastation.
Yet all this mountain scenery, which has been foolishly sacrificed for private purposes, might have been a public possession of inestimable value had it been tended as it deserved; and much yet remains in Snowdonia that might be saved for the enjoyment and refreshment of future generations, if the apathy of public feeling, and of the Welsh people, could be dispelled. But it is useless to look for local resistance to this vandalism, for one is always met by the assertion, true but irrelevant, that such enterprises “give work”; which, indeed, would equally justify the pulling down of Westminster Abbey to “give work” to the unemployed of London. Nothing but an enlightened public opinion, unmistakably expressed, can now avert the destruction (for such it is) of the noblest of Welsh, perhaps of all British mountains.
It is strange that the incongruity—the lack of humour—in these outrages on the sanctitude of a great mountain does not make itself felt. What could be more ridiculous, apart from the gross vandalism of the act, than to put a railway-station on Snowdon? A friend who knows the Welsh mountains intimately told me that on his first visit to the peak, after the building of the Summit Hotel, he remarked to a companion: “We shall be expected to have a green chartreuse after lunch here.” A waiter, overhearing him, said: “We ain’t got no green chartreuse, sir; but we have cherry brandy and curaçoa, if you like.”
In a little book entitled On Cambrian and Cumbrian Hills, published in 1908, I commented strongly on these outrages, and the justice of my criticisms with regard to the ruin of Welsh mountain scenery was not seriously disputed in the local press, though one editor did accuse me of being guilty of “a wicked libel upon the people of Wales,” and expressed himself as having been caused “real pain” by my remarks. When, however, I asked him to consider what real pain the disfigurement of Snowdon had caused to mountain-lovers, and suggested that, instead of taking me to task, he should try to arouse his readers to put an end to the vandalism which, for the sake of a temporary profit, is ruining some of the finest portions of Carnarvonshire, he made a reply which was, in fact, a most signal corroboration of my complaint; for he stated that I had evidently “no conception of the difficulties which residents in North Wales have to encounter when they oppose any commercial enterprise, backed up by English speculators, which threatens to spoil our beauty-spots.”[38] There we have the fatal truth in a sentence! What is spoiling Snowdonia is the commercial cupidity of the Welsh themselves, utilized by English capitalists. The editor naïvely added that, were I myself living in North Wales, I should be “more sympathetic.” More sympathetic, that is, with the Welsh residents, who know that their country is being spoiled, but dare not say so; less sympathetic with the mountain-lovers who deplore this crime!
In the excuses put forward for the invasion of the mountains with funicular railways, motor high-roads, and the like, there is a comic element which would be vastly entertaining if the very existence of mountain scenery were not at stake. Thus I have been met with the argument that a mountain railway, such as that on Snowdon, “takes into a purer atmosphere and into an ennobling environment those who have no other way of learning the lesson that grand mountains can teach,” to wit, “the enfeebled toilers of the towns.” I was reminded, as one convicted of “a little selfishness,” that “the weak and the feeble have to be considered, as well as the athletic and the hardy.” But, in the first place, those who travel by so expensive a route as this mountain railway are rarely the toilers of the towns, nor, so far as I have observed them, are they “the weak and the feeble.” They seem to be mostly able-bodied well-to-do tourists, who are too lazy to use their legs. I once overheard a passenger in a train, describing a recent Swiss trip, make the remark: “Oh, no, I didn’t walk a step. Funicular railways up nearly all the mountains—Pilatus, Rigi, and the rest. I wouldn’t give a fig to walk.”