have been covered with wood to a great height up the mountains, where
native Scotch firs must have grown in great profusion, as they do in
the northern part of Scotland to this day”; and he quotes a traditional
saying that a squirrel might have travelled from Wythburn to Keswick
without touching earth. In Wales the same conditions once existed,
and Pennant, in 1773, referred to the earlier destruction of the oak
forests which had clothed the upper dales. “Avarice,” he wrote, “or
dissipation, and its constant follower, poverty, have despoiled much
of our Principality of its leafy beauties.” We can no longer say of
Snowdon or of Helvellyn, as of Mont Blanc, that “around his waist are
forests braced”--even miniature forests--but a closer knowledge will
teach us that the hillside, even when barren of vegetation, is never
barren of charm, and it may be that these mountains have gained as much
as they have lost by the change. Certainly there is a keen pleasure to
the climber in standing free of all entanglement of trunk or thicket on
the bare and open fells.
Not that the mountain is often a mere treeless and shrubless
waste, for in some places, on the lower slopes, there is a thick
ground-growth--carefully shunned by the traveller, but rich and
beautiful in itself--of heather, bracken, and bilberry, and there are
not a few spots where the flanks of the hills are a very wilderness of
intermingled crags and brushwood, ancient lurking-place of “mart” or
fox, but rarely if ever trodden by foot of man. When these fail, there
may often be seen a line of stunted yews, or hollies, or junipers,
straggling up the slope, or a mountain-ash jutting out slantwise from
the side of some narrow ravine and almost bridging the watercourse. The
bilberry, like the heather, is at times found growing at great heights,
especially in the rockier and less accessible places, such as the
sides of Tryfan or Scafell Pike, where it flourishes amazingly in some
seasons and produces berries of giant size.[20]
Not less delightful is that close-fitting vestment of the hills, which
follows so faithfully each ripe curve and contour, and so trimly
encircles the projecting bosses of rock--the short crisp sward, on
which the mountain sheep have their pasture. Even the stoniest tracts
are softened, here and there, by these verdant interspaces, and it is
refreshing to see a steep saddle of turf flung across a craggy ridge,
or a streak of greenery running far down, like a path, among the grey
and pathless screes. These grass banks are in parts notched and graded
into a kind of natural stair, easy to climb and luxurious to descend;
elsewhere they have a smooth and glassy surface which in dry weather
becomes highly polished and rather treacherous to the feet.
Very inviting, too, are the narrow winding tracks, models of skilful
engineering, which sheep and shepherds between them have worn along
the slopes--slender thoroughfares which often skirt the fells for
some distance at the same level, and offer a less toilsome footing to
those whose course is round some projecting bluff or hollow combe. A
terrace-road, where one has a steep rise on one side and a steep drop
on the other, is always a delight, even when one’s terrace is but a
tiny sheep-path of a few inches’ width; nor is there any need to go
to show places, such as the so-called “Precipice Walk” at Dolgelly,
for a sensation which can be enjoyed in abundance on any unfrequented
hillside.
But let it be supposed that verdure of any kind is lacking, and that
we stand face to face with an expanse of bare cliff and scree--such
as the south face of the Great Gable--the solid cliffs rising above,
and the broken screes streaming downward and outward from their base.
Here is barrenness indeed, yet a barrenness which, to the lover of such
solitudes, is more fruitful than the choicest vineyard or cornfield.
For how weird and suggestive is this stationary rock-fall of screes,
this stony glacier arrested in its flow, yet retaining in its stillness
something of the undulant shape! Viewed from across the glen, it
looks like a great “tongue” of rocks lolling out from the mouth of
the gorge many hundreds of feet above, and gradually widening in its
fall; at closer quarters, it presents itself as a tolerably compact
mass of individual boulders, none of any great size, across which
it is necessary to pick one’s way with some deftness, because, like
Wordsworth’s cloud, it “moveth altogether if it move at all,” and a
floundering step may set half the hillside creeping daleward.
It is centuries, no doubt, since these detached stones fell from their
holdings, and they are themselves for the most part weather-worn and
sun-stained like the parent crags, but they are still occasionally
reinforced by new outcasts, when some exposed layer of rock has become
disintegrated by winter frosts and rains; and then the story of the
latest landslip is written visibly for several years in the paler hue
of the screes and in the discordant rift in the escarpment. As a rule,
falling stones, so great a danger in the Alps, are rare among our
mountains; once or twice in a season, perhaps, you may see, or hear,
a big stone go thundering down the hillside when no human agency has
been at work.
I refer to human agency, because the mention of falling stones reminds
me of the now disused sport of crag-bowling. The rolling of stones
down mountain sides, still a recognized method of warfare among
hillsmen, has rightly been anathematized in this peaceful country since
rock-climbing became popular; but in the old days, when no one went on
the crags, it was a harmless and diverting practice. Thus Gilpin, in
his travels among the mountains of Cumberland, a hundred and thirty
years back, remarked how the native children amused themselves in this
manner; and Bingley, describing his ascent of Tryfan some half-century
later, observes: “We stood on a mere point, and on each side of us
was a precipice more deep than any I had before seen; we united our
strength, and rolled down it several huge pieces of rock.” Forty years
ago it was common to see guides and tourists assiduously engaged in
the sport, the process of which was somewhat as follows. Having first
selected a steep “scar,” or a grass slope, with a pool if possible at
the foot of it, and having made sure that neither man nor sheep was
in the line of fire, the party turned their attention to some “huge
stone,” as Wordsworth has it,
Couched on the bald top of an eminence,
and expended such energy as they had to spare in detaching this rock
from its station, until it slowly toppled over, gathered fierce speed,
went smoking and crashing down the hillside, and buried itself with a
wild plunge in the waters. Such was the pastime, a sort of vicarious
glissade, and from my own bygone enjoyment of it I have been led to
hope that the famous “labours” of Sisyphus, who, according to the old
Greek legend, was condemned in Hades to roll a large block up a hill
only--only!--to see it roll down again, were not quite so cheerless a
form of punishment as poets have feigned. The self-imposed labours of
the tobogganist seem to belong to the same class.
But if any reader thinks that so dangerous a game as crag-bowling ought
not to receive even this faint retrospective approval, let me add, as a
warning, that I know one pilgrim who, for his former indulgence in it,
sometimes pays the penalty in dreams. He has loosened, maybe, from its
high parapet some monster of a rock, in weight and girth far exceeding
any upon which he ever laid waking hands, and no sooner has he launched
it on its mad career than he remembers with horror unspeakable that
there is a cottage in the glen below--even now he sees its chimneys as
the crag goes thundering towards it, and he awakes in remorseful agony
at the sickening thud upon the roof.
From the loose screes we turn naturally to the stone walls, where
some at least of the scattered blocks have found lodgment and
reconstruction. So familiar are these walls to us, and so closely
associated with the hillside itself, that they seem to be a natural
part of it, as the bridges of the valleys, and one would not willingly
miss them from the bare landscape. It is rather surprising, indeed,
to find De Quincey speaking of the “sad injury” done to the beauty
of a mountainous country by its stone walls; for to some of us the
stone wall has a more native charm in such districts than any quickset
hedgerow could have: it has often furnished us with a shelter in storm,
a shade in heat, a lunching and a siesta-place; we love it, too, as the
haunt of our mountain companions, the wheatear and the rock-ousel. The
scaling of a seven-foot wall, when the top stones have become insecure,
may present some difficulty to the novice, and it is then that he is
glad to find one of those convenient loop-holes or rather sheep-holes,
through which, after temporarily removing the door-stone, he may
insinuatingly worm himself. On some of the lower slopes, especially
among the foot-hills near the seacoast, these walls are often of
huge girth and solidity, and, being overgrown and intertwined with
numberless ivies, mosses, and lichens, have a rare and peculiar beauty;
but the increasing use of barbed wire, as an adjunct or substitute for
the walls, is yet another sign of the vandalism which in so many ways
is working havoc among the hills.
But of all the treasures of the hillside the brightest and purest are
its water springs, sources of those many Welsh “afons,” and English
“gills” and “becks,” whose beauty might convince the most hardened and
sceptical of town-dwellers that the Naiads were something more than a
dream. Follow one of these swift mountain rivers, such as the Cumbrian
Esk or the Cambrian Llugwy, or better still, perhaps, one of the lesser
and more headlong freshets, from its deep pools and rock-basins in the
lower valley to its birthplace under the heights, and you will marvel
at the prodigality of its charms--so deliciously do the waves come
dancing and singing down the slopes in a succession of hidden falls, no
two of which are alike, or in an open cascade of white foam, such as
often wins for such streams in the Lake District the name of “Sour Milk
Gill”; and at last, as the current dwindles, you will trace it to some
brimming tarn, or to its high fount in green mosses among the rocks, or
will possibly lose it underground, where it may be heard bubbling and
gurgling below the stones in its invisible cradle.
These becks, it must be remembered, unlike the turbid snow-fed torrents
of Switzerland, are as clear as crystal, so that in calm weather you
may see every pebble at the bottom of the pools, and the trout poised
with waving fins; but after a heavy rainfall, when the streams are in
“spate,” it is often no easy matter to ford them, for then the merest
runnels, across which you step to-day without hindrance, may to-morrow
be a raging flood. On the other hand, there are times, though much
less frequent, when the smaller streamlets are withered up under a
spell of summer heat, and their dry channels are useful only as a stone
staircase for the climber, who in such seasons may become acquainted,
as never before, with the feeling of thirst. I think the sorest
temptation I ever underwent, without succumbing to it, was when, on
my first visit to Scafell Pike with two fellow undergraduates, on a
burning August day, we found a jug of claret-cup left to keep cool, in
the spring above Esk Hause, by a party which had trustfully preceded
us to the summit. It must have been owing to some morally bracing
influence in the high mountain air that that cup was untouched by us:
had we been subjected to the same ordeal on the banks of the Cam, it
seems but too certain that not one drop could have been spared.
The mountain tarns, in which many of the becks have their origin, lie
for the most part in hidden recesses, unsuspected from below, under
the crowning heights, and mark the beginning of the last stage in the
ascent. It is rather curious that the older school of nature-lovers
should have felt themselves disposed to melancholy rather than
to joyfulness amid such scenes; even Wordsworth speaks of a “not
unpleasing sadness” as naturally induced by the sight of these pools,
and surmises that “the prospect of a body of pure water, unattended
with groves and other cheerful rural images by which fresh water is
usually accompanied, and unable to give furtherance to the meagre
vegetation around it, excites a sense of some repulsive power strongly
put forth.”[21] Here is a strange relic, in the mind of a great modern
poet, of the medieval sense of antagonism between man and nature: we
now think rather of these remote tarns as wells of life and healing, to
be repaired to by the pilgrim who needs refreshment and comfort in the
jostling conflict of mankind.
With the features which I have mentioned, the barren hillside is not
likely to lose its attractiveness for nature-lovers. A wilderness it
may be, but of a sort which brings to mind the rapt words of the poet--
Oh, wilderness were paradise enow.
VII
Slag-Heap or Sanctuary?
Mountains have in all ages given asylum to free races. Has the time
come when a free race must give asylum to its mountains? If we are
to have any voice in the answer, the question is one which, in this
country at least, cannot much longer be set aside; for though the
encroachments of “civilization” on wild Nature have been more or less
discussed since the famous “Tours” of Thomas Pennant created the modern
tourist, and sent him roaming through the hills, the problem of how to
preserve our mountain scenery--if we wish to preserve it--has become
much more pressing with the great industrial development of the past
hundred years, and it is no exaggeration to say that if it is not
solved within the next half-century there may be no mountain scenery to
preserve.
It is not to be doubted that, as civilization advances, mountain
districts, like all other wild districts, must be gradually “opened
out,” and made to minister more fully to human wants; but, then, what
_are_ those wants, and how can they best be gratified? The man who
owned the goose that laid the golden eggs wanted golden eggs, but his
too hasty method of opening out the goose defeated the purpose he
had in view. In like manner, if we want to make our mountains more
serviceable to the people, we must think whether the methods which we
are at present adopting will conduce to that end. Look at the working
of these methods among the Cambrian and Cumbrian hills.
Snowdonia has long been a sufferer from foreign and native aggression.
It is said that Edward I, to celebrate his conquest of Wales, held “a
triumphal fair” on Snowdon, in open defiance of the national sentiment
by which this peak was held as holy as was Parnassus by the Greeks.
What is more surprising is that the Welsh themselves have in later
times so fully acquiesced in the defilement of their sacred mountain,
and that the present plight of Snowdon would seem to be a pride rather
than a shame to them; for all earlier outrages sink into nothingness
when compared with the work of the past fifty years. The copper-mines
in Cwm Dyli, which have been worked, and neglected, and worked again,
have greatly defaced the mountain, have poisoned the waters, and
submerged the islands of Llyn Llydaw, once the haunt of the sea-gull;
but it was not until the railway was built from Llanberis, and an hotel
placed on the summit, that irreparable harm was done by deforming the
natural shape of Y Wyddfa, the topmost peak, into a dull, blunted cone.
Take 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 a few 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, for the glorious
waterfall, through which the stream dashed headlong from Cwm Dyli, 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.
It is a curious fact, too, that this greed for exploiting the natural
scenery of Wales goes hand in hand with a complete neglect of such
legitimate and really useful means of utilizing the tourist-season as
the erection of signposts, and the maintenance of bridle-paths and
mountain-tracks, which, without disfiguring the scenery, are of great
service to walkers.
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.