The ghost of holidays past
Jul. 13th, 2005 04:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hazelkIt seems AW Wainwright’s pictorial guides to the Lakeland fells are being posthumously revised. As with many culty things I’m not really sure how widely known these are so apologies in advance for the egg sucking lesson that follows.
The books are a series of walkers guides that attempt to cover all possible routes up every single hill/mountain/fell in the English Lake District. They were the life’s work of a curmudgeonly old obsessive and in some ways, by popularising the Lakes, helped to destroy the very thing he loved or at least to change it. They were also a key feature of pretty well every family holiday I can remember starting around the age of eight when Dad decided to go ‘do’ the Lake District so off we set. Bundled into the car and up the great north road to Keswick. The car broke down on the way, which it always did, but we made it into the town by nightfall and somehow managed to find a hotel. The next morning it was raining, which it also always did, so we went into town to buy boots and maps and picked up a copy of one of these weird little handwritten guides.
Possible the unique thing about these books, apart from the handwriting and the way they talk about each and every mountain as if it were an old and usually much loved friend, are the ‘satellite’ drawings used to illustrate the routes. They’re just pictures, neither scale drawings nor photographic representations, but they really make it feel as if you were standing at the bottom of the fell and asking one of the locals the way to the top. In practice they can be quite misleading, getting completely and utterly lost was also a constant feature of these holidays.
The first time it happened was on one of the more famous peaks, Helvellyn. We made it to the top with a bunch of young and hirsute (it was the seventies) youth hostellers and a local farmer doing his Sunday constitutional complete with carpet slippers and umbrella, when the mist came down thick and hard. Suddenly one of the youth hostellers decided to make a break for it, grabbed me and my brother’s hands and charged off down the nearest path with everyone in pursuit. We all made it to the bottom somehow but had ended up on completely the wrong side of the mountain and had to hitch a ride in a lorry to get back to Keswick and hot baths all round.
The one obvious change to the new editions of the books is that the routes are marked in red. It makes things a little clearer but I look forward to getting lost up there all over again if we can ever work out the logistics of taking the boys on a ‘proper’ holiday. Its time will come.
The books are a series of walkers guides that attempt to cover all possible routes up every single hill/mountain/fell in the English Lake District. They were the life’s work of a curmudgeonly old obsessive and in some ways, by popularising the Lakes, helped to destroy the very thing he loved or at least to change it. They were also a key feature of pretty well every family holiday I can remember starting around the age of eight when Dad decided to go ‘do’ the Lake District so off we set. Bundled into the car and up the great north road to Keswick. The car broke down on the way, which it always did, but we made it into the town by nightfall and somehow managed to find a hotel. The next morning it was raining, which it also always did, so we went into town to buy boots and maps and picked up a copy of one of these weird little handwritten guides.
Possible the unique thing about these books, apart from the handwriting and the way they talk about each and every mountain as if it were an old and usually much loved friend, are the ‘satellite’ drawings used to illustrate the routes. They’re just pictures, neither scale drawings nor photographic representations, but they really make it feel as if you were standing at the bottom of the fell and asking one of the locals the way to the top. In practice they can be quite misleading, getting completely and utterly lost was also a constant feature of these holidays.
The first time it happened was on one of the more famous peaks, Helvellyn. We made it to the top with a bunch of young and hirsute (it was the seventies) youth hostellers and a local farmer doing his Sunday constitutional complete with carpet slippers and umbrella, when the mist came down thick and hard. Suddenly one of the youth hostellers decided to make a break for it, grabbed me and my brother’s hands and charged off down the nearest path with everyone in pursuit. We all made it to the bottom somehow but had ended up on completely the wrong side of the mountain and had to hitch a ride in a lorry to get back to Keswick and hot baths all round.
The one obvious change to the new editions of the books is that the routes are marked in red. It makes things a little clearer but I look forward to getting lost up there all over again if we can ever work out the logistics of taking the boys on a ‘proper’ holiday. Its time will come.
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Date: 2005-07-13 09:01 pm (UTC)I can't count the times I've been lost trying to find a path described in a guide, give me an OS any time!
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Date: 2005-07-13 09:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-14 12:20 pm (UTC)I always take my compass, even if I don't use it, makes me feel more confident.
I remember getting lost in the car once with an Australian boyfriend I had. He really started freaking out about being lost, but then he came from the outback where being lost is pretty serious. I had to remind him that in England you are never more than a few miles from the next village in any direction. *smile* I love that memory...sorry, it just popped into my head, that and his fascination with hedges ?!?
BTW I thought of you last thursday, I'm glad you are OK and I hope all your friends and family are OK too.
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Date: 2005-07-14 09:21 pm (UTC)Thanks for the thoughts. We had the two minute silence today. No one I know was hurt but a couple of the bombs were very close to work.