UNESCO GOES ALFRESCO
Ronald Turnbull on the granting of World Heritage Site status to the Lake District
As I write , it ’ s just 24 hours since the Lake District was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site .
Thus it joins the Grand Canyon and the Taj Mahal among the top spots for all-around wonderfulness worldwide . Within the UK , it ’ s been raised to the status of Hadrian ’ s Wall and the City of Bath . It also becomes co-equal with – ummm – Pontcysyllte Aqueduct and the mill town of New Lanark .
Heritage Sites come in two flavours : there are ‘ natural ’ ones , and ‘ cultural ’ ones
I have never been to New Lanark , even though it ’ s only 42 miles from my home . The Lake District is 100 miles away , and I ’ ve been there hundreds of times – maybe not so much as 1000 , that would mean going once a week and there are also the Scottish Highlands ( whose very best bits haven ’ t even hauled themselves up to National Park designation ).
Heritage Sites come in two flavours : there are ‘ natural ’ ones , and ‘ cultural ’ ones . Bath and Stonehenge are cultural . The UK has just two purely natural sites : the Jurassic Coast of Devon and Dorset , and Northern Ireland ’ s Causeway Coast . The islands of St Kilda are considered as being both natural – for their soaring cliffs and sea-stacks – and cultural – for the remains of human habitation from the Stone Age onwards .
16 Outdoor focus | autumn 2017
And the Lake District too has been awarded this dual designation . This could reflect the efforts of the lobbyists in promoting the place as being wonderful in every available way . But I prefer to think it ’ s a sophisticated insight of the UNESCO Committee . The Lake District is , indeed , an artefact of man .
There ’ s scarcely a square inch of Lakeland that hasn ’ t been handled and reshaped by people . Without the Langdale axe-heads of the later Stone Age the area would be a tangle of swamps , woodland and scrub . Charcoal burners created the oak coppice of the lakesides ; slate men and copper miners made the white-painted villages ; humans and Herdwick sheep turned the hill slopes into velvetty lawn .
When it comes to ‘ cultural ’, the first press report in The Guardian cites in a slightly embarrassed way the earthwork at Penrith called King Arthur ’ s Round Table – according to an implausible legend it was the fictitious king ’ s jousting ground ; however , Penrith is actually outside the national park . They ’ d have been better mentioning the Castlerigg Stone Circle , third best such structure in England ( where Stonehenge and Avebury are already World Heritage in their own right ).
More confidently it also mentions Wordsworth , Coleridge , Ruskin and Beatrix Potter . Because a cultural artefact exists most of all in the mind .
These lumps of rock and dirt , the ‘ stones and watter ’: they ’ re nothing at all until clothed in imagery and imagination . Mountains exist , first of all , in the mind .
Up until about 1750 , upland areas were an ugly nuisance that only existed because of a ) human naughtiness and Noah ’ s Flood and b ) because nobody had invented a bulldozer big enough .
The Lake District has been sculpted and embellished over the following 200 years
It was in 1769 that he poet Thomas Grey came up with a new form of fun : getting scared by the deadly rockfalls and non-existent bandits of Borrowdale . In 1782 people suddenly spotted that Ullswater and Windermere could be looked at almost as if they were paintings by Poussin . The Lakeland fells , as we know them today , were invented in the month of August 1802 , when the poet Coleridge took a nine-day backpack trip and scrambled down Broad Stand .
As one of the finest works of the English imagination , the Lake District has been sculpted and embellished over the following 200 years : by fellwalkers , painters , dry-stane dykers , rock climbers , rare sheep enthusiasts , photographers , mint-cake makers and outdoor writers .
Now , even UNESCO ’ s noticed .