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.