Mountain Narrative Thursday November 24, 2005
For many years I’d ignored the most southerly of the Lakeland valleys, known as Kentmere. You pass it on the road before you get to Windermere, which is for many people the proper beginning of Lakeland. It is certainly dramatic and obvious when you reach this biggest lake and while some of it is delightfully scenic and enticing – like the view of the Langdale Pikes from across the lake – the rest of it is discouraging and onerous. The lake and surrounding areas of Windermere are the busiest and most touristy part of the entire district, offering pleasant afternoons of waterside strolls and ice cream breaks. But if you are a walker who enjoys quiet and unspoilt beauty, these are not the places for you. One of the advantages of diverting away to the Kentmere valley is you never enter the tourist zone; another advantage is if you live south of the Lakes, it is the nearest and quickest destination – for me, that means a comfortable day trip.
When I discovered all this I went up to Kentmere several times over several months, to undertake the classic walk known as the Kentmere Horseshoe. This leads up to a junction point signposted by a famously huge cairn called Thornthwaite Beacon, and each time I had a similar pleasurable experience, which I gradually realised was psychologically and philosophically interesting. I’d experienced this before in other locations, but it was the short-term repetition that finally made an impression.
When you reach Thornthwaite Beacon you are suddenly and dramatically presented with the deeper heart of Lakeland with a skyline that includes the famous Hellvelyn, and a distant view of lovely Ullswater. I’d first reached this point several years ago coming up from the Ullswater valley, and now I was revisiting it from a different southerly ascent. Reaching the Ullswater valley means a considerably longer drive, and for me means I spend at least two, three or more days in the area. Ullswater, in other words, indicates a more substantial Lakeland trip. Walking up to the Thornthwaite area from Kentmere is a day trip for me, which thus allows me an easy contact with a more distant terrain, and the memories associated with it. That is, the ‘contact’ is both visual and psychological: and this is what I found interesting.
On a good day, walking in the hills can make me happier than almost anything. I relax and smile at the simple delight of being out of doors, in nature, in idyllic beauty. And over the years the experience changes from the really best occasion of all, which is discovery of new areas and new mountains, to a revisiting experience tinged with inevitable memories. This is particularly poignant at the little junction areas, the bisections and combinations of tracks occurring in hillside hollows or on high-level ridges; Thornthwaite beacon being more the latter. These are characteristically points on the route when you will at least pause and admire distant views, and quite likely will sit down and pull out a sandwich or your water supply. The first time I discovered Thornthwaite Beacon from Kentmere I was delighted to recall the time I’d first arrived there, and my resolve to return again to more fully enjoy the area: here I was, doing exactly that. The second and then third time I arrived there I stopped, sat, basked in the sunshine, drank both water and the distant views, and mulled over the meaning of this poetic psychological experience more fully than I ever had. I look over there, and recall two recent trips up to Hellvelyn; I look over there and see the winding road which takes you to Ullswater, a route I’d made many times when the distant hills you could see – where I was now located – were pretty but meaningless because I’d never experienced them. I look down into the valley and remember trips I’d made up to Ullswater, and how and when I first discovered that valley, which was a car drive while returning from Keswick, just to see what was there. I remember that the first major impression was the walk that takes you up to St. Sunday Crag, and that I repeated it several times in fairly close succession because I enjoyed it so much, at a time when I relied on familiar pleasures as opposed to exploration. Then I remember consciously thinking there were famous areas I’d never seen, and deciding to explore those areas and leave the old favourites for a while, no doubt returning some time in the future and feeling them a little more freshly. But anyway there it is, over there, the peak known as St. Sunday Crag. And I realise now that the rock face you can view earlier along this Kentmere ridge is Place Fell, a great bulk towering above Ullswater at which I have gazed, ten, twenty, thirty minutes at a time, when seated down by the lake. I enjoy this new discovery, because it means you are gazing across to the distant Ullswater area at an early part of a Kentmere walk that requires a drive of only 1¼ hours. I live in the city but with this relatively small effort I find myself at the heart of imaginative and geographic delights. I enjoy the colours Place Fell presents throughout the seasons, occasionally dramatic sunset illumination, and – as with other aspects of Lakeland mountains – its still unmoving presence. And now here I am on top of Thornthwaite Beacon, looking at it from a distant perspective which also incorporates the slopes along the top where I recently walked, and where I first walked several years ago on an occasion I don’t fully recall, but I remember sitting on the Ordnance Survey cairn at the top and gazing across the gently flattening fells and then fields, extending beyond the Lake District.
And so it continues. After a few years of wandering around Lakeland, when you reach the tops of the fells you enjoy views across the peaks with which you are familiar. You can identify the craggy shapes of distant mountains because you have walked up them and also viewed them from another distant aspect, on another delightful day. As you gaze across big panoramas, it is like looking at a map: it is a cognitive as well as a geographic or geological terrain, and is one of the subtle pleasures of familiarity which I suspect is a component of most people’s walking when they return to the Lakes – or anywhere else – repeatedly and over a period of years. The famous Lake District writer Alfred Wainwright described the hills as “friends”, and although I dislike the way he anthropomorphized the hills – ‘he looks at you patiently’ or ‘they are welcoming giants’ – I understand this sentiment. A ‘friend’ is someone with whom you have a comfortable familiarity, a reciprocal affection, and a reliable mode of communication. We say ‘a good friend doesn’t let you down’, and what Wainwright meant was the Lakeland fells were unchanging, always available despite the uncertain vicissitudes of working and domestic life, and likely to offer you a reliable day’s fun. Thus a familiar landscape has first a geographic meaning, then a cognitive dimension based on experience, and then a poetic and associative i.e. psychological level, based on memory. When I gazed out north, south, east and west from Thornthwaite Beacon I was clarifying, affirming and solidifying not only my visual geographic knowledge, but also a network of linked-up memories, of distant and recent happy days, and thus a pleasurable narrative dimension which – I realised as I reflected further – was entirely imaginative. It was blended into the hills like an invisible alchemy, a cumulative sense-making process that changes anonymous rocks, crags and peaks into a terrain with a ‘sense of place’ linking a personal psychology with inanimate forms. We are narrative-making creatures, and this process is apparent during mountain walking because of it’s simpler and microcosmic scale, in relation to our wider and more complicated lives.
Wainwright’s anthropomorphic attitude is old fashioned and redundant, in the sense that it is silly and naïve to the modern sophisticated mind: a romantic, slightly eccentric affectation of on older generation. A time when the romanticised England of a Hovis advertisement was taken seriously; when men were men and women were women, the latter wearing pretty floral dresses and the former wearing boots and tweed. But what he did – as did Wordsworth and Coleridge, incidentally – is convey the psychological meaning of a loved landscape. We don’t talk like that now; we have similar feelings but we articulate them differently. I wouldn’t gaze from Thornthwaite Beacon and eulogise the ‘distant old friends’, not without a counterbalancing context conveying that I am not entirely serious – but I would express how it has affective and imaginative value, based on prior experience and a pleasurable network of memories that extends not only across the geographic hills, but also into my personal psychological past.
In the tradition of Zen meditation, one of the exercises is gazing at a wall. It may sound a strange and unappealing practice, and it is certainly difficult. It is meant to be a psychologically clarifying activity, because what happens is this: in the process of gazing at a simple wall your mind will flit, dance, and move around constantly to past, present and future concerns, bodily sensations, distant and near noises, what you should be doing, what you’d like to be doing, what’s on TV, what’s on TV tomorrow….and a thousand other thoughts and feelings you eventually realise are like white noise on the radio, a distraction. You understand that you do not have the power to decide to do one simple thing – gaze at a wall – because your mind is out of control and has been for most of your life. The wall doesn’t care about this, it doesn’t change, it doesn’t hear you, it will be there whether you concentrate on it or not. If you learn to understand and benefit from this practice, it’s like ripples on a lake gradually calming. It reveals the interior activity of your personal psychology, and how the external environment is a separate and unaffected factor. And from this, you understand the projective tendency of the mind, i.e. mapping onto inanimate features what really exists only in your imagination.
The parallel with landscape and its imaginative significance should be clear. I believe that some part of the pleasure of mountain walking is a similar slowing down process, where the racing mind is calmed, not – in this case – by an act of concentration, but by the continued presence in which you immerse yourself, of dramatically simple geography. Any walker will agree that their pastime is relaxing, soothing, recuperative etc. If pushed – or if they are writing about it, like Wainwright – they might express themselves in terms of what poetry calls the ‘pathetic fallacy’, i.e. imaginative reification. It is unlikely, unless they have studied or practiced a little meditation – they would articulate this process in these more ‘scientific’ psychological terms. I find this useful, because the ideas and experiences I have outlined have wider ramifications. We don’t just project narrative significance onto mountain panoramas, or psychological white noise onto a simple wall. In geometric terms, the latter examples are relatively simple, from which much of their meditative value derives. A city environment is a thousand times more geometrically and symbolically complex and multi-layered, carrying and embodying the history and complexity of that anthropological culture. Every house, shop, road sign, billboard advertisement, human face, piece of clothing, designer logo, sight, sound and smell has a culturally embedded and culturally relative significance. Most of it we filter out, and thus begins the battle for your attention from marketing gurus, politicians, international corporations etc. A city is psychologically noisy, as well as literally. And ultimately all of that psychic noise resides inside your own psychological activity that in theory can be calmed, refined and controlled. In practice it is not easy, and this is why people live in retreats and monasteries all around the world, where environmental stimulation is minimised.
None of this analysis and reflection alters or enhances the essentially simple experience of mountain walking. Its value is not that walking fun requires it, but that it stimulates philosophical enquiry and a wider, questioning attitude. What kind of society do we live in when it is full of harsh white noise? How much am I being affected by it? Would I be happier living in the country or at the seaside, compared to the metropolis? If that’s not possible or desirable, can I do anything to rediscover my walking tranquility when I am commuting to work or could I meditate at home when the day is over and my time is my own? Who and what is in control of my life – my employer or me? Aspirational materialism and the insecure pursuit of money or a more philosophical outlook on life that might recognize the necessity of those things, but also understands their limits? This kind of spiritual philosophy gently underlies my mountain walking – it doesn’t intrude on it or define it, and for most of the time I am not developing it or thinking about it. But for most of my life I have been attracted to philosophical and spiritual enquiry and I examine and interpret my life in those ultimate and penetrating terms. This also gently underlies my enjoyment of mountain photography so the pictures I obtain subtly, indirectly express the phenomenological experience of this walking – the calm, the fun, the invigorating and aesthetic appreciation – and how I can present this in images with requisite qualities of harmonious composition, beautiful colour and tonal range, a dramatic evocation of romantic wilderness, and an atmosphere of consoling stillness and soothing simplicity.
fab photos. A variety.
regards Elzbieta
— Elzbieta Danuta Harbord · Sep 23, 02:33 PM · §
Thanks Elzbieta!
— James · Sep 23, 04:21 PM · §