This Land is Our Land An exploration of nature’s power to shape us and the impact we, in turn, have on the environment Wordsworth House & Garden 2019 Contents Foreword by Zoe Gilbert, National Trust visitor experience manager Foreward 1 Robert Macfarlane 16 William Wordsworth 30 The landscape around us is not ‘natural’ nature that sowed the seeds of the Nature writer or static. Human beings have always modern conservation movement. Sarah Hall 2 Dorothy Wordsworth 31 been place-makers and path-finders Novelist and short story writer Julian Cooper 18 Over the intervening years, the Quotations 36 who imbue the world with meaning, Artist Lake District has become a forum Jayne Beard 5 and it belongs to us all. For thousands Thanks 37 where tensions about land use and Farmer Six Cumbrian children 23 of years, we have covered it with our expectations of nature have been played footprints, and it, in turn, has shaped George Monbiot 6 Sara Brown 24 out. When it was designated as a World our lives. Writer and environmentalist Education tutor Heritage Site in 2017, questions about Hunter Davies 9 Dave Camlin 25 After the ice retreated about 10,000 its care and purpose become even more Writer Musician and composer years ago, the Lake District was a sharply focused. wildwood filled with aurochs, wolves, Elaine Beard 10 John Hamlett 26 In this exhibition, those who live, work lynxes and wild boar. When people Farmer Paraglider and find inspiration in this special place took over, farming wrote its story on share their passion and their fears Paul Kingsnorth 12 Sue Hayman 27 the land in the form of field systems, and hopes for its future. I hope their Novelist, poet and essayist MP walls and vernacular buildings, while reflections touch you as deeply as they centuries of mining left scars across Jamie Lund 13 Billy Bland 28 have touched me. Archaeologist Fell runner the fells. Jan Wilkinson 14 Dan Simpson 29 In the 19th century, Wordsworth and Slate mine owner Farmer his fellow Romantic poets offered an emotional reinterpretation of the ‘Wordsworth and his fellow Romantic Lakeland landscape as a place of Catalogue designed by MorganStudios for Wordsworth House and Garden, Cockermouth CA13 9RX inspiration and respite, sparking an poets offered an emotional reinterpretation www.nationaltrust.org.uk/wordsworth-house. © National Trust 2019. The National Trust is a registered charity, no 205846 Cover photograph of haymaking in Thorneythwaite: National Trust/John Malley. Photographs of loans: Richard Jakobson appreciation of the outdoors and of the landscape’ 1 Sarah Hall Novelist and short story writer Though I have been asked, many times, must somehow manifest. The reader must Sarah Hall has won about the influence of Cumbria on my feel present. World-building within a book multiple awards and been shortlisted for the writing, I’ve never found a complete must succeed. Man Booker Prize. answer. Landscapes, people, animals, Photograph: Richard The Lake District is a construct, Thwaites cultures, traditions, histories, senses. topographically and politically, as well as So many versions exist. geologically. It has unshakable literary Perhaps it’s impossible to truly know the association. Its surface is intrinsic to its ingredients of the self in its formation, or artistic legacy and its identity – one their exact involvement in what is cannot say it has a soul – but it is also the subsequently produced. I began writing place where existing perceptions about stories, or at least thinking stories, very nature have been explored and young. The act of writing them, with challenged. Brutal became beautiful, various degrees of artistry, came later. malice became magnificence – that’s some trick. I remember roaming around the moorland near my parents’ cottage with a head full This, to me, always seems to be of of scenarios and narratives and voices; fundamental importance – the convincing myself they were real, as real exploration of mutability, natural and as what lay beneath my feet, as real as the human, and the idea of perception. In the mountains on the horizon. countryside, it is easy to see the operation What is this place, and where do we fit, of seasons. It is easy to witness the within or without it? How are we In situ is central to how I think about lessons of growth, change and mortality. connected, and how dislocated? Stories fiction, wherever it is set. This does not And in a farming community, it is can be historical, contemporary or mean a writer has to be present in the impossible not to see the challenges of futuristic, but aren’t they all ‘I roamed the moorland near my parents’ location – I never have been. But setting humans coexisting with nature. environmental, to a degree? cottage with a head full of voices’ 2 3 Jayne Beard Farmer I am not an artist, but I do like making Haweswater shadow The land defines us. Sometimes we are things. The shadow box (pictured right) box kindly loaned by open and hospitable and others dark, Sarah Hall was built after I completed my first novel, moody and inhospitable. We are ruled Haweswater. The map is of my childhood by the seasons and the weathers. It is region, which includes the reservoir. The breathtakingly beautiful but equally glassware and crockery was collected as harsh and unforgiving. The land is from its shores, if man-made bodies of our heaven and our hell, for all that she water can be said to have shores, and it holds and all that she gives. would all have belonged to residents of We love this land from the tiniest flower the drowned valley, over the centuries. Jayne Beard lives and to the largest fell. It is always in our farms with her partner Copper wire was used in the bombs hearts. It is home, our place of peace, Alan and their son Luke detonated in Mardale. in Buttermere quiet and tranquillity. We are fiercely Above: Buttermere. It is simply salvage: junk, scraps, loyal and protective of the land and our Photograph: John Malley rubbish. But when recycled and way of life, in that the two are so closely Left: Shearing stool reconsidered, it becomes a local relief intertwined that many do not see how we (cratch) kindly loaned by map, where landscape is depicted are one and the same, the land and us. Jayne and Alan Beard dimensionally, and where the We fight to preserve not only the land but methods of construction are seen. fell farming and its way of life. We may not The component parts of this map are not be rich in pocket but we are rich in life. We simply natural, and neither is the Lake are blessed to watch the changing seasons District. We reconstitute what we see, and from the depths of winter to the spring of give it meaning. We look through the life, the summer beauty and the autumnal window of our selves onto our changed colours, each year slightly different, but ‘The land is our heaven and our hell, for all and changing worlds. always and forever our land. that she holds and all that she gives’ 4 5 George Monbiot Writer and environmentalist I see the Lake District as one of the has a right and interest’ is widely seen George Monbiot is the most depressing landscapes in Europe. as the establishing creed of the western author of multiple books and helped found the It competes with the chemical deserts conservation movement. But he is partly charity Rewilding Britain. of East Anglia for the title of Britain’s responsible for a strange bifurcation in Photograph: Dave Stelfox worst-kept countryside. our minds, which sees industrialism as malign and destructive and agriculture as The celebrated fells have been thoroughly benign and harmonious. sheepwrecked: the forests that once covered them have been reduced by the Farming has done more extensive damage white plague to bare rock and bowling to wildlife and habitats than all the green, depriving animals of their habitats. factories ever built. It has reduced the You’ll see more wildlife in Birmingham. natural world to something resembling the aftermath of a nuclear winter across This conflict is not easy to resolve, but vast tracts of the uplands. two cherished assets – hill farming with hefted flocks and a thriving ecosystem Admirable as they were, why should – are at odds. A failure to recognise Wordsworth and John Ruskin govern such contradictions besets the British our tastes beyond the grave? Why conservation movement, and it goes back should the culture they mythologised to the beginning: a beginning often traced be treated as if it were the only current to a little house in Grasmere. and possible culture? Why is the inherent clash between ranching and wildlife I revere the occupant of that house, being resolved only in favour of ranching? ‘The celebrated fells have been thoroughly William Wordsworth. His assertion that Why, in the cradle of the conservation the Lake District represented ‘a sort of movement, are these obvious questions sheepwrecked, reduced by the white plague to national property in which every man not even being asked? bare rock and bowling green’ 6 7 Hunter Davies Writer I have lived long enough to witness the As a self-appointed expert on vanishing of wild mammals, butterflies, Lakeland – well, I have written loads mayflies, songbirds and fish that I once of guidebooks and walking books and feared my grandchildren would not biogs on Lakeland – I am often being experience: it has all happened faster asked, tell me, Mr Davies, what is the Hunter Davies’s many than even the pessimists predicted.