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Wainwright Walks

Stuart Maconie

On the front of the first edition of a book of mine called Cider with Roadies, there’s a picture I love. It’s taken in a nightclub called Bluto’s in Wigan in about 1978 and it’s of me and my teenage friend Dylan. He looks like trouble, frankly. You would cross the road to avoid him with his toothless snarling visage, however hammed up for the camera. I am looking, well, like a bit of a ponce actually. I’m in the grip of my adolescent Elvis Costello fixation and am wearing a grey ’50s demob-style jacket, a white brinylon shirt and a blue knitted tie. So far, so hipster. But my hair is all wrong and my glasses are not Costello nerd chic but tinted Doobie Brothers ‘style’. In time I would grow to love the Doobie Brothers but that time would not be for another decade at least. On the streets of Wigan in 1978 we cool kids aspired to Camden, not California.

I have another favourite picture of Dylan and me (he was named after Dylan Thomas, loved the Clash and Kate Bush and, slightly disappointingly, became a policeman, but if you’re reading this, mate, I hope you’re well). In this one we are dressed very similarly – me in a leather bomber jacket, bumpers, Beatlecut and fag, I seem to have transferred my allegiance to Colin Moulding of XTX, whilst Dylan wears his shitstopper jeans and Clash T-shirt, but we are al fresco. By Esthwaite Water in the Lake District, looking distinctly pleased with ourselves as we cradle a plump olive-green tench in our muddy hands. A good six pounds, I’d say, which was very good for us.

Though we were resolutely urban kids – the telly went straight off in our house when Jack Hargreaves came on, droning on about horse brasses and silage – our nocturnal pursuit of fun ran completely and happily parallel to a kind of punk Tom Sawyer existence of fishing and camping. We would often pile straight into Joe Mather’s dad’s van and go straight from a nightclub to a local canal or flash or gravel pit and spend the dawn catching nothing but talking about girls and listening to Radio One on the transistor radio before falling asleep in the morning sun and waking two hours later bitten to death, sunburned and starving.

Mostly, though, we loved to head up the M6 to the Lake District for a weekend, usually spent catching a few fish and absolutely no girls. No matter. We had fun drinking in the pubs of Hawkshead by evening and poaching eels from the lakes overnight under cover of darkness, girded by seven pints of Jennings Cumberland Ales. The poaching of eels was a highly skilled and technical endeavour undertaken with as much ruthless efficiency as a teenage boy can when he’s drunk his own body weight in bitter, and eel fishing is very exciting. An eel is, in its purest essence, a thick muscular inner tube with a primitive central nervous system. They give you a hell of a fight and they taste kind of nutty. We ate them for breakfast every morning, cooked up on the old Primus stove at Farmer Brass’s campsite in the oddest and often least palatable combinations: eel risotto, eel kedgeree, eel au vin, vegetable curry with eelao rice, spaghetti eelanaise. Eventually I came to fantasise about one dark night being lucky enough to pull a Variety pack of sugar puffs or a Heinz Toast Topper from the murky depths, anything that meant I wouldn’t have to have bloody eels again.

And on most of these trips, an item or two from Dylan’s bookshelf would accompany us. Not one of Richard Allen’s New English Library Suedehead thug fests. Not the well-thumbed NME Book of Rock – the one with the controversial verdict on Jethro Tull’s Minstrel in the Gallery. No. One of a series of volumes that I’d noticed as soon as I’d first set foot in Dylan’s house. His dad was an English teacher – hence the Dylan Thomas fixation – and he had all kinds of cool stuff, Kerouac, Mailer, The Gulag Archipelago. But my eye had been drawn to six or seven little hardback books that were obviously some kind of series. One was brown, another yellow, another green. They were hand-written and hand-drawn, things of such painstaking elegance of design and craft that even though the subject – Cumbrian hills – didn’t much appeal, the sheer loveliness of them, plus the maps and the local info, made them treasurable. They seemed to be written by a bloke called Wainwright. I imagined he was a bit of an anorak.

Three decades on and on the shelf beside me are not one but two full sets of Alfred Wainwright’s Seven Volume Pictorial Guide to the Lake District Fells. Look closely at the two sets and you’ll notice a crucial difference that explains the need for both. One set is battered and dog-eared, stained with coffee and smeared with butter, stained with grass and dirt. The other is relatively pristine, the reason being that one is for the fireside and the other for the fellside, one sees action in the field, the other nothing more strenuous than being pored over whilst planning a day’s adventures.

Notwithstanding the disadvantage of being dead, Alfred Wainwright has had a good few years of late. There’ve been biographies and celebrations. There’s a society bearing his name. And thanks to the Wainwright Walks TV series, a new generation has been inspired to take to the hills and retrace the steps he walked in between the late 1950s and the mid 1960s when researching his famous guide books. The success of the shows was due in no small measure to the choice of presenter, the extremely personable Julia Bradbury, a refreshing choice after years of blokes from the Jack Hargreaves school of outdoors TV presentation – crusty, bearded, curmudgeonly.

All of which could be said to apply to Wainwright himself, or at least that’s the popular image. But he had his poetic side, one that drew him from the dark satanic mills of his native Blackburn to Kendal to be nearer his beloved hills. He’d have approved of Julia too. AW was a sucker for a pretty face. He was more than just that, in fact; he was a true romantic. His love letters to his second wife, Betty, are mildly shocking in their intensity and tenderness, especially if you had him tagged as a harrumphing sourpuss. But if you know the books, you’ll know his lyrical and poetic side too. That’s the side that has made millions like me a devotee of his work, even when it was a love that dare not speak its name, such as during my tenure as an NME writer, when a liking for anything more outdoorsy than the healing field at Glastonbury marked you out as a weirdo amongst weirdos.

Wainwright classified 214 separate fells as making up the mountain landscape of the Lake District. Pedants and purists grumble about his list, saying that some such as Mungrisedale Common – a grassy pudding beneath the infinitely superior rocky throne of Blencathra – is not a separate fell at all and that Wainwright included it just to make up the numbers in book 6. This may be true. But now the list is canonical, and there are folk who will not rest until they have crested the summit of every one. I know because I am one. I’m not one of nature’s list tickers – I don’t collect records, I don’t keep a diary – but I decided to ‘do the Wainwrights’ as it would be a ready-made itinerary that would take me to every corner of the Lake District. It has been a long, strange, brilliant trip, to paraphrase the Grateful Dead.

It has taught me loads about myself and others. It has made me laugh and cry; given me a treasure house of memories to be endlessly raided.

So where do you start? Go to the original volumes. There are any number of interpretations, re-workings, spins and spin-offs, but no one has improved on AW’s original pen and ink works. The artwork is gorgeous, the writing hugely quirky and characterful as well as evocative. And though the occasional right of way may have changed, the mountains don’t. With decent gear, a 1:25,000 OS Map and the relevant Wainwright, you should be able to tackle any of the 214 Wainwrights even if you don’t have a beard. Wainwright was adventurous, but he was never foolhardy. He always has a word of sound advice for the novice fellwalker.

Of course, that advice can sometimes be quite, shall we say, bracing. There I was, by the unnamed rocky pool that hangs pendant as a teardrop on the jagged, awkward, thoroughly delicious top of Haystacks. I was that novice and had rather bitten off more mountain than I could chew. Having got a couple of fells under my belt and loved the exhilaration and atmosphere of the high places, I’d volunteered to take a mixed group of ‘newbies’ – kids, dogs, couples, skinny, plump, all kagouled and rucksacked – to the top of the justly famous Haystacks. I was confidence itself at first. We were well shod, buttied and flasked, I had a map and my freshly purchased copy of Volume 6 (the yellow one). Haystacks, unlike the ’70s wrestler of the same name, is no giant. But it is glorious. Wainwright says of it that ‘it stands unabashed . . . in the midst of a circle of much loftier hills, like a shaggy terrier in the company of foxhounds . . . but not one of this distinguished group of mountains . . . can show a greater variety and a more fascinating arrangement of interesting features’.

Shaggy, fascinating, yes, all these things. But disconcerting, too on that afternoon. For as we reached the summit a thick, drenching shroud of hill fog, ‘clag’ as the mountaineers call it, came in from the Cumbrian coast, and suddenly, where once there had been familiar landmarks and unmistakable paths, there was a silent and disorienting world of grey, of looming rock and vertiginous drops. ‘Are we going to be all right getting back down?’ asked one of my friends, with a slight tremble in her voice. By her side, a child looked up with a vulnerable, worried face from within the hood of her anorak. I was looking at Wainwright’s chapter on Haystacks. Turning to the section on descents, I saw this sentence: ‘The best advice I can give to a novice fellwalker lost in mist on Haystacks is to kneel down and pray for deliverance.’

‘Oh, we’ll be fine,’ I said hoarsely, and took out my compass with a shaking hand.

And we were. As fast as it came the mist went, and we clambered down to Buttermere via Scarth Gap glowing with satisfaction. Wainwright had, of course, gone on to offer some rather more practical advice about good lines of descent, and we’d taken it. Down the years since then I’ve had many an occasion to thank AW (as everyone knows him) for sound advice in tight corners, for illuminating titbits on flora and fauna and fell, for inspiration and consolation. And I’ve cursed him, too, for his occasional vagueness, his blithe disregard for private land and bad-tempered farmers (‘That bloody Wainwright’s not very popular round here,’ said one churl when I tried to follow AW’s route across his pasture) and for his infuriating self-righteousness (‘All fellwalking accidents are the result of carelessness,’ he once opined, which must be scant consolation if you’ve just been blown off an arête by a sudden gust). And yet, and yet . . .

As William Blake put it, ‘Great things are done when men and mountains meet. This is not done by jostling in the street.’ The hills bring out the best in people, up there, where things really matter and you can get things in perspective. No one will cut you up or not let you in; if you slow down for someone to overtake you on Striding Edge or let someone come through as they descend Rossett Gill, they will thank you properly, full-bloodedly, not with that haughty raised finger that passes for politeness amongst motorists. They will stop and ask you where you’ve been, where you’re going, pat your dog, offer it a bit of pork pie, offer you a bit of pork pie if you’re lucky. If you take a surly early teen with you up a fell, the first thing they will comment on is that everyone speaks to each other. At first they will roll their eyes at this, being at the stage when all human contact that doesn’t involve giving a lovebite is ‘like, so embarrassing’. But soon they begin to like it, and eventually they become positively hail-fellow-well-met, slapping unsuspecting passers-by on the back and calling them ‘mate’.

Start small. Get a few easy ones under your belt. Loughrigg Fell near Grasmere is the perfect short day out and entrée to the joys of Wainwrighting. It begins with a gentle climb on the rough terrace above the lake, enough steepness in the middle to make you feel you’re doing something serious and then a summit to die for. Wainwright said that Loughrigg has a bulk out of all proportion to its modest altitude, and Dalesman magazine commented, ‘It is easy to get lost among the knolls and little tarns of Loughrigg Fell.’ Well, possibly, if you’re the kind of person who can get lost in the cold meats section of Tesco’s. We just stood open-mouthed before the vista of Grasmere and Rydal, the Fair-field Horseshoe, behind us two stretches of Windermere, a bit of Elterwater. And it all looked just like AW had drawn it in his book. This was a revelation. He’d actually been here and actually drawn these hills. Look, that one’s Heron Crag and those are the Langdale pikes and that must be Wetherlam. It was so perfect and detailed that I was almost surprised that he hadn’t included the fellow having his banana sandwich by the trig point.

Steel Knotts in the beautiful valley of Martindale is not a tough fell, but even it is a kind of a challenge. It’s a different challenge, though, than the ones life usually throws at you. Recently some friends and I ended up in some real difficulties on its bracken-clad slopes, muddy, wet, sliding about, risking some of our most valued and tender parts on barbed wire fences at just that height, jumping streams, falling into peat bogs. We arrived back home to a remote lodge with no electricity and erratic hot water tired, bruised, sore, sodden, filthy . . . and exhilarated. This was not the nerve-jangling, unsatisfying, febrile stress that comes with deadlines and meetings and presentations and being bullied by the boss, but the proper soul-deep tiredness that comes with physical effort and mental stimulation and maybe just a dash of fear out in fresh air in a beautiful landscape.

These are the days you remember when you’re back in the narrow confines of routine. I once read a wonderful passage about opening a guide book, possibly a Wainwright, and the author coming across a blade of grass, one that had found its way there on a walk, and of the feeling of being reminded by this blade of grass: it ‘reminded me that I was once a free man on the hills’. Sometimes, on a fetid tube train or in a tedious meeting, we have all felt that we will never be free men and women on the hills. But there’s no rush. The hills are not fickle, they are not moody, they are not changeable, they will always be there and at heart they will always be delighted to see you, whether they are frowning through the murk or smiling in the sun.

Last year, a decade or so and several hundred fine, wild, balmy, terrifying, funny, scorching, snowy, blissful, unforgettable days in the hills later, I notched up my 214th and final fell – Kirk Fell, a forbidding hulk in the remote and sombre valley of Wasdale, thus joining a small band of about 500, it’s thought. And then champagne and fish and chips for twenty-two in a rented Cumbrian castle. My wife gave me a Wainwright first edition and we toasted the great man, who went to the great chippy in the sky. They scattered his ashes by his favourite spot, the aforementioned lonely, magical Innominate Tarn on Haystacks. Innominate is a beautiful name that actually means ‘nameless’. After AW’s death a brief, well-meaning but utterly misguided campaign sought to have it renamed Wainwright Tarn. Betty put a stop to that instantly. AW would have hated it, as would anyone with an ear for loveliness, I think.

And Wainwright did have that ear. This is how he ended Book 7, the final volume, the culmination of his labour of love and life’s work:

The fleeting hour of life of those who love the hills is quickly spent, but the hills are eternal. Always there will be the lonely ridge, the dancing beck, the silent forest; always there will be the exhilaration of the summits. These are for the seeking, and those who seek and find while there is yet time will be blessed both in mind and body.

Make that time. You won’t regret it.