Autumn in Grasmere

Dove Cottage from its garden

   Had an idyllic few days in the Lake District over the half-term, my first excursion to the region. I could wax Wordsworthian about the extraordinary autumnal landscapes I walked through until the rare-breed cows come home but of course you've heard it all before. What I found amazing was how the mountains, lakes and woods in fact lived up to the centuries-old hype and despite a highly-developed tourist-trade in the area, seem to remain irreducible to chocolate-box prettification or the "aw-shucks vision of immensities" William Logan mocked Charles Wright for. (Strange how we use "unspoilt" as a term of approval as though all natural environments were ultimately destined for spoliation.)

View from Hawth Castle

 The landscapes and bewilderingly wide skies, across which patterns of cloud-filtered light continually roam and shift, retain something inhospitably wild and barren about them which is the opposite of the "cramped and fearful" box-life of the indentured Londoner.(The quote's from MacDiarmid's great poem 'Bagpipe Music', quite germane to what I'm talking about). No wonder in the late 18th century certain ladies would be advised to observe the Lakes with the aid of a Claude glass - basically a mirror that would frame and render picturesque the otherwise unassimably natural abundance in front of them -  lest the vertiginous wilderness would throw them into a swoon.

Lake Windermere



 Now many of us use our smartphones and tablets for a similar mediation, a similar inability to take on board the enormous unhumanness of these locations society has yet to monetise and co-opt. Places where the depressing corollary of post-modernism - "il n'y a pas d'hors-texte" - feels like it's unravelled and where the outside goes on forever.