The eye of the beholder

“THE WILDEST, most barren and frightful of any that I have passed over in England, or even Wales itself.” This is how Daniel Defoe described the landscape we now know as the Lake District, visiting mountainous Westmorland in 1724.

Wild, barren,. This opinion was shaped by the intellectual attitude of the time, which held that mountains were fundamentally ugly. Unlike the fertile flatlands and rolling hills of ‘civilised’ parts of the world – south-east England, say – the steep and intractable realm of the mountains, so resistant to ploughing and planting, was repellent, savage, Celtic, even slightly obscene. Mountains were, as author Robert Macfarlane memorably observed in , “castigated as ‘boils’ on the Earth’s complexion, ‘warts’, ‘wens’, ‘excrescences’ and even, with their labial ridges and vaginal valleys, ‘Nature’s pudenda’.”