The Romans used a road called the High Street to traverse the high fells of what today are the eastern fringes of the Lake District national park. A sensational, undulating ridgeback of peaks, it offers views across Scafell Pike to the west, north to Scotland’s Galloway Hills and east to the Pennines. Nearer to hand, gullies and crags, impossibly etched with drystone walls, fall away at the angle of repose to valley floors smudged with pitchy smoke from farmhouse chimneys and clumps of what Wordsworth described as little lines of ‘wood[s] run wild’.
I count myself lucky to have drunk in this life-affirming view many times. Increasingly though, my visits stir ambivalent feelings. What nags me is that those woodlands, like much of the Lake District,
