IIt was surprising to learn that the uplands of Britain were always rocky, covered with thick grass and not suitable only for sheep. About 54,000 years ago – a blink of an eye in geological time – the island’s highlands were teeming with nature. The lushly forested peaks, cliffs and valleys were home to megafauna including the mammoth, woolly rhinoceros and giant elk. A sour note in this overgrown Garden of Eden were carnivorous cave lions and saber-toothed cats, prowling around in search of a meaty dinner.
Ed Douglas’s achievement in this excellent book is to return a proper sense of color and even carnival to the highlands of Britain. However, their first task is to define their terms. In 1936, the renowned American geographer Roderick Peat declared that what makes a mountain is not its height but its ability to “enter the imagination of those who live in its shadow”. But by the 1990s, the United Nations, newly tasked with protecting the world’s high places from environmental and economic degradation, insisted on putting away its tape measures and statistical charts and coming up with some universal criteria.
As a result, the current definition of a “mountainous” area is one where altitude varies by at least 300 m within a 7 km radius. This means that Douglas’s home on Totley Moor, which stands on the Millstone Grit upland of the Eastern Peak District, almost qualifies; This is a matter of obvious satisfaction for this one-time editor of the Alpine Journal. Entire regions of Scotland, Wales and northern England straddle this line, not forgetting the twin domes of Exmoor and Dartmoor.
Less palatable for Douglas, however, is the way in which Britain’s upper echelons have historically been imagined as isolated, luxurious but strangely detached places from life at lower levels. He reminds us that the country’s highlands meet more than 60% of the country’s water needs. Moreover, the plants that make up the majority of our diet originate in the same harsh environments: potatoes, barley, corn, apples, tomatoes. Those of us who live at or below sea level would do well to reframe our ideas about the highlands as a place where nothing more than an occasional lucky twig of heather grows.
Douglas suggests that the tendency to see Britain’s upper echelons as out of touch with history, politics, culture and even time is equally misguided. The truth is that mountains have shaped much of the story of our island. When the Romans arrived from mainland Europe in the 1st century AD, they found the lowlands of southern England, with fertile soils and gentle hills, rapidly growing and welcoming the new order. Meanwhile, the rugged North stood apart – and you can still see evidence of this bifurcated response in the landscape today. Go to a Roman ruin in the south or east of the country, and chances are it is the remains of a country estate or, at least, a beautiful villa. Head higher north and you’ll find yourself battling the remains of a post or high brick wall, intended to keep the denizens above from the good stuff.
And yet… it turns out again and again that it is in those cold, difficult and above all, high places that the real treasure lies. The Romans eventually overcame their fear of heights to begin mining at Wanlockhead, which remains the highest village in Scotland at over 400 metres. A thousand years later and the Norman invaders, who had initially given England’s rocky spine a wide berth, set up shop in the Peak District and insisted on taking a share of the handsome profits generated from local lead mining.
Douglas suggests that the best way to think about this constant push-pull between the central lowlands and the marginal uplands is as a kind of internal colonialism. Britain’s highlands have been plundered for raw materials for millennia. Perhaps the most poignant example in this book is the story of the Elan Valley, a beautiful expanse of land in the mountains of rural mid-Wales. The poet Percy Shelley visited his uncle’s Radnorshire estate in the early 19th century, and was enchanted to find his own version of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lake District.
But in 1896, the valley was dammed and flooded to create a huge reservoir, providing Birmingham with a permanent supply of cheap and clean drinking water. It was part of MP Joseph Chamberlain’s radical program to rid England’s Second City of cholera and dysentery by building a 73-mile aqueduct from the Welsh mountains to the Midlands plateau. This caused the village of Nantgwilt, complete with church and surrounding fields, to disappear permanently underwater.
The compulsory purchase of the Elan Valley echoes the earlier Highland Clearances, during which tenant farmers in Sutherland, Argyll and Inverness-shire were ordered off the land to make way for infinitely more profitable sheep farming. Many of these dispossessed crofters, like the Radnorshire farmers 150 years later, were obliged to immigrate to America to find a place to build a stable home.
Yet it would be catastrophic and defeatist to suggest that the upper regions have been exclusively the site of passive trauma. Douglas does a good job of identifying times throughout history when Britain’s high places demonstrated a culture of determined resistance. There are the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745 when Highlanders loyal to the Stuarts moved down from their highlands in an attempt to overthrow the newly established Hanoverians. This tartan army reached Derby, only 110 miles from London, before being forced to turn back.
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In truth, Douglas hasn’t discovered anything new about the ancient uplands, but he has woven his sources into a clever survey that ranges from the tectonic plates of prehistory to today, when the main concern was Southern second-homers raising prices for young locals. One of the joys of his sweeping, looping narrative is the space it leaves for insightful cameos by notable individuals, including several women.
The daughter of a Galashiels school teacher is Janet Lapworth, who in the 1870s had her geologist husband tailored a special waistcoat, including rows of pockets on the front into which he could quickly sort his specimens. Or Hannah Mitchell, who grew up on a hard-scrabble tenant farm overlooking Kinder Scout, the Peak District’s highest point, and developed a passion for wanderlust to escape the constricting circumstances of her own poor life. Michelle’s determination to overcome her troubles helped her become a campaigner for suffrage, JP and social justice.
However, my favorite Uplander has to be Queen Victoria. As a young girl she greatly enjoyed Walter Scott’s highly regarded Highland novels. Now that Jacobitism was safely defeated, it was delightful to imagine the Highlands full of handsome men in kilts ready to defend a woman, even if that woman was a Protestant Hanoverian princess. When she bought Balmoral in 1852, the Queen initially had little interest in moving far. But after Albert’s death she was persuaded to make occasional excursions to famous peaks including Lochnagar and Ben MacDui. Here began what the 20th century novelist George Scott-Moncrieff memorably called “Balmorality”. It was a scene of the upper echelons, decorated and watered down, best seen on a biscuit tin.
