In Robert Macfarlane’s book Mountains Of The Mind, he describes the history of our interest in mountains. It hasn’t always been like this, he says; not so long ago, wild places were regarded with horror. Our appreciation of mountains is a cultural and learned response, popularised like certain countries and locations become popular within the holiday industry. When Daniel Defoe visited the Lake District in the 1720s he found it wild and frightful, which was not an unusual sentiment.
It’s an interesting idea, that we might not be enjoying the Lake District or anywhere else if we were living a hundred years ago. If we were, it’s quite possible we would gaze up at Scafell Pike or Helvellyn and feel not an excited attraction, but a fear and a revulsion. What’s up there? What will we find? How can it possibly be safe, compared to this nice cosy valley and the pleasures of a fire in an open hearth?
And yet, aesthetic response is innate as much as learned. Taste can be developed and refined, say for example in the duration of arts studies at university, but children do respond to shape, colour and style with an aesthetic feeling. I remember as a boy, taking great pleasure in a particular purple shirt. Like most children I played with painting and drawing, and this extended further with me into GCSE and then A Level Art, although the latter only lasted a few months, when I opted instead for other A Levels. I vividly remember my first experiences of the Lakes as occasions of great aesthetic joy – and no one had ‘taught’ me that, it was innate, although admittedly they were valley rather than high level encounters.
The early explorers in the Lakes had quaintly Victorian notions about how to enjoy the place. They tried to codify what the components were, that made a satisfying aesthetic scene. One of the first was called John Brown, who enjoyed the place and said the perfection of Keswick derived from beauty, horror and immensity. Thomas West wrote the first guide book, describing twenty ‘stations’ he regarded as the finest and definitive viewpoints that every visitor should seek. Then finally, a painter called William Gilpin defined the mountain ‘picturesque’ (a fashionable idea at the time) as requiring
Aesthetics, we can therefore see, are partly learnt, partly cultural, and partly a matter of fashion and development.
I enjoy the mountain photography of Walter Poucher (1891 – 1988), not because it’s especially fine or accomplished – in fact it’s technically quite weak, lacking the fine reproductive powers we obtain from modern cameras – but because it’s charmingly ‘old school’, from a different era. He was, as far as I know, the first major and popular mountain photographer, covering not only the Lake District but also Wales, Scotland, and the Alps. He published many books, which presumably were definitive and highly regarded. They were mostly mountain photography volumes, although a few were walking manuals. One of my first guidebooks was The Lakeland Peaks, first published by Poucher in 1960, and reproduced for over thirty years. It makes charming use of photographs as visual maps, tracing routes and paths onto topographic details. It’s the only book I’ve seen do that; Wainwright did something similar with his drawings, although photographs are clearer and more useful guides.
I saw a few of Poucher’s older volumes in a second-hand bookshop recently, selling for £20 when they originally cost a few shillings. I was tempted, and enjoyed surveying the crude black and white photographs, but with a sense of nostalgia rather than aesthetics. The photographs are not that great, but I do enjoy seeing the workings and sensitivities of this venerable old fella, and seeing how his mountain photography was similar to mine: that viewpoint, that use of light, or that composition of river, rock and cloud. He came from a different era, and yet his work is not drastically dissimilar.