Harvest 2024: Alfred Wainwright
Keasden Harvest Festival, 22 September 2024
You will have heard of Alfred Wainwright, the Blackburn-born fellwalker, guidebook author and illustrator famous for his guides to the Lakeland Fells written in the 1950s, and for designing the first guide to the Coast to Coast Walk between St Bees in Cumbria and Robin Hood’s Bay.
Wainwright is credited for the saying, “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing”, although it’s my guess he was only repeating what he’d heard many northern country folk say to him while on his travels.
He loved the hills of the north, maybe all the more because he spent most of his life cooped up in a municipal office, albeit in Kendal, where he served as the Borough Treasurer from 1948 until 1967. In his Pictorial Guide To The Western Fells he wrote:
“The fleeting hour of life of those who love the hills is quickly spent, but the hills are eternal. Always there will be the lonely ridge, the dancing beck, the silent forest; always there will be the exhilaration of the summits. These are for the seeking, and those who seek and find while there is still time will be blessed both in mind and body.”
Wainwright knew our area here, these hills, very well indeed. Amongst his other books were A Pennine Way Companion (1968) and Walks in Limestone Country (1970).
So he walked these heights, he crossed these moors, just as half a century later you and I do. I wonder if you recognise, in this extract from his book A Pennine Journey, things about the experience of walking these hills which you yourself have found:
“Oh, how can I put into words the joys of a walk over country such as this; the scenes that delight the eyes, the blessed peace of mind, the sheer exuberance which fills your soul as you tread the firm turf? This is something to be lived, not read about. On these breezy heights, a transformation is wondrously wrought within you. Your thoughts are simple, in tune with your surroundings; the complicated problems you brought with you from the town are smoothed away. Up here, you are near to your Creator; you are conscious of the infinite; you gain new perspectives; thoughts run in new strange channels; there are stirrings in your soul which are quite beyond the power of my pen to describe. Something happens to you in the silent places which never could in the towns, and it is a good thing to sit awhile in a quiet spot and meditate. The hills have a power to soothe and heal which is their very own. No man ever sat alone on the top of a hill and planned a murder or a robbery, and no man ever came down from the hills without feeling in some way refreshed, and the better for his experience.”
Wainwright had a reputation for being “curmudgeonly” although Eric Robson, once chairman of the Wainwright Society, said that this was overstated. “He was a complex man,” Robson said. “He was shy, and he engaged his brain before opening his mouth. He liked solitude.” I would say that his writings reveal that he had something of the spiritual about him.
“To be spiritual is to be amazed,” wrote the Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement, [to] get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.”
Wainwright was forever amazed about the mountains and fells, the countryside around him. And he shares this deeply spiritual vision with all who enjoy his books.
Now, whether or not you think of yourself as a spiritual person, I’d say that Harvest is a festival which gives you and I permission to be amazed, at the world around us, for all the life expressed from the heights of the skies to the rivers and ocean depths; amazed at the way that nature provides for itself, and for us, so generously. In because amazed, then grateful; and because grateful, then prepared to be gentle with all this life we share, and generous with all that nature gives to us.
Harvest is an occasion to be appreciative and to recommit ourselves to caring for the earth, its creatures, the world’s suffering ones, and each other.
In his guidebook to Lakeland’s Central Fells, Wainwright writes these words:
‘an inexpressible humility fills the heart … I must hasten now to the Scafells, noblest of Lakeland’s cathedrals, while good health and appreciation of beauty and simple reverence and gratitude remain with me, for when I have lost these blessings I shall have little left.’
