At the dawn of the 18th century, the English upper class saw the Cumbrian Mountains as an isolated poverty pocket, inhabited by sullen mountaineers who spoke with an incomprehensible accent and looked askance at strangers.

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The upper class didn’t like the mountains, either; they saw them as a howling wilderness, cold and unpleasant. In 1724, Daniel Defoe (of Robinson Crusoe fame) explored these mountains and reported them “…the wildest, most barren and frightful of any that I have passed over.” A Londoner of Defoe’s era would no more have gone there for fun than a modern New Yorker would seek out Harlan County, Kentucky.

That was before the Industrial Revolution. When the small, old cities of England became foul traps of toxic fumes and disease, ideas of beauty changed quickly. The rational and man-made had given the educated classes a Hell on Earth; so they turned to the natural, and the emotional. They turned to Romanticism — and Romanticism’s leading light, poet William Wordsworth, happened to be from the Lake District.

Wordsworth sang the praises of his beloved Lakes at length and in detail, describing all the sublime emotions conjured by their vistas. Other apostles of Romanticism did too, and a steady pilgrimage of poets visited the Wordsworths, including Southey, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Tennyson. Later, John Ruskin would make the Lakes his home.

The things Wordsworth praised were exactly the things that, 100 years before him, people had rejected as ugly: “… a place for all kinds of beautiful works of art and nature, woods and valleys, fairy valleys and fairy tarns, miniature mountains, alps above alps …” as his sister Dorothy described it.

By 1820 Wordsworth was actively campaigning to preserve this landscape from the depredations of the modern.

No fewer than three Lakeland houses are preserved as monuments to Wordsworth’s heritage. His boyhood home sits at the center of the town of Cockermouth, on the banks of the River Derwent as it flows from the mountains.

After leaving college he moved into Dove Cottage, a modest and quaint old cottage he shared with Dorothy by the lake known as Grasmere. Later he and his family moved to an attractive small manor nearby, Rydal House, where he lived until his death.

In a very real sense, all the scenery for miles about is a monument to his vision of the Lakes landscape. Its preservation in the form Wordsworth knew it derives both from his expression of its beauty and his campaign to save it.

Wordsworth saw the Lakes as a landscape that had existed from time out of mind, now threatened by modern coarseness and industrialization. That’s not really accurate. It was threatened all right, but the landscape Wordsworth knew had existed for only about four centuries (admittedly a long time, even for England), and had not a single natural feature beyond the rocks of the mountains and the water in the lakes. Wordsworth was looking at a 15th century landscape of rural poverty that had survived long enough to become quaint.

If you go back a very long time, Cumbria reveals itself as a center of a large and impressive civilization. The New Stone Age’s megalithic culture, noted for huge monuments such as Stonehenge, originated in the Cumbrian mountains to spread north to Scotland’s Orkney Islands, south to the English Channel and over the water to Ireland and Brittany. This was a sophisticated society, peaceful enough to need no massive fortifications, rich and well-organized enough to build monuments; a society with industry and trade.

Relics include impressive stone circles in the Lakes, the best being Castlerigg near Keswick and the wonderfully named Long Meg and Her Daughters near Penrith.

When the megalithic civilization disappeared, however, Cumbria sank into obscurity, assuming the marginal role it would play for the next four millennia.

Among the English lands, Cumbria emerges last into history, gaining significant written records only after being incorporated into the kingdom of William the Conqueror. It was during the Norman centuries that Cumbria began to gain a landscape Wordsworth might have recognized. William divided the great oval of the Cumbrian Mountains between his noble pals by cutting it into pie slices, each slice having a mountain area at the pointy end and extending out into the flatlands beyond. This allowed each estate to have a variety of different types of farmland, a common medieval practice that hedged against agricultural catastrophe.

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