Upland by Ed Douglas reviews – a respected survey of British uplands | History books

Met comes as a surprise to hear that Britain’s hills were not always stony, grassy and only suitable for sheep. About 54,000 years ago – a mere blink in geological time – the highlands of the island were teeming with nature. Dense forest peaks, cliffs and cliffs were home to megafauna including mammoths, woolly rhinoceros and giant antelopes. The only pain in this elevated Garden of Eden were the carnivorous cave lions and tabby cats that wandered unsuspectingly in search of dinner.

Ed Douglas’s achievement in this excellent book is to restore a proper sense of style and even celebration to the British high places. His first task, however, is to define his words. In 1936, US geographer Roderick Peattie said that what made a mountain not its height was that it could “penetrate the minds of those who live in its shadows”. But by the 1990s, the United Nations, which had a new responsibility to protect the high places in the world from being destroyed by environmental and economic damage, insisted that it release its tape chart and statistical charts and discover other ways that people need around the world.

Therefore, the current definition of a “hilly” area is where the height varies by at least 300 meters over a distance of 7km. This means that Mr Douglas’ house on Totley Moor, which sits on the edge of a mill in the eastern part of the Peak District, almost qualifies; a matter of obvious satisfaction to this one-time editor of the Alpine Journal. Travel freely through the line and all parts of Scotland, Wales and the north of England, not forgetting the two domes of Exmoor and Dartmoor.

What may not impress Douglas, however, is how Britain’s highlands have long been thought of as remote, fascinating but largely unknown to life below ground. He reminds us that the highlands of this country provide more than 60 percent of this country’s water. In addition, the plants that make up most of our food come from the same hardy place: potatoes, barley, corn, apples, tomatoes. Those of us who live on the coast or down would do well to change our view of high ground as a place where nothing grows beyond the occasional shoot of heather.

The same mistake, says Douglas, is the tendency to see British communities as past, political, cultural and time-only. The truth is that the mountains are the ones that shaped many stories about our island. When the Romans arrived from Europe in the first century AD, they found that the south of England, where there was fertile land and gentle hills, collapsed and signed the new system. The northern rock, meanwhile, stood out – and you can see evidence of this diverse response today. Go to the ruins of Rome in the south or east of the country, and chances are you are left with a country estate or, at least, a beautiful building. Head north and you’ll find yourself walking on military ruins or a tall brick wall meant to protect the climbers on top of the good stuff.

And yet… it often turns out that it was precisely in the cold, difficult, and, above all, high places where the real treasure lies. The Romans overcame their fear of heights to start mining at Wanlockhead, which at over 400 meters remains the highest village in Scotland. A thousand years later and the Norman enemies, who once gave England’s stone backbone so much space, set up shop in the Peak District and insisted on a cut of the profits from the local lead mines.

Douglas suggests that a better way to think of the endless push and pull between the central plains and the plateaus is as a form of internal colonialism. For thousands of years, high places in Britain have been looted for their natural resources. Perhaps the most striking example in the book is the story of the Elan valley, a beautiful mountain landscape in the mid-Wales countryside. In the early 19th century the poet Percy Shelley wandered his uncle’s estate in Radnorshire, only to discover his version of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lake District.

But in 1896, the valley was breached and flooded to create a large reservoir from which Birmingham could obtain cheap and clean drinking water. It was part of MP Joseph Chamberlain’s program to rid England’s second city of cholera and dysentery by building a 73-mile canal from the Welsh mountains to the Midlands. This caused the village of Nantgwyllt, complete with church and surrounding farms, to disappear under water.

The forced purchase of the Elan valley also coincides with the original Highland licences, where tenant farmers in Sutherland, Argyll and Inverness-shire were ordered to leave the land in favor of the more profitable sheep. Many of these evicted crofters, like Radnorshire farmers 150 years later, were forced to migrate as far as the US to find land to build a permanent home.

However, it would be difficult and defeatist to say that these mountains have become places of danger. Douglas does a good job of identifying those periods throughout history when Britain’s upper class displayed a culture of resistance. There are the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745 when Highlanders loyal to the Stuarts were swept from their hilltops in an attempt to capture the newly installed Hanoverians. These tartan soldiers made it to Derby, only 110 miles from London, before being forced back.

Douglas did not know anything new about the old high places, but he put his sources in the technical research, from the historical stones to the present day, where the main concern is the southerners driving the young trees. What makes him so interesting is his clear and vivid narrative and the way it is left to the main characters, including several women.

There is Janet Lapworth, the daughter of a Galashiels teacher, who in the 1870s sewed her geologist husband a special waistcoat with a row of pockets in the front into which he could place his specimens on the fly. Or Hannah Mitchell, who grew up on a hardscrabble farm and saw Kinder Scout, the highest peak in the Peak District, and developed a love of chasing to escape the hardships of her poverty-stricken life. Mitchell’s determination to overcome his problems made him a no-nonsense, JP and social justice activist.

My favorite, however, remains Queen Victoria. As a little girl she loved the Highland novels of Walter Scott. Now that Jacob was soundly defeated, it was fun to think of mountains full of handsome men in coats ready to rescue a woman, even though the woman was a Protestant Hanoverian princess. When she bought Balmoral in 1852, the queen initially had no interest in going far. But with Albert’s death he was persuaded to go and climb famous peaks including Lochnagar and Ben Macdui. This was the beginning of what the 20th century novelist George Scott-Moncrieff famously called “Balmorality”. It was a view of the mountains, raised and watered down, perfect for a biscuit tin.