Of the many times I traversed this spectacular ridge the only time I have never seen anyone else was in thick mist
Of the many times I traversed this spectacular ridge, the only time I have never seen anyone else was in thick mist. But I don’t blame AW for the crowds, Striding Edge’s reputation goes back a lot longer; Wordsworth took Walter Scott “along that horn of the mountain” in 1805. He usually indicated several alternative approaches.In The Eastern Fells Wainwright described 15 different approaches to the top of Helvellyn, at 3,118ft the third highest summit in England, including the rocky spine of Striding Edge. More radical is the introduction of colour.Wainwright is occasionally blamed for the erosion on some fell paths, but it is the grandeur and beauty of the Lakeland hills themselves that generate their popularity.
Up to now every reprint has used the original metal plates, or film made from them, but these have faded. The pages of the new set have been “reoriginated” from the original artwork, held in the Kendal Record Office, revealing all AW’s meticulous detail. Later this year, Frances Lincoln will also begin publishing an updated set of Wainwrights following a first-ever revision, by Chris Jesty. Many of the changes are at valley level – parking, road layouts – yet there are 3,000 revisions in Eastern Fells alone. “I don’t think anybody since the days of the monks had ever produced a completely hand-written book.”There is an intimacy with a man and his landscape when he tells you the path turns “slightly right” at “the third ash tree” while ascending Jack’s Rake on Pavey Ark. Spanish National Tourist office (020 7486 8077; )..
After visiting Mallorca with her lover, Frederic Chopin, in 1838-39, George Sand returned to France to compose one of the most malicious travel memoirs ever written. “Travellers habitually enlarge on the good fortune of the southern races,” she scoffed, in A Winter in Majorca “This is an error … from which I am now safely delivered.” She went on to describe the people of Mallorca – at length – as barbarians, thieves, hypocrites, cowards, monkeys and Polynesian savages. The typical Mallorcan peasant, she declared, led a “poor, witless existence”.
His prayer was a “senseless formula” and his songs expressed “that bleak melancholy which overwhelms him in spite of himself”. The local wheat was excellent, but the bread was “disgusting”. The same went for the olives, which, “thanks to their Moorish inheritance”, the Mallorcans knew how to cultivate. But where the oil thus produced should have been the finest in the world, it was in fact so “rancid and nauseating” that “every house, man and carriage in the island, and the very air of the fields, is saturated with its stench”.What can account for such bitterness? Sand was writing in an age before lager louts had been invented. Sand had had the fortune to stay in the most picturesque part of the island, in villages of pink stone, amid ancient terraced plantations of citrus and olive, by mountains where rugged peaks soared straight out of the Mediterranean. What was she complaining about? I am on my way to investigate.Where Sand had to cross the island by coach, on wild paths beset by “ravines, torrents, swamps, quickset hedges and ditches”, I have a train to assist me.
Not that anything about this line is particularly hi-tech: the olive oil and citrus trade with Marseille paid for it, I am told, nearly 100 years ago. Palma and Soller are only 20 miles apart, but in old wooden carriages that creak and clank through the hills, the journey takes an hour.From Soller, I walk across the valley to my hotel Even in torrential rain, I am impressed Grand old mansions dot the slopes. And the village of Fornalutx, when I get there, is built of pinkish-red stones, the same hue as the crags surround it Ancient terraces, grazed by goats, climb up to craggy peaks. I check in at an immaculate little hotel called C’an Reus, where the exquisite lisp of the English owner makes me proud to be her compatriot. I dine on suckling pig and rabbit with onions and a stew of cabbage, bread and garlic.