Upland by Ed Douglas review – a glorious survey of Britain’s high places

It comes as a shock to learn that Britain’s uplands were not always rocky, covered with coarse grass and suitable only for sheep. About 54,000 years ago – a mere blink in geological time – this island’s high places were teeming with nature. Lushly forested peaks, crags and gorges were home to megafauna including mammoth, woolly rhinoceros and giant elk. The one sour note in this elevated Garden of Eden was the carnivorous cave lions and sabre-tooth cats who prowled the browse looking for a meaty dinner.

Ed Douglas’s achievement in this excellent book is to return a proper sense of colour and even carnival to Britain’s high places. His first job, though, is to define his terms. In 1936, the celebrated US geographer Roderick Peattie declared that what made a mountain was not its elevation so much as its capacity to “enter into the imagination of the people who lived in [its] shadows”. But by the 1990s, the United Nations, newly tasked with protecting the world’s high places from environmental and economic decline, insisted on getting out its tape measure and statistical charts and coming up with some universal criteria.

Consequently, the current definition of a “mountainous” region is one where the altitude varies by at least 300 metres over a radius of 7km. That means that Douglas’s home on Totley Moor, which sits on the millstone grit uplands of the eastern Peak District, just about qualifies; a matter of obvious satisfaction to this one-time editor of the Alpine Journal. Romping comfortably across the line are whole swathes of Scotland, Wales and northern England, not forgetting the twin domes of Exmoor and Dartmoor.

Less pleasing to Douglas, though, is the way in which Britain’s uplands have historically been imagined as places apart, spectacular yet oddly detached from life at lower levels. He reminds us that the country’s high places provide more than 60% of the nation’s water needs. What’s more, the plants that make up much of our diet originate in that same hardy environment: potatoes, barley, maize, apples, tomatoes. Those of us who live at sea level or below would do well to reformulate our ideas about the uplands as a place where nothing much grows beyond the occasional sprig of lucky heather.

Equally misguided, suggests Douglas, is a tendency to view Britain’s uplands as existing outside history, politics, culture and even time itself. The truth is that mountains have shaped much of our island story. When the Romans arrived from mainland Europe in the first century AD, they found that low-lying southern England, with its fertile soil and gentle hillocks, quickly rolled over and signed up to the new order. The craggy north, meanwhile, stood aloof – and you can still see evidence of this bifurcated response in the landscape today. Go to a Roman ruin in the south or east of the country, and chances are that it is the remnants of a country estate or, at the very least, a handsome villa. Head to the high north and you will find yourself scrambling over the remains of a garrison or high brick wall aimed at keeping uplanders away from the good stuff.

And yet … it frequently turns out that it was precisely in those cold, difficult and, above all, lofty places that actual treasure lay. The Romans eventually overcame their fear of heights to start mining lead in Wanlockhead, which at more than 400 metres remains Scotland’s highest village. A thousand years later and the Norman invaders, who had initially given the rocky spine of England a wide berth, set up shop in the Peak District and insisted on taking a cut of the handsome profits that arose from local lead mining.

Douglas suggests that the best way to think of this ceaseless push and pull between the central lowlands and the marginal uplands is as a kind of internal colonialism. For millennia, Britain’s high places have been ransacked for their raw materials. Perhaps the most poignant example in this book is the story of the Elan valley, a beautiful stretch of land in the mountains of rural mid-Wales. In the early 19th century the poet Percy Shelley had roamed over his uncle’s Radnorshire estate, entranced to have found his own version of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lake District.

But in 1896, the valley was dammed and flooded in order to create a vast reservoir from which Birmingham might draw an everlasting supply of cheap and clean drinking water. It was part of the MP Joseph Chamberlain’s radical programme to clear England’s second city of cholera and dysentery by building a 73-mile aqueduct from the Welsh mountains to the Midlands plateau. This necessitated the village of Nantgwyllt, complete with church and surrounding farms, disappearing permanently under water.

The compulsory purchase of the Elan valley carries echoes of the earlier Highland clearances, during which tenant farmers in Sutherland, Argyll and Inverness-shire were ordered off the land to make way for the infinitely more profitable sheep. Many of these evicted crofters, just like the Radnorshire farmers 150 years later, were obliged to emigrate as far as the US to find a place to build a stable home.

Yet it would be doomy and defeatist to suggest that the uplands have exclusively been places of passive trauma. Douglas does a good job at identifying those times throughout history when Britain’s high places demonstrated a culture of determined resistance. There are the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745 when Highlanders loyal to the Stuart cause swept down from their mountain fastness in an attempt to overthrow the newly installed Hanoverians. This tartan army got as far as Derby, only 110 miles from London, before being forced to turn back.

Douglas has not, in truth, found out anything new about the ancient uplands, but he has knitted his sources into a deft survey, going all the way from the tectonic plates of prehistory to today, when the chief concern is southern second-homers driving up the prices for young locals. One delight of his capacious, looping narrative is the room it leaves for delightful cameos by remarkable individuals, including several women.

There is Janet Lapworth, the daughter of a Galashiels schoolteacher, who in the 1870s sewed her geologist husband a special waistcoat incorporating rows of pockets on the front into which he could sort his specimens on the fly. Or Hannah Mitchell, who grew up on a hard-scrabble tenant farm with a view of Kinder Scout, the highest point in the Peak District, and developed a love of rambling to offset the constricted conditions of her own impoverished life. Mitchell’s determination to walk off her troubles led to her becoming a suffragette, a JP and a campaigner for social justice.

My favourite uplander, though, remains Queen Victoria. As a young girl she gorged on the highly confected Highland novels of Walter Scott. Now that Jacobitism was safely defeated, it was delightful to imagine a Highlands full of craggily handsome men in kilts ready to come a lady’s rescue, even if that lady happened to be a Protestant Hanoverian princess. When she bought Balmoral in 1852, the queen was not initially much interested in venturing far. But with the death of Albert she was persuaded to undertake the occasional excursion up famous peaks including Lochnagar and Ben Macdui. Here was the beginning of what the 20th-century novelist George Scott-Moncrieff memorably called “Balmorality”. It was a view of the uplands, spruced up and watered down, best seen on a biscuit tin.