They call it the Lake District. It's something in the way of being a Storied Place. Take a map of England, and then spread it open. Note the location of it's central hub, in London, situated in the Southeast. If you start from that point, and make your way on a more or less steady Northwestern line of travel, sooner or later you'll notice how all the signs of metropolitan life begin to drop off and fade away the further you get from the locations of Downing, Buckingham, and Windsor. For a while you'll notice remnant signs of our first carbon footprint is you tread your way through the Country's industrial centers. These are what someone once referred to as the lands of dark, satanic mills. Most of these business establishments have overrun the countryside that used to reign like an undisputed green monarch long ago. Now all of that has been eclipsed by factory towns like Birmingham, Liverpool, Northampton, or Manchester. The curious traveler will have to make their way through or past some of these points of interest in order to reach the main locale I have in mind. It's a hilly area located near the Northwesternmost edge of England proper. It's not too long after you've past this particular region that you'll come to that demarcation point where Britain ends and Scotland begins. Should you choose to take the travel route known known as the A591 past Helsington Laithes, you'll soon find yourself moving through the county known as Cumbria.
This is the spot on the map where are destination is located. Even before we've reached the neighborhood we're looking for, however, the attentive traveler will begin to notice a further change in the landscape. If you can manage to make your way past the various industrial centers that have come to make up a great part of the modern identity of Britain, and if you know where to look for it, you might just be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of the land's other face. This is true of places like Cumbria. It's here that the signs of modernity begin to drop off in a meaningful way, the kind that forces you to notice almost without being aware of it. One moment you'll find yourself surrounded by skyscrapers, however modest, and yet after a while these begin to fall back, and it's like someone was kind enough to introduce you to the idea of a natural landscape. It's a process that begins well before you reach sight of Cumbria, though you'll have to make your way past places like Manchester first. Once that's done, it's almost like watching a slow burn magic trick. It becomes a game of first you don't see it, and now you do. Traveling toward and then through the English Countryside is akin to starting out in the confines of real life, and then slowly entering the remnants of a storybook.
You get the impression that if you hang around a location like Cumbria long enough, you'll almost begin to understand how the ancestor's of the people who live here could believe that creatures like elves and dryads made their homes in trees and moors that surround you on all sides, or that you occupy what's left of the homes of a race of giants, and other things. Such folkways appear to have come easy to a people of Cumbria.
They like to tell how it's the true location of King's Arthur's Camelot. They'll be more than happy to point the tourist out to the site of the Round Table, or the home of the Lady of in the Lake. As enticing as all of this neighborhood lore might be, it's still just the appetizer for the location in mind. Moving further into the heart of Cumbria reveals a setting which is almost as near to that of a storybook as anyone is ever likely to achieve in whatever it is we think of as real life. This would be not one, but rather a series of simple small towns with names like Grasmere, Keswick, Hawkshead, and Ambleside. The one trait that each of them shares is just this. The Lake District is an old place, and yet it's people have kept up with the times, by and large. Odds are even if you're invited into any one of the quaint looking cottages that dot this landscape, you'll be treated to the comforting sight of what's become the standard setup of the modern household. A widescreen TV that's barely used, and more than one Personal Computer and/or Laptop, complete with a corner Wi-Fi modem.
The funny thing is how even this doesn't seem to detract from the sense that we're witnessing a place that's always somewhat out of time. You can't call the District a living relic, not by a long shot. At the same time, there's the general impression that the hours of a man's hours are able to take their time here. The pacing of daily life is, or can be slower than in London. I'm not sure if there is any spot left where the air is clear, yet this place comes pretty close. Also there's the general look of the towns about the Lakes. What I'm about to say next is a cliche, yet it's true enough. The Lake District really is perhaps the closest England will ever have to its own Hobbiton. It's just possible that the ability to link this real life location with one of the most famous and well liked settings in the history of Fantasy fiction is also not a chance piece of similarity. I have called the Lake District a storied place. The full meaning of that description stems from the fact that it's also something of the birth place for the Romantic Movement. In 1799, one of the District's longtime citizens took up residence in the somehow aptly named Dove Cottage, located in Grasmere. His reason for doing this was simple enough.
This guy wanted to be a writer. Not just any penny-a-page wordsmith, either. This fellow had set his sights on being a full-time professional poet. His name was William Wordsworth. I'm not sure it's correct to label him as the Father of Romanticism in English Letters. For one thing, while the authors that comprised the the group might have agreed that together they constituted a new Movement in the arts, they were generally averse to the idea of having any of one of them becoming a public figurehead. In general, they tended to guard their artistic freedom very well, and none of them (least of all William Blake) would have taken kindly to the idea that the group should have its Inspiration subordinated to the whims of any one of them. That would have been a recipe for disaster. Wordsworth wasn't even the first one of them to start writing poetry. That honor goes to the pioneering efforts of Blake. Instead, it seems more accurate to say that Wordsworth was the one who came closest to giving the Romantic Poets something a like a spiritual home. A place where like minds could gather and compare notes and share ideas and philosophies with one another. This seems to have been the function for places like Dove Cottage and other spots along the banks of the District. A collective writer's retreat which in time became something of a literary hub from which the ideas of Romanticism emerged and began to spread.
The story I want to talk about today is one that owes something of an eternal debt to the shared home of the Romantic Movement. It's main setting is on the shores of the Lake District, and it serves as something of a love letter to the place. It has the advantage of being written by an author who has gone on to be considered something of an honorary local son. The kind of artist who is able to produce a work that is of such quality that he often gets a spot for himself on the same shelf as works like
Songs of Innocence and Experience. The story itself fits into the category of an ode. It's a tribute to the kind idyllic childhood Summers when your family would take you on a vacation, and rather than any National Lampoon style nightmare lying in wait for you, everything just somehow turned out right. It was never a matter of perfection. Instead, it was about having the kind of experiences that you knew was always going to somehow define that part of your life. The kind of experiences where can still recall the feel of it all, even after the memories of the events and what little photographic evidence you had of is has begun to fade. Written by Arthur Ransome, this is the tale of
Swallows and Amazons.
