Guides and Guides
THE first of these books is a collection of essays published at different dates in the journal of the Fell and Rock Climbing Club. The editor exclaims in her introduction, " Why not get out the map ? " The first essay is about maps, the planet Jupiter and Ethiopian bombs with a kind of postscript on Bowfell ; another muses, "March days by Silverstrand (we used to call it Silverstrand, though I can find that name on no map)" ; another, stringing Bowfell to a number of other crags and peaks, reiterates " Study thereby the map " ; a fourth begins, " I will take down my scattered maps." As we plug along at the heels of the essayists, "larding the lean earth" with what one of them calls our " bones," we get lost in a Lakeland mist, for the very good reason that there is no map at all.
The one essay that is not merely episodic (though there is an enjoyable climb by Mr. Banner Mendus) or flatly informative in the manner of " . . . and here the troops received that drill and train- ing which were so essential a part of the discipline of the Roman army" (or of any army ?) is one of moving eloquence and rich intimacy by Mr. H. H. Symonds on the Herdwick sheep. The author, who knows the breed and its habits as though he were a " statesman "-flockmaster himself, describes how the Forestry Com- mission is driving them both out of their farms and fells. I was able to compare the facts of his indictment from my own experience of much the same process of eviction in Snowdonia two years ago, and the pity of it is that the coniferous slums swallowing up the sheepwalks are based on a system of monoculture discarded nearly a century ago by enlightened Continental forestry. In this essay knowledge, grasp and a strong individual sense of values are at one.
Mr. Ingram, who writes about the Peak District, the Cheshire plain, the Potteries, the Black Country, Sherwood Forest, the Dukeries and the Shires in the justly, familiar Face of Britain series, has the advantage of having been a farm-worker. In a sturdy collo- gual style that frees him from guide-bookery convention on the " Highways and Byways " model, he is able to renovate the Cobbett tradition of associating land with people in a succession of regional variations. This gives a certain unity to a survey of otherwise im- possibly violent contrasts, especially between the High Peak solitudes and the industrial formicaria that neighbour them. Factories, antiquities, slums, cloisters, Erebus and the mountain calm, blast furnaces and the ripple. of the Manifold=the author certainly had his work cut out. It is not surprising that he should be perfunctory at times and as occasionally disappoint us, as in his account of Laxton in Nottinghamshire, the sole survivor of the open-field village community. But the farm-worker is also the sole survivor of the all-round worker, and that craftsmanly catholicity has stood Mr. Ingram in good stead for this formidable book.
For the last of this trio I have to be on my guard against pure panegyric. So I set to work diligently hunting for flaws, and an indifferent bag they are. The book might have mentioned the peculiar colour-wash of the cottages at Cuddington, the abundance of grave-boards in the churchyard of Quainton and that Olney steeple is the first of the broach-spires that stud the limestone range deep into Lincolnshire. The editors certainly should not have omitted the Brill post-mill, chestnut (in the figurative sense) as it is, and room should have been found for one group of Chiltern farm- buildings with their black weatherboarded barns. They are archi- tectural enough for anything, and the book is an " architectural guide." The very poverty of these sotto voce asides reveals a very fine achievement. The photography is superb ; the other books are merely well illustrated. The alphabetical gazetteer at the end is of a packed Compression and the letterpress among the photographs of the ripest scholarship. A happier collaboration could not have been between text and picture, editor and editor, objective presentation and the stamp of personal independence. The tradition of the Murray Handbook has been crowned, and, in this volume at any :rate, progress does mean something.
H. J. MASSINGHAM.
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