Upland by Ed Douglas review: 'Lessons from British mountain history'
This book is a must-read for anyone with an interest in the past, present and future of Britain’s mountains, writes Roger Cox
What is a mountain? It sounds like an obvious question, but as the climber, author and journalist Ed Douglas points out in the introduction to his engrossing new book, Upland, the answer isn’t as straightforward as you might think.
At the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, when representatives from mountainous countries were trying to get a chapter on “sustainable mountain development” into the UN’s Agenda 21 plan to protect the environment, they quickly realised that formulating a definition was easier said than done. Should altitude be the deciding factor? Perhaps, but that would make the almost entirely flat Tibetan Plateau, with an average height of 4,500 metres, more of a mountain than Ben Nevis. In the end, Douglas writes, “criteria were agreed that for a place to be described as mountainous, the altitude had to vary by at least 300 metres over a radius of seven kilometres.”
Given that its subtitle is “The Strange History and Vital Future of Britain’s Mountains”, in settling upon a definition of “mountain” for this book Douglas could easily have kept things local and used the official UK government description: “any peak or landmass with a height of 600 metres (1,969 feet) or higher.” (Equally, he could have gone with the standard threshold used by map-makers and hill walkers: 610 metres or 2,000 feet. ) Had he concentrated his attention exclusively above 600-odd metres, though, he would have been restricting himself to a somewhat disjointed view, both geographically and historically. By contrast, as he puts it, “applying the 300-metre benchmark to Britain is visually striking.”
To illustrate his point, he invites the reader to imagine a 300-metre rise in sea level. Were this to happen, most of south, central and eastern England would be underwater, but “much of the outline of Wales and Scotland remains, northern England too, along with the twin domes of Exmoor and Dartmoor.” He goes on to observe that “a portion of British history springs from this imbalance” – and it’s thinking about the various imbalances between highland and lowland that provides the book with its central pivot. In this sense, Upland feels like a companion piece to David Gange’s 2019 book The Frayed Atlantic Edge. Gange, a kayaker and academic, aims to reimagine the story of these islands from the perspective of the Atlantic coast; Douglas attempts a similar exercise, only swapping wave-lashed shores for wind-blasted uplands.
Before getting stuck into the human history of Britain’s mountains, however, Douglas first sets out to describe the creation of the mountains themselves. This, of course, is also an exercise in human history, as all the discoveries that led us to our current understanding of geology were made by scientists with their own backstories, and so, as well as brisk, readable primers on plate tectonics and glaciation, we also get the stories of key thinkers like Adam Sedgwick, James Hutton and Robert Jameson.
There then follows a wonderful, meandering account of human life above 300 metres in what is now the UK, rich in detail and incident, if perhaps inevitably lacking in narrative thrust, given the sheer scale of the exercise. Via the 21st century archeological work of Richard Bradley and Aaron Watson, we meet the prehistoric inhabitants of Ben Lawers in what is now Highland Perthshire, prolific rock artists “enmeshed with their landscape, intimately aware of things we now sense only vaguely”; and we spend time in Roman Britain, where, under the wall-building invaders, “Scotland’s Southern Uplands ceased to be a space of free movement... it was now a line to be defended. That would not change for a millennium and a half, by which time it became hardwired into the political boundaries of modern Britain.”
Moving into the Medieval period, we see how, in the time of David I of Scotland, the establishment of the "burghs" in the lowlands of eastern Scotland "saw Gaelic begin to withdraw to a 'Highland line'"; and how, in Wales, "as the English stripped them of their best land, the mountain-dwelling Welsh faced an insuperable problem. Feudalism relies on muscle, and the princes of Gwynedd could not grow enough soldiers [on the land they had left] to defend themselves from their numerous enemies."
There are also several chapters detailing the ways in which Britain’s uplands have been asset-stripped. The Romans might have seen them simply as “unproductive places full of barbarians”, but Douglas details how they have variously been used and abused by those trying to graze sheep, hunt game, harvest timber and extract minerals, and also, following the rapid growth of Britain’s cities during the Industrial Revolution, how many upland valleys were flooded to provide new sources of drinking water.
All of this is well done; however, where Upland really takes off is in its final third, where Douglas begins to explore the evolution of modern attitudes to the mountains. There’s a telling contrast drawn between the Reverend Thomas Grierson, a proto-Munro-bagger of the early 19th century who mostly seemed to climb mountains so that he could brag about having climbed them; and the Gaelic poet Duncan Ban MacIntyre, who “would have had a thousand things to say about Beinn Achaladair before he mentioned whether he had ever bothered to climb it.” And then again we have William Gilpin, an 18th century priest, author, teacher, artist and gardener from Scaleby near the Solway Firth, and among the first critics to develop an idea of the picturesque as distinct from the sublime. All of these attitudes then come into play in the final few chapters, which deal with access to the hills, their conservation, and – crucially – how they should be managed in the future. In spite of the complexities of the various contemporary land use debates concerning rewilding, carbon capture schemes, the installation of renewable energy infrastructure and the right to roam, Douglas is careful to avoid tub-thumping, and paints a nuanced, clear-eyed and informative picture.
If knowing where you’re going means knowing where you’ve been, this book is a must-read for anyone with an interest in the next few chapters of Britain’s epic mountain story.
Upland, by Ed Douglas, Bodley Head, £25
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