Walking a small county

Churchyard in Beetham

I returned from England on Friday.  Eight days hiking in Westmorland, with a couple of days in London beforehand, and one in Oxford thrown in for dessert.  Six days beneath the half cloudy, half sunny skies of England -- weather a Seattle hiker can relate to -- and two days of rain. 

But even a day of torrential rain -- as one of those days happened to be -- can be fun when the temperature is moderate, the scenery is attractive, and a dry room and convenient pub await one at the end of the day.

I hiked from the tidy, former county town of Appleby in the north, eastward to the Lake District, south through Patterdale and Grasmere and Troutbeck, and finally -- leaving the Lakes behind -- south to the Irish Sea coast through Westmorland's largest town, Kendal.

Over the pass between the
Grasmere and Patterdale
watersheds

I felt akin to Frodo and his companions, walking through strange and foreign lands.  Walking across the pastures and pleasant small towns of northern Westmorland, up and over the eastern fells of the Lakes, along the shores of Ullswater and Grasmere and Windermere, and finally southward through the prosperous rural and suburban precincts of the old Barony of Kendal (one of the few constituencies to vote Liberal Democratic in Thursday's election), all the way to the sea at Arnside. 

I thus visited a wondrous and varied world on foot.  And yet, a little research when I returned home revealed that the entire former county of Westmorland is only slightly larger than Thurston County in Washington -- a smallish county in which our state capital of Olympia is situated. 

Hiking across pastures

Perceived distance depends on how one travels.  When I reached Kendal, near the end of my trek, and saw posters advertising a concert in Appleby, my first impression was -- "who would go that far away just for a concert?"  But if you have a car, who wouldn't drive "from one end of Thurston county to the other"?  Traveling on foot lets you feel how distances were understood during the great majority of England's history.  For most people -- and not just serfs -- a county was one's entire world.  In fact, one's town or village was, for the most part, one's entire world. 

Roman road

We are so accustomed to crossing counties in a matter of minutes by car or train that much of history before the steam engine makes little sense to us.  Having to walk from town to town reminds us of just how long a mile actually is.  It shows us how residents of two towns, ten miles apart, might well speak in different dialects or accents.  Or even in totally different languages, rooted in Norse or Germanic or Celtic -- as my review of Rory Stewart's The Marches discussed last December.

In some ways, the world -- especially a world so full of history as England -- seems more "real" when one walks it.  When you stroll past trees and stone buildings that have existed for centuries.  When you follow a path that was actually a Roman road built so that Roman legions could march from one military camp to the next.  I walked a couple of miles along one long, narrow lane, lined on both sides with dense hedgerows.  Scientists have studied the composition of plants within those hedgerows and determined they were planted in about 1100 A.D.  Who would notice or care if he swept by in a car at 50 mph?

All very well, of course -- but my craving for authenticity of experience goes only so far.  I deigned to fly by jet to and from England.  I didn't insist on sailing around the Horn.