Wainwright would be more downcast than podcast

Nov 5 2007 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

IN THEORY, I think all those headphones, cordless phone receivers and other assorted audio aids that visitors are given to guide them around any historic site or building are a great idea. Not that I’ve ever used one, of course. I’ve been too busy on such visits stopping my children and their friends talking too loudly, squealing, shouting, running, skipping, jumping and parking half-chewed lollipops on works of art to have the remotest chance of listening to the dulcet tones of some “expert” guide me through the finer points of whatever I’m looking at.

Yet, I’m aware that I’m out of step with current thinking on these matters, as the audio genie has sprung out of the lamp house and into the countryside, courtesy of the highly fashionable podcast.

The latest personality to be podded is none other than the sage of the Lake District, Alfred Wainwright, who died in 1991, aged 84, and whose memorably meticulous prose and drawings are regarded as essential guides to this part of Cumbria.

Books are now regarded as simply not enough these days, and the gravelly tones of this famous late Lancastrian have been recreated by actor and Wainwright impersonator Nick Wood-Jones, so that hill walkers can be talked through the landscape.

The downloadable recording means that ramblers will be able to get directions through the headphones of their MP3 digital music players. Already dubbed “flat cap nav” (a reference to Wainwright’s favoured headgear), the podcast covers one of the author’s preferred walks of 1½ miles around Helm Crag, near Grasmere.

After being told where to start their ramble, walkers pause the recording until they reach the next landmark, restarting it for further instructions and so on.

This idea comes from the Cumbria tourist authority to mark the centenary of Wainwright’s birth, and one can but imagine the incredulous look on our man’s face on learning of this from that great fell in the sky.

He was a dedicated enthusiast whose comments often bordered on the amusingly perverse, as in “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing”, but he also was strongly practical, advising “Never walk along a country lane if there is a bus”.

Wainwright studiously avoided contact with walkers, especially those wielding his books who were determined to spot the author in his natural habitat.

This is certainly at odds with Cumbria Tourism spokesperson Ellis Butcher trilling: “Now he’s virtually holding your hand all the way up there.”

Again, one involuntarily chuckles at Wainwright’s reaction to “holding hands”, as a person whose old-school attitudes were the antithesis of today’s touchy-feely generation. The only thing he’d be hugging closer would be his pipe.

However, broadcaster Eric Robson, Wainwright Society chairman, and one of the few who fell-walked with him, says: “The idea that this priest and poet of the Lakeland fells is telling you which path to take, while reading his love letter to the fells directly to you, is a novel approach to 21st-century hill walking.”

Others have not been so magnanimous about the scheme. One writer this week said: “It goes without saying that mountain walkers seek the wind in the cotton-grass or the piping call of the meadow pipit, not ears jammed with the dour tones of Wainwright, let alone an actor pretending to be him. Ipods have their place and it’s not amid sublime landscape.”

What all of us who love the Lakes can agree on is Wainwright’s sentiment that: “Surely there is no other place in this whole wonderful world quite like Lakeland, no other so exquisitely lovely, no other so charming, no other that calls so insistently across a gulf of distance. All who truly love Lakeland are exiles when away from it”.

My case rests that we don’t need a podcast to experience its appeal.

But, to throw off my fogeyish mantle (albeit for a nanosecond or so), my sons traipse everywhere with headphones clamped to their heads pumping rock music into their brains. Perhaps, as a halfway house, having Wainwright pumping musings about rocks into their brains isn’t such a bad idea?

peter.elson