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Early Travellers

Appreciation of the natural landscape of mountain and moorland is a relatively modern phenomenon. The earliest travellers to the Peak District were often over-come by the unimagined horrors of the landscape. Daniel Defoe, for example, in his tour through Britain in 1725, condemned the High Peak as ‘the most desolate, wild and abandoned country in all England’, and ‘ a waste and howling wilderness, over which when strangers travel, they are obliged to take guides, or it would be next to impossible not to lose their way’.

That intrepid lady traveller, Celia Fiennes, had come to the same conclusion during her Northern Journey a few years before. ‘You are forced to have Guides as in all parts of Derbyshire, she said.
‘All Derbyshire is full of steep hills’ she explained, ‘and nothing but the peakes of hills as thick one by another is seen in most of the County’.

Edward Browne, a native of East Anglia, wrote of the Peak in 1662 as ‘ a strange, mountainous, misty, moorish, rocky, wild country’.

When the Reverend Gilpin visited Peak Cavern at Castleton in 1772, he could scarcely bear the sight of the stupendous cliffs of limestone at its entrance. ‘A combination of more horrid ideas is rarely found than this place affords and, at last, the idea growing too infernal, we were glad to return’, he wrote. These early travellers came in search of the picturesque, rather and the impressive, and Mr. Gilpin found Dovedale much more to his liking. ‘The whole composition is chaste and picturesque’, he reported, ‘and beautiful in a high degree’.

Mention of Dovedale leads inevitably to those great popularisers of that delightful dale, Izaak Walton ‘the father of angling’, and Charles Cotton, who lived at nearby Beresford hall. As the ‘piscator’ and the ‘viator’ in the second part of The Compleat Angler (1653) they extolled the virtues of that sparkling stream. Walton called it; ‘The finest river that ever I saw and the fullest of fish’.

Gradually, the taste for wild scenery grew, helped to a great extent by the later Romantics like Lord Byron and John Ruskin. Byron it was who, after a visit to Dovedale, said that there were ‘things in Derbyshire as noble as in Greece or Switzerland’.

And Ruskin also ‘found his joy’ in the ‘clefts, glens and dingles’ of the Peakland dales, just as modern visitors do.