Excerpt from Walking in the Lake District

IT was said of the great Jebb that such time as he could rescue from the adornment of his person he devoted to the neglect of his duties. Under distractions no less perplexing, though in kind not similar, I have compiled these tattered chapters. I have written of the Lake country partly in wrath, because it was a rash promise to make a book about it, but more in happiness and mixed feelings are, they say, the proper attitude to a loved object.

For yourself, reader, my hope is that the book may stir, or else maintain, your interest in the greatest of our future National Parks, and that you will do something to create these. Many now preach the gospel Preserve the countryside Let us then preserve it in the best possible way, by teaching as many as we can to use and value it not by locking it up, or by making a museum of it, a kind of spectacle which a man looks at with his hat tipped well back on his head, as if it were a sacred picture or some holy survival from a better past Visi tors are requested not to touch the countryside.'-none the less, born and confined as now we, are, among a discipline of bricks and mortar, or at best among the sham gentilities of the Tudor tea-shop style, our problem is not easy there is a risk, a certain crudeness in us. But we can only learn liberty by the use of liberty and until we get this free access to the open country backagain into our city life, we shall be still unsatisfied. For our roots are in the country, and we cannot be finally happy if we are entirely cut away from the places of our first origin. To the unconscious memory of man the country is more than something which separates one town from the next 5 you cannot learn about it, or go back to the old racial experience, by riding through it in a motor 'bus. We love best that with which we have mixed our own labour, and therefore we learn the country as friends only if we walk it in the sweat of our brow, or with cold hands and frosty noses.

If the new youth movement does not help us, I shall be surprised, and Youth Hostels in particular 5 indeed if I had not inscribed this book with quite a number of other and more personal names already, it would have been inscribed with a wider title, the Youth Hostels Association. This shifting of organised interest into the fresh air stands, I think, for cleanliness and imagination and good taste and sane feelings 5 for good buildings 5 for no litter; for a knowledge of the outdoor world; for an understanding of agriculture and for a decent humility in the presence of the most skilled of all the workers, the agricultural labourer and the shepherd. It stands for the preservation of rural England. It is itself a council for the preservation of rural England a council of young people who know a fine thing when they see it and will let no one spoil it. It knows also that charity begins at home, and that the more of us are educated a little in this matter, then the bigger hope there is of reforming that great open-handed English populace which throws its rubbish and half-timber broadcast. Moreover simplicity and hardihood are a part of any good living and of good companionship, and the free comradeship in this movement is a first rate social investment. There is no better test of the spirit than to walk together. To walk together is more than walking out See her at breakfast is a wise proverb with reference to impressions of over-night. See him on a wet walk is an equally good precept. The freedom of the open air and of the fell side is a civilizing thing it is a needful part of our self-knowledge, and of our knowledge of one another.

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