Last updated 05:27, Friday, 27 June 2008

The High Places: Leaves from a Lakeland Notebook, by A. Harry Griffin with illustrations by A Wainwright. Edited by Peter Hardy (Frances Lincoln. £12.99)Harry Griffin wrote in 1947: “There’s no more pleasant way of spending a summer Sunday afternoon than climbing, in old clothes and well-worn rubber shoes, the clean, sunny face of Gimmer Crag in Langdale and enjoying long smokes in the sunshine between pitches.”

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He published them as part of his weekly article in the Lancashire Evening Post. The articles ran for 30 years – there are more than 1,500 of them in the scrapbook that has been retrieved from his daughter’s archives. A selection of these are now re-published here for the first time.

The smoking was essential. Harry is the great contemplative writer of the Lake District, a man who enjoys musing on the landscape – using his pen much as a painter might use a brush, looking and recording what he sees or what he remembers seeing. I imagine that on the hillside or rock-face he would notice things in the gaps between the sucks and puffs and then, on returning to his messy, untidy study, he would write his crystal clear prose, as, with each intake of nicotine, he recalled the landscape before him.

The Lakeland of 50 or 60 years ago is sharply portrayed beneath quiet clouds of what-now seems-like-nostalgia: “The speck-like sheep grazing in the patchwork of fields between their old stone walls”; “the merry sound of its tumbling becks and foaming gills and the tinkle of a thousand tiny streamlets lapping against the boulders and dancing in the sunlight”; “the buttresses of Kirk Fell and Gable... and the great northern precipice of Scafell.”

With Harry Griffin, there always seems time to observe and record.

Alfred Wainwright’s drawings are the same. Harry used to watch Wainwright catching his bus in Windermere Road, Kendal, every Saturday morning on his weekly escape to the fells. Wainwright contemplated the fells as he drew his pictures and maps and meticulously wrote his text in the silence of a winter’s evening and Harry’s mind, in he same way, was imbued with the landscape as he wrote. There have been very few who have captured the hills so naturally in their writing.

Harry Griffin didn’t just write about the rocks and stones and trees. He was a working journalist and he had a ready eye for all things and people of interest. He knew Millican Dalton, the Borrowdale recluse who lived in a cave: “Now he is gone, and only his old cave remains to remind one of a happy vagabond.”

He knew Owd Joe of Wasdale Head “who knew more about sheep and less about anything else than almost anybody I have ever known”.

And he knew Wainwright, “the most unassuming of men”, and gave a very fine review of his first guide to the fells.

In the last article, which was left on his desk when he died he says: “As an old cragsman – I did my last rock climbs at 78 after devoting 60 years, week in week out, to the craft of cragsmanship – I have always considered crags to be the most striking and interesting features of mountains, the features that give mountains their character.”

More than almost anyone else, Harry Griffin understood the character of mountains and especially those of the Lake District.

It is a great pleasure to have these quiet contemplations of our landscape retrieved from oblivion.