Upland

Britain’s mountains are our grandest and wildest places, their vast openness providing inspiration and escape. But they are now so revered that we overlook the many peoples who long inhabited them and the dramatic history of plunder and dispossession that explains how strangely empty these regions have become.

From the earliest Brittonic tribes to present-day tensions between farmers, tourists and ecological activists, Upland repopulates Britain’s mountains with the kings and monks, soldiers and poets, engineers and industrialists, visionaries and campaigners who made them what they are. Derided for centuries as uncivilised wastes, Britain’s uplands in fact hosted richly cultured, distinctive and resilient populations. And yet by the time Romantic poets ‘discovered’ the beauty of these places and industrial workers sought escape in them, the land itself had been denuded by clearances, famine and the needs of sheep and landowners. The creation of national parks has since ensured their preservation, but as activists now see mountains as a logical place to begin restoring biodiversity, Britain’s uplands have once again become sites of conflict.

As the poet Waldo Williams wrote, mountains are rich in their poverty. As Upland shows, the tension between upland communities and those who wish to control them is as old as the hills. To appreciate that richness and to understand that tension, this book provides the history of Britain from a fresh perspective: the view from the mountains. There has never been more urgent need for it.