The Origins and Development of Mountaineering and Rock Climbing Tourism in the Lake District, c. 1800–1914

The Lake District has played a central role in the development of the sport of rock climbing in the British Isles, the late nineteenth century witnessing increasingly athletic and gymnastic approaches to the crags and fells. Climbing as we know it today emerged as a sub-cultural development, gradually establishing the legitimacy of an increasingly sporting approach to mountains, thereby changing the accepted notions of what it meant to be a mountaineer. Despite the accumulated Romantic and literary reputations of the Lake District landscape, mountaineering there was slow to emerge, the cultural significance of the Lake District landscape to mountaineers remaining for most of the nineteenth century, if not entirely negligible, then certainly subordinate. Why this should be so forms the basis of the first part of this chapter, focussing on the cultural significance of mountains in a European context and the pre-eminence of Alpine mountain landscapes as tourist destinations amongst the bourgeoisie. The elite tourist focus on ‘being elsewhere’ ¹ , on social distancing, exclusive locations and internalised notions of Romantic individualism and self-cultivation, meant that Alpine mountain landscapes emerged as the locus of the British middle classes’ fascination with mountaineering in the middle of the nineteenth century. The second half of this chapter examines the emergence of the Lake District as a tourist destination for British mountaineers and rock climbers in the 1880s and 1890s as the regional middle classes sought to exploit the recreational hinterlands of the industrial cities of the north of England by adapting elite cultural approaches to mountain landscapes and applying them to regional upland landscapes. Part of a drive to express regional self-identity and exceptionalism, the cultural meaning of the Lake District landscape to mountaineers and climbers, always multi-layered, became enmeshed in new recreational paradigms, gradually differentiating itself from the Alpine mountaineering tradition that had gone before.