Daniel Defoe, touring the Lake District, reported that the hills “had a kind of inhospitable terror in them.”
He saw nothing useful in them. No mines or coal pits — “all barren and wild, of no use or advantage either to man or beast.”
The description reminds me of the U.S. Army’s report on the part of West Texas where I was born. The Army, which explored my native land in the 1850s, did concede that it might make a good place to imprison people.
What strikes us today is how so many tourists see beauty in those hills that Defoe despised. People seem to love the Lake District, just as I love the Piedmont.
It’s striking — how different the approaches to measuring value, measuring wealth.
• Source: Defoe’s lines are from Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, published in three volumes, 1724-7, but I have them in Geoffrey Young’s Country Eye: A Walker’s Guide to Britain’s Traditional Countryside; London: George Philip Limited, 1991, p. 10.
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