Scribner
Review by Walter Cummins
I’m fortunate to have taken several of Fowler’s ten rural walks in Britain along with a number of similar routes. But my ignorance limited me to enjoying the immediate beauties of the landscape, the abundance of what William Blake called a green and pleasant land. What I missed and Blake captured was the background reality of “dark Satanic mills.” The hidden history that Fowler exposes is the dark past that made the beauties possible.
One of my happiest walker’s memories has been standing on the grass of a southern slope of Mount Snowden and watching hundreds of new-born lambs springing into the air, one after another, one here, one there, with no predictable pattern as they filled the hillside, leaping bundles of white fluff.
William Wordsworth must have experienced a similar scene that he describes more profoundly in Book 11 of The Prelude:
And happy creatures; see that pair, the lamb
And the lamb’s mother, and their tender ways
Shall touch thee to the heart; in some green bower
Rest, and be not alone, but have thou there
The one who is thy choice of all the world –
There linger, lulled, and lost, and rapt away –
Be happy to thy fill; thou call’st this love,
And so it is, but there is higher love
Than this, a love that comes into the heart
With awe and a diffusive sentiment.
Thy love is human merely: this proceeds
More from the brooding soul, and is divine.
Fowler, in her chapter “The Wool Walk: Dolgellau and the Americas,” describes an area where “Nestled in the Mawddach valley, Dolgellau’s cottages fan out from the tiny centre and climb into the foothills of Snowdonia.” Sheep still roam the nearby hillsides, and in the eighteenth century Thomas Gainsborough painted the town. Fowler—Professor of Colonialism at the University of Leicester—was accompanied on his walk by Charlotte Williams, a mixed-raced now-academic child of a Welsh mother and Guyanian father who grew up in Northern Wales and always felt like an outsider tainted by the racism of constant comments on her skin color.
That’s Fowler’s strategy for each of her ten walks, to choose as a partner who represents an ethnic group that had suffered some form of discrimination by the local society of the area being visited. That partner tends to be a writer, artist, academic, a person of achievement despite past treatment. By bringing such a companion with her as a significant individual, Fowler emphasizes the victims of past abuse and those who suffered so that certain affluent British could dominate the landscape and build their magnificent homes and estates. While the victims always included many thousands of people from other parts of the world, such as slaves in Africa and America and subjugated Indians, a good number of those trapped in poverty were British workers misused by the wealthy.
Dolgellau produced great amounts of woolen cloth to fulfill the demands of a major market needing the fabric to clothe African slaves and enslaved people in the Caribbean and North America. Despite the great profits, Welsh workers saw little benefit:
If Dolgellau is a quintessentially Welsh town, its distant Atlantic connections were crucial in making it what it became. Transatlantic slavery permeated the lives of rural working people: sheep-shearers, wool-carders, spinners and weavers. Not that these people were made rich by slavery: on the contrary, their lives were often harsh. The money was being made by people far higher up the economic ladder: landowners with sheep-grazing pasture, wool-merchants, slave-traders and their backers.
Each of Fowler’s rural walks documents a version of the same historical fact—that the abuse of humans in some part of the world, Africa, Asia, America, provided the wealth that made some British very rich and made possible the estates, villages, lakes, rivers, and paths that make walking through Britain such a joy for so many—views that lead people to “There linger, lulled, and lost, and rapt away.”
Fowler’s research and documentation led to a backlash by the owners of estates and others who resisted criticism of Britain’s historical legacy against her and the National Trust that works to preserve properties found on the routes of these walks. Fowler notes, “Almost as soon as the report was released, I, my co-authors and the Trust itself were plunged into a culture war, with influential media figures and even politicians portraying us as public enemies and haters of British history: we were ‘at war with the past’, shouted one among many similar headlines.” She received “an avalanche of hate mail.”
The outrage is no surprise. Countries, businesses, schools, communities, families, and individuals fall into defensive mode when evidence of shame is revealed, resisting with campaigns of denial. For example, according to Countryside, even William Wordsworth and his family are tainted, the poet who wrote of a “higher love” that he realized on Mount Snowden.
As famous as William is, I doubt few knew of his sea captain brother, John, until Fowler told the story. He became the captain of a ship bound for China, where, as he wrote to an uncle, “I shall also have a chance of making by opium.” Although opium trading was illegal, he hoped for great profits to support William’s life as a poet. To his family’s distress, a ship under John’s command sank, and he did not survive.
Although William’s brother might be considered one on the fringe of those who exploited dominated people, John did not have moral qualms about the opium trade. “William, it has to be said, rather glossed over his brother’s trading activities, presenting him as a ‘pilgrim of the sea’, as though he were on a spiritual mission rather than an opium-trading expedition.”
Much wealthier families made and maintained their fortunes through the abuse of others beyond addiction to opium. Slavery was central, the buying, selling, and supporting of a system that made many rich and able to acquire large swathes of land for their estates and the control of property that resulted in the miles of green and pleasant landscapes.
