The lump of Cumbrian rock that changed the way we see the world
Just as the last Ice Age was melting, the massive Bowder Stone plunged 600 feet into Borrowdale - ready to turn people on to the sublime beauty of nature.
Let’s imagine it happened in the middle of a lightning storm. One day between 13,500 and 10,000 years ago, something made a gigantic 2,000-tonne chunk of volcanic rock shear away from the summit of the King’s How mountain in Cumbria.
The vast stone crashed 600 feet to earth coming to rest at a crazy angle on the floor of Borrowdale valley. Now known as the Bowder Stone, this huge andesite lava boulder stands 30 feet high and 50 feet wide.
It astonishes and puzzles visitors who clamber up the helpfully positioned ladder to admire the outstanding views from the top. But this massive block is remarkable not only for being the biggest free-standing stone in the country.
It is also an object that catalysed an intellectual revolution. Bowder helped to change public’s view from believing the countryside was “primitive and uncultured” to today’s profound English love of the natural world.
But, hang on, how could a mere lump of rock - however impressive its size - have helped lure 45 million visitors to Cumbria and the Lake District every year? To discover the answer you need to delve into 200 years of turbulent politics, war and a fierce battle of ideas.
You could say that Napoleon started it.
On September 14, 1812, the French dictator and his Grande Armee of 450,000 soldiers stormed into Moscow. His ill-fated aggression threw Europe into chaos and closed the ports. This brought an end to the traditional Grand Tour undertaken by wealthy upper class young Brits through France and Italy in search of art, culture and the roots of Western civilisation.
With access to the Continent cut off, the privileged classes began looking for opportunities to travel closer to home. Until then, polite society’s idea of what was beautiful was something elegant, cultivated and urbane. 18th Century poets wrote as one civilized man talking to other civilized men - indoors.
They explored social concerns that had little contact with barbarous world of nature. They saw their job as teaching the authoritative, established rational moral rules they claimed to have derived from Greek and Roman models. The untamed countryside was seen as a place to be avoided.
In 1698 Daniel Defoe reflected this worldview by describing the Lake District as “the wildest, most barren and frightful of any that I have passed over in England”.
But then Edmund Burke entered the story. He was the Whig politician who founded modern conservatism by publishing “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” a savage 1790 assault on the rationalism of the French Revolutionaries which he claimed had produced the guillotine, the Terror and Napoleon.
He argued that the horrors of the Revolution had come about because the French radicals thought they could get at the truth through intuition and theoretical reasoning alone. Burke insisted it was the passions and senses, not reason, which told you what was right.
Burke triggered an upheaval in the way we see the world. He published a new theory of aesthetics which proposed the “sublime” and the “beautiful”, two modes of experience that were available in abundance in the Lake District.
The Beautiful, according to Burke, is what is well-formed and aesthetically pleasing, whereas the Sublime is what has the power to compel and destroy us, but we experience pleasure if we view it in safety. Polite travellers began touring the Lakes looking for the “picturesque” which they viewed backwards through a smoked lens called a Claude Glass.
Journeying to Europe to worship at the source of Continental culture went out of fashion. For the first time Brits, particularly middle class Brits, began looking for beauty and sublimity in the natural environment of their home island. It was to lead them to the Lake District and, at its heart, Bowder.
From then on, throughout the 18th and 19th Centuries, the Bowder Stone provoked repeated comment from artists, poets and writers. It served as a crucially important fixed point helping visitors to orient themselves in the midst of a strange and uncertain landscape. Its rough, delicately balanced enormity seemed poised between Burke’s two aesthetic categories of beauty and sublimity.
Much to William Wordsworth’s chagrin a passage from his 1814 poem “The Excursion” was assumed by tourists to be a description of the Bowder Stone:
“Upon a semicircle of turf-clad ground,/ the hidden rock discovered to our view,/ A Mass of rock, resembling as it lay,/…a stranded Ship….”
The verse triggered the start of mass tourism to this and all the other Lake District mountains and valleys referred to by the great bard of Grasmere. It helped to cement the fame of the Bowder Stone by association with his name.
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This is a short extract from a fascinating chapter in Secrets of the Crooked River a book about Cumbria, the North Lakes and the town of Cockermouth.
It is on sale at The New Bookshop, Main Street, Cockermouth.
You can also pick up a copy at Bookends in Keswick and Carlisle, along with Sam Read in Grasmere.
Also on sale now is our latest book, Secrets if the Lost Kingdom, a book that reveals Cumbria existed for 500 years, effectively, as an independent country.