Book reviews Roly Smith
loved and photographed landscape,
with some unusual viewpoints and
interesting stories to accompany the
magnificent pictures.
Wainwright Revealed
Richard Else
Mountain Media, £19.99 (hb)
I
Photographing the Peak District
Chris Gilbert & Mick Ryan
fotoVUE, £27.95 (pb)
R
ay Manley’s book The Peak:
A Park for All Seasons, which
he did with myself and
broadcaster Brian Redhead
in 1989, has long been regarded as
the definitive book on landscape
colour photography in the Peak
District.
But this new book from the
excellent fotoVUE stable challenges
that claim, with a brilliant collection
of over 750 outstanding colour
images of around 150 locations in
and around the Peak District.
It is one of a series which now also
includes The Lake District by Stuart
Holmes; The Dolomites by James
Rushforth, and most recently,
Scotland by Dougie Cunningham.
The Peak District book is
a collaboration between local
photographer Chris Gilbert and
publisher and photographer Mick
Ryan. Mick, originator of the
Rockfax climbing guides, lived
in Bradwell for five years while
working on the book, and by a
strange coincidence, Chris now lives
in the same cottage at Cressbrook
as Ray Manley lived when he was
photographer for the Peak District
National Park.
Photographing the Peak District
is a superb evocation of this much-
4 Outdoor focus | spring 2018
t will come as no surprise to
anyone who has studied the
Wainwright phenomenon that
the author and producer of a
series of TV documentaries on the
great man comes to the conclusion
in this book that the famously
curmudgeonly fellwanderer was on
the autism/Asperger’s spectrum.
There are several clues to this
admittedly medically-unconfirmed
diagnosis. AW’s meticulous
obsessiveness in producing his
hand-written seven-volume
Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells in
his spare time over 13 years; the fact
that he apparently tore up the first
draft of his first book after deciding
his hand-written text should be
justified on both left and right sides;
his lack of empathy towards his
wife and family, and his barely-
concealed antipathy towards most
people as opposed to animals, all
seem to point to that conclusion.
“Ex-Fellwanderer is
an altogether darker
work but one which is
more revealing about
Wainwright”
they squealed for… mercy” and
that football hooligans should be
castrated.
Yet Wainwright
was never, in the
author’s view, wilfully
uncooperative, rude or
curmudgeonly
The author states: “That
Wainwright behaved in the way he
did was, I concluded, an involuntary
act,” and one which led him to
consider that he might have autistic
tendencies.
The book which confirmed the
author’s views was the controversial
Ex-Fellwanderer, published on
his 80th birthday in 1987. “Ex-
Fellwanderer is an altogether
darker work but one which is more
revealing about Wainwright,”
he writes. It had included such
thoughts as the only deterrent for
violence was physical pain, that the
culprits should be “birched until
AW was “not greatly concerned”
when his first wife left him, yet he
was extremely concerned about
cruelty to animals, suggesting that
“murderers and terrorists and
rapists and muggers” should be
substituted for the animals used in
medical experiments.
Yet Wainwright was never,
in the author’s view, wilfully
uncooperative, rude or
curmudgeonly, despite the fact
that his initial approach had been
rebuffed by a terse: “I would not
consider either an interview or
an appearance on TV, this sort of
publicity not being my cup of tea at
all.”
Although Wainwright was no
artist – the author refers to him as a
“fine draughtsman” –in his opinion
his Guide to the Lakeland Fells is
a shamefully unacknowledged
“literary masterpiece.” Sixty years
on from the publication of the first
volume, few would argue that they
are an essential part of Lakeland’s
literary and social history. The
author is to be congratulated for