Chapter 4 Romantic waterscapes: the development of cultural landscapes

Before the reservoirs: the countryside and the Romantics

The relationship between rural areas and Romanticism has been the subject of in-depth studies for some time, most notably by Jonathan Bate, James Winter and, more recently, Fiona Sampson.³ Much of this work has focused on the Lake District, one of the first areas of the United Kingdom to be associated with Romanticism due to the writings of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and others. It was through their writings, as well as the drawings of William Gilpin and artists such as J. M. W. Turner that depictions of the rural landscape as idyllic and picturesque were constructed. While the reservoirs would not be built for a number of years, these figures helped to project an image of areas like the Lake District or the Washburn Valley that would have an impact in later years. While situated in the Lake District, Thirlmere was an interesting counterpoint to many of the other Cumbrian lakes, such as Windermere, which were more aesthetically Romantic. Lying in a narrow valley with high crags on either side, overshadowed by the imposing peak of Helvellyn, Thirlmere was, as Harriet Ritvo has noted, an ‘aesthetic litmus test’. Many were perturbed by Thirlmere from an aesthetic perspective, but those who were not demonstrated an inclination for the sublime. As time went by, many were enchanted rather than intimidated by Thirlmere’s beauty, aided by the writings of Coleridge in particular.⁴

Perceptions of the Washburn Valley were brought to wider audiences by the art of J. M. W. Turner, who became friends with Walter Fawkes and stayed at Farnley Hall in the lower valley annually between 1811 and 1824.⁵ It was from the steps of Farnley Hall that he painted Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps (1812), inspired by a lightning storm over Otley Chevin. Although they are less well known, Turner also painted a number of scenes from the Washburn Valley, many of which are still held in the private collections of Farnley Hall. One such example, currently held by Leeds Museums and Galleries, is Turner’s 1818 Valley of the Washburn (Figure 4.1), which focuses on a section of the Farnley Hall estate. The painting is indicative of the picturesque and Romantic styles in conveying an irregular, hilly scene, but one that idealises the rural environment. It depicts the lower valley from a high vantage point, the foreground showing the River Washburn as a gentle stream flowing down the valley towards the wide vista of Wharfedale in the background. It constructs the valley as an area of quiet serenity, the sparseness of the riverbanks juxtaposed with the green fields and wooded areas in the distance. It provides an image of the rural idyll comparable to other examples during the early nineteenth century, such as the artistic work of John Constable or the aforementioned works of Wordsworth.

The Elan and Claerwen valleys became associated with Romanticism due to the brief presence of Percy Shelley. Unlike Turner, who sought to construct a Romantic image of the Washburn, Shelley had yet to fully develop his literary skills before spending time with his uncle at Cwm Elan, the largest house in the Elan Valley. Shelley went to Cwm Elan following his expulsion from the University of Oxford in 1811 for espousing atheism. With his new wife, Harriet Grove, Shelley attempted to purchase Nantgwyllt, the largest house in the Claerwen Valley, staying there for a short time before having to leave due to lack of funds. While the rivers Elan and Claerwen are never mentioned by Shelley, his attitudes to the area more generally are conveyed in snapshots in letters sent to family and friends. In letters written from Cwm Elan, Shelley wrote that: ‘This country is highly romantic; here are rocks of uncommon height and picturesque waterfalls. I am more astonished at the grandeur of the scenery than I expected.’⁶

While this type of description corresponds to Romantic understandings of wild and natural countryside in the early nineteenth century, it is a little misleading. As Sampson has noted, the landscape that Shelley found so enchanting had been framed to look as such; Shelley’s uncle had converted much of his ten thousand acres of land in accordance with the ideas of the picturesque two decades earlier.⁷ Despite the lack of urban engineering, which would come nearly one hundred years later, the Romantic constructions of areas like the Elan Valley, and the Washburn Valley in Yorkshire as depicted by Turner, were just that – constructions framed according to particular aesthetic ideals.

Focusing on aesthetic ideals can demonstrate how these landscapes, rural areas that were essentially urban liminal spaces, were thought of as a consequence of the reservoirs. It would be reasonable to assume that reservoirs and dams would have ruined the Romantic associations these areas had. In many cases, however, reservoirs, particularly those built in the nineteenth century, sunk into the ground to appear as natural lakes, were often deemed to make these areas more beautiful and help them further conform to Romantic ideals. Focusing on these areas shows the benefits of focusing on less well-regarded landscapes or, as Katrina Navickas has termed them, areas of non-outstanding natural beauty.⁸ Matthew Kelly has noted that Romantic poets in Dartmoor wrote about the passage of water across the landscape in almost mythical terms, yet areas of Devon had been drawing water from the area for centuries, while Plymouth Corporation would complete a major waterworks project in Burrator reservoir in 1898. Dartmoor was, as Kelly has termed it, an anthropic landscape, made not just by the direct actions of human and non-human actors but also by how human actors perceived and depicted the landscape culturally.⁹ This term could be applied to all of the landscapes looked at here, and many that are not.

Waterworks and the rural idyll

Many of the rural areas looked at here, then, were already strongly associated with Romanticism. The construction of the reservoirs, though, transformed these areas, both physically and culturally. During the construction of Leeds’s Washburn Valley scheme, newspaper correspondents sporadically commented on the aesthetic of the valley during the period of construction itself. Articles in Leeds newspapers regarding the valley during the 1870s typically covered three aspects: engineering, economics and romantic description. Of the seventeen articles published by the Yorkshire Post, Leeds Mercury and Leeds Times during the decade, seven fell into the first two categories, while ten fell into the latter category. While the articles that covered the engineering or economic aspects of the reservoirs stressed the dimensions, construction issues and increasing financial expense, articles in the latter category stressed the picturesque nature of the valley, in some cases in spite of the effects of construction.¹⁰ Articles from 1869 remarked on the isolated nature of the valley as well as its natural beauty, ‘as point after point in it is turned, the eye rests on scenery which awakens the highest admiration’.¹¹ The lack of images in newspapers during this period gave greater importance to the written word, as authors had to convey the Romantic nature of the valley through language. Additionally, newspaper correspondents did not overtly encourage the residents of Leeds to visit the valley, perhaps conscious of the lack of access, with the closest railway stations in Otley and Pool-in-Wharfedale some miles away.¹²

The completion of waterworks schemes brought different dimensions to the cultural landscape. These dimensions were overwhelmingly viewed in positive terms, with the reservoirs adding to the natural aesthetic of these areas. In heightening the beauty of areas like the Washburn Valley or the Elan Valley, the reservoirs made them more attractive places in the eyes of many commentators, who engaged in promoting these spaces as improved by urban engineering. Towns and cities often marketed and sold themselves through the selective use of place that purposefully ignored problems or issues, such as crime.¹³ This is indicative of how place was marketed and sold in a literal sense through commercial products, which did not occur in places like the Washburn Valley or Vyrnwy. However, there was drive from local newspapers and locally produced guidebooks to promote these areas according to Romantic ideals. This engaged with what Peter Larkham and Keith Lilley have referred to as ‘subverse place promotion’: documents that were not created to commodify an area, but that did rely on the rhetoric used in place promotion and civic boosterism.¹⁴ The improvement of rural landscapes by urban engineering, in addition to further changes that contributed to an idealised rurality such as afforestation schemes, linked cultural landscapes with the city. The influence of the city was aided by how the rural landscape was conceived in the late nineteenth century as a place distanced from urban life, which enhanced myths of rurality within the popular imagination.¹⁵ This is what Maria Kaika has termed the urban–rural dialectic, the idea that the city and the countryside held antithetical definitions of each other. The city was seen as either dirty and industrial in contrast to the pristine and pure countryside, or as a place of technological modernity set against rural backwards tradition.¹⁶ Reservoirs, then, acted as cultural capital for cities like Leeds, Liverpool and others that helped to link the landscape to the civic project, a theme that was underscored by the city’s newspapers and guidebooks.¹⁷

In the case of Leeds’s Washburn Valley scheme, this process began as early as 1879, shortly after the completion of Fewston reservoir, in the Leeds Mercury: ‘These great reservoirs, so far from defacing the valley, have added fresh beauty to a place that was previously so pleasing in scenery that it was thought it could not be improved’.¹⁸ There is a recognition that the valley was a site of beauty prior to the construction of the reservoirs before remarking on how the reservoirs had further added to this beauty. The timing of articles like this is significant given that the scars of construction must have remained in certain places not long after the completion of Fewston reservoir. The Yorkshire Post, opposed to the building of the reservoirs during the 1860s and 1870s, took a more positive tone in 1882 in describing the waterworks as a ‘magnificent chain of reservoirs’.¹⁹ Instead of lauding the aesthetic appeal of the valley, the Yorkshire Post instead argued that the reservoirs would bring attention to a previously unknown part of Yorkshire, such as the home of the Thackerays to whom William Makepeace belonged.²⁰ Even if the reservoirs did not inspire Romantic thoughts, literary associations could fill that role.

The Leeds Times, which supported the Washburn scheme from its inception, was keen to emphasise the positive impact the reservoirs would bring to the landscape. In particular, it sought to draw comparisons between the reservoirs and the Lake District, employing the term ‘The Leeds Lake District’. Although Matthew Kelly has argued that, before the formation of the Lake District as a national park in 1950, there was no distinct cultural idea of the Lakes, contemporaries did draw parallels between the lakes of Cumbria and their reservoirs.²¹ One correspondent named ‘A Son of the Times’ did just that in 1897:

I see that a confrere is dragging our readers right away to the other side of England to see some lakes for a ‘Holiday Tour’; there is no necessity to go a quarter of the distance, the lakes of Leeds are within 20 miles, and will in beauty compare with those of a distance. They lie amid beautiful scenery, and for size will more than equal Rydal Water or Grasmere, high sounding names though they be.²²

The development of tourism in the area, alluded to here, will have aided writers local to Leeds in making connections between Cumbria and their own Lakeland. Between the completion of the reservoirs in 1879 and the closure of the Leeds Times in 1900, the term was used thirteen times. Although various schemes had sought to dam lakes by 1880, such as Glasgow’s Loch Katrine waterworks, as well as a short-lived proposal from Leeds to take water from the Lake District, the 1870s and 1880s was the period that several cities, including Liverpool with Lake Vyrnwy and Manchester with Thirlmere, utilised lakes in order to supply large amounts of water.²³ It was during this period that lakes, in particular the Lake District, were associated with a more utilitarian purpose as well as being areas of natural beauty. This term, then, not only evoked the Cumbrian Lake District, which was undergoing its own experiences of urban engineering, but sought to place the waterworks scheme in comparison with other industrial towns and cities, tacitly inducing civic rivalry.

In 1880, a correspondent named ‘The Rambler’ invoked this language as he sought to emphasise how engineering prowess and nature could combine to produce a visually pleasing end product:

The Leeds Corporation have demonstrated that it does not follow because waterworks are formed in a beautiful valley – like the Washburn for instance – that the charms of the scenery are to be destroyed. With an engineer like Mr. Filliter, who has an eye to picturesqueness combined with utility, the lake district of Leeds, in the valley of the Washburn is every year becoming more charming.²⁴

The celebration of engineering skill in these publications was not uncommon or just consigned to the United Kingdom, as Kaika and Matthew Gandy have highlighted in their studies of Athens and New York respectively.²⁵ Indeed, the borough surveyor Edward Filliter’s aesthetic appreciation was later commented on by a correspondent of the Wharfedale and Airedale Observer, who remarked, ‘in the contour lines of the reservoirs […] and in the judicious planting of trees and shrubs on the borders of the lakes, evidences of the true instincts of the landscape gardener are visible in every direction’.²⁶ This, once again, emphasised a progressive environmental narrative that was noted in Chapter 2, as well as offering a riposte to those that were concerned about the effects of urban industrialisation on the countryside.²⁷ The reservoirs, because of their earthen embankment design, blended in with the natural appearance of the valley, a feature that the Leeds Times credited to Filliter. Thus, the reservoirs not only fulfilled their purpose in providing a pure supply of water to Leeds, but did so while heightening the natural beauty of the valley.

It was not enough, then, for engineers to design waterworks that functioned correctly: they also had to have an eye for the aesthetic. The skill of the engineer in remaking the rural landscape was commented on in an article in the Morning Post regarding Lake Vyrnwy. The writer noted the loss of a picturesque village under the waters of Vyrnwy; however, ‘it is much to the credit of those who designed the work that […] it has been successfully carried out with a view to beauty as well as utility’.²⁸ In Leeds, John Lee, a regular contributor to the Leeds Times who wrote under the pseudonym ‘The Owl’, often commented on the Washburn Valley as a site of beauty that had been improved by the addition of the reservoirs, praising Filliter’s design prowess in combining strength and beauty.²⁹ Lee was particularly keen on drawing the comparison to the Lake District. In an obituary to the former waterworks committee chairman, Alderman Samuel Croft, who presided over the construction of the reservoirs, ‘The Owl’ noted:

Guided by the skill and taste of Mr Filliter, waterworks engineer to the Leeds Corporation, the deceased alderman and the committee over which he presided for many years had the good sense to combine the useful with the beautiful, and the ‘Lake District’ of the Leeds Corporation will compare for utility and picturesqueness with any town in the kingdom.³⁰

While the Leeds Times often focused on the picturesque and Romantic elements of the reservoirs, it continued to be married to a sense of utility and nature. The reservoirs heightened the beauty of the valley, but their purpose in providing water for Leeds was also important to recognise. Unlike the Lake District of Cumbria, these lakes were man-made, and therefore humanity had tamed the wilderness and improved it, while also providing an important utility. One newspaper that might have been expected to carry negative opinions towards the reservoirs was the Wharfedale and Airedale Observer; however, even it praised the impact of the engineering works on the valley’s aesthetic. One article argued that the decline of industry, impact of construction and rural depopulation were positives, as the waters would be less threatened from pollution, and the picturesque beauty of the valley would be preserved intact as a consequence.³¹

Reservoirs also became associated with another type of utility: fishing. The importance of fishing to these waterscapes is discussed in more detail in the following chapter; however, it is worth noting that it was often fishing correspondents who wrote effusively about these rural areas. An article in the Montgomeryshire Express extolled the virtues of these newly made fishing spots in Wales: ‘Lake Vyrnwy is beautiful and majestic in its wild loneliness; the lakes of the Elan Valley are greatly to be admired for their charming situation and lovely views’.³² Despite being tamed by humankind, to this writer Vyrnwy continued to encapsulate a sense of wildness that enticed visitors, while the Elan Valley reservoirs were praised for views which were, ultimately, unnatural. This was pointedly referred to by a correspondent of the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News in 1894, when they noted that ‘next to Loch Katrine, Lake Vyrnwy is admitted to be the most beautiful lake in the United Kingdom, and this in spite of it being artificial’.³³

A trend across the case studies looked at here is the continued emphasis placed on the role of local government in making these spaces. A correspondent to the Yorkshire Post in 1910 sought to do just that when writing about the Washburn Valley. After noting that the area had not been recorded in the Domesday Book because of its remoteness, he argued:

It is this remoteness and miniature charm which have environed it at last with fame, art and science having combined to secure it for human use in a distant city […] But [for] the colossal earthworks buttressing the dams, these lakes are perfectly natural, washing on shingly margins in miniature coves and headlands, under hill and wood and island.³⁴

This framed the reservoirs not only as improving the area as feats of urban engineering, but simultaneously natural in composition due to their integration into the landscape. It is clear from this correspondence that not only did the reservoirs heighten the beauty of the valley, but it was because they were man-made that this was possible. Given the commonality of language used by newspaper writers across the country, this could easily be describing Vyrnwy or the Elan Valley. The engineers and navvies had rescued these areas from remoteness and had constructed a second nature, a conscious, ‘pride-inducing’ remaking of the natural landscape that improved on its former appearance, which had simultaneously made the wilderness serviceable and positioned the city apart from nature as an area engineered to be distinct from the urban.³⁵ It further emphasises the centrality of urban engineering to the remaking of the cultural landscape, and the sense of civic pride that it evoked. This construction of nature was somewhat pointedly remarked on by a correspondent of the Yorkshire Evening Post who, on a walk in the valley, came across three men, described as being of ‘the artisan class’, arguing over why the banks of the reservoirs were white. On telling the men that this was because of the amount of flowers at the sides of the reservoirs, one replied, ‘Ah, say maister, theer’s no wonder ert t’ rates going up when t’ Corporation plants t’ reservoir sides wi’ flowers ter mak t’watter look nice’.³⁶

Guidebooks also offer an insight into how rural areas like the Washburn Valley were conceptualised externally. Guidebooks became increasingly popular during the nineteenth century as middle-class urbanites began to explore the countryside, as well as other countries, with guides by John Murray and Karl Baedeker particularly popular. Guidebooks that covered small areas of the country, like those examined here, conditioned readers to think within smaller geographical frameworks, thereby helping to establish areas like the Washburn Valley or Wharfedale as distinct.³⁷ One such guidebook was Tom Bradley’s The Washburn, published in 1895. Bradley wrote a series of articles for the Yorkshire Post’s ‘Weekly Post’ supplement on the rivers of Yorkshire, such as the Nidd, the Wharfe and the Derwent, among others, which were later published as pocket-sized books. Once again, the river was the main focus of the guide, which opens:

The River Washburn is one of the very few of the Yorkshire rivers which enjoy distinction of retaining their natural beauty and peaceful rest unsullied and undisturbed by the noisy rush of the railway engine, the scream of its frantic whistle, and the settling pall of grime that follows in its wake.³⁸

Although the valley was missed by the expanding railway network, Bradley’s account neglects the industrial history of the area. This had declined by 1895, but there was a pre-existing relationship with the Washburn Valley and the flax-spinning industry, which is ignored by Bradley in his depiction of the valley as a place of timeless peace. He also ignored the ways in which the valley had been previously engineered, such as the creation of small reservoirs at Blubberhouses for West House Mill.³⁹ He did acknowledge the presence of engineering in the valley, particularly the reservoirs; however, he argued ‘it [engineering] has tended rather to heighten its beauties than depress them, and the reservoirs with their broad spreading surfaces and luxuriant margins have all the appearance of natural lakes’.⁴⁰ Once more, the natural aesthetic of the valley was improved by technology.

Although technology had improved the appearance of the valley, Bradley lamented the lack of tourist activity in the area. In describing the beauties of Lindley Wood, he remarked that the reservoir would make a ‘magnificent yachting and boating resort’ for ‘the toilers in our busy hives’.⁴¹ This activity would not have been permitted on Lindley Wood as the sporting rights to the reservoir had been secured by the Fawkes family. Indeed, boating was not an activity undertaken on the reservoirs until the late twentieth century, when Thruscross was used by the Leeds Sailing Club from shortly after its completion in 1966 until 1995.⁴²

Bradley’s guide was followed by another prominent writer on Yorkshire, Harry Speight. Speight also came from a journalistic background, writing articles for the Bradford Observer, among other newspapers. Whereas Bradley used the rivers of Yorkshire as his primary focus, Speight wrote about more specific areas of North and West Yorkshire, such as lower Wharfedale, Nidderdale and Craven. Like many guidebooks, Speight’s account of the Washburn Valley, published in 1900, started in Leathley, in the south of the valley, which he described as having ‘too tempting a bonne bouche to be omitted from the rambler’s holiday menu’.⁴³ From here, one could follow the Washburn to reach ‘the Leeds “Lake District”’ where ‘the long bright expanses that supply that famous city with pure water may be viewed, gleaming in the distance, lake-like for many miles’.⁴⁴ The reservoirs were presented by Speight and others as grand landmarks, both in terms of size and aesthetic. This was further emphasised by Edmund Bogg in his guide Two Thousand Miles in Wharfedale, in which he lauded the engineering skill of the reservoir’s engineers while simultaneously reinforcing the link between the valley and ‘the Cumberland lakes’.⁴⁵ Speight further remarked: ‘[h]ow the mind of the poet and antiquity fondly turns to scenes such as these, recalling the many changes of the place and of faces and forms that have vanished, and of the fleeting works of man, while Nature alone is ever young and fair’.⁴⁶ There is a misrepresentation of the past in this quote; as has been established, the natural landscape was vastly altered as a result of the reservoirs. Speight also emphasised less positive aspects of the valley’s representation, on this occasion damage from floods that had destroyed bridges at Lindley Wood and Dob Park.⁴⁷ However, like Bradley, Speight sought to elicit a sense of timeless peace in his description of the valley, a sense that was more fiction than fact.

Despite the similarities between how the reservoirs of Leeds, Liverpool and Birmingham were culturally depicted, it is interesting that those writing on Vyrnwy and Elan never directly compared those lakes to the Lake District as with Leeds. That did not mean that the civic links between Vyrnwy and Liverpool or Elan and Birmingham were any less strong. The Liverpool Echo pointedly referred to this civic link in 1930 in an article about Central Wales, arguing that ‘Liverpool people can claim to have created in Vyrnwy the most beautiful lake in Wales’.⁴⁸ Just as with afforestation, the civic link between Liverpool and Vyrnwy is cemented here; not only is the emphasis placed on the people of Liverpool rather than the corporation or the engineers, but the use of ‘created’ also speaks to the socionatural hybridity of Vyrnwy. In effect, this was a space that the people of Liverpool, through their city council, had made, and in so doing had made that area more beautiful, a tribute to the city and its denizens.

It was not just proponents of the cities themselves that celebrated these waterworks. H. V. Morton took in the Elan Valley while searching for Wales in the 1930s. After providing contextual information on the reservoirs, he detailed his journey around the valley. In keeping with the Romantic context, Morton was especially interested in learning more about Nantgwyllt, providing some colourful detail on Shelley and his time in Wales. He then went on a tour of the dams themselves, describing the thunderous sound of the water disappearing down dark iron tubes, once again invoking ideas of rural modernism that became prevalent during this period. Unlike J. B. Priestley, who paid little attention to the Washburn Valley reservoirs on his English Journey, Morton was taken by the Elan Valley reservoirs, writing that ‘The Elan Valley is, to my mind, more beautiful than any lake scenery in the Principality’.⁴⁹ Additionally, Morton was clear on who was responsible for creating this idyllic scenery; on returning to the surface following his tour of the dam, he ‘looked out at the placid lake where a man in a boat was trying to catch trout in the bath water of Birmingham’.⁵⁰

The defence of the rural idyll

Not all depictions of these rural areas were positively influenced by the reservoirs. Although few in number, they are nonetheless informative when looking at notions of place and how attitudes towards the cultural landscape were shaped by broader literary ideals. A letter to the Manchester Guardian was quick to bemoan the changes occurring at Thirlmere in 1880: ‘the beauty of the little lake – let what may be said, one of the wildest and most romantic of them all – is gone’. As the paper was quick to point out, though, construction work had hardly begun on the reservoir, suggesting that even impending engineering works affected the cultural landscape for some.⁵¹ In the case of the Washburn Valley, this narrative, somewhat unsurprisingly, mainly originated within the valley through the work of Reverend Thomas Parkinson. Parkinson, a resident of Crag Hall near Fewston village, but vicar to the parish of North Otterington, North Yorkshire, wrote a number of books on the area, including an account of folklore in Yorkshire and a collection of writings relating to the Forest of Knaresborough.⁵² His collection An Idyll and Ballads of Washburn-dale offers an insight into his perceptions of the changing valley. The poem ‘A Dirge for the Vale’ provides a eulogy to the valley before the coming of the reservoirs:

Brother, dost thou remember,

The valley bright and fair,

Where ran the sparkling river,

And breath of peace was there […]

But, ah! the village changeth!

The villagers are fled;

No sound of mirth ariseth –

All rural life is dead.⁵³

Whereas the extracts examined so far have sought to emphasise how the reservoirs heightened the beauty of the valley, Parkinson highlighted the idyllic past, showing what had been lost to urban engineering. The final verse presented a sterile vision of rural life that was somewhat hyperbolic, as rural life continued long after the construction of the reservoirs. However, it does highlight a sense of loss. Predicting that the reservoirs – ‘this new thing in our vale’ – would bring the people of Leeds to the valley, he concluded:

In us who knew the ‘older’;

This new thing cannot wake;

The old associations;

Now buried ’neath this lake.⁵⁴

For Parkinson, the reservoirs symbolised the end of a way of life for many, signs of a better time lost beneath the waters. In some ways this undoubtedly happened, with the reservoirs negatively impacting on population decline generally and Fewston village specifically following the subsidence. This is evidence from a more declensionist perspective of the anthropic landscape that Kelly refers to.⁵⁵ The demolition of Fewston Mill, the ruins of which now lie under the waters of Swinsty Reservoir, encapsulated a loss of employment and population. For Parkinson, the reservoirs were visible signs of urban expansion into the countryside and rural depopulation that signalled the end of a way of life for many in the valley.

Parkinson was not the only resident of the valley to express dismay at the decline of rural life. A letter to the Yorkshire Post in 1903 from ‘A Native’ further underlined the transformative effects of the reservoirs and how they had impacted on meanings of place:

It is probably unknown to nine-tenths of the inhabitants of Leeds how greatly the appropriation of the once remote, peaceful, and prosperous valley of the Washburn to the purposes of the Leeds water supply, has had the effect of desolating and materially and socially altering this retired spot, not only by substituting large lake-like reservoirs for its purling river and attractive river scenery, but also by sweeping away historical and other landmarks, disinheriting its old yeoman families, and removing or alienating their ancestral homes.⁵⁶

The correspondent employed the same techniques as Parkinson in portraying the valley as a more idyllic place before the coming of the reservoirs. Although industry was, for a time, relatively successful in the valley, its decline was precipitated by factors other than the reservoirs. The correspondent further sought to contrast the Washburn Valley of the past, the ‘purling river’ and historic landmarks, with what remained, echoing Parkinson’s narrative that the past was lost under the waters of the reservoirs. ‘A Native’ claimed that he was not complaining about these losses, but was informing those who were less informed in Leeds. However, both Parkinson and ‘A Native’ imbued the Washburn Valley with a meaning that was not reciprocated by wider narratives, that the construction of the reservoirs had not added to the valley but had removed its history and heritage.

It is also worth dwelling briefly on one of the main waterworks projects that was not the focus of writers, particularly guidebook writers. Accounts of Thirlmere from guides to the Lake District sought to portray the reservoir in scientific terms, perhaps because the Lake District as an area was already heavily associated with Romanticism. A guidebook from 1895 did not comment on the aesthetic merits of Thirlmere but concentrated more on its engineering qualities.⁵⁷ Another from 1905 further detailed the ways in which Thirlmere had been engineered, although it did comment that a dam on the north ‘enhanced its beauty’.⁵⁸ However, as Ritvo has noted, Thirlmere was considered by guidebook writers as a secondary attraction that writers included by default due to its location next to the A591. Additionally, it was an area that, above all else, was difficult to enjoy owing to restrictions on access imposed around the reservoir and surrounding land by the Manchester Corporation, to a much greater extent than imposed by other municipal authorities.⁵⁹ In what was perhaps the first cultural landscape to be associated with Romanticism, it is understandable that those seeking aesthetic delights would be less inclined to visit Thirlmere over Windermere.

There were, then, some negative portrayals of reservoirs to go with the large number of positive representations. Francis Brett Young’s 1932 novel The House Under the Water offers an interesting counterbalance to the constructions presented thus far. Young specialised in the regional novel, focusing on the Black Country in a period of transition from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. However, like Birmingham Corporation, his interests extended beyond Warwickshire to encompass the borders of Radnorshire.⁶⁰ The novel follows the fortunes of Griffith Tregaron, a tenant farmer who married into minor Italian aristocracy following his time fighting for Garibaldi during Italian unification. Tregaron is summoned by his uncle to Nant Escob, a large house in Forest Fawr, Wales, where he bequeaths his home to his nephew before shortly dying. The story then charts the travails of Tregaron, who goes through periods of boom and bust with various enterprises, and his family, in particular his youngest daughter Phillipa (Phil) who becomes one of the point of view characters.

Published in 1932, the novel sits at a nexus point. Young’s construction of Forest Fawr is undoubtedly inspired by the picturesque and Romantic movements. Influenced by the time the novel was set in the late nineteenth century, Phil’s first impressions of Forest Fawr are not to be overawed by its intimidating nature but to fall in love with it, much like the early Romantic aesthetes approaching Thirlmere. Later in the novel, when Phil realises that the engineer Charles Lingen, the object of her romantic desires and whose monologue opened this chapter, has returned to Forest Fawr in order to dam the valley and flood the house, it breaks her heart. Furthermore, it is not so subtly implied that ill fortune will follow anyone who betrays Nant Escob. Shortly after selling the house to the North Bromwich Corporation – a thinly veiled pseudonym for the city of Birmingham – Tregaron suffers from various economic setbacks: the death of his second son fighting in South Africa, ill health, losing almost all the money he made selling the house, and eventually succumbing to a brain aneurism. Young implies that there is a cost to modernity, then, for both the central protagonists.

David Cannedine has noted the close relationship between Brett Young and the Conservative politician Stanley Baldwin during the interwar years, arguing that Young’s novels spoke to the same notions of wholesome rural traditions that Baldwin advocated during his time as prime minister in the 1920s.⁶¹ The novel, though, is not anti-modern by any means, and as such corresponds to broader historiographical arguments about rurality during the interwar period put forward by Peter Mandler and David Matless.⁶² Indeed, Kristin Bluemel has argued that the novel, written for a middle-class audience well versed in Brett Young’s linguistic style, urged readers to reject the idea that rural places were victims of modernity but could respond to social and economic changes with resilience.⁶³ Tregaron’s eldest son, Rob, treated as the black sheep of the family due to being born out of wedlock to another woman, is a case in point. When he leaves Nant Escob following a confrontation with Tregaron, he travels to North Bromwich to design first bikes and then motor cars, making a small fortune in the process. Rob, presented as a good and honest character alongside Phil, is shown to be rewarded for his hard work and good nature in comparison to other characters who are often punished for their vanity. Furthermore, rurality is not necessarily held up as a perfect way of life. Of the family, only Phil fully enjoys her time at Nant Escob, with other characters, such as Tregaron’s Italian wife, Lucrezia, depicted as lonely and isolated from the life they once knew. Tregaron also initially struggles to adapt to life in Forest Fawr, struggling to make a living from sheep farming and resorting to selling timber from the estate.

In some ways, The House Under the Water points backwards to Romantic traditions, to a way of seeing and engaging with the rural landscape that valorises untouched nature. However, in other ways the influences of the 1930s come to bear; as novels such as Brave New World pointed to the social dangers of trusting to science, Young’s novel is not so black and white. Through the character of Phil, it comes to terms with change – while Phil’s heart is broken by Lingen’s dream to flood the valley, when she returns years later she sets out to see her former home:

Yes, Nant Escob was gone, and Barradale had done his worst, yet the spirit of Forest Fawr, resurgent, inviolable, had perfected, out of man’s disfigurement, a new loveliness surpassing any that conscious man could achieve. Phil dismounted, trembling. The pony wandered away. As she sat on the escarpment, still gazing, tears started to her eyes so that she could not see: tears of thankfulness, tears of joy, and others, inexplicable tears.⁶⁴

‘Man’s disfigurement’ here can be juxtaposed with Lingen’s narrative of mastery that opened this chapter, highlighting the scale of the Promethean project. In some ways, this is the perfect description of the socionatural hybridity of these cultural landscapes, altered by humans but still shaped by nature, becoming an entanglement of the intentions and actions of both. It also symbolises that change in these rural areas, often characterised negatively, could be seen as a positive, thereby producing a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between social actors and modern society.⁶⁵

The perspective put forward by Young is interesting for a number of reasons. First, while literary, Nant Escob and the subsequent reservoirs are thinly veiled descriptions of Nantgwyllt, the one-time home of Percy Shelley, and the Elan Valley reservoirs. Indeed, one of the nearby homes in the novel is called Glen Elan. The meanings put forward in his novel, then, can be taken to be representative of the Elan Valley itself, seen through fictional eyes but processing real emotions. Second, the perspective is more nuanced than any other looked at in this chapter. Rather than being the product of longer-standing Romantic traditions, the novel is emblematic of a rural modernism that conceptualised the landscape in a more complex way. As Bluemel has highlighted, the ending provides a happy ending for both Phil and the reader, but not necessarily in preservationist terms. Brett Young’s engagement with nostalgia for a landscape lost results in a more complicated resolution for the heroine, showing that rural people and rural places could face modern changes with resilience.⁶⁶

Conclusion

Newspapers and guidebooks had definitively moved away from describing waterworks in rural areas in Romantic terms after the Second World War. There were instances where the civic link between the city and the countryside was stressed; however, in line with the wider social trends of the post-war period that emphasised the white heat of scientific revolution, there was little place or appetite for writers to remark on how these rural areas had been altered by urban engineering. This was especially the case with guidebooks, which became much more utilitarian in purpose, providing clear instructions on how to get from one location to another. The lack of description left it up to the walker to determine meaning, but this does mean that the continuity of meaning between the city and the country weakened.

A related factor was the decline of local government in the post-war years, with power increasingly centralised in Westminster. Water governance remained in local control longer than other utilities, but the industry was pseudo-centralised during the 1970s with the creation of the regional water boards, before being privatised in the 1980s. This removal of power from local government meant that there was little reason to stress the link between urban engineering and the rural countryside to the residents of cities like Leeds or Liverpool, especially when some of the waterworks projects had been built over one hundred years previously. While private water companies such as Yorkshire Water have engaged with the history and heritage of these sites, they ultimately remain privatised structures serving interconnected regions rather than individual cities.

In this context, then, the return of narrative walking books in the twenty-first century is worth noting. A number of books have been published that provide commentary on the process of walking in nature that pays attention not just to idealised landscapes but also to areas that would have previously been dismissed, such as peat bogs or former industrial sites, perhaps reflecting a greater public interest in the environment. As Matless has noted, this combination of nature writing and memoir, propagated by writers like Robert MacFarlane and Helen Macdonald, has become increasingly popular and has revived what was deemed to be a lost form of writing that highlights the impact of the non-human as well as the human.⁶⁷ Matless argues that these works are part of a broader cultural geography that links the landscape with Englishness, an observation that ties into how waterworks like Rutland Water were conceptualised from the 1970s onwards.⁶⁸ Reservoirs such as those in the Elan Valley or at Vyrnwy have yet to be re-evaluated by what might be called public walking histories or narratives. Despite Sampson’s recent dismissal of the Elan reservoirs, which she argues are a ‘huge simplification’ of the landscape, there remains a cultural fascination with these waterworks, as seen in novels such as Sarah Hall’s Haweswater among others.⁶⁹ The interpretation of these waterworks by contemporary writers would add a fascinating layer to an already rich history of their cultural landscapes.

This chapter has shown that newspapers and guidebooks were heavily invested in reinforcing this civic link. Writers clearly attributed meaning to reservoirs, structures implemented by urban authorities that remade the countryside. Writers depicted these areas as being improved and made more beautiful by urban engineering, a conclusion that people like Ruskin would have most likely bristled against given his opposition to Thirlmere. The presence of similar tropes to describe these areas across newspapers and guidebooks speaks to their cultural currency in lieu of statistics on readership, which are hard to ascertain for local publications. As with other means of altering these waterscapes, like afforestation, the centrality of the city was key. As such, the city was not seen in opposition to the countryside but as an active agent in making the countryside more idyllic. This conclusion, as with other aspects of reservoir management highlighted in other chapters, helps to move beyond the culture/nature binary, or indeed the city/country dialectic identified by Kaika – the construction of reservoirs helped to facilitate a reciprocal hinterland relationship between the city and the country, and the cultural landscape was an important part of that relationship. Charting the development of literary writing from Romanticism to rural modernism in the twentieth century helps to show how attitudes to the cultural landscape were more complex than can first appear. There are, once again, differences across the individual case studies, but the similarities help to draw a national picture of how reservoirs were largely conceived within the popular imagination. It also underscores the importance of rural modernism as a theme of this book, showing that there was more to understanding landscape than feelings of nostalgia. The development of writings about the cultural landscape encouraged urban citizens to see places like the ‘Leeds Lake District’ for themselves, facilitating a growth in leisure that is explored in the following chapter.

Notes

1. 1.  Francis Brett Young, The House Under the Water (Heinemann, 1932), 88–9.

2. 2.  See Simon Gunn, The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class: Ritual and Authority in the English Industrial City 1840–1914 (Manchester University Press, 2000), 163–82; Tom Hulme, After the Shock City: Urban Culture and the Making of Modern Citizenship (Boydell Press, 2019).

3. 3.  Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (Harvard University Press, 2000); James Winter, Secure from Rash Assault: Sustaining the Victorian Environment (University of California Press, 1999); Fiona Sampson, Starlight Wood: Walking Back to the Romantic Countryside (Corsair, 2022).

4. 4.  Harriet Ritvo, The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism (University of Chicago Press, 2009), 13–14.

5. 5.  David Hill, In Turner’s Footsteps: Through the Hills and Dales of Northern England (John Murray Ltd, 1984), 22; M. Sharples, ‘The Fawkes-Turner Connection and the Art Collection at Farnley Hall, Otley, 1792–1937: A Great Estate Enhanced and Supported’, Northern History 26, no. 1 (1990): 142, https://doi.org/10.1179/007817290790175935.

6. 6.  Percy Shelley, ‘Letter to Elizabeth Hitchner’ (1811), quoted in Sampson, Starlight Wood, 73.

7. 7.  Sampson, Starlight Wood, 73.

8. 8.  Katrina Navickas, ‘Building Amenity in Areas of Non-Outstanding Natural Beauty in the Southern Pennines’, in New Lives, New Landscapes Revisited: Rural Modernity in Britain, ed. Linda M. Ross et al. (British Academy, Oxford University Press, 2023), 96.

9. 9.  Matthew Kelly, Quartz and Feldspar: Dartmoor – A British Landscape in Modern Times (Vintage, 2016), 121.

10. 10.  This was particularly true of articles in the Leeds Times, which firmly supported the construction of reservoirs for both utilitarian and tourist purposes. See ‘Local news’, Leeds Times, 28 August 1869, 3.

11. 11.  ‘The Future Water Supply of Leeds’, Yorkshire Post, 24 August 1869, 3.

12. 12.  According to guidebook writer Tom Bradley, Otley was 2.5 miles away from Leathley in the south valley, whereas Pool-in-Wharfedale was 1.75 miles. Tom Bradley, The Washburn (Old Hall Press, 1988 [first published 1895]), 33.

13. 13.  Stephen Ward, Selling Places: The Marketing and Promotion of Towns and Cities 1850–2000 (E. & F. N. Spon, 1998), 1.

14. 14.  Peter J. Larkham and Keith D. Lilley, ‘Plans, Planners and City Images: Place Promotion and Civic Boosterism in British Reconstruction Planning’, Urban History 30, no. 2 (2003): 197, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926803001123.

15. 15.  Pyrs Gruffudd, ‘Selling the Countryside: Representations of Rural Britain’ in Place Promotion: The Use of Publicity and Marketing to Sell Towns and Regions, ed. John R. Gold and Stephen V. Ward (Wiley, 1994), 261; Jeffrey Hopkins, ‘Signs of the Post-Rural: Marketing Myths of a Symbolic Countryside’, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 80, no. 2 (1998): 65, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0435-3684.1998.00030.x.

16. 16.  Maria Kaika, City of Flows: Modernity, Nature, and the City (Routledge, 2005), 14.

17. 17.  Jon Stobart, ‘Identity, Competition and Place Promotion in the Five Towns’, Urban History 30, no. 2 (2003): 167, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926803001111.

18. 18.  Special correspondent, ‘Agriculture in Yorkshire’, Leeds Mercury, 19 November 1879, 8.

19. 19.  ‘Local and Other News’, Yorkshire Post, 24 February 1882, 3.

20. 20.  William Makepeace Thackeray was a prominent British novelist during the nineteenth century, most notably the author of Vanity Fair (1848); ‘Local and Other News’, Yorkshire Post.

21. 21.  Matthew Kelly, The Women Who Saved the English Countryside (Yale University Press, 2022), 95.

22. 22.  A Son of the Times, ‘Leeds Water Supply: The Inspection by the City Council’, Leeds Times, 24 July 1897, 5.

23. 23.  Ritvo, Dawn of Green, 109; Owen Roberts, ‘The Politics of Health and the Origins of Liverpool’s Lake Vyrnwy Water Scheme, 1871–92’, Welsh History Review 20, no. 2 (2000): 320.

24. 24.  The Rambler, ‘The Leeds Lake District’, Leeds Times, 25 September 1880, 2.

25. 25.  Kaika, City of Flows; Matthew Gandy, Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City (MIT Press, 2003).

26. 26.  ‘Spring in the Washburn Valley’, Wharfedale and Airedale Observer, 15 June 1888, 2.

27. 27.  Vicky Albritton and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Green Victorians: The Simple Life in John Ruskin’s Lake District (University of Chicago Press, 2016), 12–13.

28. 28.  ‘The Magazines for March’, Morning Post, 5 March 1890, 2.

29. 29.  The Owl, ‘Notes by the Owl’, Leeds Times, 3 December 1881, 5.

30. 30.  The Owl, ‘Notes by the Owl’, Leeds Times, 24 November 1883, 4–5.

31. 31.  ‘Spring in the Washburn Valley’, Wharfedale and Airedale Observer, 2.

32. 32.  ‘Mochdre Reservoir’, Montgomeryshire Express, 28 August 1906, 4.

33. 33.  ‘Trout-Fishing on Lake Vyrnwy’, Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 14 April 1894, 21.

34. 34.  Correspondent, ‘The Washburn Valley’, Yorkshire Post, 24 November 1910, 4.

35. 35.  Kaika, City of Flows, 107; Kaika, ‘Dams as Symbols of Modernization: The Urbanization of Nature Between Geographical Imagination and Materiality’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96, no. 2 (2006): 295, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.2006.00478.x.

36. 36.  ‘Making “T’Watter” Look Nice’, Yorkshire Evening Post, 12 September 1913, 4.

37. 37.  Gráinne Goodwin and Gordon Johnston, ‘Guidebook Publishing in the Nineteenth Century: John Murray’s Handbooks for Travellers’, Studies in Travel Writing 17, no. 1 (2013): 43–61, https://doi.org/10.1080/13645145.2012.747791; Marjorie Morgan, National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain (Palgrave, 2001).

38. 38.  Bradley, The Washburn, 3.

39. 39.  Diana Parsons, The Book of the Washburn Valley: Yorkshire’s Forgotten Dale (Halsgrove, 2014), 44–5.

40. 40.  Bradley, The Washburn, 3.

41. 41.  Bradley, The Washburn, 7.

42. 42.  Yorkshire Dales Sailing Club, ‘History of YDSC’, accessed 30 January 2018, http://yorkshiredales.sc/history-of-ydsc/.

43. 43.  Harry Speight, Upper Wharfedale (Elliot Stock, 1900), 107.

44. 44.  Speight, Upper Wharfedale.

45. 45.  Edmund Bogg, Two Thousand Miles in Wharfedale (James Miles, 1904), 344–5.

46. 46.  Speight, Upper Wharfedale, 126.

47. 47.  Speight, Upper Wharfedale, 107.

48. 48.  ‘The Wonderland of Central Wales’, Liverpool Echo, 7 July 1930, 6.

49. 49.  J. B. Priestley, English Journey (Heinemann, 1934), 178; H. V. Morton, In Search of Wales (Methuen, 1932), 190.

50. 50.  Morton, In Search of Wales, 192.

51. 51.  Manchester Guardian, quoted in ‘Untitled’, Crewe Chronicle, 18 September 1880, 5.

52. 52.  Parkinson was instituted to North Otterington, which lies to the south of Northallerton, by the Archbishop of York in 1871. It is somewhat ironic that Parkinson was so moved by the construction of the reservoirs when he would have been one of the few whose employment was not directly affected. Anon., ‘Local and General’, Leeds Mercury, 9 December 1871, 8; Parsons, Book of the Washburn Valley, 57.

53. 53.  Thomas Parkinson, An Idyll and Ballads of Washburn-dale (East Kent Works, n/d), 45, 52, edition held by Leeds Library.

54. 54.  Parkinson, Idyll and Ballads, 53–4.

55. 55.  Kelly, Quartz and Feldspar, 121.

56. 56.  A Native, ‘The Leeds Corporation and the Washburn Valley: A Wail’, Yorkshire Post, 3 November 1903, 4

57. 57.  The English Lake District, Including Furness Abbey, Shap Spa, Seascale, etc., etc. (George Philip and Son, 1895), 77–8.

58. 58.  The English Lake District; Being the fourth edition of ‘Morecambe and the Lake District Illustrated’ (William Mate and Sons, 1905).

59. 59.  Ritvo, Dawn of Green, 174.

60. 60.  L. J. Jay, ‘The Black Country of Francis Brett Young’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 66 (1975): 62, https://doi.org/10.2307/621621.

61. 61.  David Cannedine, In Churchill’s Shadow: Confronting the Past in Modern Britain (Penguin, 2003), 161

62. 62.  Peter Mandler, ‘Against “Englishness”: English Culture and the Limits to Rural Nostalgia, 1850–1940’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 7 (1997): 155–75, https://doi.org/10.2307/3679274; David Matless, Landscape and Englishness, 2nd ed. (Reaktion Books, 2016).

63. 63.  Kristin Bluemel, ‘Rural Modernity in Britain: Landscape, Literature, Nostalgia’ in New Lives, New Landscapes Revisited: Rural Modernity in Britain, ed. by Linda M. Ross et al. (British Academy, Oxford University Press, 2023), 58.

64. 64.  Young, House Under the Water, 680.

65. 65.  Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy, Green Modernism: Nature and the English Novel, 1900 to 1930 (Palgrave, 2015), 9.

66. 66.  Bluemel, ‘Rural Modernity in Britain’, 57.

67. 67.  Matless, Landscape and Englishness, 22.

68. 68.  Matless, Landscape and Englishness; Dennis Cosgrove et al., ‘Landscape and Identity at Ladybower Reservoir and Rutland Water’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 21, no. 3 (1996); 534–51. https://doi.org/10.2307/622595.

69. 69.  Sampson, Starlight Wood, 76; Eileen Pollard, ‘ “When the Reservoir Comes”: Drowned Villages, Community and Nostalgia in Contemporary British Fiction’, C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings 5, no. 3 (2017), 1–21, https://doi.org/10.16995/c21.9.