Journey 3
Celia Fiennes
Lake District
Had the wildest landscape in Britain embraced modernity?
The Lake District was unfamiliar to Fiennes, and it tested her self-improving mission to the extreme.
It was a significant detour, and a hard one. As Nick struggles up Kirkstone Pass, he admires Celia’s ambition in tackling such a dangerous, steep and slippery route.
She did so because she wanted to see how people here lived. To her, their squalid lives were down to laziness. A product of her time and class, she couldn’t see that poverty was the cause, and also something not easily escaped. To her, a lack of ‘modernity’ was holding the area back.
Fiennes had another motive for visiting the Lake District. Her quest for health led her to seek a local fish called the Arctic charr. Nick goes on a mission to track one down, which proves difficult as numbers are declining with climate change. He also samples the traditional potted charr paste Fiennes would have eaten.