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Sacred Mysteries: The last active volcano of the Lake District

Through John Ruskin (that 19th-century aesthetic colossus), a Lake District vicar called Hardwicke Rawnsley (1851-1920), came to know Octavia Hill, the housing reformer.

In 1893, she and Rawnsley recruited Sir Robert Hunter (who saved Hampstead Heath and Burnham Beeches). The trio founded the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty.

The character usually known as Canon Rawnsley appears in a new light in a work of devotion – not to him, but to the old parish of Crosthwaite, spread over 90 square miles around Derwentwater. Its history is told in the 700 pages of Mountain Republic by the retired publisher Philippa Harrison, who lives in Rawnsley’s old vicarage. He died in a house where Wordsworth had lived, Allan Bank, which he left to the National Trust.

The author’s focus is on the Eighteen Men. These were customary tenants chosen annually at St Kentigern’s church to govern the parish. The parish was broken up in the 1850s and the last Eighteen Men were sworn in on Ascension Day 1874. Thus ended the “Mountain Republic”.

But to Rawnsley belongs the “afterglow”, the saving of the landscape from “those injurious encroachments upon its scenery which are from time to time attempted from purely commercial or speculative motives”. As Rawnsley, devoted to his parish, also put it, lightly: “I came and preached until I bust, / The sacred name of the National Trust.”

Philippa Harrison does not mention it (for she could not quite pack all the world in her parish microcosm), but Rawnsley had been one of the undergraduates who had rallied to Ruskin’s call to mend the boggy village road at Hinksey near Oxford. The work married craft theory to social responsibility. Oscar Wilde, a fellow volunteer, left a subversive account of the road, abandoned half way through the marsh.

It is notable that Ruskin, who had spells of insanity, Octavia Hill and Rawnsley himself, were volcanoes of energy who would suddenly collapse. It was a Victorian pattern of behaviour. To recover, they went to bed or, like Rawnsley, abroad.

Thus in 1887, when a mass trespass on Latrigg and Skiddaw outnumbered fourfold the Kinder Scout protest half a century later, Rawnsley was not leading the protesters. He was abroad recuperating. From what – stress, a breakdown? – Philippa Harrison wisely does not diagnose.

At Oxford, Benjamin Jowett (the demiurge of Balliol, where Rawnsley took a third-class degree) had warned him: “You must get rid of all excitable ways which will altogether unfit you for any place of responsibility.” But he didn’t rid himself of them. Yet for 33 years he ran his parish, founding a national body that now conserves a quarter of the Lake District.

No finger of his was without its pie. He founded the Keswick School of Industrial Arts, whose embroiderers made the pall for Tennyson’s coffin at Westminster Abbey. He tried to help Beatrix Potter by writing a version of Peter Rabbit in rhyme. He began a Herdwick Sheep Association. He reluctantly declined the bishopric of Madagascar.

When his wife died in 1916 he retired as vicar, and in 1918 married his secretary, dying in 1920, at 68.

Eight years earlier he had written himself an epitaph

Here rests at last a man whose best

Was done because he could not rest,

His wish to work, his wish to serve

Were things from which he could not swerve,

Till Death came by with gentle hand

And said – “Sleep now – and understand.”