LAKELAND REMEMBERED

The National Trust has issued an appeal for funds to protect the Lake District from erosion, climate change, and other problems.

Cleverly, it illustrates its brochure with an account of Wastwater's problems, together with a section of walkers' map. I don't like to live in the past, but inveterate mapsters like me, given a bit of map, inevitably begin to trace past expeditions. Here is Nether Wasdale, where I spent the night those - good heavens - sixty years ago, and here is the route up the side of Wastwater, where I stopped and removed my boots and socks and dangled my feet in the lake.

Now, I was suffering at the time from a neurosis which had the effect that whenever I found myself in a pleasant situation my mind was crossed by a sense of unease, like a cloud passing over the sun. I had much to be glad of; I was young, I had survived the war, I had a place at Oxford; and yet the nagging sense of insecurity often intruded. Perhaps I unconsciously feared that the Djinn would arbitrarily reverse the magic and that I should suddenly find myself back in a bleak transit camp. Anyway, as I sat with my feet in the water a shoal of little fish gathered round them and began to nibble very gently. I had been enjoying this odd experience for some time before it occurred to me that I was in a strangely happy situation - and no shadow had passed over my mind to disturb it. And it never did again.

With a wonderful sense of escape I carried on up the dale to the Wasdale Head Hotel, where I proposed to have something to eat; but they were not serving food that day (it was the 1940s, remember). This was such a set-back that the stout lady behind the bar said that perhaps they could 'put me up a bit of a cold plate'. When it arrived it was the largest mixed platter I had ever seen. Some time later I set off again, over Black Sail Pass to the Youth Hostel, reputed at the time to be the most remote outpost of the YHA (perhaps it still is).

In the small hours a wild enthusiast roused us out of bed to stand in the shivering cold to see a great silver moon rising over Scafell - all except an Indian student who refused to get up, on the logical grounds that he had seen the moon before.

All this, half-forgotten, re-created by a meander along a line on a map. I must make a contribution to the appeal - perhaps there is some other chap out there who needs to dangle his feet in the water.