The Arrival of Motorcars

This chapter examines the earliest period of motor tourism and how the Lake District responded to the gathering motor revolution. In 1897 one of the first adventurous motorists, Henry Sturmey, successfully crossed Kirkstone Pass, and within a decade the first motor tourists began to penetrate all corners of the district. As their numbers increased so did complaints about dust, noise, fumes, speed, and the expense of building and maintaining the roads. Proposals to make a new road over remote Styhead Pass, for example, provoked disputes just as the railway projects had done, and Wordsworth was summoned to defend mountain solitudes and the rights of walkers against invading motorists. The chapter reveals how motor tourism rapidly transformed people’s awareness of the environment in which they lived and travelled, and how Wordsworthian values of natural beauty and quiet, the sense of retirement, and the recreational value of walking were increasingly drawing tourists’ attention.