C S Lewis: Peak was author’s “ideal country”

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As the new film version of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is released, Vivienne Smith looks at the Derbyshire links of its author, C S Lewis.

WHILE he lived and worked in Oxford, C S Lewis was no stranger to Derbyshire. Not only did one of his closest friends come from the county, but he also twice visited the Peak District on holiday in the 1930s.

Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast in November 1898. To friends and family he was always known as Jack.

Just nine years old when his mother died, he became very close to his only brother Warren who was three years his senior.

Lewis served in the trenches during the First World War and was wounded at the Battle of Arras in 1918.

At the end of hostilities, the young man went to Oxford where he achieved a first class honours degree.

It was here that he made the acquaintance of fellow students Alfred Cecil Harwood and Owen Barfield. They ended up lifelong friends.

Born in Eckington in North-East Derbyshire, Cecil was the son of local nonconformist minister the Reverend William Hardy Harwood.

Lewis found him to be “a wholly imperturbable man”.

This opinion was shared by Lewis’ brother, Warren, who described him as a “pleasant, spectacled young-looking man with a sense of humour of the whimsical kind, to whom I took at sight”.

Together with his wife Daphne, Cecil helped to found the first Rudolf Steiner School in London. He also taught and lectured on the progressive educational principles of the institution.

Lewis was a frequent visitor to the couple’s home in the capital and became godfather to their son, Laurence.

By contrast, Owen Barfield was a Londoner born and bred who ended up a solicitor. It was to his adopted daughter Lucy (another of the author’s godchildren) that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was dedicated.

As well as a love of poetry, all three men shared a passion for rambling. In fact, the annual walking tour with Harwood and Barfield became the highlight of Lewis’ life.

For a few days each year, he could put behind him his work as a lecturer and tutor in English at Magdalen College, Oxford.

As Lewis himself later wrote: “My happiest hours are spent with three or four old friends in old clothes tramping together and putting up in small pubs.”

However, there were certain little luxuries he disliked going without.

According to his brother, Warren: “The whole day had to be planned around the necessity of finding ourselves, at four o’clock, at some place where afternoon tea would be available.”

Cecil Harwood did most of the organising.

Indeed, so great was his enthusiasm for the task that Lewis dubbed him “Lord of the Walks”. He particularly admired the way that nothing seemed to faze the Derbyshire man.

In his autobiography Surprised by Joy, the author commented how Harwood would remain calm even when “the last light of a wet evening had just revealed some ghastly error in map-reading (probably his own) and the best hope was five miles to Mudbam (if we could find it) and we might get beds there”.

Unfortunately, when Lewis decided to visit the Peak in the Easter vacation of 1935, his friend from Eckington was unable to join them. Instead, just he and Owen Barfield made the trip.

He wrote to the latter a few days beforehand to tell him he had all the necessary maps.

The Oxford don also asked if he could find out how to pronounce Chapel-en-le-Frith and Edale. It would save the embarrassment of showing his ignorance.

The starting point for the four-day tour was Rudyard Lake, near Leek, on the edge of the Peak District.

It was here the two men met on April 8.

Their intention was first to make their way northwards to Chapel-en-le-Frith, taking in the Goyt Valley en route. They spent the night at one of the local hostelries in the self-styled “Capital of the Peak”.

Next day, Lewis and Barfield continued north towards Hayfield to make an ascent of Kinder Scout. They were following in the footsteps of an historic event, as the famous Mass Trespass had taken place here just three years earlier.

Their route took them up past Kinder Downfall, where the River Kinder plunges over the edge of the plateau. Next came the trek across the barren peaty moorlands.

After making their way down Grindsbrook into Edale, they continued on to Castleton before calling a halt for the day.

Although Lewis and his friend stayed overnight in the town, it is not recorded whether they went to see any of the famous caves during their visit.

However, next morning the two companions walked past Speedwell Cavern on their way to Winnats Pass.

Turning southwards, they then struck out across the moors to Wardlow from where they followed the River Wye downstream along the beautiful Monsal Dale.

The final night of the tour was spent at Bakewell.

In view of his propensity for taking afternoon tea, one wonders if Lewis was tempted to try the local delicacy, Bakewell pudding.

The two men spent their last day on a trek to Ashbourne, taking in the wonders of Dovedale en route. Then it was back to Oxford and the daily grind for the university lecturer.

It was not simply the companionship which Lewis enjoyed on such trips, but also the landscape. And he certainly found the scenery of the Peak uplifting.

As he remarked in a letter to a friend later that April: “It is limestone mountains: which means, from the practical point of view, that it has the jagged skylines and deep vallies (sic) of ordinary mountainous country, but with this important difference that, owing to the paleness of the rock and the extreme clarity of the rivers, it is light instead of sombre.”

In fact, the Derbyshire countryside made such an impression that he decided to make a return visit with his brother.

Throughout the 1930s the pair took a walking trip together every year, usually in January. It was something they both looked forward to.

Warren himself later commented: “On these long days, and during the pleasant evening hours when we took our ease in an inn, Jack was always at his most exuberant, his most whimsical, his most perceptive – the overworked cab horse released from the shafts and kicking his heels.”

While touring the Chilterns early in 1935, the brothers had played with the idea of compiling a beer map of England, with areas colour-coded according to the local brewery.

However, during their trip to Derbyshire a year later, their thoughts were on a somewhat higher plane, at least when visiting Taddington Church.

Lewis had spent a miserable Christmas nursing a heavy cold. But by the New Year he had recovered sufficiently to face the bracing weather of the Peak.

The week of their visit, temperatures across the county were below freezing overnight and only a degree or two above in the day. A fall of snow ensured the scenery was decidedly Christmassy.

Although Warren kept a record of their holiday in his diary, only brief extracts have yet been published.

These reveal that, on January 14, 1936, the two men passed through the village of Taddington, not far from Monsal Dale.

They called at the parish church of St Michael’s, which Lewis’ brother described as “a beautiful old building of local stone”.

Then, while taking a look inside, they came across a notice in the Lady Chapel in the north aisle, which had been set aside for private prayer.

It asked that visitors should enter with special reverence as it housed the Blessed Sacrament.

The brothers discussed the matter when they later stopped for lunch, no doubt at a pub in the neighbourhood.

The gist of the theological argument was this. Under the circumstances, was it right that the little side chapel should be shown greater reverence than the rest of the church?

In the end, the two men agreed to disagree.

It was three years after this visit that C S Lewis first started work on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. But he did not begin writing in earnest until almost a decade after that.

The novel was eventually published in October 1950.

The first of seven books charting the Chronicles of Narnia, it ended up a bestseller worldwide.

According to some scholars, Lewis based the imaginary landscapes of Narnia on the mountains and moorlands of the Ulster he had known as a boy.

Yet, who is to say that the spectacular scenery of the Peak did not also prove inspirational to the author?

After all, as C S Lewis wrote in a letter following his first walking tour in Derbyshire in April 1935: “It is appreciably more like my ideal country than any I have yet seen.”

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