Ramblings
Saunterings
Ramblings: about North-West England
Ramblings is a set of articles about North-West England, of unknown authorship and
indeterminate date, believed to have been written for amusement on rainy days,
which are not unknown in North-West England.
9. Dame Mary Merewether
The Annual Harriet Martineau Lecture
The annual Harriet Martineau Lecture to the Assembly of
Cumbrian Women’s Institutes was this year given by Dame
Mary Merewether, the eminent environmentalist and emeritus
professor at the University of Cumbria. Harriet Martineau (1802-1876), often
described as the first female sociologist,
was a writer and philosopher who from 1845 lived in Ambleside, where there remains
a great need for sociology.
Charles Darwin met her in 1836 and
commented “I was astonished to find how ugly she is” although his brother
“Erasmus palliated all this, by maintaining one ought not to look at
her as a woman”. She was, understandably, a life-long feminist.
She described Darwin as "simple, child-like".
Dame Mary gave an absorbing talk,
much appreciated by the members, on recent changes to Lakeside
flora caused by the multitude of people trampling upon it.
Dame Mary described the history of Cumbrian plant-life. After
the Ice Age, the fells were colonised by hardy arctic-alpine flora,
small, delicate but tenacious. Some, such as mountain sorrel and
purple saxifrage, survived despite the climate warming. Heather
and then trees, such as birch and oak, swept over the lower fells.
The forests were then largely felled and the uplands became bog.
During the last few centuries, most remaining plants were chewed
away by sheep. And now, to polish them all off, we are walking all
over them.
Dame Mary also used the platform to announce the formation
of the Campaign for Lakeland Feminisation (CaLF).
As Dame Mary pointed out, the Lake District is overwhelmingly
masculine, with, amongst others, Adam Seat, Allen Crags, Buck Pike,
Carl Side, Great Cockup, Grey Friar, Hart Side, John Bell’s Banner,
St John’s Common, Shipman Knotts, and, of course, Coniston Old
Man and numerous lesser Mans. The only femininity to be found
is in the soppy Maiden Moor and Ladyside Pike.
She proposed, as an interim measure, pending the equalisation
required by present legislation, that Women’s Institute members
should from now on refer to Blencathra as Blencathy, Seatallan as
Seatalice, and Glaramara as Glearymary.
The Campaign will be formally launched on Saturday April
24th with a march around Sisters Water, followed by a rally outside
The White Lioness in Pitterpatterdale.
(Your reporter apologises for any inaccuracies above. The
information was gleaned by eavesdropping on a formidable
entourage that gathered in the Crowing Cockerel after the lecture.
He was unable to gain entry to the Assembly of Cumbrian Women’s
Institutes, not being a woman.)
Dame Mary Merewether: Obituary
Dame Mary Merewether, the redoubtable feminist fell-walker
and environmentalist, yesterday passed away reluctantly at
the Swineshead Nursing Home, Kendal, aged 83.
Dame Mary always objected to being described as a fell-walker
but she is in no position to do so now. “This is the Lake District not
the Peak District, so focus on the lakes, not the peaks” she said. Up
until the unfortunate accident when she slipped off the gangplank
of the Coniston Gondola, she walked one hundred furlongs every
day, and for every step she insisted upon being able to see at least
one lake. Somebody once asked her what counted as a lake. She
replied “Young man, if you do not know a lake when you see it,
you have no business to be in the Lake District”.
She had no truck with the masculine obsession to get on top of
everything. She ridiculed the revered Albert Rainwhite, who she
considered to have wasted thirteen years working out 924 ways
up 214 mountains with only the merest reflection on the meres.
“Twelve ways up Blencathy for a worse view of Derwentwater than
what you get from Skiddorf, for heaven’s sake” she harrumphed.
Mary was born at Leighton Hall, renowned for its buzzard. She
was the sixth child of the Hon. Henry and Agatha Merewether, who
had already fled from the first five children to live in Mauritius. She
was brought up by her eldest sister, who later wrote a best-seller
Parenting without Parents which provided a too-intimate portrait of
Mary’s childhood.
Mary was trained as a doctor but abandoned her course when
she realised that the sight of blood so entranced her that she was
in danger of harming her patients. So she turned to frogs. As she
sliced them up, she gradually fell in love with them.
Her interests broadened from amphibia, and she moved closer
to the wetlands of the Lake District, in order to study its unique
wildlife. She was forever, dawn to dusk to dawn, browsing the
waters’ edges. Many startled visitors reported sighting a magenta
hippo. She remains the only person to have gained any benefit
from visiting the slopes of Sourfoot Fell, where she discovered that
the Sourfoot mayfly may not fly at all.
Her publications led to a lectureship at the University of
Lancaster, where she patrolled campus in her billowing magenta
cape. Mary had few qualifications for academia: nightmarishly
untidy, belligerent beyond belief, and utterly disdainful of
students. But these particular qualifications stood her in good
stead in the academic world and she rose inexorably to become the
first Ranarian Professor at the University of Cumbria, sponsored by
Eco-Retreats.
Her work on the flora and fauna of the lakes’ shores led to her
endamement in 1985. Dame Mary leaves no offspring, of course,
but legions of admirers who march like Amazonian warriors along
her well-worn paths.
Her ashes will be scattered, as she wished, in her two favourite
lakes - her top half in Buttermere and her bottom half in Creamy
Water.
Photos:
Harriet Martineau.
Dame Mary Merewether and her beloved Bertie, the car.
The name of the chauffeur-mechanic is not known. Dame Mary always called him ‘you’.
Comments:
• I came across Dame Mary several times at conferences
on environmental matters. She always asked the first question after keynote speeches, and it
was always a rudely aggressive one. This was a ploy to get everybody else in the audience
to ask their neighbour who the questioner was, as anyone so rude must surely be a famous
academic. So, everyone soon knew who Dame Mary was.
• I'm not sure it was a ploy. She was just rudely
aggressive all the time. At least, she was to me.
Ramblings
Saunterings
© John Self, Drakkar Press, 2024-
Top photo: Rainbow over Kisdon in Swaledale;
Bottom photo: Ullswater