Douglas Freshfield - Writing

Writing

Freshfield's mother considered it important to educate her son in the appreciation of nature and the arts. From an early age his parents took him on journeys which included the English Lake District and Scotland. When he was eight his father started taking the family on holiday in Switzerland, particularly the Alps. The ten years of summer holidays in the Swiss and Italian Alps greatly impressed the child. He said, sixty years later, in an interview with Adolf Hess:

I think that, without any interruption, for the following ten years, I went each August to the Alps with my parents, and I experienced not only the easy trips, but also many less usual destinations. We toured the Monte Bianco, the Monte Rosa and the Bernina; we went to Arolla, to Evolene, to Cogne, in Val Formazza, in the Glarus Alps, to Davos, to Livigno and in the Vorderrhein. Some maps I drew still show our yearly itineraries. We climbed Mount Titlis, the Jazzi Peak, the Mittelhorn, and some other peaks of moderate height. But as those didn't satisfy my ambition, in 1863 I decided to try alone the Gran Paradiso, where the unforgiving weather stopped me. I was able, anyway, to pass through the Dent du Géant, and to climb the Monte Bianco.
The following year I was ready to begin my excursions with two of my schoolmates, and I made the march recorded in Across Country from Thonon to Trent (printed privately)

Mrs Freshfield was an authoress herself and her publications included "Alpine Byways" and "A Tour of the Grisons". Valeria Azzolini wrote about her in I resoconti di viaggio di Freshfield ("Freshfield's Travel Journals"):

Lover of the mountain in the youngest and truest sense, hurry was unknown to her because it wasn't really reaching the top which insterested her, but the captivation of the landscapes she encountered on the path, and thus the hours she spent in that enjoyment.
Apart from the members of the family, there was another protagonist in Mrs Freshfield's narrations: the guide, Michel Alphonse Couttet. And it was surely in those years that the young Freshfield understood the importance, in every mountain action, of the presence of a good guide.

Freshfield believed in good companionship more than the physical exercise when climbing. When he had almost reached the end of his career, he stated:

My highest ambition has never been to spend my days in strenuous exercises to develop my muscles. No other mountaineering moment was instead more appreciated by me than that in which I could enjoy the landscape, while the others had to open a path.

In his first work, The Italian Alps (1875), he abandoned himself to enjoying the mountains, writing with an elegant descriptive ability. He repeatedly refined his drafts about his excursions and mountaineering, like an ante litteram correspondent. This made him one of the best prepared and finest 19th century linguists in the UK to write about exploring Italy. As an instinctive and inspired narrator, he reported ecstatically on all the mysterious wonders of the Alps. He wanted to ahare these with the rest of Europe and described the characteristics of the Alps with unrivalled sharpness. His descriptions were from all angles - poetic, ethnographic, and scientific. Letting the reader into the atmosphere of the Giudicarie Alps he noted:

The low elevation of the valleys, their sunny exposure, and the gentle slope of their hillsides, give the scenery an air of richness rarely found at the base of great snow-mountains. The frequent and gay-looking villages, the woods of chestnuts, the knots of walnut-trees, the great fields of yellow-podded maize, the luxuriant vines and orchards, have the charm which the spontaneous bounty and colour of southern nature always exercise on the native of the more reserved and sober North. No contrast could be at once more sudden and more welcome than that offered by these softer landscapes to the eye fresh from the rugged granite of the Adamello chain.

Nobody who had entered the Giudicarie valleys previously had revealed so much in spite of the humble dolomitic reality. He dedicated further pages to the familiar Val Rendena.

The road, winding at first high on a woody hillside, commands a charming view of the upper valley as far as Pinzolo. Orchards and cornfields separate the rapidly succeeding hamlets, each of which resmbles its neighbour. The method of construction in this country is peculiar. The lower stories only, containing the living-rooms, are built of stone; from the top of their walls rise large upright beams supporting an immensely broad roof. The spaces between the beams are not filled up, and the whole edifice has the air of having been begun on too large a scale, and temporarily completed, and roofed in.
The great upstairs barn is used as for the storage of wood, hay, corn, and all sorts of inflammable dry goods. The roof being also of wood, the lightning finds it easy enough to set the whole mass in a blaze, and fires arising from this cause are of common occurrence.

These lines recollect a Rendena which no longer exists, but they can still teach those who are passionate about mountains to discover and preserve whatever remains that is still untouched by time or the hand of man.

Below us lay the smooth level of the Val d'Algone; on one side rose the bare, torn and fretted face of a great dolomite, surrounded by lower ridges scarcely less precipitous, but clothed in green wherever trees or herbage could take root. Towards the south the distant hills beyond the Sarca waved in gradations of purple and blue through the shimmer of the Italian sunshine. A short zigzag through thick copses took us down to the meadows. The large solitary building in their midst is a glass manufactory. At this point a good car-road begins, which branching lower down leads either to Tione or Stenico.
The loftier dolomites were soon lost to view behind a bend in the valley, and the road plunged down a deep and narrow glen between banks of nodding cyclamens, bold crags, and the greenest of green hillsides.

After his expeditions around Kangchenjunga Freshfield wrote of Dzongri:

Suddenly you are in the presence of the Snow mountain unless they are indeed as they seem, in the first awestruck moment of beholding, embodied spirits of overwhelming power and malignity. Below you is the Prague Chu Valley; before you on the other side, long line of mountains-a succession of terrible granite spires, running down, one and all so steep and jagged that it seems as if no snow could ever cling to their sides. They have been fearfully searched by winds that mark the course in sweep of the wrinkled drifts and all the scars and lines run downwards giving the mountains an infinitely cheerless and depreciating expression like a sad, worn face.