JUDGING BY CULTURAL artefacts alone, one might be forgiven for thinking that the outdoors was only for the lonely. William Wordsworth famously wandered ‘lonely as a cloud’, whilst Casper David Friedrich’s ‘wanderer above a sea of fog’ is similarly aloft and aloof. Our literary shorthand is shot through with the Gothic romance of Wuthering Heights and the uncompromising striving of Nietzsche’s Ubermensch, whose protagonist leaves the comforts of home and ventures forth on an upland journey that’s both physically and mentally gruelling. Victorian protagonists are usually rugged individualists – Supermen – who wrestle with rigours and battle with the elements.
There’s a socio-political element to all this hard work too. These tough guy stories weren’t drafted in splendid isolation. They developed in the context of industrialisation and, with it, a European drive for resources and empire. The mountain is either the backdrop to emotional turmoil or a playground for conquering heroes.
There is a more equitable and convivial version of our outdoors story to counterbalance all that high-class wandering. The English Ramblers movement grew out of that same period of industrialisation and pressed for working-class access to private land. Glasgow shipbuilders escaped deprivation and war to walk and climb in the Lomond Hills. In both cases, people met and travelled in groups. Both were key in the developing the post-war common goods of conservation and outdoors education; but still, the history told is overwhelmingly white and male.
Yet how we relate to nature is on the move. Digital technology, austerity, Black Lives Matter, climate breakdown and the pandemic are just a few of the more obvious agents of change in recent years. Correspondingly, the tales we tell about the great outdoors are changing, too.
On social media and within these pages, adventuring in company is enjoying a
