ABSTRACT
The English Lake District is widely agreed to be an outstandingly beautiful area, offering literary associations and adventurous play as well as landscape to the discerning tourist. It presents itself not only as a National Park (on the distinctive and limited British definition) but also as a candidate for UNESCO World Heritage Site status, for which it would be required to demonstrate ‘Outstanding Universal Value’. The actual distribution of such sites is strongly skewed towards the wealthier, more developed and more politically influential parts of the globe, as Frey, Pamini and Steiner have explained, with 46 per cent of the total list being located in Europe. But their econometric analysis does not extend to examining the bias in cultural preference that seems also to be evident in the compilation of the list. 1 Although the Lake District has yet to feature on the World Heritage list, it has long been deemed a plausible contender, held back mainly by categorisation problems; and the cultural preference point is illustrated by the fact that its landscapes do not have universal appeal across the globe, or even within Britain. 2 Nor has their appeal been universal across time: until as recently as the mid-eighteenth century travel and topographical writers such as Celia Fiennes and Daniel Defoe were repelled and even frightened by these howling wastes and barren wildernesses, wanting to feast their eyes on lush meadows and productive fields, on tidy, managed, controlled, reassuring tracts of agricultural lowlands, with the human hand visibly in command of a tamed and subdued landscape. 3
