'My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky'

‘In that county, there was enough to be seen, to occupy the chief of their three weeks…all the celebrated beauties of Matlock, Chatsworth, Dovedale, or the Peak…[but] It is not the object of this work to give a description of Derbyshire’

If only she had. Jane Austen’s fleeting reference to the ‘celebrated beauties’ of Derbyshire, in Pride and Prejudice, always leaves me wishing she’d elaborated. But is her instinct correct?

Derbyshire, and in particular the Peak District, is world-renowned as a place of natural beauty and as a hot-spot for every imaginable activity involving lycra. From mountain-biking to climbing, from caving to hiking, the Peak is the place to go. Rock climbing enthusiasts, for example, flock to the area for the bouldering (both indoor and out).

Is it wrong, therefore, to expect the area to be a fertile ground for the arts too? One doesn’t expect Stratford-upon-Avon to invest in a world-class bouldering wall: why should we, then, expect the Peak District to produce poets?

Because landscapes demand a response. Cows, sheep and horses may stare blankly at the view: humans feel an impulse to react, to interpret, to communicate; even if that communication is only a breathless “Wow!”

Of course, it’s often much more than a “wow”, as in the painstaking landscape paintings of John Constable. The effect of a landscape spread out before the eye was not lost on Constable: ‘There has never been an age, however rude and uncultivated, in which the love of landscape has not been in some way manifested.’ Whether it’s Constable’s depiction of cumulus clouds or Wordsworth’s description of a frozen lake, the impulse ‘to turn landscape into art’, as Margaret Drabble writes in her book A Writer’s Britain, ‘seems a natural one’. Drabble, however, suggests ‘it is hard to say precisely why painters and writers should labour to reproduce in paint or words what each of us can see with our own eyes’.

To my understanding, there is nothing strange, unexpected or baffling about this impulse: Forster grasped the kernel of the matter when he wrote ‘Only connect’; Alan Bennett’s Hector understood when he proclaimed ‘Pass it on, boys’. The need to share an individual experience lies at the very heart of the creative impulse: it drives writers to write and painters to paint.

When Wordsworth describes ‘O Derwent! winding among grassy holms’ or ‘the morning light…yellowing the hill tops’, we see the landscape as he did: that precise moment is captured in his words and recreated each time it is read. And that, to me, seems to be the point.