In reply to TobyA:
David Craig elaborates the argument TobyA summarises in Native Stones - a great book, I think. It's not that no one used to go into the hills - Craig mentions shepherds and "nesters", for example. But, as TobyA hints, in the cultural imagination the mountains and crags were seen as a sinister, dangerous place. Craig notes that even in Victorian times, many polite folk would lower the train blinds as they went through mountainous areas, to avoid looking upon the "horrid sight of the dark crags".
Craig then gives a really interesting discussion of the different ways in which Wordsworth and Coleridge discuss the Lakes. Coleridge is an outsider, who grew up in Devon and London. When he finally comes to Cumbria, he goes on a bonkers tour around the Lakes not really minding where he went, but taking whatever route seemed most direct. Hence, he finds himself up shit creek on Broad Stand, where he has a sublime, visionary moment. The fear and danger and transgression of the mountains is part of their beauty, for him. But, Craig feels that Coleridge never really sees the fells: he only sees his abstract "idea" of what the fells mean.
Meanwhile, Wordsworth was a local boy. He used to go nesting. For Craig, he has a more authentic relation to the hills: he actually understands them, even as they come to signify many things for him: a place of restoration, a place opposed to city life, a place to connect with childhood and with God.
Either way, after the Romantic writers, we never saw the mountains in the same way again. More importantly: those many meanings that are written into the landscape so shape our understanding of them, that it's hard to have an 'original' relation to the hills; nor to see the reality, without transforming them into something other than what they are (e.g a place of "freedom", "beauty" and "nature" - whatever those things mean in this context).
I realise that's not a particularly fleshed out account, but TobyA and others can correct my errors and fill in the blanks.
Anyway, these days, I think, many of us don't see the Lakes as a place where people live, work, struggle; it's a gigantic museum/spectacle constructed to honour that elusive deity Nature (poor Nature, who has been seen, of late, doing a lot degrading zero-hour contract gig work for Capital). We often refuse to see it as an industrial - or even post-industrial - landscape, preferring to think of it as "unspoilt wilderness". To be fair, climbers and runners and folk who spend a lot of time there are probably more immune to these sorts of mystification than others who get less access to it.
On a different note: a primary school teacher friend recently told me that, when he took his 10 year olds to Windermere, they were blown away. "Wow! It's so beautiful!!" They were from a school in Lancaster, 40 minutes away and they'd never been before. I wonder if all this UNESCO palaver, and all the other "developments", will actually help kids like them to get a little piece of this precious "heritage".
Post edited at 22:21