Last updated 11:28, Saturday, 11 October 2008

Brought up with a farming background, he’s worked in estate management, stood on the auctioneer’s podium, got his hands dirty harvesting timber in the Ennerdale valley and been a leading officer in the Lake District National Park.

Author John Capstick and photographer Peter Freeman

So if anyone is qualified to give an opinion about the future of the Lake District, looking at it from several different perspectives, it’s got to be 64 year old John Capstick.

And now Mr Capstick has combined his encyclopaedic knowledge of what makes the region tick, and what threatens the future of its treasured landscape and its vital communities, with the photographic talents of a former colleague at the National Park office, Peter Freeman.

They have produced a new book which spectacularly underlines his words – and a sobering warning about that future of the Lakes and Dales.

John and his wife Jill – they met while both working for the National Park Authority – live in a converted barn in the quiet village of Johnby, near Greystoke, where they run a landscape consultancy.

The uninterrupted views of the Pennine hills from John’s back garden illustrate just what quality landscape means to locals and the many thousands of tourists who flock to the Lake District to get away from the rat race.

In Shadows of a Changing Land, John and Peter have joined forces, the former with the 10,000 words of description and opinion, the latter with pictures which show the Lakes and Dales in all their changing glory, to produce what could almost be described as a campaigning book.

John Capstick’s ancestors were rooted in the Sedbergh area, but he was born in Exeter where his father was working in wartime agriculture.

“Conceived in West Cumbria, born in Exeter,” as he puts it.

John’s parents were living in West Cumberland before they moved down to Devon.

At the end of the war his father got a job with ICI on the agricultural side and the family eventually moved back north, buying a house in Great Musgrave near Kirkby Stephen.

They were there until 1950 when they moved to the family farm at Old Hutton just outside Kendal and John’s father went back to farming. John was brought up on the farm and went to school in Kendal.

However he didn’t go to university, instead moving to Southampton to work for the Ordnance Survey.

“After that I thought I had better get an education and went to the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester for three years doing estate management.

“It was a good training, although prior to that I had to work for a year on a farm in Somerset,” explained John.

After leaving college he got his first job working for land agents Edwin Thompson in Keswick.

“I came straight out of college and went to work doing all sorts of things in estate and property management.”

After that John worked for the auction mart company in Kendal, getting experience of selling livestock –“and what always seemed to be the cheap furniture.”

When local government was re-organised in 1974 John had his first spell with the National Park board, although he had always had an interest in forestry and got the contract for harvesting timber in Ennerdale – “hard, sometimes dangerous work, but very enjoyable,” he said.

“There were some ups and downs. I used to stay two nights in a caravan and go back home for a bath and a meal then return to the caravan.

“It was something I never regretted, even though it was a tough life, particularly right through the winter.”

When John got the offer of renting a timber yard in Broughton in Furness he and Jill, who was a landscape architect with the NPA, ran the business there until the chance of a job back at the National Park came along and, within a year, John was promoted to Head of Park Management under then National Park officer John Toothill.

“The next step would have been to apply for the post of National Park Officer, but I wasn’t a politician and, with Jill running a private practice as a landscape architect, she suggested working with her,” he said.

John Capstick left the board in 1993 and, since then, he and Jill have worked with a wide range of businesses including caravan sites, hotels and on farm diversification schemes.

He had known Peter Freeman for 20 years, ever since Peter came to the NPA in the mid-1980s from the Northumberland National Park to be head of visitor services.

Peter is from Derbyshire and John said: “We knew the same people and he had always been a climber while I was a pot holer in my younger days.

“We got on pretty well and worked together until I left the Park, but we have kept in touch and he occasionally takes me climbing.”

Peter, 67, does tourism consultancy work and has just returned from a climbing trip to America.

“He had always wanted to do a book of photographs,” said John. “I agreed to write the text without realising what I was getting into. It’s not a book about the history of the Lakes or the landscape as such. It’s about the way things are, the problems and how we have to think about the landscape in the future.

“I didn’t want it to be another run of the mill book. Communities are so relevant to the Lakes and Dales. Coming from a farming background helped me tremendously. The Lake District landscape has been made by farmers.”

For John Capstick, communities are a big part of that landscape. “It’s no good having a carbon neutral Lake District without the farmers and the people,” he says.

“I look at the World Heritage debate and ask what exactly is it going to do. Will it bring benefits or be another layer of bureaucracy?”

John says the book is intended to highlight the landscape and make people think carefully about the future. Farmers don’t simply want to be seen as park keepers—there is a lot of pride in producing stock.

The book puts under the microscope the effect of social changes – ageing rural populations, problems for locals in finding housing, the lack of work and the disappearance of community facilities like shops, post offices and pubs.

Nearly 50 per of the economy of the Lake District is linked to tourism and he says the landscape is often taken for granted and ignoring change is simply not an option.

John Capstick warns against complacency. Lifting the cover on the landscape may just reveal things that aren’t so healthy.

The parlous economic state of upland farming and social decline and tensions in changing communities paint a less rosy picture.

Visitors looking out at the views from their car windows might think it looks much the same year after year, but this fails to recognise the underlying dilemmas which face many of these areas.

In John Capstick’s view, testing times lie ahead and a serious debate is needed over the kind of landscape the present generation is planning to leave to future generations.

Not, he says, another arid debate with focus and stakeholder groups, but a genuine discussion which involves the whole upland community, visitors and users coming together to decide where they wish to see the landscapes go in the future.

“Of one thing we can be sure,” he says. “If we simply assume they will always be there whatever we do, we may wake up one day and find, too late, that the legacy we are handing on to future generations has irreversibly changed for the worse and we will only have ourselves to blame”

Those generations won’t readily forgive if all they have to remind them of how the Lakes and the Dales used to look are photographs – even ones as magnificent as those in this new book.

Shadows of a Changing Land is priced £25 and will be available from several bookshop outlets in the county. Details can also be found on www.shadowsofa changingland.co.uk