It so happens that as I have known the mountains of Carnarvonshire and Cumberland rather intimately for many years, the process of spoliation which, as Elisée Reclus has remarked, is a characteristic of barbarism, has been there forced on my attention. It is close on half a century since I was introduced to some of the wildest mountains of North Wales by that muscular bishop, Dr. G. A. Selwyn, of whom I have spoken in an earlier chapter, when, as tutor to his nephew, I was one of an episcopal party that went on a summer holiday from Lichfield to Penmaenmawr. There the bishop relaxed very genially from the austere dignities of his Palace: and having procured an Ordnance map, was not only taken with a desire to find his way across the heights to Llyn-an-Afon, a tarn which nestles under the front of the great range of Carnedd Llewelyn, but insisted on being accompanied by his nephew and his nephew’s tutor. Mountaineering, as I afterwards saw, could not have been one of Dr. Selwyn’s many accomplishments; for we had to make more than one expedition before we set eyes on the lake, and in the course of our first walk he slipped on a steep ridge and put his thumb out of joint, to the secret amusement, I had reason to fear, of my pupil, who, greatly disliking these forced marches into the wilderness, regarded the accident as a nemesis on an uncle’s despotism. But to me the experience of those bleak uplands was invaluable, for it was the beginning of a love of mountains, both Cambrian and Cumbrian, which led me to return to them again and again, until I had paid over a hundred visits to their chief summits. Thus I could not fail to note, now in the one district, now in the other, how the hand of the desecrator had been busy. Recent discussions in the press on the subject of the proposed Sty Head motor-road have been useful in two ways: first, they called forth so strong and general an expression of opinion against that ill-advised project, as to render its realization extremely unlikely for a long time to come; and secondly, they drew attention to the wider and deeper under-lying question of the preservation of British mountain scenery against Vandalism of various kinds. The attempt on the Sty Head was in itself a significant object-lesson in the dangers by which our mountain “sanctuaries” are beset. A hundred and fifty years ago the poet Gray could write thus of the hamlet of Seathwaite, where the famous Pass has its entrance on the Borrowdale side: “All further access is here barred to prying mortals, only there is a little path winding over the fells, and for some weeks in the year passable to the dalesmen; but the mountains know well that these innocent people will not reveal the mysteries of their ancient kingdom.”