Haystacks, favourite spot for a Wainwright statue?

Haystacks, favourite spot for a Wainwright statue?

A Cumbrian businessman says the proposed statue to the county’s chronicler of the fells should be placed on one of his beloved mountains, rather than in Kendal town centre.

Mark Weir, owner of Honister Slate Mine and no stranger to controversy, said the sculpture of author Wainwright could become the ‘Alfred of the North’. A town centre placement would devalue the work of art and it would become a pigeon roost.

Mr Weir whipped up a storm almost as big as the one which hit the Lake District during last October’s Original Mountain Marathon when he luridly described the events as coming ‘within inches of turning the Lake District mountains into a morgue’. Superintendent Gary Slater of Cumbria police described the statement at the time as ‘a little exaggeration’.

Mr Weir, as well as owning the slate mine, installed Britain’s first via ferrata on nearby Fleetwith Pike, within view of Wainwright’s favourite fell Haystacks, where the author of the Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells’ ashes are scattered.

The tourist potential of such a placing of a major art work cannot be overlooked.

The mine owner also points out that, although Wainwright lived in Kendal, the town itself is not even in the Lake District national park. He told the News & Star newspaper: “Considering his passion for the fells, to put him in a town would be a travesty.”

Wainwright himself wrote of the Honister area: “There is no beauty in despoliation and devastation, but there can be dramatic effect and interest, and so it is here.”

Sculptor Graham Ibbeson, best known for the statue of Eric Morecambe that adorns the Lancashire town from which he took his name, has been commissioned to create a statue of the Grumpy Old Fellwalker, at an estimated cost of £80,000.