Sir,— In common with all my fellow countrymen who know how each year the possibility of irretrievable harm to the quiet and beauty of our Lake Country is threatened by private enterprise, commercial undertakings, and improvements (so-called) by public bodies, I beg to thank you for the suggestion in your leaderette that the time is come for some departmental authority that can be appealed to before any such threatening of harm be put into effect.

It is very unlikely that any Government, even if it had the money, would be far-sighted enough to nationalise what is really the holiday home and recreation ground of the whole of the North of England.  It becomes increasingly difficult to persuade those who live by the visitors that what the visitors want is the countryside left alone and unimproved.  The determination of the Cumberland Highway Authority to destroy the old world beauty of the approach to the ancient hamlet of Portinscale, the patriotic effort to save our island home from the invader by a hydroplane company and aviation school at Bowness, the many attempts in the past years to run railways through some of the loveliest parts of the district, the mining companies that have been started and failed after having wrought irredeemable mischief to the landscape makes one feel that there ought to be in the best interests of the nation some court of appeal which would insist upon local inquiry and, on being satisfied that intervention was necessary, would have power to negative the proposed undertaking.    

(London Daily News, 22 January 1912, p. 3)