Lord of the crags

There is a corner of Northumberland, in the valley of the River Coquet, where the climate has been changed for ever by the actions of one man. In the mid-1860s, William Armstrong set out to transform vast tracts of raw, bleak moorland into what he described as ‘an earthly paradise’ and by the time of his death in 1900, at the age of 90, he had planted over seven million trees and shrubs on an estate of more than 1,700 acres.

Armstrong’s intention had been to recreate a rugged Himalayan landscape of rocks and streams and cascades — a damp valley environment that, as it happened, was well suited to conifers. The species he planted included Douglas fir, Caucasian fir, Low’s fir and Western Hemlock; they would have been quite unfamiliar to most of his countrymen at the time. Some have since reached such a great height that they are described as champion trees; Cragside has England’s tallest Douglas fir, which is more than 58 metres high. Today the climate at Cragside is noticeably wetter in winter than it used to be before the plantings, and also — of particular importance in this cold northern landscape — about 1°C warmer. The environment provides habitats for the red squirrel and the otter.

And at the centre of the estate, on a precipitous hillside overlooking the Debdon Burn, towers the magician’s palace of Cragside, an architectural triumph by Richard Norman Shaw that, thanks to Armstrong’s matchless ingenuity, became the first house in the world to be lit by hydroelectricity.

The wonder that is Cragside is the brainchild not of a romantic nature-lover but of a brilliant self-taught engineer. When he could tear himself away from the seductive charms of Coquetdale, which he had known since boyhood, the lord of the crags was emperor of another domain: the vast Elswick Works on the north bank of the Tyne at Newcastle, 30 miles to the south, where he employed more than 20,000 workers in the production of hydraulic cranes, bridges, ships and armaments.