Douglas Freshfield
[1] His father attached great importance to preserving open spaces for public enjoyment and was active in campaigns to save Hampstead Heath and Ashdown Forest.
When he arrived safely in at Dzongri, he lit a big bonfire, which could be seen from Darjeeling and the Governor of Bengal ordered a Gun Salute to be fired in his honour.
The family loss was the occasion of a memorial gift for the people of Forest Row in the form of a building to be used as a parochial hall and institute.
At the reopening Freshfield expressed the wishes of his wife and himself when he hoped the hall would be used by all classes of parishioners, and that it would keep alive the memory of its original founder.
He is buried at Brookwood Cemetery in front of the memorial to his son Henry Douglas Freshfield (1877–1891), which was carved by Edward Onslow Ford.
This memorial consists of a pediment displaying a relief of Apollo in his chariot below which is a bas-relief group of two naked putti with inverted torches, emblems of death, above which is a profile portrait of the young Henry Freshfield wearing an Eton collar.
I was able, anyway, to pass through the Dent du Géant, and to climb the Monte Bianco.The following year I was ready to begin my excursions with two of my schoolmates, and I made the march recorded in Across Country from Thonon to Trent (printed privately)Mrs Freshfield was an author herself and her publications included "Alpine Byways" and "A Tour of the Grisons".
Letting the reader into the atmosphere of the Giudicarie Alps he noted:[8] The low elevation of the valleys, their sunny exposure, and the gentle slope of their hillsides, give the scenery an air of richness rarely found at the base of great snow-mountains.
The frequent and gay-looking villages, the woods of chestnuts, the knots of walnut-trees, the great fields of yellow-podded maize, the luxuriant vines and orchards, have the charm which the spontaneous bounty and colour of southern nature always exercise on the native of the more reserved and sober North.
No contrast could be at once more sudden and more welcome than that offered by these softer landscapes to the eye fresh from the rugged granite of the Adamello chain.Nobody who had entered the Giudicarie valleys previously had revealed so much in spite of the humble dolomitic reality.
The lower stories only, containing the living-rooms, are built of stone; from the top of their walls rise large upright beams supporting an immensely broad roof.
The spaces between the beams are not filled up, and the whole edifice has the air of having been begun on too large a scale, and temporarily completed, and roofed in.The great upstairs barn is used as for the storage of wood, hay, corn, and all sorts of inflammable dry goods.
The roof being also of wood, the lightning finds it easy enough to set the whole mass in a blaze, and fires arising from this cause are of common occurrence.These lines recollect a Rendena which no longer exists, but they can still teach those who are passionate about mountains to discover and preserve whatever remains that is still untouched by time or the hand of man.
Below us lay the smooth level of the Val d'Algone; on one side rose the bare, torn and fretted face of a great dolomite, surrounded by lower ridges scarcely less precipitous, but clothed in green wherever trees or herbage could take root.
The loftier dolomites were soon lost to view behind a bend in the valley, and the road plunged down a deep and narrow glen between banks of nodding cyclamens, bold crags, and the greenest of green hillsides.
After his expeditions around Kangchenjunga Freshfield wrote of Dzongri:[10] Suddenly you are in the presence of the Snow mountain unless they are indeed as they seem, in the first awestruck moment of beholding, embodied spirits of overwhelming power and malignity.
They have been fearfully searched by winds that mark the course in sweep of the wrinkled drifts and all the scars and lines run downwards giving the mountains an infinitely cheerless and depreciating expression like a sad, worn face.
