by David Murray on February 10, 2012
This book, England’s Landscape: The North West by Angus Winchester and Alan Crosby was published in 2006 by English Heritage. It is No. 8 in a series covering the regions of England and includes chiefly the three historic (as distinct from current administrative) counties of Lancashire, Westmorland and Cumberland.
This is a comprehensive coverage of landscapes of many types. The region is blessed with an enormous diversity. The two main lowland areas of North Cumbria and West Lancashire could scarcely be different from the mountainous massif of the Lake District and the high moorland of the Pennines.
In addition to the rocks and rivers the human activity around them is surveyed, we read of men extracting coal and minerals from deep under the earth and leaving their mark above it in what we now see as fascinating industrial heritage. Buildings – houses and castles, churches and chapels, mills and mines – are all part of this story and their existence all flowed from the nature of the rock and earth beneath them.
The growth of agricultural villages, both lowland and upland, is explored and so is the more recent (ie. two hundred years or so) spread of industrial towns and cities based on iron, coal and plentiful soft water, along with the west coast ports and the development of the region’s extensive transportation networks – roads, canals, railways and back to roads.
England’s Landscape: The North West is beautifully illustrated with colour photography and also with maps, charts and diagrams to help the reader understand the way that the region has developed over the years through human settlement, economic activity and, more recently, conservation – of both the natural and built environment.
This is a book to be read by all who are seriously interested in the North West. How can we think constructively about our future if we do not understand how we came to be where we are?
Other Volumes in the “England’s Landscape” Series
More on the Landscape of the North West
by David Murray on October 3, 2011
Today I scarcely need to write anything to explain the subject of the books I’m listing. The National Trust is such a vital part of Lake District life, and has been for many decades, that it surely needs no introduction.
Bruce Thompson was for many years between the two world wars the agent for National Trust properties in the North of England. In 1945 he published these 223 pages of the history of the Trust’s involvement in the Lake District, with their agreement but also with freedom to express his own opinions.
Then in 1987 Elizabeth Battrick covered the next forty years. Her 185 pages describe each of the properties in eleven different areas of the Lake District, and in addition there are pages on other nearby properties elsewhere in Cumbria and also in Lancashire.
Click on the book images to find copies on Amazon.co.uk.
by David Murray on August 4, 2011
I bought this book, Historic Farmhouses in and around Westmorland, many years ago from the Westmorland Gazette office in Kendal. My interest was personal as it includes a description of Ashes Farm, Staveley, which was my maternal grandfather’s birthplace way back in the 1870s. His father before him was born in Longsleddale and farmed high up on the fells at Bannisdale Head before moving down to the lower altitude of Staveley.
Reading through it I discovered sections on other ancient farmhouses in which past generations of my ancestors had lived: Godmond Hall, Burneside Hall. So for me the book has an emotional fascination, but quite apart from that it contains insights into the buildings in which generation after generation of hardy Westmorland folk were born, grew up, worked the land, raised their families, and passed them on to the next.
Going back more centuries many of these buildings were the local places of safety and security as this county was on the invasion route from the north. Many old pele towers are now incoporated into peaceful family homes, but if the walls could speak they could tell tales of horror. This was a tough land to occupy.
Others, of course, were somewhat away from the worst of the dangers but still have a story to tell if only we can read it. This book helps us to read that record of the past.
Historic Farmhouses in and around Westmorland, based on articles by J. H. Palmer in the Westmorland Gazette, was first privately printed in the 1940s then was published by the Gazettte in 1952 and reprinted in 1983. It has been out of print for many years but copies can still be found on the secondhand market. Click here
or on the book picture to find copies on Amazon.
