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 August 24, 2011
David Joy’s 270-page volume on the railways of what is now Cumbria is a “must” for anyone seriously interested in either the general history of the Lake District county or the railway history of northern England. Published in 1983 by David & Charles of Newton Abbot it came as Volume 14 of the major series, “A Regional History of the Railways of Great Britain”.
Two lines in the south of the region reached to Windermere. The branch from the Oxenhome mainline station through Kendal, Burneside and Staveley to Windermere village (built shorter than originally planned after strong opposition from William Wordsworth) still functions. The Ulverston to Lakeside line branched from the Furness railway and a small part from Haverthwaite survives as a tourist attraction. Then there was the now defunct Coniston branch, and the narrow gauge line from Ravenglass up to the lower slopes below Scafell. This latter continues as the Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway, and is one of the region’s great tourist attractions.
Only one line, though, ever penetrated deep into the Lake District and went right through to the other side. That was the Cockermouth-Keswick-Penrith line which, following it from east to west, passed to the north of Derwentwater and continued along the shore of Bassenthwaite Lake on its way ultimately to the coast at Workington; the author starts his book with the sad story of its demise in the 60s and 70s of last century.
Whilst a few lines had local passenger carrying and tourism potential the great majority were driven by the growth of extractive industries – coal, iron ore, copper and slate. The complex webs of railway lines around Furness and the Cumberland west coast near Workington and Whitehaven, not to mention those of the Eden Valley and the trans-Pennine route over Stainmore, were all industrially driven. Their decline followed the contraction and disappearance of the industries they were created to serve.
The story was well told by David Joy in this volume written thirty years ago, and although shorter books have been written on individual lines and Gordon Suggitt’s “The Lost Railways of Cumbria” is one that covers similar ground in a smaller format, there has since been no work on the same scale to supercede it.
This title is long out of print but copies are widely available on the secondhand market. To see used copies available through Amazon.co.uk click on the book cover above or here on: Railways History – The Lake Counties
by David Murray on July 29, 2011
Archaeology in England is often thought of as being about Romans, Vikings, Saxon treasure hoards and early primitive peoples, but it is far more than that. The field of industrial archaeology in particular is of great importance to the understanding of our country and how it came to be what it is today. This is especially true of the North of England.
Yes, I can ‘hear someone thinking’, the mill towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire; the iron and shipbuilding of the North-East. Well, certainly, those areas are important but so also are the rural and upland areas of the Lake District and the Pennines. What we now think of as centres of the tourist industry have only been so for about a century and a half. Before that their industrial activities were of a very different nature – and this is often forgotten.
I had reason earlier today to pull of the shelf my copy of The Industrial Archaeology of the Lake Counties by John Marshall and Michael Davies-Shiel. It dates back to 1969 but to my knowledge there’s been nothing to replace it since. In addition to the coal and iron industries well-known on the coast, there are chapters on “Mines and Quarries of the Fells” and “Industries of the Woodlands”. Used copies can be found on Amazon (click the link above).
There have, of course, been many advances in the field since 1969 and works on specific aspects of the subject can be found. One that I’ve enjoyed digging into, and have had in my collection for several years, is Furness Iron: The Physical Remains of the Iron Industry and Related Woodland Industries of Furness and Southern Lakeland
by Mark Bowden (2000).
In the same series as Marshall & Davies-Shiel was The Industrial Archaeology of North-east England by Frank Atkinson. This was in two volumes, and it is not difficult to obtain either of them. Click on the following links to see what is available on Amazon. Volume 1 – Volume 2
The Industrial Archaeology of Lancashire by Owen Ashmore (1969) also appears to be in plentiful supply on the secondhand market.
As I have already implied, these books are dated but not out-dated and can give hours of enjoyable exploration into the past even for people who won’t want to dig further. For those who do I’ll include here some more recent titles on more specific topics as the weeks go by.
