Engel's England

by Matthew Engel

  ‘Nothing about Westmorland?’

  ‘I do mention it once in one of them. I’m a Cumbrian lad.’

  Historically, Westmorland survived because communications were so terrible. The mountains on the northern border were, if not impenetrable, rather less than penetrable, and the journey north – by whatever means – involved getting across Shap Fell, the ridge north of Kendal and south of the village of Shap.

  In Derbyshire the A6 is unavoidable. Heading north, it dribbles away into irrelevance. But in Westmorland it regains something of its old self-confidence. The presence of the M6 means it no longer matters anything like as much as it once did. But on the windy top of Shap Fell there is a reminder of how much it used to matter. A stone remembers ‘the drivers and crews of vehicles that made possible the social and commercial links between north and south on this old and difficult ridge … and local people who gave freely of food and shelter to stranded travellers in bad weather’.

  At least I think it says that. Unfortunately, someone tried to make it more legible by painting up the carved lettering but botched it by failing to wipe the wet paint from the surrounds, so the whole thing became hopelessly smudged. Below the inscription is a list of organisations that paid for the stone, and this is in Old English typeface and now almost wholly unreadable. But I could just make out the dread words Cumbria County Council, and I suspect their handiwork. The timing of local government reform in 1974 was fortuitous for its perpetrators, because Cumbria County Council might not have survived a single winter meeting before the M6 came through four years earlier.

  There are still differences between Westmorland and Cumberland. Westmorland kids support Manchester United or City; by the time you cross the border to Penrith, Newcastle takes over. The Cumberland accent, from here, sounds rather Geordie. And historically, according to the cultural historian Mike Huggins, who lives in Windermere, most of Westmorland looked not north but south to Lancashire, partly because that was the most reliable way out. The A66, heading east to Scotch Corner, was (and still is) vulnerable to the weather – and Shap was notorious. ‘The road was blocked regularly well into the 1960s, and it was a hell of a place to get stuck. The lorries would skid all over the place and it could take weeks to clear.’

  Also, much of Westmorland’s industry, such as it was, hinged on the making of wooden bobbins for Lancashire cotton mills: there were eight bobbin mills in Ambleside alone. Farming in Cumberland and Westmorland had much in common, but – as I discovered at the show – there was and is a Lancashire-and-Westmorland style of hedging which is entirely different from Cumberland hedging. The word Cumbrian is of ancient lineage but, says Huggins: ‘It was hardly used until about the Second World War.’

  Now Cumbria has won. And the public face of Westmorland survives for non-locals in only one, remarkably happy, respect: the M6 services at Tebay run, as the signs proclaim, by Westmorland Ltd, and built on their own farmland by the Dunning family. This is not only the least worst of Britain’s seventy-odd motorway services; it is genuinely excellent. I had a pot of builders’ (refill on offer) and Borrowdale tea bread overlooking a duck pond with a view of Blease Fell and the merest hint of passing lorry. In this landscape, even the M6 seems tame and inoffensive. I was tempted to stay for dinner.

  And the reason Westmorland ought to have survived as a county is that it was excellent. It gets a bit noisy round the dual carriageway heading towards Barrow; the lime works at Shap are pretty ugly; and the Royal Oak in Appleby used to be run by a pair of miserable old sods who wouldn’t allow you to have vinegar on the chips because it lowered the tone. Kendal is a town of grey stone and grey weather; but how can you dislike a place best known for making mint cake? And two miles out, heading to Grayrigg, you are already up on the moors with only the wind and the hills for company.

  One also senses a remarkable solidarity, which the county show epitomises. ‘During foot and mouth I remember going up and down the streets on the council estates in Kendal,’ said Tim Farron, MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale. ‘These were mostly people who had no connection with farming, and never walked on the fells. Yet they really felt the pain.’

  Of course Westmorland was tiny. Roger Bingham, historian and councillor, remembers that when he first swam a length of the pool, he got a certificate signed by the county’s chief education officer. Not printed: he really signed it. And Westmorland always tended to get overlooked. The Illustrated Counties of England, the collection of Illustrated London News articles produced in 1985 and almost the last gasp of establishment sentimentality for the old counties, gave even Huntingdonshire a couple of thousand words. But Melvyn Bragg’s essay was called ‘Cumbria’; and he mentioned Westmorland just once, in the context of ‘Cumberland and Westmorland wrestling’, when he couldn’t get out of it.

  Westmorland was an anomaly. But a dazzling anomaly. Looking across Grasmere early one morning, from close to Wordsworth’s cottage, I saw Silver How ringed with cloud like a pearl necklace. Doubtless Wordsworth would not care for the traffic, especially as red squirrels are being run over by cars on the A591. He wouldn’t realise what a triumph it is that Westmorland actually has red squirrels to run over.

  The talk at the showground was obviously all about the weather: it generally is. It was a particularly wretched year for the damsons. The food tent was packed with makers of damson wine, damson beer, damson gin, damson chutney, damson cheese and what-have-you, all now looking for simpler, more readily available alternatives to damsons like Kobe beef or goliath tigerfish.

  ‘Diabolical,’ said one grower. Damsons like the wet – they wouldn’t be here otherwise – but the suspicion is that a cold snap sent the bees back to their hives just when they should have been pollinating. And the weather did for the grape harvest. Again. The High Cup winery near Appleby produces various fruit wines (the elderflower and apple is very drinkable) and might count as the most northerly commercial vineyard in the world. Except that they had not had a grape harvest since 2006, when they were still only amateurs.

  It was bad on show day too. All morning there was a wind that reeked of November, and darkening skies. I was keen to catch the Cumberland and Westmorland wrestling. It started with a costume competition in which entrants posed in traditional gear, which comprises singlet and long johns with a pair of trunks on top, all of them handsomely embroidered with motifs. The sport is thought to have hints of Viking; the uniform seems to have Gypsy influences with an undertow of Turkish boudoir. It is not something one would lightly wear in places unfamiliar with the customs. To the intense irritation of some adherents, competitors are now allowed to wear conventional athletic gear to encourage newcomers sensitive to peer-group mockery. Yet the decoration, says Mike Huggins, was actually a concession to Victorian sensitivity: the bourgeoisie were shocked by the sight of men parading in what appeared to be their underwear.

  The style of wrestling involves standing with the torso at right angles to the lower body and proceeding in a manner that may be similar to the mating rituals of the praying mantis. The costume competition had just morphed into the actual wrestling, starting with the under-eights, and I was just starting to relish it all, when the threat changed to reality and the rain started, leading to an unseemly rush to the car parks, which, shamefacedly, I joined. The farmers had all come in Range Rovers; my pathetic little hire car was not going to stand much chance of escape when the fields churned up.

  This book, like life, is about what happened when I was busy making other plans. I decided to take one of England’s strangest roads, which passes between the carriageways of the M6, flanked by unfenced strips of moorland, grazed by sheep, the odd goat, and cattle wearing luminous collars, who are accustomed to plonk themselves on the tarmac and dare you to budge them. They would not attempt such a manoeuvre on the motorway, certainly not more than once.

  The lane leads to Scout Green, a rather Home Counties-sounding name for a hamlet in such a strange landscape. It is a good vantage point for anyone keen to ph
otograph the trains on the main line to Glasgow, making either the climb to Shap, infamous in steam days, or the thrilling, surging, swerving southward descent. It was when I emerged back on to the A6 that I saw the sign ‘Wet Sleddale’. It led to a car park by a reservoir.

  There was one other car here, inhabited by an elderly gent who wound down the window for a chat. ‘Is Sleddale Hall anywhere near here?’ I asked, carefully pronouncing it Sleddle, trying to fit in. He pointed across the far side of the reservoir, towards the beck that fed it, and a tumbledown cottage halfway up the hillside behind: the least stately home on the tourist map, a place some way below the National Trust’s radar screen.

  Yet Sleddale Hall attracts a steady stream of visitors because it played the role of Crow Crag, Uncle Monty’s rural slum in the cult film Withnail and I. The elderly gent turned out to be Bill Benson, who used to farm on the east side of the reservoir. He likes to come here, rather poignantly, as though hefted to the land like a Herdwick sheep. So he told me a bit of the story. Whatever hall-like pretensions Sleddale might have had were ruined, not just by normal agricultural decay, but because the reservoir ate up all the land on the valley floor in the 1960s. It is still said to be a wreck, though someone is supposed to have bought it to do it up, which might have seemed a good idea at the time, presumably a rare hot Westmorland day.

  ‘Do a lot of people go there?’

  ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘In summer.’

  Well, it was summer on some reckonings: the sun was shining at this point, the track looked puddled but passable, and it all seemed too serendipitous to miss. It has become a place of informal pilgrimage, like Jim Morrison’s grave or Ringo’s childhood home. Bruce Robinson, who directed the film, is a neighbour of mine: here was a chance for a little Sleddle-cred. So off I trotted, second-best brown brogues and all.

  The track grew vaguer and boggier. I pushed on across moss and rush and grass that occasionally subsided into swamp. After half an hour I was more in need of another visit to Bicester than bloody Sleddale, but I refused to be daunted. Finally, I and whatever was left of my socks and brogues reached the edge of Sleddale Beck and the ford that led straight up to the hall.

  What Bill had not mentioned was the effect of all the rain. The beck would have been easy enough to cross in trout fishermen’s waders, iffy in wellies, unthinkable in my rig-out.

  I gazed up at the hall, feeling like Moses denied access to the Promised Land, though as I recall Moses only had to go downhill, not trudge up a sodden fell with dusk approaching. And it seemed most improbable that Sleddale Hall had supplies of milk and honey.

  September 2012

  The High Cup winery failed to get a successful grape harvest even after the fine summer of 2013, ‘too cloudy late in the season,’ said the proprietor, Ron Barker. However, Barker managed to acquire grapes from locals who grow them in greenhouses, and was planning a grape wine to go with the likes of his damson, gooseberry and spiced beetroot. ‘Grapes are a bit of a novelty to be honest,’ he said. ‘Temperatures are not predicted to rise enough to make them reliable for another thirty years.’ A second Westmorland-owned service station opened in 2014 – on the M5 at Gloucester.

  19. Bowled by a floater

  HAMPSHIRE

  The admiral and I sat on the deck of the cruising yacht Seesaw, heading out towards the middle of the Solent. ‘Fifteen knots,’ he said, sniffing the wind and observing the flags. ‘Maybe eighteen. Bit stiff for small boats.’

  Seesaw was part of a flotilla of fifty or so vessels, half from the mainland, half from the Isle of Wight, converging on the Bramble Bank, aka the Brambles, a small hazard to shipping a mile and a half out from Cowes. We might have been rushing towards a minor international incident, a skirmish for seemingly useless territory to plant the flag and claim the drilling rights. We were in fact going to a cricket match. Of course.

  Almost all year the bank lurks just below the surface, the maritime equivalent of a golf bunker – a sand trap – ready to snare the unwary. Its greatest triumph was catching the QE2 on her final arrival into Southampton. But on the lowest of low tides, a handful of times a year, about an acre of terra firma will appear for around an hour. And, since 1972, on a day when one of the late summer spring tides reaches its ebb, the Royal Southern Yacht Club from Hamble and the Island Sailing Club from Cowes have met halfway for a brief and barmy contest.

  The game is not intended to be serious: no one keeps score and the winner is preordained – they take it in turns. But the occasion has its own rituals. Barbecues are often set up in the outfield; once there was an instant bar, complete with optics; I had heard stories of bikini-clad lovelies wandering around, serving champagne.

  This time, however, something felt wrong. We could see land ahead of us all right, but experience suggested that was the seemingly permanent island of Great Britain. Close at hand, what did we see? We saw the sea. Low water was supposed to be at 6.30; it was almost 6 o’clock. ‘Typical,’ moaned someone on board. ‘We spend 364 days a year avoiding the Brambles. When we want it, it isn’t there.’

  Moments later, it was possible to glimpse some figures in the sea. Further investigation suggested they were not swimming but wading – chest-deep: not ideal for cricket, but a start. Soon the little rigid inflatables – the ‘ribs’ – made a sort of landfall and the young men rushed into the waves, as if it were D-Day. The water declined from knee-deep to ankle-deep, and play of a kind began. A substantial group of people were clustered round the bat, though it was difficult to tell who was fielding, umpiring or spectating. They all appeared to be walking on water: the bank never appeared.

  Sadly, I was not among the throng. The kindly people from the Island Sailing Club had given me and my friend Hugh a cushy number by billeting us on the Seesaw to escape the buffeting on the ribs. But the wind was getting ever stiffer and time was too short; it was deemed too risky to extract supernumeraries on to first the ribs and then the cramped and crowded field. Even the Labrador, who was supposed to be the most important outfielder, never made it.

  So we sat, like staff officers, feeling dry, safe, cheated and guilty, next to the admiral, watching from afar. The admiral was not a naval admiral, in charge of whatever rust buckets and rowing boats the Royal Navy might still have had at its disposal in 2012, but Robin Aisher, Olympic yachting bronze medallist 1968, admiral of the Island club and a genial sort. He adored the Brambles: when he was racing, it gave him an advantage – he knew a safe short cut. He also said it really did have a bramble on it until the Great Storm of 1703, which he talked about as if at first-hand, making it sound like the hurricane of 1987 or last week’s thunderstorm.

  Aisher had played in the match every year until this one, having broken his wrist last time, aged seventy-seven, trying to chase a ball into the water instead of leaving it to the Labrador. But he was transfixed not by the game but by the fate of one of the ribs, which had got beached and then swamped. The Southampton harbour master and the Calshot lifeboat, which had been nonchalantly standing by, started to get serious. ‘Probably about twenty knots now,’ said the admiral. ‘Gusting twenty-five.’

  It was known from the start that the 2012 match might be a little iffy: the tide tables indicated that the ebb would not be as low as usual. And the situation was compounded by the westerly wind. ‘What we need for the cricket is a soft easterly,’ was the admiral’s judgement.

  But the game continued. It was essentially aerial, like baseball, and the batsmen kept hitting and running, if a little mincingly. At 6.35, just after scheduled low water, the sound of cheering rose from the players, and there was a scramble for the ribs. The stricken boat was somehow refloated. But another, containing eight humans and the unemployed Labrador, broke down on the way home. Some of the younger players were said to have contracted hypothermia, though these reports came from their mothers, who, I think, meant their boys felt cold. The gusts were nudging thirty now. Seesaw began to live up to its name.

  There was no champagne and no
bikinis back in the club bar. But there were pints of Young’s and plates of spaghetti vongole, and plenty of slightly rueful laughter. ‘A bit hairy going off,’ was the general verdict. ‘It was very disorientating going for a run because the water was going across you,’ reported one player.

  Drinking with the admiral was a grizzled seadog bearing a resemblance to Captain Haddock. This was another Robin, Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, the first man to sail single-handed and non-stop round the world, and not a man to be perturbed by minor difficulties in the Solent. However, he complained that he had been bowled by a ball that had floated on to his wicket, which he thought quite unfair. By the time he had finished telling the story he had also been caught after the ball bounced off two boats and a fielder’s head.

  I couldn’t see the injustice myself, either way. But wet bobs and dry bobs don’t mix very often. Cricket and yachting both take large chunks out of summer weekends, even if the bobbing is just round the Solent, never mind the world. Not sure Sir Robin was used to what happens on dry land. Well, relatively dry land.

  What this one annual event does is bring together what are perhaps Hampshire’s two most distinctive sporting elements: boats and cricket. The Solent is a narrow strait, almost wholly sheltered (except when I’m out there): ‘an inland sea’, the admiral called it. It also has a unique tidal pattern, so that sailing is both gentle and piquant.

  It is thought to have the greatest concentration of yacht clubs in the known world: sixty-six in Hampshire, including the island, and five major ones in Cowes alone, among them the Royal Yacht Squadron, whose baronial headquarters (address: The Castle, Cowes) dominates the waterfront with an air more forbidding than any mere fortification. Heaven help the invading navy that ever tried to get in that way without a specific invitation from a member. ‘Everyone in Cowes mixes together,’ one yachtie told me. ‘Except the Squadron.’