Engel's England

by Matthew Engel

  On such a day, we could hardly be alone, but the company was never overwhelming. And what also struck me, as other walkers overtook us (which most of them did), was their capability, their good nature, their responsibility. It was an honour to be among them. There were a couple of plastic bottles at the summit, and one of my satsumas rolled fifty feet down a precipice into Ruddy Ghyll, where it bobbled beguilingly for a long time. That aside, there was almost no litter anywhere.

  Except that God had indeed dumped all his builders’ rubble here instead of hiring a skip. At first, along the valley, the view was dominated by the green mass of Great End ahead of us. It was Great, but very far from the End. All this time, Scafell Pike, instead of dominating the landscape, was maintaining its distaste for publicity, remaining totally invisible. But then we reached the mountainside Piccadilly Circus of Esk Hause. Anselm pointed to an outcrop beyond a stony plateau. ‘There it is,’ he said.

  Herein lay my one bleak but indisputable triumph. I knew nothing of the terrain, but consider myself expert in identifying the too-good-to-be-true. I seized the Wainwright: ‘Ill Crag is prominently in view from the section between Esk Hause and Calf Cove. It is the highest thing in sight, and wishful thinkers will assume it to be the summit – until the Pike itself is finally revealed, indisputably higher and still far distant across a waste of stones.’ Moral superiority was some compensation for the hour that preceded the final ascent, which comprised mostly what Wainwright called ‘delectable clambering’, the adjective not being the one that sprang to my mind.

  Someone had told me you could always find the summit of Scafell Pike, even in thick mist, by the sound of cheering and popping champagne corks. But it wasn’t like that. There were thirty or forty people up there, and a few dogs (on leads, as per the only instruction). The mood was contented, excited even, but not triumphalist. There was a pervading sense of respect for the place: hardly any graffiti on the stones even – one said ‘DEAN & STE’, as though the writer had been caught in the act and urged to desist.

  There was also, very touchingly, a framed wedding photo, late 1940s at a guess, placed on the flat-topped cairn which is much favoured for souvenir pictures and takes the 3,209 feet of the summit to about 3,213. Otherwise there were just a few windbreaks, roughly constructed from the stones, and the trig point. No information, other than the misleading sign built into the cairn, which serves as both a First World War memorial and a record of the land being given to the nation by Lord Leconfield. No café, no railway station – the English leave such fripperies to Snowdon – not even a guide to the view: Wainwright’s monopoly of the wisdom is unchallenged.

  So everyone just ate their sandwiches and pointed to the panorama. There was a touch of heat haze rendering Mont Blanc, Everest and Australia invisible, but still: Skiddaw and Derwentwater to the north; Windermere and the Pennines to the east; Morecambe Bay and the real Scafell to the south; Sellafield and the Isle of Man to the west. Then people began pointing upwards, puzzlingly, towards the few fluffy clouds. And there, way, way above us, was a lone paraglider. Bloody typical. No matter how high you get, there will always be some swine who outdoes you.

  The descent was very untriumphant. I queried Anselm’s navigation, this time wrongly, thus forfeiting the moral high ground while still hugging the actual high ground by lagging behind. I had long stopped worrying about my back and knee but everything else was hurting, most particularly my left big toe, which is a very Scafell Pike-ish kind of injury. As you tire, you start bashing the stones more and more often.

  There seems to be some kind of mountain truism here: the descent is always harder. Mentally, you’ve done it and imagine yourself home. The world starts to intrude on your thoughts. And, gravitationally, a slight stumble is now more likely to be disastrous, as suggested by the fate of the satsuma. We took longer going down than up.

  But, as Sir Edmund Hillary put it in more trying circumstances, ‘we knocked the bastard off’. Anselm was congratulatory. No one back home seemed impressed by what I had done; I was, though. Next morning I sat, achey but self-satisfied, in the garden by Crummock Water belonging to the Lakesman and writer Hunter Davies, who once published three bestsellers in a year. I mentioned the difficulties of descending.

  ‘It’s a metaphor for fame and life,’ he said sagely. ‘The fun and satisfaction is getting there. But coming down is hard.’

  A couple of months earlier, in a bitter-cold March when the snow was still on the bottoms as well as the tops, I had come to Keswick, where a big man in claret breeches praised the ‘purity of the lakes and the pointed mountains’ and raised his arm roughly in the direction of the four peaks that overlook the town, and rolled them round his tongue: ‘Catbells, Glaramara, Skiddaw, Blencathra’. His view was somewhat obscured, not just by the mist, snow, murk and dark, but because he was on stage and pointing at Row L in the back of the stalls.

  The role was that of Francis Herries: ‘Rogue Herries’, protagonist of Cumberland’s most famous saga, which was being dramatised in one of Britain’s most remarkable playhouses, the Theatre by the Lake. The building, though new, is attractive. But in other British theatres the architecture and stage design do not have to compete with such a brilliant backdrop outside. Other theatres tend not be to be seventeen miles from a railway station. Nor set in towns like Keswick, with a population below 5,000. Nor quite so far from a serviceable pair of spare underpants, never mind claret breeches. Keswick has dozens of shops selling anoraks, parkas, cagoules, wind jackets, fleeces and what-have-you. The nearest M&S is another seventeen miles away, in Workington.

  Since Rogue Herries required, as well as the eight professional actors, more than thirty locals on stage as extras and chorus, this meant the ratio of performers to a full house was about 1:10 and to the town’s entire population not far off 1:100. Artistically, Rogue Herries may not have been the theatre’s finest achievement – there were times when it seemed to be going on longer than the entire eighteenth century in which it was set. It was, though, a triumph of ambition, even audacity, enterprise and local pride. A triumph of planning too, though everything at this theatre constitutes that.

  The spring show, designed mainly for local consumption, is nothing to the summer season, which runs from May to November (a somewhat optimistic length for a Cumberland summer) and involves, in a manner unmatched in England, an extraordinary self-imposed challenge. Six plays run in repertoire, as opposed to repertory – two a night, one in the main house, one in the little studio – with fourteen actors engaged for the duration to appear every night in one or the other. Just casting the plays is an extraordinary balancing act between the artistics and the logistics. If Keswick did have a railway, it would be a doddle to run in comparison.

  Somehow it all works. Since the current building opened in 1999, the theatre has always turned a profit; its grants make up only a small proportion of its revenue, giving it a solidity many bigger theatres would envy. The trick, says Patric Gilchrist, the executive director, is the balance. ‘In the main house we give them what you might call “take the money and run”. In the studio we find that anything with a warning about language and content goes down particularly well.’

  I think Gilchrist was being unduly self-deprecating: Oliver Goldsmith in the main house is not unambitious. But it seems to me that Keswick’s theatre may have found a virtuous circle to go with the dress circle. If the summer is fine the town is packed with tourists; if it’s not, then those who are there will need to find somewhere dry, and where better?

  On midsummer evenings it is still light when the interval comes, and it is possible to wander outside with a G&T and stare at Derwentwater and Catbells etc. It struck me that Gilchrist had missed a trick. He could have saved on the set for Rogue Herries and staged the play even more spectacularly outside, on the little lakeside beach with the waters lapping the shore. True, cast and audience would have got hypothermia. And I suppose drama here will always require a balance between artistics and logistics.


  When Herries talked about the county in his play, he knew where he was: ‘Half the girls in Cumberland have wanted to marry my son,’ he said. These days the word Cumberland has almost totally disappeared. Outside the county it conjures up only a sausage. Inside, the name has gone far more completely even than Westmorland. In 2013 there was still the Cumberland News, the minor county cricket club and the Cumberland Building Society. Not much else.

  Of the new county names instituted in 1974, nearly all are already consigned to the dustbin of history: Cleveland is back in Ohio; Avon is just a river again. None gained such widespread acceptance as – I will try to say this without obvious distaste – ‘Cumbria’. Here, in a manner I otherwise experienced only in Huntingdonshire, I felt like a throwback, a refugee from the past. When I said in advance to the locals, ‘I’m coming up to Cumberland’, they would reply, ‘Oh, you’re coming to Cumbria, are you?’

  This is partly because the name is perceived to have historic resonance, dating back to the Dark Ages; partly because, even before 1974, it was already being used as a generic term for the Lake District; partly because Cumbrian was previously used as the adjective for someone from Cumberland; and partly because Cumbria has, more than any other modern entity, found itself on the news for countywide catastrophes: foot and mouth in 2001; the floods of 2009; a mass shooting in 2010.

  But also Cumbria represents Cumberland’s imperialist triumph: incorporating the whole of Westmorland, a slice of Lancashire and a soupçon of eviscerated Yorkshire, which was rendered into the Poland of English local government. If you’re Cumbrian, especially a Cumbrian councillor, what’s not to like?

  Personally, I love the rolling syllables of the old name: one can almost hear Herries’s horse galloping over the moor or John Peel’s view-halloo: Cum-ber-land. A land, not an ‘ia’, a real place. The Wikipedia page for Cumbria has to warn people not to confuse it with Cumbia (a Latin American dance), Umbria (Italy) or Cambria (the classical name for Wales).

  And, as I understand it, the alleged Dark Ages history is largely mythical. It hinges on the legend of Dunmail, now referred to as the last king of Cumbria, supposedly killed in AD 945 on Dunmail Raise, the hillock on the A591 separating Cumberland’s Thirlmere from Westmorland’s Grasmere. But his very existence is dubious, and Professor Angus Winchester of Lancaster University said on Radio 4 that the geography is misleading: ‘Even in the tenth century there was no suggestion really that Dunmail’s territory extended into the southern half of what is now Cumbria. So calling Kendal and Barrow and Millom part of Cumbria is probably a complete misnomer historically.’

  Wordsworth refers to Dunmail as

  He who once held supreme command,

  Last king of rocky Cumberland.

  And people with a sense of place still see the Raise as a significant boundary. ‘“There’s nowt good comes over t’Raise,” we always say,’ the Keswick-based writer Keith Richardson told me. ‘And I’m sure they say the same thing in Westmorland.’

  There is nothing left there now to advertise the Raise’s significance to the casual motorist, just a discreet water treatment plant and an antique AA phone box. Not even a Dunmail Theme Park and Souvenir Shop. And certainly not a county boundary sign. You could whizz through and think Dunmail Raise was an offer of improved pensions to retired postmen. Cumberland existed as a recorded entity from 945 to 1974. Its abolition was classically English: thoughtless and pointless.

  Even in its historic form, the county was always an uneasy coalition. There is Carlisle, shorn of its medieval strategic importance. It lies there, making McVitie’s ginger nuts and custard creams, with a pleasant but pint-sized cathedral and a well-preserved castle, awaiting the day – should Scotland choose independence – when it can become England’s El Paso or Panmunjom. There is the fat arable land of the Eden Valley. Avoid the M6 and take the ubiquitous A6 from Carlisle to Penrith, and you pass the smuggest-looking farms in the kingdom, so neat an errant buttercup would be shot on sight.

  There is the tourist country of the Lakes, and even that may be divided into two: the lowlands of the coach parties, and the lonely tracks. You can switch from one to the other quite rapidly: straight after leaving the hordes in Buttermere, you can turn on to the Newlands Pass and fancy yourself the last motorist on earth.

  And there is West Cumberland: a coast that is at once industrialised and undiscovered; repellent and ravishing. The towns race each other to the reputational bottom; each knowledgeable local has their own unfavourite. Cumbrians competed to feed me names of places that they assured me were the pits of the earth, all in places where the earth no longer supports pits: Frizington, Rowrah, Cleator, Cleator Moor … But I couldn’t quite see it. Every ex-mining village in England exudes despair: voting for only one party, their people can thus safely be forgotten by all of them. Yet these, set between the sea and the mountains, all had a strange, savage beauty about them.

  The big coastal towns turned out to be sharply differentiated, one from the other. I had a strong childhood holiday memory of Dad driving us from Westmorland to Whitehaven for Sunday lunch: a hotel with a view out to sea over vast railway sidings full of coal wagons; and my mum asking the receptionist the way to the promenade, to be greeted with a you-must-be-out of-your-mind kind of look. (No one I found could remember such a hotel, suggesting it was me who was out of my mind.)

  Whitehaven lives up to its name in several ways. It is less than 1 per cent non-white. It also has the most sensational setting. Given a different industrial history, culture and above all climate, this might have had not just any promenade but one for the beau-monde: the Monte Carlo of the North, a Cumbrian Cannes. There but for fortune. It has improbable admirers: Candida Lycett Green (John Betjeman’s daughter) of The Oldie fell in love: ‘A tremendous place … one of the best and most undiscovered Georgian towns in the country’. But being undiscovered, no one cherishes it, and the buildings are shabby.

  Its neighbour Workington is bedevilled by its unlovely name, though working would be a fine thing for people in its more deprived wards. And it looks away from the sea, gazing mainly at its own not very pretty navel. Yet in Portland Square it has a cobbled, tree-lined piazza of exceptional charm, not so much Cumbria as Umbria (or Umberland).

  Further up the coast is Maryport, where in 1979 the Guardian sent their reporter Melanie Phillips. ‘The inhabitants appear to be paralysed by apathy,’ she announced. The only virtue she could find in a town of dismal poverty was that there was little juvenile delinquency: ‘Social workers say that the children do not have enough spirit or initiative to get into trouble.’ Maryport roused itself enough to complain furiously. Now it has a new aquarium and the beginnings of touristy self-confidence. And it really does have a promenade, though everyone else on it seemed to know each other. The toilets had been vandalised and locked up. ‘Kids!’ said a kindly local, advising me to piss in the bushes. In context, this suggests the new generation may be more energetic.

  In fact, this whole coast is less poverty-stricken than one might expect. There is one reason for this. I discovered it by taking the slow coastal train down from the little resort of St Bees (best known as the start of the coast-to-coast walk) alongside a beach so stony it might have been Scafell-Pike-on-Sea. Then we stopped at the least welcoming station in all England: Sellafield.

  Once the HQ of Britain’s nuclear industry, Sellafield was known as Windscale and had a visitors’ centre. It no longer bothers. I was told to expect armed guards. I saw none, though I expect they saw me. The perimeter fence was high, and topped with razor wire, and the guardhouses made Checkpoint Charlie look like Liberty Hall. But, oddly, a short distance away there was an open gate in the fence, unattended, seemingly unnoticed.

  I did consider exploring the possibilities: marching into the control room like Homer Simpson and pressing buttons at random. But it would be cruel to try to mess up Cumberland’s grand projet: Sellafield still employs 10,500 people directly, plus about 1,500 contractors, which, si
nce the meltdown of Ford Dagenham, makes it the largest single-site source of employment in the country. But perhaps trespass might not have been that easy. And the last train back to St Bees was at 18.27 and the conversation with the armed guards might have involved missing it. Such a discussion could go very badly for anyone wearing a ‘No Nukes’ T-shirt.

  Most of West Cumberland loves Sellafield, even though it does not produce power any more; it merely reprocesses spent nuclear waste. It is a symbol of modern working life: most of us spend our days doing very little of what we were designed to do, we merely try to clear our inbox. Final site clearance at Sellafield is scheduled for 2120, even more distant than at Dungeness.

  There were two Windscale piles, where the plutonium for Britain’s nuclear weaponry was developed. No. 2 has been dismantled but no. 1 remains, because that was the site of the infamous fire of 1957, which did more than anything to discredit nuclear power in Britain – Windscale became so notorious it had to be rebranded – and there are still about thirty tons of melted, contaminated fuel at the bottom.

  As the train drew away, two other beacons in the landscape came into view briefly, before disappearing into cloud: Scafell Pike and Scafell. Both, with luck, will still be there after 2120, probably along with my unemptied inbox.

  The most impressive and distinctive inhabitants of Cumberland have four legs not two, and that is not a mutation caused by nuclear fallout. These are the 50,000 Herdwick sheep which graze the very summits of all the fells, avoiding Scafell Pike only because it grows rocks instead of grass.

  They are extraordinary-looking beasts, with a fleece so thick it is useless to anyone else but damn useful to them on a winter’s night. Their meat, however, is gamy and much valued, even though the animals are tough as old boots. The ewes have white faces and mostly off-white wool to go with their aquiline noses, erect ears and fetching little topknot. Yet their lambs are generally all-black, making the fellsides the most multiracial-looking place in the county, until they grow lighter with age.