Yesterday I dropped my wife off for an hour in Newark-upon-Trent to do whatever wives do when they “go into town”, and with camera in my pocket I drove five or six miles down the A46 in search of a memorial. What I came away with was quite a surprise.

Having lived in this area for only seven years, and for the early years I was away travelling on business for much of the time, I can’t claim to be an expert on its local history. I was aware of a battle having been fought to the south of Newark during the fifteenth century Wars of the Roses but knew little about it.

At first attempt I missed the church of St. Oswald, down a narrow lane toward the Trent in East Stoke, but eventually found it on my way back toward the main road. The church building here is very ancient in its origins, although substantially rebuilt in the 1700s.

What I originally came to find was a memorial plaque bearing an inscription “Blessed are the peacemakers” (words of Jesus from the Gospel of St. Matthew). I found it, and the photograph above of the church shows at its far left the top of the statue rising out of the bushes. More on that in a later article. The thing that caught me by surprise, however, was a large stone plaque against the wall of the church itself.

As I’ve said, the fact of a battle was not new to me. What struck me was the sheer scale of the event. As I now know from further reading, in the space of just over three hours on June 16th 1487, in what today is a peaceful backwater overlooking the valley of the meandering River Trent, a total of 48,000 men fought so intensely that they left 7,000 dead behind them.

The Earl of Lincoln was in command of the Yorkist troops, a mixture of English rebels and Irish recruits backed by a mercenary force of Germans led by Colonel Martin Schwartz and funded by the dowager Duchess of Burgundy. The Yorkist rebellion had seemingly been defeated at the much better known Battle of Bosworth Field two years earlier. This was a ‘last-ditch’ attempt to gain the crown, and if successful the Earl of Lincoln was expected to be in a position of considerable power. It was not to be.

Although King Henry VII was present, and nominally at the head of his army, the effective military leader on the Lancastrian side was the Earl of Oxford. At first it appeared that the smaller number of Yorkist troops were about to prevail, but Oxford maneuvered skillfully and the King kept his throne.

In a field close by there is said to be another memorial stone with the inscription: “Here stood the Burrand Bush planted on the spot where Henry VII placed his standard after the Battle of Stoke (June 16 1487)” I haven’t seen that yet, and can feel another bout of exploration coming on. Map. More on the Battle. English Heritage Battlefield Register.

The copper mines around Coniston were worked from at least the middle of the 16th century and, with a number of breaks in production in between, up to end of the 19th when competition from high-grade ore imported from overseas killed this local Lake District industry.

Coniston Old Man, the mountain behind Coniston village, was a source of large amounts of copper ore. This ore was initially carried by pack horses to be processed at Keswick but from the 18th century onwards was transported by boat down Coniston Water and then carted by road to the coast.

Today the homes of generations of Coniston copper mine workers are mostly holiday cottages and the old mine workings are a tourist attraction, albeit mostly for those with enough energy to do some walking.

Anyone interested in old industries, or simply in the ways our forefathers earned their livelihood, or in the processes by which today’s Lake District landscape was shaped, will want to explore this aspect of Coniston’s past – either on the ground or in an armchair (see Coniston Copper Mines: A Field Guide by Eric G Holland).

I have today posted a new article on the Coniston coppermines on our main English Lakes web site, expanding on this fascinating aspect of Lake District history: .

Eric Holland’s much larger book, Coniston Copper: A History, gives a more extensive treatment of the subject. It is out of print but can still be found, albeit often quite expensive, at some book dealers either new or secondhand.

Back in the early-70s, when what is now Cumbria was spread between Cumberland, Westmorland, and parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire, I became a frequent user of the county record offices. What began as a family history search became a local history study, and I came to appreciate the great value of the archive services maintained and operated by our county councils. Students of Lake District history would be in great difficulties without them.

Life has changed since then. There was no such thing as a laptop computer, and any thought of a handheld pda such as a Palm or Blackberry was the stuff of science fiction. Search rooms were small, and one sat at tables with paper and pencil poring over boxes of papers – yes, the originals, not images on a screen. Such indexes as existed were typescripts, and much of the contents of many boxes had never yet been indexed.

Of course the functions of a county record office are wider ranging than to provide a service for amateur, or even professional, historians. The county archivist has statutory duties with respect to the documentation of the various local government bodies. Nevertheless what most people these days experience is the provision of information in the form of old, even ancient, documents recording the history of towns, villages, parishes, houses and families.

Those of us with an interest in Lake District history, or Cumbria family history outside the National Park, owe a great debt to the professionalism of the staff at the record offices in Carlisle, Kendal, Barrow and Whitehaven. They, however, need modern facilities in which to provide the ever more sophisticated services we ask of them.

It is good, therefore, to know that the building of the new state-of-the-art Carlisle record office is under way and completion is expected late in 2010. The major task of packing for the move is already in progress. Apparently volunteers to help with this massive “house move” are still being sought. Click here for more details if you’re interested.

Recently I travelled up to the Lake District in the north of England to visit an elderly maiden aunt.  I say, “elderly,” but that’s not really an adequate expression.  She’s approaching a hundred and two years old.   She still has a lively interest in the doings of her large brood of nephews and nieces, and the even larger numbers of great- and great-greats as well.  But also she thinks a lot about the past.

Having been born in 1907 there’s a lot of past for her to think about, and her memory is still amazingly intact.  Old photographs fascinate her, and this made me think of how important it is to record in writing for future generations something about those people on the sepia tinted pictures of yesteryear before no-one any longer has a clue who they were.

Memories, of course, often involve places as well as people. In family collections it is often the snaps of people rather than places that have survived. Photos of fondly remembered places as they were many years ago are often limited to a few creased old postcards. Occasionally a treasure hoard of old photographs is discovered and what memories they bring flooding back as they appear in the local newspaper.

Windermere, Sunset 1926.
Reproduced courtesy of Francis Frith.

The English Lake District for a century and a half has been one of the most photographed areas of Britain.  How good it is to know that many photographs – of lakes, rivers, towns, villages and individual buildings – have survived and are available to massage the memories of generations of lovers of Lakeland.

Holidays past, childhood homes, honeymoons among the mountains, visits to grandparents, sunny afternoons rowing on Derwentwater, the “steamers” on Windermere, paddling in the Rothay and scrambles up Scafell; all these and more come back to life through an old photo on the wall.

Increasingly, as photos of distant places long ago become conveniently traceable over the Internet, people living even thousands of miles across the world’s oceans can find and acquire beautifully printed copies of these records of the past.  More and more homes around the world are displaying fondly a picture of England’s Lake District, a valued legacy from the photographers of generations past.

—
David Murray, a native of Cumbria, is owner of a growing portfolio of niche websites including some about the English Lake District.  thelakedistrict.inoldphotos.com and lakes.around-england.co.uk are two of his sites about which he is especially enthusiastic.

In a previous posting I mentioned recently visiting the Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway after staying overnight at Muncaster Castle.  During the same trip, while further north, I had a chance to slip into Michael Moon’s bookshop in Whitehaven.  I’d not gone for anything in particular but enjoyed maybe thirty minutes just browsing around and came out with a small paperback book about the Coniston railway.

Nowadays many people may be surprised to know that Coniston ever had a railway, but in fact for almost a hundred years there was a branch line from Foxfield through Torver to Coniston.  The Coniston copper mines were the principal reason for its existence in the early days but by the time it was eventually functioning in 1859 cheaper sources of copper were available from other areas of the world (globalisation is nothing new!) and in later years it became principally a tourist line – a wonderful entry point to the southwestern Lakes and, although popular, far less crowded than Windermere.

Personally I recall travelling on it as a child, catching the train from Askam, on the southern shore of the Duddon estuary with my grandfather and changing at Foxfield for the short trip up to Coniston.
That was in the early 50s. The line became seriously uneconomical and closed to passengers in 1958.

I may eventually write something more extensive on our main Lake District web site, but for the moment will finish by recommending anyone interested in old Lakeland railways to buy:

The Coniston Railway by Robert Western (ISBN: 978 0 85361 667 2) from Amazon.co.uk. (By the way, if Amazon says they have none look below the “out-of-stock” paragraph; there may be Amazon 3rd party dealers with copies; that was the case when I checked just now).

It was the year before I was married. (I’ll let you work out when that was; I’m just indicating that it was well within living memory). Windermere was frozen over for several weeks during that winter, and for the first time for many years it was safe to skate over large areas of its surface.

Going back a bit further – that is, a few thousand years – not only was the lake frozen, but it was under several hundred feet of ice as the glaciers of the most recent ice age (I won’t say “the last”, as it might not be, in spite of what we’re told about global warming) …. Anyway, as I was saying, just over ten thousand years ago Windermere was under a massive glacier.

Strictly speaking that isn’t true, for at that time there was no Windermere. There were two much smaller lakes, one up at the Ambleside end, and another down toward Newby Bridge. In between the two, Claife Heights (now on the western side of northern Windermere) and Cartmel Fell (now on the eastern side of southern Windermere) were joined together in one continuous belt of hills, and the two lakes were in totally separate valleys ….. although both valleys were invisible under the cold solid white stuff.

As the glacier crawled its way down toward the sea at Morecambe Bay it carved a swathe through the hillside and allowed the waters of the two lakes (once they’d thawed, centuries later) to run together and create a single lake, the longest in England, that we now know and love as Windermere.

My bookcases have for decades now carried a wide range of books about the Lake District. However, I have very few that focus on just a single lake … because there are very few such books in existence. There is, however, an excellent book about Windermere: Portrait of Windermere, by Christopher Taylor. I bought mine twenty-five years ago when it first came out and have dipped into it repeatedly down the years. The paragraphs above owe much to my most recent dipping.   Click on the title or the graphic above to find a copy through Biblio.com

Or click on this link for more on other Lake District Books

That’s all for now,

- David Murray -
England’s Lakes

I have for many years found it fascinating to look at the different kinds of traditional buildings in the Lake District, Since the 1970s I have often carried with me a copy of R. W. Brunskill’s paperback field handbook, Vernacular Architecture of the Lake Counties.

Another book that has been on my shelves for more than twenty-five years is Palmer’s Historic Farmhouses in and around Westmorland, which I find especially interesting as my own forebears at various times down the centuries have lived in two of the featured properties.

An early-1990s work is Susan Denyer’s Traditional Buildings & Life in the Lake District, and even more recent (2006) is Brunskill’s Traditional Buildings of Cumbria.

Three of these can be found on the secondhand network although the Palmer book is rare and pricey (try our book search page at BrunleaBooks for access to several large networks of independent dealers around the world) whereas the latest Brunskill book can be bought new from Foyles of London, and when I last looked there was a good discount.

- David Murray -
England’s Lakes

Twenty-five years ago and more I was spending a large proportion of my professional life in the Lake District, driving up most days from Blackburn where I then lived and often staying overnight in Carlisle, or Keswick, or over in the west of the region at Eskdale Green.

I’d known the southern areas and fringes of the Lake District, the parts in Lancashire and Westmorland, fairly well from a very young age as my family came from there and I spent many childhood holidays by the Duddon and on my uncle’s farm at Gawthwaite. Now, however, in the early-80s my involvement as an adviser to several large clients, including major aspects of the economic and administrative development of the ten-year-old county of Cumbria, meant that I had to learn about it from a wide variety of other perspectives.

The late Dr. William Rollinson of the University of Liverpool was immensely helpful to the team that I was leading, briefing us on the economic and social history of the region. On my Lake District Squidoo lens I’ve given some prominence to one of Bill’s later books, his updated edition of Collingwood’s classic, The Lake Counties, sadly now out of print but sometimes available on the secondhand market. Click above on the title to see if there’s a copy available on Biblio.com. If not, try here at Amazon.co.uk

A book which I bought at the time and devoured as part of my personal briefing was by two other academics, John Marshall and John Walton, both from the University of Lancaster. The Lake Counties from 1830 to the mid-twentieth century is 300 pages of concentrated information and insight on the development of this part of the country and, unlike much academic output, is highly readable.

Click on the link above to see whether there’s currently a copy available. If you want to understand the Lake District and the past couple of centuries of its development this is, in my opinion, a “must-read”.

[Note: I have never had a problem in buying secondhand books from any book dealer over the internet, but please note carefully what the seller says about the edition and the condition.]

- David Murray -
England’s Lakes