Literary Landscapes and Broken Computers

September is here, and I am all behind-hand with everything, and my posts have been a little erratic – but the past few weeks seem to have been a permanent holiday, and we have had a wonderful time. First we took a trip to Cumbria, where I did lots of reading, but internet connections were virtually non-existent, so blogging was difficult. Then my mother came to stay, which was lovely, and then we went down to Devon to visit our elder daughter, and my laptop ceased to function at all. The Man Of The House got it up and running again once we were back home, and it operated, in somewhat idiosyncratic fashion, for a couple of days before deciding enough was enough. And, since it will not respond to instructions (you can turn it on, but that’s as far as it goes) I cannot use it or access anything on it, including my notes on the books I’ve read!

It was actually my younger daughter’s old computer, which I have been using because the monitor on my own machine is broken, it overheats, half the keys don’t work properly unless you hit them again and again and again, and it is v-e-r-y-v-e-r-y-s-l-o-w... So now I have two laptops, neither of which is any good. Anyway, in a bid to restore something resembling normal service, I am struggling to use the one with the broken monitor, but I am so cross about modern technology I can’t think straight, so this post is a bit of a mish-mash.

Visiting places always sets me thinking about the history, the people who lived there, and any literary connections there may be. Devon was easy: EM Delafield, author of the incomparable Provincial Lady, and Joyce Dennys, who wrote the equally funny ‘Henrietta’s War’, both lived in the county (Kentisbeare and Buddleigh Salterton), and I’m hoping to go to both places on a future trip.

Agatha Christie lived in Devon, and set
some of her novels there.

But, as I mentioned in my last (http://goo.gl/UR1qO), we did visit Bigbury-on-Sea, where we looked across the beach to Burgh Island, with its art deco hotel, which was the setting for two of her novels. And we walked on Dartmoor, on a bleak, windy day which, of course, made me think of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson striding across the moor in Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ , with its description of spooky Grimpen Mire.

Poet Ted Hughes (another of my favourites) hailed from Yorkshire, but lived in the Devon for many years, and the landscape inspired much of his work. And, of course, at the other end of the county is Exmoor, and the Valley of the Rocks, immortalised by RD Blackmoor in ‘Lorna Doone’, which is a fantastic read, and if you haven’t read it, you should.

‘Westward Ho!’, another tale of romance and adventure, was so popular that a village in Devon was named after it, complete with apostrophe! I just downloaded this from Project Gutenburg, for my Kindle, and realised that Charles Kingsley also wrote ‘Hereward, the Last of the English’, which I read and loved as a child, so I downloaded that too.

Finding literary connections with Cumbria sounds simple – after all, there are the Lakes, with Beatrix Potter (her home is a delight, and you can see the dolls’ house featured in Two Bad Mice) and Wordsworth (we once went to Dove Cottage, which was much smaller than I expected). Wordsworth’s friend and fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (whose work I’ve always preferred) lived at Keswick for a time. Later on in the 19^th century, John Ruskin - whose wife Effie ran off with Millais, the pre-Raphaelite painter - lived at Brantwood, overlooking Coniston Water, and there’s an interesting little museum about him in Coniston village. Coniston and Windermere feature in Arthur Ransome’s classic children’s stories, while Arthur Wainwright’s Guides are a joy to read, even if you are not a serious walker.

The end paper in Arthur Ransome's 'Swallows and Amazons'
shows the landscape he created, based on the Lake District.
Wildcat Islan is really Peel Island, in Coniston Water.

Melvyn Bragg, Broadcaster, journalist and novelist Melvyn Bragg born in Carlisle, set many of his novels in and around the Lake District. Much as I always enjoy his radio programmes, I have tried and failed to read his novels and never got beyond the first few pages.  

An illustration from The Tale of Two Bad Mice,
showing Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca inside
he dolls' house. We once saw the original huse
inside High Top, Beatrix Potter's former home.

We always stay in Barrow in Furness, where The Man Of The House was brought up and, as he always reminds me, until the new-fangled county of Cumbria was created, the Furness Peninsula was originally part of Lancashire, while the Lakes stretched across Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire, so the area is hard to place geographically. It would have been nice to find a writer from Furness, but the nearest to a ‘local’ author is poet Norman Nicholson, who died in 1987, and lived all his life in Millom, on the Duddon estuary. We went there once, years ago, and I keep meaning to go back, because I like Nicholson’s poetry, and think his work should be better known.

So there we are, a quick literary tour. I am sure there are there are authors and books I have forgotten to mention with connections to Devon or Cumbria, so if you think of something I should read, please add a comment!

A Place where Lepers were Outcast...

We passed this sign whilst out walking during our Cumbrian holiday. It's the name of an area, like a hamlet, which is certainly not big enough to be a village, and is now part of Ulverston. According to a local information leaflet, it was once the place where lepers were sent – cast out from the community where they lived before. However, there are no further details, and I'm having problems trying to find anything out, so I may contact the tourist office and see if they can recommend a local historian who may be able to help.

Anyway, the sign reminded me of 'The de Lacy Inheritance', written by my friend Elizabeth Ashworth, which has one of the most chilling openings I have ever read, with words taken from The Mass of Separation, which excluded lepers from family, home, society and church.

I'd never heard of this particular custom, so I looked it up, and found the ritual spoken by a priest even more horrifying than Elizabeth made it sound, with a curious incantatory quality, which reads like an ancient curse. It is hard to imagine listeners remaining unmoved by the rite, which banned lepers from any form of normal human contact – even touching the rim or rope of a well was forbidden unless the sufferer was wearing gloves. It must have been such a lonely life, cut off from everyone they knew and loved, unable to make a living or indulge in any leisure pursuits, and denied even the comfort of the church (although some places of worship had a special window, so sufferers could stand outside and listen to a service).

It made me realise what a terrible disease leprosy was in the days before drugs were available to cure it (it was well into the 20th century before this happened – Victoria Hislop's novel 'The Island' shows how attitudes changed). I always think of lepers living in special hospitals, or lazar houses as they were known, where they were cared for by monks, but I may have gleaned this idea from Ellis Peters' excellent Cadfael books, and I'm not sure how true it was. I understand there were also 'colonies' which were not attached to religious institutions, where sufferers lived as normally as possible, totally isolated from the rest of the world. Additionally, may beggars became became beggars, travelling from town to town, ringing a bell which warned others to keep away, eating scraps left out for them, and maybe staying the occasional night at a lazar house. For more Saturday Snapshots see  Alice's blog at http://athomewithbooks.net/

The Druid's Circle

The inner ring at The Druid's Circle, at Birkrigg Common,
near Ulverston, in Cumbria.

We have been away, hence the somewhat patchy posts and lack of response to comments last week – you might as well be in outer space as far as Internet connections go in parts of Cumbria. Anyway, we are back home now and, hopefully, normal service has been resumed, and I have some holiday pictures which I'm planning to show you as Saturday Snapshots, including these, which were taken at the Druid's Circle, at Birkrigg Common, which is near Ulverston, where Stan Laurel (of Laurel and Hardy) was born.

Me, walking around the inside.

We usually stay up there once a year, because the Man Of The House comes from Barrow in Furness, and still has friends and relatives in the area. Barrow is a ship-building town, and is not at all beautiful, but it's right at the top of Morecambe Bay, and the beaches are gloriously unspoilt, and it's very close to the Lake District (it only takes 20 or 30 minutes to drive to Windermere). The countryside is just incredible – you have to see it to believe it – and the nearby towns and villages are lovely. 

A closer view of two of the stones.

 This year we did lots of walking, and went to some places I'd never seen before, including this stone circle, which was almost hidden by the bracken and is, so we were told, much more visible during the winter, when the ferns die back. The grass inside the circle is kept short, but around it is a sea of very dense, very tall bracken, with wide grassy walkways through it. It was very lonesome, very wild, and very windy, and these prehistoric remains look like some kind of strange fairy circle, with stones sprouting up around the rim where there would normally be mushrooms - and it's on a slightly grander scale!

You can just see three of the stones in the outer ring,very
low down in the grass - almost at ground level.

It's a double circle, with 12 very weathered small stones forming an inner ring. The stones in the outer ring are difficult to count, because they are somewhat scattered, and even more weathered, and even smaller than the others. The circle is only about 27ft in diameter across the greatest part of the outer ring, and is believed to date from the Bronze Age, possibly from around 2,000 years BC. Apparently fragments of human bones were found in an urn during an excavation carried out in the early 20th century, and evidence of ancient fires was also uncovered. However the site remains as mysterious as other stone circles, and its significance is unknown. I have tried to do some research, but there doesn't seem to be much information available, and I can't discover whether it aligns in any way with the sun, moon, planets or stars. Some of the stones do line up with the spire of Bardsea Church and Chapel Island, and I think there is at least one old trackway nearby, but I don't know if Druid's Circle lines up with any other features in the landscape, or whether there are ley lines or anything like that.

This is another of the outer circle stones, right up against
the bracken, which stretches far as the eye can see.

It does feel very mysterious, and I imagine sunrise and sunset would be quite spectacular up here, but it would be a bit spooky in the dark, as its very isolated, with no lighting. The view down the hill to Bardsea village, Seawood, Bardsea Beach and out across Morecambe Bay was amazing, and I walked around the inner and outer rings, and stood in the centre, and tried to examine the stones, but it wasn't as peaceful as we expected, because a group of Scouts on an activity day were cooking soup on a little camp stove to one side of the circle. They were were very well behaved, and were no trouble, but they obviously thought I was nuts wandering round touching the stones! 

This was the view looking back over a gate as we walked up
to the stone circle. You can see Bardsea Church spire, and
Chapel Island, one of many tiny islands in Morecambe Bay.

There is a small road which runs up on to the common, quite near the stones, but it doesn't seem to be used much, and we walked along minor roads, tracks, footpaths and bridleways, going up and up and up, until we thought we couldn't go any further. It was tough going in places, because we are not really used to walking, and we are not very fit (our legs ached so much the next day), but we enjoyed looking at the wild flowers in the fields and hedgerows, and listening to the birds.  For more Saturday Snapshots see  Alice's blog at http://athomewithbooks.net/

*Information in this post was taken from the booklet 'Discovering Ulverston & Surroundings' by Jeff Chambers.