th October 2020.
A visit to the wild, ex-industrial coastal strip of Cumbria is always bracing . . . which has the observational texture of an outsider’s or tourist’s comment. While it’s true that this area was not bred in our family’s bone, since circumstances shifted us further west after a decade in the remote landscapes of the Northumberland and Westmorland fells, most of us have come to know it well.
Frizington centre
From the gardens and conservatories on slopes above Windermere to the kitchen sinks of Workington or Barrow[i], Cumbria’s rich/poor divide is acute. One of my sons has for some years lived in Millom, where the partially landscaped ‘slaggy’ left by extensive ironworks now otherwise vanished, rises at the end of the street. Millom lies on the western shore of the Duddon estuary, excluded, along with Haverigg prison, from the Lake District National Park. Travelling north under the 2000-foot brooding fell of Black Combe, from Silecroft to beyond R