I’m just back from a visit to Ennerdale – one of the most beautiful and least changed valleys in Lakeland. BBC TV’s Countryfile had called to ask if I’d be filmed talking about Tom Rawling, the wonderful Ennerdale poet, beside How Hall,the farmhouse where he spent so much of his childhood. (The programme goes out on 19 Feb. 2012).

How Hall, the Ennerdale farm where Rawling spent much of his childhood

Rawling (1916-96) was a magnificent poet – perhaps Cumbria’s best 20th century poet in my view – and, though largely forgotten at the end of his life, he’s been undergoing a renaissance of appreciation since his poems were reissued by the Lamplugh and District Heritage Society in 2009. The name may sound parochial, but believe me Rawling is a fine and perhaps major poet, bringing to life in vividly textured words the farming life of an earlier generation, the landscape and the fishing. All of it, as you read, is gritty and real enough to get your hands on, and profoundly beautiful at the same time.

(Do email stanandmarina@aol.com and get hold of a copy of his poems – it’s only £7.50 and I’m sure will become a collector’s item in the future.)

 I enjoyed meeting a very friendly BBC team, including producer Dean Jones and presenter Ellie Harrison, and despite the cameras, radio mics and freezing temperature we talked pretty spontaneously in the sunshine and open air, with a rich authentic odour of cow muck in the background (the farmer was manuring his fields at the time).

After filming I had a wonderful walk in the freezing air and bright sunshine around Ennerdale Water.

And the previous day, I’d taken time out to walk up in the snow to Bowscale Tarn, that amazingly dark, melancholy and beautiful place. I’ll put some pictures in here.

Snow on Haycock across Ennerdale Water; Angler's Crag in middle distance

Bowscale Tarn: a study in subtle blacks and whites just before sunset

Rose Castle: A Gem of the Northern Lakes

Rose Castle is a gem of northern Cumbria – a beautiful house centring on a pele tower built in the 1340s and once the palace of the Bishops of Carlisle.  It belongs to the Church. But there is now a threat that within about one week it will be sold to the highest bidder with no arrangements for public access and little protection for its future. Yet there is a plan to take care of its financial liabilities and allow public access to this beautiful and tranquil place.

Please read the information below and sign the petition at www.friendsofrosecastle.org  NOW before it is too late.

I first discovered Rose Castle when I was researching my Literary Guide to the Lake District: Coleridge and the Wordsworths went there on their way to Scotland in 1803 and Coleridge wrote in his notebook:

“We are delighted with Rose Castle, the thickset green Fence to the garden, the two walls, the lower making a terrace / the House, the Orchard crowding round it – The Chestnuts – the masses of Ivy over the gateway, from one great root. This stands on the other side of the wall to my left as I face the gateway – Go in, the ivy over the Coach-House, belonging to the same mass – the horns of the dark old mulberry Tree among it – the Swallows & their Shadows on the Castle-House walls – the green shaven Bank, like the roof of a House between the main Building & the Castle, properly so called / the great Nets on this castle, to cover the fruit Trees – all, all perfect – Cottage Comfort & ancestral Dignity!”  – Coleridge, Notebooks, 1427.

Here is what my friend Philippa Harrison has written about the house and its peril:

LAST CHANCE TO SAVE ROSE CASTLE FOR THE NATION?
Only one building represents the unique history of the establishment of a Border between Scotland and the North West of England, Rose Castle, created for the Bishopric of Carlisle to administer the “lands which were Scottish”, before Cumbria finally became English a hundred years later than the rest of the country. Also the preeminent English castle in the medieval Scottish wars and reiver skirmishes in the North West, Rose is the only remaining monument to our turbulent border history there. Its retention, with public accessabilty and as an educational resource, is vital for the maintenance of any sort of national historical perspective.

Although today Rose, its land and gardens, have a wonderful, indeed exceptional, sense of serenity and calm, it mirrors the development of national and dynastic struggle, architectural taste and the role of the Church in England since the Norman Conquest. Now the castle mainly reflects the Gothic Revival style, its chapel well recognised as an outstanding example. But there remain the pele towers and the crenellations of the fourteenth century when Rose was burnt three times within twenty-five years only to rise again each time, phoenix-like, to become a symbol of triumph over adversity. Later besieged, taken and burnt in the Civil War, Rose was rebuilt by the Cumbrian people yet again while secular castles were abandoned and left wasted.

In this sense Rose belongs to its people, a people easily ignored by the distant centres of governance. Since Rose was decommissioned as the Bishop’s see-house , it has been made clear to the Church Commissioners that there is a local plan for removing all financial liabilities for the castle from them if they so wish, a plan which will preserve the spiritual, historic and educational value of Rose for future generations. To achieve it, everyone needs to work together. However within ten days the Church Commissioners appear to be intending to recommend that Rose goes under the hammer with no stipulations about public accessibility, educational use, use of the chapel or the great public rooms.

This situation is of paramount importance for the North of England, a travesty of natural justice and a betrayal of eight centuries of care from the bishops of Carlisle and the Cumbrian people.

Only public protest about disposal without any guarantee of the preservation of a unique resource for the public good has any chance of affecting the outcome. A petition at friendsorrosecastle.org has been hastily set up. Every press comment about the importance of Rose for the national heritage will count.

The Bishop of Carlisle has written that he very much hopes “ that a really worthwhile use for Rose can be found”. Amen.

It turned out to be totally gripping. Young had been a pioneer of mountaineering and a brilliant climbing writer, a heroic ambulance driver in World War I (where he lost a leg) and after the war pioneered mountaineering with an artificial leg. He had many German friends, and worked secretly with Germans opposed to Hitler to try and bring about the dictator’s downfall. His exploits were incredible, literally, and Hankinson’s book brought the whole thing to life, telling the story with such verve that I couldn’t stop reading.

But also the book reminded me of Alan. I first met him when I gave a talk on Thomas De Quincey in Cockermouth in 1981. Alan was a deep-voiced, jovial, lionlike chap with a mane of white hair: hugely well-read, deeply friendly, vastly intelligent and entirely likeable.

After that I bumped into him quite often around Cumbria (he lived in Skiddaw Street, Keswick); we talked about this project and that, and I was delighted when he won prizes for his wonderful book Coleridge Walks the Fells, in which he retraced the course of Coleridge’s great 1802 walk around the Western Lakes, comparing how places are now to how they were then. The book is a classic.

When I came to write my own Literary Guide to the Lake District he took a great interest – and showed it with practical help. One day I phoned him and asked if he remembered whether a particular plaque was still at the top of Grisedale Hause – because last time I was up there, I’d forgotten to check, and I needed to know for the book. There was something similar that I’d neglected at the summit of Great Gable too. The upshot was that Alan said ‘Don’t worry, I’ll go up and take a look, and let you know.’

When my book came out I was able to thank ‘Alan Hankinson, who with memorable generosity volunteered to climb both Grisedale Hause and Great Gable to find things I had forgotten to look for.’

Alan was himself of course a fine climber and The First Tigers, his history of the beginnings of british rock-climbing, is another classic and fascinating even if you’ve never set foot on a mountain. In fact, it’s hard not to keep throwing in the word ‘classic’ when writing about Alkan: he wrote so well, telling so many stories that needed to be told, and produced the perfect book on each one.

He was loyal too. Towards the end of his life he turned up more than once at poetry readings I gave at Dove Cottage and elsewhere, although he clearly wasn’t well and admitted that he was finding it difficult to write. And yet really I must have been someone he knew only peripherally, an occasional contact. But the thing about Alan was that when you met him his warmth and interest made you feel that you and he had always known each other.

Alan died, sadly, in 2007 and I didn’t hear about it until some time afterwards. Only when I read the obituaries and found out abaout his amazing career in TV, film, radio and journalism, and his war service with the Gurkhas, did I realise how many other aspects he had besides those I’d seen.

Earlier this year I was asked to run a course on English Literature for trainee Blue Badge Guides. It turned out that my predecessor in the job had been Alan. I felt proud, as well as a bit intimidated, to find I was stepping into his shoes. It certainly gave me something to live up to, though I didn’t do the job with a pint always at my elbow, as I’m told Alan used to!

Sadly his books (apart from two US publications on American Civil War battles – yes, he was an expert on that as well!) seem to be out of print. A bit of a scandal really when you know how good they are. Alan deserves to be better known. Some enterprising publisher should at least put out digital reprints of The First Tigers, Coleridge Walks the Fells, and his biography of Young. Meanwhile, I never go to Keswick without thinking of him and missing that deep-voiced laugh, and that encyclopedic knowledge of literature and the Lake District. Here’s to you, Alan, and thanks for telling so many great stories.

Packhorse bridge over Watendlath Beck

It was lovely to revisit Watendlath – one of my favourite places, with its old stone buildings, little packhorse bridge and tranquil tarn under the mass of the fells – especially outside the tourist season, when the place was practically empty and the loudest sound was the flock of insistent chaffinches hustling me for sandwich crumbs. But sadly I didn’t go for a long walk because it was simply too wet and the visibility was too restricted. Next time, I hope!

Fold Head Farm: used by Walpole as the model for Judith Paris's farmhouse

Eric and I talked under the overhanging roof of a barn, to keep ourselves and the microphone out of the rain. (The producer, Barney Rowntree from production company Somethin’ Else, wasn’t so lucky: he stood outside, holding said mic!) Walpole was an immensely popular writer in the late 1920s and the 1930s, but has been neglected since his death and is mainly remembered now for his sequence of novels about the Herries family, set in Cumberland.

The Herries Chronicle is unevenly written,  and while Walpole writes excellently about the landscape, he doesn’t always show much understanding of real Cumbrian concerns like farming. But the books are well worth reading for their drama, their incredible visual imagination, their narrative drive, and notably for Walpole’s amazing imagination for the grotesque and terrifying. He’s a superb Gothic writer: death, withcraft, hallucinations, madness, violence and terror bring out the very best in him and he deserves to be rediscovered for that alone.

Watendlath Beck, winding off towards its spectacular descent in the Lodore Falls

I summed up my mixed feelings about Walpole, and tried to suggest why he’s still worth reading, in a review for the TLS three or four years ago. I’ll put it in here for anyone who’s interested. And here’s a link to details about the programme: don’t forget to come back here after you’ve checked it out – there’s more to read!

http://www.somethinelse.com/2011/03/23/the-walpole-chronicles-bbc-radio-4/

HUGH WALPOLE

Rogue Herries  736 pp. 978-0-7112-2889-4

Judith Paris  757 pp. 978-0-7112-2890-0 

The Fortress  811pp. 9-780-7112-2891-7 

 Vanessa  852 pp. 9-780-7112-2892-4 

 Introductions by Eric Robson. £7.99 each. Frances Lincoln.

‘I’m now pinning all my hopes on two or three Lakeland novels, which will at least do something for this adorable place,’ wrote Hugh Walpole in August 1925, two years after establishing himself in a house on the fellside slopes of Catbells, six miles from Keswick. ‘I feel a longing desire to pay it back for some of its goodness to me.’ Later he added, more tensely, ‘These four books shall clinch my reputation or I’ll die in the attempt’.

            The journal-entries, with their mixture of naive enthusiasm, sentimentality (as if Cumberland somehow needed his writing) and naked careerism, are quintessential Walpole. They were also prophetic: Walpole’s reputation, such as it is, rests on the Herries novels, which have remained sporadically in print and dimly in the public consciousness long after his fifty-odd other books have vanished without trace.          Born in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1884, Hugh Walpole was the son of an Anglican clergyman whose career took him to England, America and Scotland. Hugh was sent to English boarding schools, where his poor sight made him a target for bullying and he sought popularity by developing a talent for story-telling after lights-out in the dormitory. A ‘third’ in History at Cambridge and a miserable six months at the Seamen’s Mission in Liverpool (he was expected to follow his father into the church) made it clear that, once again, story-telling was the solution, and Hugh entered literary London.

            His first novel, The Wooden Horse, appeared in 1909 and thereafter Hugh pursued his career by combining massive productivity with a facility for forming friendships with the great and influential. ‘I simply worshipped men of letters and went for them direct as a kitten goes to a saucer of milk,’ he guilelessly confessed later. His enthusiasm and longing to be liked worked wonders. Though no two writers could have been more different, he became the intimate friend – almost the adopted son – of Henry James, who instructed him to begin his letters ‘Très-chère Maitre’, and cushioned devastating criticism of Walpole’s writing (‘It isn’t written at all, darling Hugh – by which I mean you have…never got expression tight and in close quarters (of discrimination, of specification) with its subject’) with affection so intense that the disciple was never offended.

            Gradually the writing became more competent, the reviews better, the friendships more numerous, until by the mid-1920s Walpole could boast allies on all sides. Treated as an equal by Bennett, Wells, Buchan and Galsworthy, he was also a close friend of Virgina Woolf (though she found his Judith Paris as ‘unreal’ as he found The Waves). Walpole’s fiction, with its tone of nebulous seriousness, its vague philosophising, its faintly ‘daring’ subject-matter about relationships, appealed to the middle-brow reading public as weighty stuff. Bestsellerdom became routine, accompanied by American lecture-tours, an FRSL, and ultimately a knighthood. Progress was only jolted, temporarily though painfully, in 1930 by Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale, which caricatured Walpole as Alroy Kear, a ruthless, manipulative careerist determined at all costs to be recognised as a great writer.

            Walpole, however, needed a place in geography as well as in society. He wanted to feel English, and he wanted to feel rooted. The solution presented itself when he visited the Lakes and remembered early holidays in Cumberland, the happiest times of his childhood. He quickly bought Brackenburn, a modern stone house overlooking Derwentwater, moving in in June 1924. . Though he retained a base in London, most of his writing thereafter was done at Brackenburn.

            The idea of a regional family saga was conceived at once. Derived from his reading of Hardy, Zola and (though he disliked admitting the debt) Galsworthy, it was already a slightly dated notion, but it satisfied Walpole’s characteristic impatience to use his new surroundings in fiction, as well as offering what must have seemed a reliable route to popular success and literary acclaim. Elements of self-projection are also obvious. The opening of the first novel, Rogue Herries, is clearly a fantasy version of Walpole’s own situation, the arrival of the uncouth eighteenth-century protagonist at his ruinous farmhouse in Cumberland a grotesque, gothic transformation of Walpole’s move to Brackenburn. When he later refers to his second-generation hero, David Herries, as ‘the patriarchal founder of an English family’, Walpole is making David everything he could not himself be.

            The faults of the Herries novels, which were written at headlong speed between1930 and 1933, are big and obvious. There is virtually no plot: the passage of generations of farmers, merchants and landowners with their accompanying feuds, obsessions and antagonisms generate a semblance of motivation, and that suffices. Historical accuracy is flouted: Walpole lacked the patience for research, consoling himself during the writing of Rogue Herries that ‘no one knows very much about the eighteenth century really, or only a few do. I can be venturous.’ Character development is rudimentary: it was perhaps as well that the Très-chère Maitre did not live long enough to be asked for his comments on the raging squires and red-haired gypsies of Herries. Even the Cumbrian landscape is rarely engaged with. Though often well-described, it remains a backdrop, a terrain seen as by a tourist. It has no texture, no one is shown realistically working within it. Tellingly, we never encounter a sheep until the middle of the second novel, Judith Paris, and when we do it is on a shearing-day treated as a grandiose set-piece:

There were eight hundred sheep and five hundred lambs…Beyond the house in a grand half-circle were fifteen clippers striding the sheep-stools, and each clipper held a sheep, shorn, half-shorn, about to be shorn. There was a tremendous noise, for the gate of the farmyard was packed by five score of wooled sheep pressed against it…

Walpole’s many non-literary friends in Keswick could easily have shown him any aspect of Cumbrian working life, but he probably never thought to ask.

            Yet it would be unfair to dismiss the Herries novels as mere swashbuckling fakery. Walpole’s true gifts are those of an oral story-teller. The marvellously enticing opening sentence of Rogue Herries (‘A little boy, David Scott Herries, lay in a huge canopied bed, half awake and half asleep’) offers an image for both author and reader. The author dreams the novel, and the reader will be allowed to share his dream. The result, at its best, is a kind of bedtime story for adults.

            Walpole is a dab hand at fantasy, the horrific, the bizarre. In this realm his imagination is of splendid fertility, and he has a masterful gift for the visually grotesque, as when the boy David watches the firelit room and his father’s mistress in it:

All the things in it moved; the fire-dogs grinned and yawned; over a large arm-chair of faded red silk, oddly enough, some harness had been slung, and it lay there in coils of silver and dark brown leather, and these coils turned and stretched and slipped like snakes. Then against the wall was a long, thin mirror in tarnished silver and, in this, Alice Press was most oddly reflected, the side of her face that was shown there being very thin and red, her hair tawny-peaked like a witch’s hat; her eyebrow jumped up and down in a terrifying manner.

Witchcraft, indeed, provides a horribly convincing crowd-scene in Rogue Herries, where Mrs Wilson, a mentally-confused and infirm old woman servant from Herries’s household, tries to visit a dying friend in a nearby village and is taken for a witch.

Men and women, close together as though for protection, were gathered together at the end of the cobbled path. They stood, huddled together, not speaking, staring at her. Although she could not see well and was so deeply frightened that it was though her heart were beating in her eyes, yet certain faces were very distinct to her.

She is stripped, stoned and thrown into a river, where she dies. The episode is seen from the victim’s point of view – Walpole knew all about ‘the look of lust and hatred, curiosity and pleasure’ on the faces of a bullying mob – and is cinematic in its constant restless movement and shaky, off-balance shifts of vision. Walpole was a natural screen-writer, enjoying a successful stint in Hollywood scripting David Copperfield and Little Lord Fauntleroy for David O. Selznick, and demonstrates it repeatedly in the Herries novels, in both crowded set-pieces (feasts, fights, markets, travelling-theatre shows) and episodes of fast-moving, claustrophobic horror like the burning of Fell House in Vanessa, where Adam Paris, confused by smoke, searches on the wrong floor for his daughter’s room until the fire traps him.

            Perhaps the finest scene in the tetralogy is also the grimmest. It occurs in The Fortress, where John and Uhland Herries, cousins who have cherished a lifelong loathing, make their separate ways through dense mist (Walpole is always good with mist and fog) to meet at Skiddaw House, a desolate shepherd’s bothy on the north slope of the mountain. Uhland is lame, John crippled by an obsession with his own cowardice, which he overcomes to confront Uhland. Uhland shoots John, then turns the gun on himself. Walpole heightens the scene to a painful vividness by the use of banal detail – the dusty wax fruit on the windowsill of the neglected room, the child’s drawing on the back of the crumpled scrap of paper which is all Uhland can find for his suicide note. The result is a scene that would not be unworthy of Conrad or Hardy.     The final volume, Vanessa, demonstrates that Walpole is not inspired solely by the idea of historical distance. It brings the story up to the 1930s, with episodes set in the Great War and the Russian Revolution, a debate about Virginia Woolf’s fiction, and a heroine obtusely, and refreshingly, indifferent to the scenic beauty of the Lakes, who survives a freak snowstorm at the summit of Scafell while her companion dies of hypothermia – the landscape at this last moment acquiring tactile quality and becoming uncompromisingly real.

            The Herries novels sold massively on first appearance, and survived the rapid deflation of Walpole’s reputation after his death from diabetes in 1941. In his genial introduction to this reprint (included, strangely, without variation in all four volumes) Eric Robson usefully sets the novels in the context of Walpole’s prosperous but shakily-founded career and stresses their traditional narrative virtues, though perhaps underestimating the darkness of the tetralogy as a whole, and Walpole’s real strengths as a writer of the gothic. (He was, appropriately, a collateral descendent of the author of Otranto.) There has been some quiet recognition of these strengths in recent years: Tarnhelm, a highly original werewolf story told from a child’s viewpoint, featured in a collection of his weird tales issued in 2003 by Tartarus Press as a limited edition, which deserves a cheap reissue. And several fantasy websites currently draw attention to Portrait of a Man with Red Hair, his dreamlike 1925 novella about sadism.

            As for Herries, there will be places in these massive blocks of paper where everyone will want to skip. But Walpole’s ham-fisted, messy and eccentric attempt at the Great Lakeland Novel still deserves to be read. The episodes – by turns gracelessly ornate and bleakly brilliant – remain often weirdly enthralling and memorable, their sheer self-indulgence a guilty pleasure for the reader too. In the Herries novels, Walpole confessed, he had allowed himself to be, for the first time in his adult life, ‘what I really am – a little boy telling stories in the dormitory.’

Catbells from Newlands

It was my first day out this year (I had pneumonia over Christmas and didn’t leave the house for a month!) and after scraping thick ice off the car in Manchester I was expecting near-hypothermic conditions on the fells. I had thermals, quilted shirt, multiple sweaters, gloves, woolly hat, the lot. So after parking at Newland Village Hall I put on my woollies and set off for the footpath up Catbells.

I soon discovered my mistake. The sky had already cleared and before I reached the foot of the path I’d shed the gloves, then the hat. Once I started on the slope, most of the rest followed. If I’d been certain of privacy (though I only met 4 people all day), I’d have taken off the long johns as well. By the time I reached Catbells summit, all I had above the waist was a thin t-shirt (plus bulging rucksack, of course) and it stayed that way until after 3 pm.

Derwentwater: the fells reflected in a perfect mirror

Derwentwater was a perfect mirror with hardly a quiver of air to stir the glassy surface. I kept north over Maiden Moor and along to the wonderfully solid and elegant cairn on High Spy, erected I suppose as a landmark by long-departed nineteenth-century slate miners.

Looking back towards Swinside: Catbells casts its shadow in low winter sun

Not Andy Goldsworthy, but Victorian slate miners: the cairn on High Spy

Then I took the path down (left, east) just before the tiny tarn – the point where this path leaves the main one is at about 232154 - down through the old slate workings. Not having taken this route before I hadn’t realised how weird and wonderful this little enclave is. The path twists and turns and sometimes follows long stairways of slate steps across the fellside.

There are fragments of derelict mine buildings and some extraordinary pieces of old mining equipment still standing about. You’d need to be extremely careful coming down here in poor light, or in a hurry, but it’s fascinating. I even found a tunnel entrance containing a snowdrift, still intact and hardly melted weeks after the departure of the snow. A natural ice-house. I wonmder how many weeks it will take for the snow to vanish completely?

Weird: snowdrift in slate mine

Eventually the path reached the beck, where I swayed precariously across on the wet boulders and found myself joining the main route alongside the foot of Castle Crag. By now of course I was steadily replacing the clothing I’d rejected earlier. And having (as always) underestimated the distance, I found myself finishing the walk in twilight, rewarded by the sight of a big warm-gold full moon rising behind Walla Crag with its reflection in the lake. A splendid walk, lit first by blazing sun and then by golden moon, and all in January!

Old winding-gear looks down into Borrowdale

Castle Crag, late in the January day

Full Moon rises over Walla Crag and Derwentwater

I stayed overnight at Sycamore Cottage, Ellonby (up near Greystoke): a small but delightful holiday cottage – I’ll put the link in just below  in case anyone’s interested – which I was kindly lent by Nicky Godfrey-Evans of Cultural Tourism Training, who had asked me to come up and talk to trainee Tourist Guides, the following day, about literature. www.sycamorecottage.info is the link for the cottage! Do take a look.

These accredited Guides are required to know a huge amount about British life and culture, quite apart from their local knowledge (of Cumbria in this case). My brief was to give an outline of the history of English literature in the morning, and a more detailed history of literature in Cumbria in the afternoon. Quite a challenge – but an interesting one that turned out to be great fun.

So in the morning we whizzed from Beowulf  to Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and the Man Booker Prize by way of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens et al; and in the afternoon it was Thomas Gray, the Wordsworth circle, Beatrix Potter, Arthur Ransome, Melvyn Bragg and so on. We had a few coffee breaks, and lunch. I met dozens of lovely and fascinating people. And I was completely hoarse. But it was a great day.

By the time we left the building (in Kendal) the weather had changed again for the worse, and I drove slowly back to Manchester in the thickest fog I’ve ever taken a car through. Fortunately it thinned out a little on the way down. But after a walk like that I’m not going to grumble about the weather.

Ennerdale Water - part of Tom Rawling's home territory

He left the valley early  but kept contact with his native region and his extended family, and returned often for fishing trips. He was an expert salmon fisherman, and worked with the naturalist and fishing-writer Hugh Falkus studying not merely the catching of sea-trout but their mysterious life-cycle.

Rawling only began writing poetry when he retired from teaching, but what poured out then was a rich and powerful flood of poems about his Ennerdale childhood, his memories of the farm and the village, and about fishing. The poems are vivid, sharp and close to the earth – and they bring to life a whole world, social and agricultural, much of which has vanished from the Lakes.

He had success with two books (Ghosts at my Back, 1982 and The Names of the Sea Trout, 1984) and got to know many of the leading poets of his time – Ted Hughes was a frequent fishing companion, Anne Stevenson encouraged his work, Seamus Heaney wrote friendly notes and comments on draft poems – but then somehow his work was forgotten.

Rawling's poems and memories: A vital part of Lakeland culture rediscovered

Anyone who loves poetry por Lakeland needs to know these poems. As Chris McCully and I wrote in the magazine Trout and Salmon (my first venture into a fishing magazine – I haven’t held a rod in 50 years! – )

“Rawling’s grip on the texture of rural Cumberland life was both sensory and philosophical. Writing of ‘Clipping Day’ he remembers

           the ewe’s flesh flinching

as shears neared the throat

for the first cut into the rise

where new wool pushes off its past

in order to repeat it.

Often the recollections have a richness that rises to celebration, the glimpse of a good world charged with benevolent power that hints at the Biblical:

                                                A good summer

            was a full barn. Carts came, turned back empty,

            came again, ironshod hooves struck cobbles,

            a mare snorted as she charged the rising causeway,

            winged shelvings swayed with the load,

            wheels rattled. Then thunder, the barn floor

            booming under fetlock-feathered Clydesdale feet.

A confirmed atheist, Rawling would have repudiated any religious overtones here but the sensory precision of his work (that ‘fetlock-feathered’ Clydesdale) would have earned respect from possibly the greatest nature-poet ever to have written in English, Gerard Manley Hopkins. And always there’s the accuracy. Architecture-buffs reading the last excerpt would recognise that ‘causeway’ as the stone ramp up to a raised Lakeland granary…

“[And Rawling's fishing experience] bore fruit in poems like ‘Night Fisherman’, where sight is extinguished and the world slips all the more sharply into relief:

            Now touch is master, blindman fingering

            of reel and rod, the hook’s keen point.

            Feet shuffle-feel the ground,

            delicately crunch gravel;

            body poised ready to reach

            beneath the mirror of the pool…”

Here’s one more poem, in full:

Sloe Gin

for Seamus Heaney

Let the first hard frost
expose the spiny twigs
reveal the bare-black fruit.
Reach through jutting thorns
for the blue-hazed sloes,
ignore the blood on your wrist.
Needle-prick to the hard stone,
watch their transfusion seep
through the gin. Each day
an agitation of the jar,
and after many days of alchemy,
decant this ruby in your glass
to taste silk-sliding fire
of frost and thorns
and bitter fruit.

From The Names of the Sea-Trout (Littlewood Arc, 1993)

Besides the new collection, How Hall and the excellent CD (both available from stanandmarina@aol.com or bobnet.64@btopenworld.com) several of Rawling’s original books and pamphlets are still just about available, new or second-hand, so I’ll add the links here. If you want to catch up with possibly the finest 20th century Cumbrian poet (and yes, he stands at least equal to Norman Nicholson) then you need to read them. For me, they helped to make 2010 a memorable year for English poetry.

And now, here’s to creativity – yours, mine, everyone’s – in 2011! Happy New Year.

Can't find any image of the lady herself: this is just a collection of altars in the Museum

“The Venus Stone, focal point of this year’s innovative literary Festival in Maryport at the end of November, has just undergone a historical facelift. It seems she may be a true Venus after all!

Always interpreted as a representation of a ‘lady of the night’, the Venus was thought to be hanging about outside the fort gateway, with more than literature on her mind, and was possibly a sign for a brothel in the fort. However, new insights into the greater significance of the Venus Stone have recently come to light.

The figure next to the gateway is probably a true statue of Venus standing in a substantial temple dedicated to her, says stone expert Dr. Peter Hill. Dr Hill, in a Review of the collections at the Museum, has pointed out that the sculpture itself is of high-quality workmanship with the gateway shown with pillared arches. The temple has finely carved columns with capitals supporting an arch.

The stone itself would have been part of a major gateway within the fort. The gateway, the only contemporary representation of a gateway to a Roman fort, is the pattern used for reconstructions on Roman sites and films.

Archaeologist Lindsay Allason-Jones has further interpreted the sculpture as representing Venus in her role as a protector of men, but this year’s LitFest, the third to be based around a stone in the Roman collection, will be exploring every aspect of the Goddess of Love!”
Maryport LitFest
25-28th November
Read all about it at www.senhousemuseum.co.uk
or contact Jane Laskey at the Museum on 01900 816168

Artist Peter Roebuck (right, in red) and friend Peter Thomas at Arison

Just back from the opening of an excellent new exhibition of paintings by Peter Roebuck at the Arison Gallery in Chorlton, Manchester.

Peter has I think made a unique and very distinctive contribution to the English vision of landscape – though he also paints still life, people and many other subjects. But to me, landscape is the heart of his work and he has worked with enormous dedication and integrity over many years to refine a most unusual way of seeing, and showing, the world.

The hallmark of Roebuck’s work is a combination of radiant intensity of light with a quality of visual softness, created sometimes by mist, sometimes by frost, sometimes by distance or sunset light, but always conveying a sense of stillness and fascination. Perhaps that’s the outcome of the very close and long-continued observation which you sense has gone into these paintings.

Guitarist Bob Jones (of Bourbon Street Preachers and other bands) and friend Bernie enjoy the paintings

Working in both oil and watercolour, Peter Roebuck returns often to certain favourite subjects: the waters, and the shores, of Morecambe Bay, the lesser-known areas of Lakeland, and the Mersey Valley, centring on Chorlton Meadows not far from where he lives. The radiance of his colours and the intriguing simplifications of landscape forms, which make the places portrayed appear more, not less, fascinating, mean that these paintings are haunting and, in their way, inimitably strange as well as beautiful. The longer you look at them the more interesting they get. 

If you’re in South Manchester between now and 9 October, and have even a few minutes to spare, do go and take a look, to see fine work by a greatly underrated and totally individual artist.

 The Arison Gallery is at 512 Wilbraham Road, Chorlton, Manchester M21 9AW  (0161 881 6734).

Poet Angela Locke takes Rose and Poppy across the valley

Just back from a wonderful couple of days in Cumbria. The excuse was that Jeannie Pasley from Carlilse City Council had asked Cumbrian novelist and poet Angela Locke and me to go up and read poems for something called ‘Love Parks Week’.

I’d never heard of  Love Parks Week, but apparently it happens in lots of places around the country and puts on events in parks and other green spaces to entice people to come out and enjoy them more in the summer.

Our venue was the lawn right under the vast east window of Carlisle Cathedral, but it wasn’t daunting: everyone was very friendly, there was a great PA system that actually worked with a mic you could actually adjust, and Jeannie was there to greet us and get everything set up. Amazingly, the weather was perfect – cool but dry, turning (at times) warm and sunny. And we got a wonderful audience – people drifted in and out but the maximum was up to around 40, and many people stayed for the whole hour-and-a-half.

Angela Reads - under that towering east window!

It was lovely to read with Angela, a well-known local poet who has also just published a beautifully-written and deeply engaging travel book, On Juniper Mountain, about her travels in Nepal and how she came to found the charity Juniper Trust.

Afterwards I was able to spend some time with Angela and her husband Colin at their fine old house under the slopes of Bowscale Fell at Mosedale, near Penrith. We did some walking in the Mosedale Valley with the dogs and I was able to enjoy the gorgeous garden they’ve made in front of this beautiful traditional cottage – which was once painted by Sheila Fell, with L.S. Lowry in attendance. I have to say Lowry isn’t my favourite artist and even Fell gets pretty depressing, so the reality, with the warm evening light falling across the drifts of honeysuckle, was idyllic in a way that I definitely prefer, though neither artist would have countenanced it in their work!

Garden at Bowscale Cottage: drifts of honeysuckle, and Carrock Fell beyond

Anyway, a big Thank You to Carlisle City Council, and please invite me back! And thank you also to Angela and Colin, the perfect friends.

Oh, and for more about Love Parks Week and what might be on near you, go to http://www.loveparksweek.org.uk/

Brantwood, home of John Ruskin

 First place definitely goes to ‘Mother Lode’, the magnificent exhibition of landscape paintings by Julian Cooper, currently showing at Brantwood, Ruskin’s house overlooking Coniston Water in Cumbria. No chance of getting there through the snow at present, but I’d very strongly recommend a visit once the roads are clear.

 Julian Cooper is probably Britain’s most original and accomplished landscape painter. His particular interest is in mountains and rock surfaces (naturally enough, since he’s a keen climber), and over recent years he has developed increasingly brilliant and intense techniques for painting the patterns, textures and – if I can put it like this – the meanings of rock, the way it communicates itself to the hand, the eye and the memory.

Exhibition opening: Cooper with Amanda (left) and Cumbrian poet and novelist Angela Locke (right)

From open-air painting in the high Andes, he moved on in the 1990s to superb semi-abstract and highly-textured paintings of the Himalayas, often focusing not on the summits and profiles of mountains (which have been endlessly explored by previous artists) but rather on rock and snow faces, their textures, patterning and forms.

 He’s now taken this a step further, to paint industrially-worked rockfaces which are literally the interface between man and nature. The Brantwood exhibition shows paintings from two such arenas: Cumbrian slate quarries from the Langdale and Coniston areas, and the Carrara marble quarries – the historic quarries from which Michelangelo took his marble and which are now quarried on a terrifyingly industrial scale.

Admiring 'Fantiscritti Portal', one of the most remarkable Carrara paintings

Julian’s paintings are exhilarating and massively impressive. No one has ever painted rock like this before: the huge clefts and portals of vast stained marble surfaces, dwarfing tiny, insect-like industrial plant; the angled, many-coloured slate blocks, with angular light from a cave-mouth dripping over them. Julian’s work can look like realism, but compare it to any photograph and you see a miraculous added depth, an extra dimension of radiant experience. Looking at ‘Sawyers Wood’for example I can feel my own lifetime’s experience of scrambling around in and on such places, somehow embodied and singing out from the canvas.

Adventurously, some paintings are spotlit in a darkened room, which suits them perfectly. Cooper silhouetted here against 'Sawyer's Wood'

The rock in these pictures speaks to us in its own strange language and asks us what we’re making of it – sensuously, industrially, envrionmentally. It has an ominous and seductive beauty.

This is a whole new take on landscape and if you love the Lakes, or nature, or painting, you should go over to Brantwood as soon as the snow clears and enjoy some of the best landscape painting of our time. Not to mention Brantwood’s excellent restaurant, and the fascinating memorabilia of Ruskin himself, the great Victorian artist, social activist, prophet of climate change and a deep thinker about the interconnections between geology and art.

The exhibition has been arranged in collaboration with Michael Richardson, director of Art Space Gallery, London, who represent Julian Cooper and where the exhibition can be seen during September, 2010. For further details contact mail@artspacegallery.co.uk  or visit www.artspacegallery.co.uk

Brantwood sunset