The English Administrative County of Cumbria

Population and area summary of the County of Cumbria

 

 

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The County of Cumbria is located in The Northern Counties of England, it covers an administrative area of 6,768Km² and in 2001 was home to a population of 487,607 persons, that represents 0.99% of that of England and 0.01% of the population of the entire United Kingdom.

 

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Historical notes about The English Administrative County of Cumbria

CUMBRIA

Cumbria is a "new" county formed by the merger of the Counties of Cumberland and Westmorland including the Borough of Barrow in Furness, formerly part of Lancashire. The history of the county can therefore be revealed in the detail of the Historic Counties if you follow the links above.

THE LAKE DISTRICT in 1950

The English Lake District is very small and very lovely. Therein lies the secret of its power over the minds and imaginations of men. It has a long and fascinating history for those that can read it, going back to the earliest days when the mountains were first made, and the Lakes were first fashioned. Now it has become a great national sanctuary of England. But it was not always beautiful as it is today. For centuries the great peaks loomed over scenes of terrible desolation, over dark and gloomy forests, swamps and wild vegetation, and unrelieved and monotonous moorland. It took nearly a thousand years of man's ceaseless activity to make the Lake District the incomparable thing of beauty it is today. But since the eighteenth century, when the Lakes first became widely known through the coming of adventurous visitors, it is the natural beauty of the district which has given it life and fame, that beauty which arises from harmonious blending of the works of Nature and of Man, in a very much deeper meaning than the old Yorkshire-man ever intended when he first said, "In t'Lake District there's nowt but scenery."

To recognize that important truth in any consideration of the Lake District in modern times is the highest duty of all those who care for it, and who desire its preservation. For because it is so small and lovely it is the more susceptible to injury. Consider that the highest mountain is only some three thousand feet, yet where else in the world can be found such noble and inspiring effects of sheer height? Where else is the work of Nature and of Man so perfectly united as in the cultivated dale-heads that thrust themselves right into the vast majesty of the mountains? Where else is Beauty so satisfying and so complete as in the little tarns set among the lovely hills?

This is the theme of all the writers since the middle of the eighteenth century. This they said, is the Lake District, there is none like it; and with that they were well content.

Today the emphasis must be placed elsewhere, for the beauty of the Lake District is now threatened as never before. The activities of man grow apace, and in his desire to enjoy more fully and more easily the splendours that surround him, he is in danger of destroying the thing he loves. Farming, afforestation, building, quarrying, road-making, the impounding of water, the damming of lakes, the creation of reservoirs, the erection of factories, the taking of land for military purposes, the use of motor-buses and speed-boats, the provision of holiday facilities - all these must be considered in the light of the supreme need to preserve the beauty of the district.

Heart of Lakeland

Though it is the pride of three counties - Lancashire, Cumberland and Westmorland - the essential part of the Lake District lies within a circle not more than thirty miles across. This is not to depreciate the beauty or the value of the surrounding fringe described in other texts on this area. The villages and towns of Lakeland Lancashire outside this small circle have a charm and distinction of their own not easily to be surpassed, and the same holds true of Cumberland and Westmorland.

Nevertheless, the essential part of Lakeland proper is very small. From the summit of Helvellyn on a clear day you may see almost the whole of it, certainly the great peaks, most of the Lakes, with Scotland, the Pennines, and the Irish Sea filling up the distance.

This is perhaps the best-loved spot in the British Isles, and in consequence has been described and praised in the most lyrical language by thousands of loving and enthusiastic pens, good, bad and very bad. In the engaging preface to Eothen, Kinglake said that he had endeavoured to discard from his book all valuable matter derived form the works of others. But in the case of the Lake District almost everything said must almost inevitably savour of truth that within this small circle of thirty miles there are to be found the richest and the most varied treasures.

National Heritage

Here are the mountains with the noble names that fill the mind with a kind of song - Skiddaw, Helvelly, Saddleback (with it lovelier and older name of Belncathra), Scawfell, Great Gable, the Old Man of Coniston, Langdale Pikes, Fairfield, Bowfell, High Street, and a score of others - and here are the lakes that have become part of the national heritage with their equally lovely names - Windermere, Ullswater Derwentwater, Bassenthwaite, Coniston Water, Grasmere, Rydal, Buttermer, Crummock, Ennerdale, Wastwater, Thirlmere and the rest. Here are the hills and fells, the lonely tarns, the great mountain passes, the peaceful dales, the quiet farms with their white-washed buildings, the crags and the wooded slopes, the rivers and the becks, the stone walls running up the mountain sides, the wandering mountain tracks, the rich green pastures, the little villages and the old-world towns, the country churches and the hospitable inns, and, indeed, all that makes Lakeland the joy and delight that it is.

For those who love statistics (and this strange taste is not at all uncommon) the lakes and the mountains have all been surveyed and measured and counted. It must always be considered as being in the nature of a miracle that in this little circle there are one hundred and eighty mountains all of which scale two thousand feet, and eight of which aspire to three thousand; fifteen considerable lakes from Windermere to Brother's Water; and no less than twenty mountain passes.

The great name of Wordsworth is now so inseparably linked with the three Lake counties that he is popularly supposed to have been the first discoverer of their beauties. In the fullest sense, of course, this is true, for he stands without a rival in sympathetic understanding, artistic feeling and inspired interpretation. But for many years before Wordsworth the writers has been busy. The local poets, like Richard Braithwaite in the seventeenth century, and Josiah Relph in the eighteenth, has little to say of the local scenery, though much of the local people.

It was not until the middle of the eighteenth century when, as Professor de Selincourt has said, "a feeling for the rugged and mysterious in Nature became a fashionable affection," that the real surge of writing began; and what was then begun has never ceased. Since that date there is no aspect of Lakeland life that has not had its faithful chronicler. The story of the rocks and the Skiddaw slates has been told in the most learned treaties; every bird, migrant or native, has been catalogued; every moth and butterfly has been noted; every wild flower has been named and indexed; whilst farming, fishing, the rural industries, fox-hunting, climbing, walking, sailing, shooting - all have found their faithful and devoted historians.

Most of the early writers were scrupulous to observe the county distinctions. The antiquarian, Father West, who published his Antiquities of Furness in 1774 and his Guide to the Lakes in 1778, referred to the rivalry which then existed between Derbyshire and Cumberland respecting Dovedale and Keswick, each county claiming a superiority in natural beauty.

And when Wordsworth first published his famous Guide to the Lakes in 1810, it is interesting to recall that he published it as an anonymous introduction to a volume of sketches entitled Select Views in Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire. The Select Views have long ago vanished, for as Wordsworth said of them in a private letter, "They will please many who in all the arts are most taken in by what is worthless"; but the Guide to the Lakes remains not only as a piece of literature, but as the first and finest handbook to National parks. Wordsworth was the first to see the Lake District as a whole without distinction of county boundaries, and to see it as it had never been seen before.

He had, of course, supreme advantages. He was born in Cumberland, educated at the Elizabethan Grammar School at Hawkshead in Lancashire (now in Cumbria), where he carved his name on the desk which is still to be seen as clearly as the pictures of old Hawkeshead which he has left in The Prelude, and lived the whole of his life, save for three years, in the solitudes of Westmorland. Beyond all, he had the inward eye, united to the power of immortal expression. His book was written, as he tells us, with the purpose of saving the Lake District as he knew it from those who would destroy "the tranquil, the lovely and the perfect." It is full of the rarest insight; full, too, of the acute awareness of natural beauty and of its significance. And, lastly, it abounds in the most practical wisdom.

The proposal to make the Lake District a national park is comparatively new. It has arisen as a distinguishable and determinate part of the problem of controlling the use of land in these complex days, and is a late development in the history of the preservation of natural beauty, whose necessity and wisdom painful experience has shown. But, prophetically enough, it was Wordsworth who first conceived the idea. The fight to preserve the natural beauty of the Lake District has already begun, and, indeed, much earlier, Father West had spoken of the evils of litter in terms which sound like a pamphlet issued by the Friends of the Lake District.

But Wordsworth's conception of the Lake District as a sort of national property is now almost universally accepted as both desirable and necessary. In the fullest sense, of course, it is already a national possession; for with a sure instinct, most people think of the Lake District as one and indivisible, where county boundaries have little or no meaning. Today, dwellers in the south of England find it difficult to believe that any part of the Lake District is in Lancashire at all, and they have little if any idea of where the boundaries run, nor do they greatly wish to know. Lancashire for them means Widnes and Bolton and Oldham and St Helens, not that stretch of country that lies between the Duddon and Windermere, the glory of the Furness Fells, or Coniston Water or Esthwaite, or Hawkshead or Coniston Old Man, or the lovely Rusland Valley with its unmatched views of the distant hills and its glorious and famous beeches, or all that stretch of country that lies between the Winster and Windermere known as Cartmel.

Westmorland is better known, for it is perhaps the truest Lake County of them all. It contains Helvellynm, and thousands of people who have never ascended its neighbour, Dollywaggon Pike and never will, yet because of Wordsworth and Scott seem to know the summit of Helvellyn very well. They both recorded in verse the moving story of the faithful dog that watched by the body of its dead master for three months by Striding Edge. These verses were made the standard recitations in schools, and the imagination of many a child has been stirred by Scott's picture of the devoted dog in that lone place keeping its vigil -

How long did'st thou think that his silence was slumber?
When the wind waved his garment how oft did thou start?

Westmorland also contains High Street, the Langdale Pikes, Fairfield, Wansfell Pike and Loughrigg Fell, and, amont its lakes, Grasmere and Rydal Water to which thousands of Wordsworthian pilgrims come yearly, the lovely tarns Codale and Easedale, and the rivers, the Kent, the Brathay and the Rothay.

Cumberland contains the greatest peaks. It glories in Scafell and Skiddaw and Saddleback (all over 2,000 feet high), the lakes of Derwentwater and Bassenthwaite and Wastwater, and the vale of Borrowdale, which many hold to be the loveliest of all the vales of Lakeland.

Fame of John Peel

Just as the poems of Wordsworth and Scott made Helvellyn a household work, so the name of John Peel brings Cumberland to every hearth.

It is one of life's little ironies that a man whose name is known wherever the English tongue is spoken should have been made famous by men whose names are almost forgotten. To have kept a pack of hounds for fifty-five years is a slender claim to immorality.

But the world has literally worn a path to the grave of John Peel in the little churchyard at Caldbeck under the shadow of Skiddaw. Some, it may be added, have even gone to Troutbeck under the mistaken impression that he was born and lived there. But it was a Wigton man named John Woodcok Graves who was sitting with John Peel one night recounting hunting days, when an old woman began to sing a child to sleep with the old lilting tune of "Bonnie Annie." Graves immediately took pen and paper and composed on the spot - "D'ye ken John Peel with his coat so gray?", and remarked with some insight - "By Jove, Peel, you'll be sung when we're both run to earth."

And it was a Norwich man who had sung in Carlisle Cathedral for fifty years, on William Metcalfe, who fourteen years after the death of Peel in 1854, re-set the music of the old tune we sing today. Hence, it is to Graves and Metcalf that the world is really indebted, and John Peel lives on because of them, and not otherwise.

All the Lake Counties are rich in literary associations, and the great names of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, De Quincey, Hazlitt, Lamb, Shelley and many others are intertwined with this rich part of England.

It is perhaps natural that in such a region, so rich in history and association, the life of the local people should tend to be forgotten. Yet a very remarkable local life exists. The dalesmen of the Lake District are almost as unique as the Herdwick sheep they breed. They are for the most part Norse in origin or extraction, practically untouched by the Celtic or the Saxon, certainly unconquered by the Normans, and intensely proud of their geographical and economic distinction. The Rev H. H. Symonds spoke for generations of visitors when he said -

. . . "those who have known the dalesmen of Cumberland and Westmorland in the warmth of actuality, and have admired the pride, the courtesy, the independence of their spirit and stock - a certain magnificence and largeness of heart, which the high places of the earth have bred in them, and to which the severity of wind and weather have grandly led them on."

The contents of text which deals with the counties of Cumberland and Westmorland have spoken of the life of the people in the towns and villages, their history, their occupations and pastimes, and the people of the Lake District proper exhibit the same sturdy qualities and follow the same pursuits.

Local Industry

See them at Threlkeld at the sheep dog competitions, or at Grasmere in the guide's race or at the ploughing matches, and you will feel the strength of the local tradition, note the ways of thought and feeling, and hear the rough beauty of the local speech. All these qualities are displayed in what has come to be known as the tourist industry on which the life of Lakeland so much depends. Yet the real mainstay of the local life is still agriculture. The mountains of the Lake District are made still more attractive by the presence of the Hardwick sheep, a local breed that can flourish and thrive even in the cold and rain and snow of the district. They are bred for their wool and their mutton, the wool, rich in fat, and the mutton rich in taste and flavour. They can survive under the snowdrifts for weeks, and when fully grown, can live all year round without hay or artificial feeding. This breed of Herdwick sheep is strictly local; it is not found anywhere else, and is, in truth, a basic industry.

But when all is said and done, the appeal of the English Lake District is simply the appeal of one of man's deepest needs, the need of natural beauty.

Hen Wordsworth put forward his great claim for the preservation of the district he said that the Lake District must be protected from rash assault because it was capable of satisfying the most intense cravings for the tranquil and the lovely and the perfect to which main, the noblest of her creatures, is subject.

The Master of Trinity, Professor G M Trevelyan, in his advocacy of National Parks has followed where Wordsworth led. He said -

"It is a question of spiritual values. Without vision the people perish, and without sight of the beauty of Nature the spiritual power of the British people will be atrophied . . . By the side of Religion, by side of Science, by the side of Poetry and Art stands Natural Beauty, not as a rival to these, but as the common inspirer and nourisher of them all, and with a secret of her own . . . "

Preservation of Beauty

But in this modern age these wise and brave words seem to fall on deaf ears. In recent years the fight for the preservation of the Lake District has been carried on with great intensity, particularly by the organization known as The Friends of the Lake District. That work has always been hard and almost thankless, but latterly it has become heartbreaking.

The enemies of natural beauty are so many, and their methods are so various, that eternal vigilance is essential. A score of conflicting claims which must in some manner be satisfied. The great cities need water; the country area need electricity both for light and power; the demand is made for quarrying and mining; the cry arises for more timber; great motor roads are driven through the remote places; and in rural solitudes artillery ranges and bombing grounds are established.

These claims and demands make great inroads into our diminishing store of natural beauty, and it is surely a grave national weakness that in a matter of such high importance as the preservation of the countryside the battle should be left to a few private and public-spirited individuals.

National Parks

All this emphasizes as nothing else can the imperative and urgent need for the Lake District to be made forthwith a National Park. The name is a little unfortunate because of the conflicting ideas the words evoke. But there is no thought of regimentation or of nationalizing the land in the ordinary acceptation of that term. An authoritative definition has now been given by Mr John Dower in his masterly Report to the Ministry of Town and Country Planning in May of 1945.

A National Park may be defined as . . .an extensive area of beautiful and relatively wild country in which for the nation's benefit, and by appropriate national decision and action (a) the characteristic landscape beauty is strictly preserved, (b) access and facilities for public open-air enjoyment are amply provided, (c) wild life and buildings and places of architectural and historic interest are suitably protected, while (d) established farming use is effectively maintained. Obviously, the whole of the Lake District falls completely within this definition.

In National Parks planning requires a more direct and specialized form of control designed to achieve the essential purpose of preserving for all time areas of grand and noble landscape, these to be chosen and determined by a fixed and common standard. The first essential is that the planning must be in the hands of a National Parks Commission with adequate administrative and financial powers. Its relation to local and central government must be carefully defined, but the decisive word must lie with the Commissioners who will consider all questions from the national point of view. The whole success of National Parks lies in the character and quality of the Commissioners, and the nature and extent of their powers.

For the essential requirements of the Commissioners' policy are all-embracing. The local life must be preserved in its full integrity, and this means that farming must be fostered and improved as the main traditional rural economy and life. The traditional rural industries must also be continued and encouraged, and what has been called "the tourist industry" is not the least of these. A comprehensive road policy must be formulated and adapted to the needs of a National Park. All carriage roads must be classified by reference to their use, and to the needs of through and local traffic. Certain mountain track-ways and fell routes must be closed to motor traffic, except for farm use, quarrying and other wayside occupations.

The daleheads, lake shores and fell sides must be protected against all buildings except for agricultural purposes, and, in particular, the building of special holiday accommodation must be permitted in the National Park only on sites previously agreed and specified. New residential building must be confined to the areas already developed, and the building of rural houses and farm buildings and cottages must be encouraged in suitable places and on suitable sites. The local fauna and flora must be preserved and protected by suitable bye-laws.

The tress of Lakeland - the oak, ash, beech, sycamore and other hardwood trees - all add to the beauty of the countryside, for the planting is discontinuous and the variety enhances the effect; but the Commissioners must prevent the austere beauty of the hills being murdered by regimented and monotonous conifer plantations. It is also of the highest importance that effective control be exercised over all statutory bodies, subject to the overriding power of Parliament; and that a recognized procedure of appeal shall be set up to investigate and decide all threatened encroachments by departments of government in whatever form they are made.

It is only by the exercise of wise control that the Lake District can be preserved in its natural beauty, the local economy continued, and the area made more fully accessible for open-air recreation and public enjoyment. Practical proposals always sound a little dull, and the details of the working machinery a little uninteresting. But the sustaining and inspiring purpose is the determination that this noble heritage of beauty shall survive to stimulate and give pleasure to future generations of man and women.

 

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