by Tom Fort
Otherwise the rupture between Pitton’s past and its present is almost complete. Despite occupying the same position in the streamless valley, and retaining a significant proportion of its old buildings, it has become a wholly different place, observing a set of values, priorities and objectives that would have been literally unimaginable when Ralph Whitlock was a boy. He wrote: ‘I knew every hedge, every tree, every gutter, every dog and cat, every holiday visitor as well as every village resident.’ And that was but a small part of what he knew. No one will have that kind of knowledge again.
19
LAKELAND STATESMEN
Troutbeck, Cumbria
On a raw, rainy day early in November 1799 two of England’s greatest poets walked over the Garburn Pass from Kentmere, through the straggling village of Troutbeck, down to the shores of Windermere and across by the ferry to Hawkshead. The landscape through which Wordsworth and Coleridge strode at their customary forced-march pace – accompanied by Wordsworth’s brother, John – was as grand and rugged then as it had ever been, and is still today. But even then, two centuries and a little more ago, the old Lakeland life and ways were changing fast.
Writing to his sister Dorothy, Wordsworth pronounced himself ‘disgusted with the new erections and objects around Windermere’ – the erections being vulgar villas paid for by plutocrats from the proceeds of commerce. After a night in Hawkshead, the party went on to Rydal and then Grasmere. Crossing in front of Rydal Hall they were rebuked by a servant for straying on to private land – an impudence likened by Coleridge to the ‘trespass on the eye’ caused by the ‘damned whitewashing’ of the house, a form of tarting-up regarded by both poets as an outrage to the senses.
Town End barn, Troutbeck
Troutbeck in the 1880s
They did not linger in Troutbeck. Had they done so, they may not have been offended by any whitewashed houses – not yet. They would have found a place apparently rooted in its past and traditional patterns of life, but actually on the verge of great and irreversible change.
It is called a village and functioned as a village. But it is made up of a string of minute hamlets, clusters of housing each separated from the next by a field or two, stretched along a mile of hillside from Town Head in the north to Town End in the south. Troutbeck’s church and school were both built at a distance from the village, on the valley floor next to the main road from Windermere up towards the Kirkstone Pass, where the eponymous beck flows and where they could serve the outlying farms on the eastern side.
The founding fathers chose carefully, to suit their needs rather than any notion of what a village should look like. There was rich grazing along the stream, so they built their homes and barns to look down on their best land. Higher up rose the fells, where their sheep could be turned out to fend for themselves for most of the year. They took stone from the quarry beside the old Garburn track for their building: thick slabs for the walls, split stones for the roofs. Houses and barns stood together as one, right by their land.
The earliest written records, from the sixteenth century, reveal Troutbeck to have been a loosely grouped community of yeoman farmers – the Lakeland ‘statesmen’ so revered by Wordsworth. They held their land by customary tenure, which meant that they owned it except for any minerals that might be found underground. Wordsworth, in his romantic way, chose to portray this society as a kind of democracy or republic of shepherds. In fact, of course, the age-old determining principle – that there should be haves as well as have-nots – applied just as firmly in Lakeland as anywhere else. By the end of the sixteenth century fifty or so families of statesmen had established themselves in Troutbeck. But the scale of their land holdings varied considerably, and by no means could they be regarded as a community of equals.
Nevertheless, in the way they lived and worked, in their situations and in the challenges they faced, they were as one – ‘a race of men singularly sturdy, independent and tenacious of their rights’, as they were described by Samuel Haslam Scott in his history of Troutbeck, A Westmorland Village, which was published in 1904. They raised and tended the Herdwick sheep of the fells, each attentive to his own but ever ready to lend a hand to help another, and all expected to join together in the necessarily cooperative enterprise of rounding up the animals at shearing-time.
They lived in exactly the same way: they grew some oats and ate bread cooked on the griddle, with salted beef, mutton or bacon (but rarely a green vegetable and never any fruit). They wore grey coats, knee breeches, shirts of hemp and flax, leather clogs with wooden soles. They were solitary in their work, their only regular companions being their staffs and their dogs. Their duty was to provide for themselves and their dependants, and to pass on what they held to the next generation, increasing the inheritance if the chance came.
They built their chapel where the Jesus Church still stands. Early on it had an earthen floor, considered ‘more convenient when there were frequent burials’, but in 1707 it was decided that it should be flagged. Twenty-two of the Troutbeck statesmen are recorded as having sent a man and a horse and ‘trayled flags’ from Applethwaite Quarry. Fourteen of the villagers gave a day to ‘mossing the church’, which meant clambering on to the roof to plug the gaps between the flat stones with moss to stop the rain and snow getting in. The school was built across the road from the church in 1657; George Longmire and Stephen and George Birkett were responsible for the walls, while Myles Sewart, Troutbeck’s carpenter, took charge of the roof.
Life was hard, but it was not all toil and travail. They had their amusements, which they cherished and took seriously. The village was the home of the Troutbeck Players, who toured Lakeland performing their ‘Play Jiggs’, characterised by Samuel Scott as ‘short dramas in verse, the interest arising from the incidents of low rustic intrigue and sometimes terminating in the most extraordinary moral application.’ The village celebrity in the late seventeenth century was Thomas Hoggart, known as ‘Auld’ Hoggart, who was originally from Bampton and combined sheep farming with writing plays likened in style to those of the Spanish master Lope de Vega. One of his hits, The Siege of Troy, began with a procession through the village of ‘the minstrels of five parishes . . . followed by a yeoman on bull-back.’
Wrestling in the Cumberland and Westmorland style was a big draw in Troutbeck as elsewhere. So too was hunting, which spread deep and strong roots in the statesmen communities. This was very different from the gentlemanly and aristocratic version adopted further south. The Lakeland huntsmen came from all levels of society and walks of life. An account of hunting around Loweswater in the late eighteenth century speaks of a hound being kept at almost every cottage – ‘two or three qualified inhabitants take licences to kill game and command the pack . . . as soon as the harvest is in, an honest cobbler shifts his garb and becomes huntsman.’
Less than half a century after Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s walk Troutbeck listed around sixty owners of land. The biggest was George Browne of Town End with 735 acres. Four farmers had between 100 and 400 acres each. The rest made do on what were little more than smallholdings. Most of the villagers were still Troutbeck born and bred.
Over the next half-century, up to the death of Queen Victoria, there was a social revolution. The development of the Applethwaite slate quarry brought an influx of workers and required the building of new cottages. A number of the old dwellings that had fallen into disrepair as the families that owned them died out or moved elsewhere were replaced by smart new residences. Others were extended and modernised. The old track through the village was widened and macadamised. The Mortal Man, the village inn of great antiquity, was entirely rebuilt. Most significant was the provision in 1869 of the Village Institute, a sturdy stone expression of Victorian self-belief built opposite the lane going down past Low Fold Farm to the main road.
By then many of the old statesmen families had moved out or disappeared altogether, although the most prominent – the Brownes – held on at Town End, the magnificent old far
mhouse at the southern tip of the village. Five years after the opening of the Village Institute, the village’s long-serving parson, the Reverend William Sewell, died at the age of eighty-eight. He had been in charge of Troutbeck’s spiritual welfare for more than forty years, combining his duties at Jesus Church with farming his own land, hunting and teaching at the grammar school in Ambleside. On one occasion the bishop visited, and came across Sewell helping his neighbours with the sheep. When the bishop dared to suggest that this was unworthy of him, Parson Sewell retorted ‘when you find me better remuneration, I can probably afford to lay aside assisting my neighbours and I shall be very glad to give up tending my sheep.’
The opening of the railway to Windermere and the consequent influx of outsiders had done much to erode the self-contained isolation of Troutbeck. But it remained a working, farming, hunting village. Samuel Scott’s book summed up the life at the dawn of the twentieth century thus: ‘The people are better educated, better clothed, better housed; travelling is no longer beset by hardships, and sanitary conditions are vastly improved. But in the main the Westmorland farmer lives the same life as his forefathers did . . . The methods of farming have changed very little.’
Local priorities were clearly indicated in the school logbook: ‘An hour lost through scholars being permitted to go hunting . . . punished three boys for running sheep . . . many children absent through sheep-shearing . . . cautioned boys against grappling fish in the stream.’ The schoolmaster was a man called George Joyce, who was also the organist and church choirmaster and treasurer of the Village Institute. He organised concerts as well as magic lantern entertainments, using the money raised to equip the library with books and the playground with swings.
In 1914 the last of the many George Brownes of Town End died, and the flag over Troutbeck School was flown at half-mast. The Brownes had been a dominant presence for more than four centuries and over that period their social status had risen from that of yeoman farmer to considerable landowner and gentleman. The last of the line was a noted scholar and antiquary, a great collector of old books and manuscripts, and an occasional contributor on historical matters to the Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society. His chief skill was in carving wood, and many examples of his craftwork can still be seen at Town End, which remained in the ownership of his family until the 1940s when it was handed over to the National Trust.
That same fateful year, 1914, saw the election of Richard Clapham as Troutbeck’s Hunting Mayor. The Mayor’s Hunt originated back in the eighteenth century. Initially it was a purely local affair in which harriers chased hares, but over time the tradition evolved of inviting the famous Coniston Foxhounds over from beyond Windermere. In some ways Clapham illustrated the changing nature of the times – he was a Yorkshireman who had lived in Canada and New Zealand before returning to England on the death of his father. It was the opportunities for sport that lured him to Troutbeck, and in his forty years living there he identified closely and passionately with the Lakeland sporting heritage. He hunted three times a week, with the Coniston and Ullswater, Blencathra, and Eskdale and Ennerdale packs. He acted as whipper-in for the Kendal Otterhounds, shot grouse and blackcock across Wansfell and deer in the Troutbeck Park estate (owned by Beatrix Potter), and fished for trout and salmon wherever and whenever the opportunity presented itself.
Clapham wrote voluminously about his sporting life in the field sports press, and produced several books, including the definitive Foxhunting on the Lakeland Fells. Anyone wishing to know what a Lakeland hound should be need only consult Clapham: ‘Light in frame and particularly well let-down and developed in hindquarters . . . good neck and shoulders and loin . . . long in pattern and ribs carried well back . . . a good nose, plenty of tongue, and, last but by no means least, pace.’
The Mayor’s Hunt, held each November, was one of the great events in the Troutbeck calendar. The other, linked with it and held at about the same time, was the Shepherds’ Meet, at which the stray sheep gathered off the fells before the onset of winter were identified by the marks on their ears, horns or fleece and claimed by their owners. The location for this time-honoured get-together was always the yard behind the Queen’s Head Hotel at Town Head, the northern outpost of the village where it comes down to the main road. In times past the reclaiming of the animals was followed by a great gathering of shepherds and hunters in the hotel over steaming plates of a local delicacy known as ‘tattie pot’, washed down by much ale and enlivened by the singing of old hunting songs, ‘D’Ye Ken John Peel’ among them.
The Queen’s Head Hotel was gutted by fire in June 2014, and was still a blackened ruin when I was there in September 2015 – despite a large sign on the road promising that it would reopen ‘early in 2015’. The Shepherds’ Meet and the Mayor’s Hunt do still survive in a somewhat reduced form, but in almost every other way the Troutbeck that Richard Clapham finally left in 1947 to return to Yorkshire has had most of the life taken out of it. It is now three-quarters given over to second and holiday homes, which makes for a muted atmosphere over the winter months. The property prices are startling – £300,000 for a decrepit semi-detached cottage requiring another £200,000 to make it habitable. The Village Institute is kept solvent by the weekly meetings of the Penrith Christadelphians (although why they cannot discuss God’s intentions for the Earth in Penrith itself is not immediately obvious). The village shop and café had recently shut down when I was there because of some trouble with the tenants, although they have subsequently reopened.
The night I spent in the village was that of the Annual Parish Meeting in the Institute, although I managed not to hear about it until the morning after, which was rather irritating. A grand total of eleven residents turned out, I was told: the burning issues were the reluctance of South Lakeland District Council to put up any signs on the A592 to indicate the existence of Troutbeck; and the reluctance of anyone to do anything to restrain 4x4s from roaring up and down the track past the old quarry.
Economically it is the walkers – devotees of the cult of Alfred Wainwright – who keep Troutbeck from relapsing into the status of seasonal holiday settlement. At the Mortal Man they deal with a steady stream of them in any half-decent weather all the year round. They also make a speciality of welcoming dog-owners; the evening I was there I watched a couple with their two Labradors who had hardly a word to say to each other but chatted to their pets as if they were fully sentient human beings. The landlord of the hotel was extremely friendly and helpful to me, but he looked profoundly exhausted by the demands of tending to dog-lovers and fell-trampers fourteen hours a day seven days a week.
After my excellent supper I cycled the whole length of the village very slowly, from north to south, and then again from south to north. I stopped at each of the little huddles of old houses to marvel at their construction: the massive walls, low porches, strange cylindrical chimneys, thick-slated roofs, mullioned windows and mighty exposed beams; and at the way they speak so honestly and directly of the lives of those who made them. They lie at rest in the grassy churchyard below the village: Birketts, Longmires, Forrests, Brownes and others.
But the race of Troutbeck statesmen is not quite extinct, not yet. The next morning, after breakfast at the Mortal Man, I was introduced to a vigorous, elderly chap in mud-caked wellingtons who said he could spare me half an hour before he had to get 120 Cheviots (sheep, if you please) ready for collection. He was actually an outsider, from Windermere, but had married a Troutbeck girl in the 1960s and had taken the tenancy of one of the few farms not controlled by the National Trust. When the owner died he had managed to scrape together enough to buy it, and had subsequently built his holding up to 600 acres, doing sheep and beef cattle. ‘I thought it were paradise when I came here,’ he told me. ‘And it were.’ But everything changed in the 1970s: house prices rocketing, locals selling up and moving out to Windermere and Bowness, no building allowed because of the village’s conservation status, th
erefore nowhere for young families to live. It was a familiar story, with a familiar coda: the shutting of the school in 1976.
‘In winter it’s just dead,’ Mike said, shaking his head. ‘Except for us farmers, the ones that’s left.’ He handed over his tenancy to his son a while back, but he still keeps working. He said he had no hobbies, no interest in holidays, no thoughts of retiring – ‘it would put me in the ground,’ he said. I asked if they had any trouble with the walkers who stream over from Ambleside by Wansfell Pike and down the old track known as Nanny Lane into the village. He grimaced. ‘Bloody Wainwright,’ he growled. ‘You know he advised taking wire-cutters in case you had to get through a fence. Fancy that!’ But he acknowledged that without the Wainwright devotees, Troutbeck would be hard-pressed to retain the life it has.
But would anyone go back to the way it was? Samuel Scott posed the question more than a century ago, when the old structure was already crumbling. He pointed out very wisely that those who groaned and sighed thinking of the times departed were liable to forget what had also departed – the toil, the discomfort, the squalor, the actual and spiritual darkness. ‘They are unmindful,’ Scott observed, ‘that when people are unlearned and credulous, they are rude and cruel too.’ How futile it is to moan about the ‘destruction of village life’ as if somehow the best of it – the closeness of community, the friendships and bonds that went with it, the sense of worth and shared identity – could have been salvaged to complement underfloor heating, Wi-Fi and the multichannel TV experience.