The Pie At Night: In Search of the North at Play

by Stuart Maconie

  In September 1896, members of the Bolton Socialist Club were involved in a huge trespass march over Winter Hill. A local landowner called Colonel Richard Ainsworth had effectively annexed the hillside by closing and barricading the path claiming he’d bought it as a private grouse moor. Ainsworth tried to prevent Bolton people from using public rights of way and in this abuse of their rights he was assisted by the local police. But they were no match for the 10,000 walkers who confronted them that day, singing a special song composed for the event by Bolton socialist poet Allen Clarke, titled ‘Will you come o’ Sunday mornin’?’

  Ten thousand people gathered to be confronted by gamekeepers, police and their barriers. But the crowd simply hurled the coppers over the fence and climbed the hill via Smithills Moor before descending to Belmont. Belmont is the village where my old band The Young Mark Twains made several excellent demo recordings, in a studio there in the hills, and where I once went swimming in the reservoir at dawn. Unlike the trespass, however, there’s sadly no plaque or memorial to these memorable events.

  The tourist leaflets and the brown signage calls them the West Pennine Moors. We in Wigan never thought of them as that till recently, but they have always formed a kind of backcloth to the dramas of life, in a minor way, rather like Skiddaw does with Keswick. They loomed large in my youth. You could see them from the bottom of my street and measure the passing seasons from their changing raiment, from heavy shawls of snow to necklaces of rain, to thin scarves of mist across their broad shoulders. Sometimes they would not be there for weeks on end, hidden behind clag and shadow, and then the curtains would part and the sun would ebb and flow across them as the summer came and went.

  More prosaically it’s where we got our TV pictures from, from the slender mast that flickered scarlet through the dusk, there high at the heart of ‘Granadaland’. During the sixties, seventies and eighties, people around here identified themselves strongly with our Independent Television franchise Granada, more so than the BBC, I would concede. Created by Sidney Bernstein and run by visionaries like David Plowright, it established itself as a powerhouse of freethinking, risk-taking, exciting TV from World in Action to Coronation Street, Tony Wilson’s pop shows to Olivier’s definitive TV Lear.

  When, in the early nineties, Plowright was ousted as chairman by Gerry Robinson, ex-head of Compass Caterers, who wanted to cut budgets and extract more profit, there was outrage in the media. Granada executives signed a letter of protest which said that the removal of ‘this efficient and universally respected programme maker has undermined the morale and intentions of the Granada Group ethic … we await to see whether they [the new owners] will reassert the Granada ethic of quality and diversity.’ John Cleese was more direct. He sent Robinson a fax which read ‘F*** off out of it, you ignorant upstart caterer’. Normally this kind of snobbery would annoy. But I took his point. When we looked to those masts or the old Granada building in Manchester, north-westerners were proud of their channel and the fact that its programmes were the envy of the world, all from that needle of metal on Winter Hill.

  My favourite of all those moors now, though the one I knew and had visited the least till last summer, is Anglezarke. You have to be dull of spirit not to be seduced by just the name I think. It has a high, wild northern echo, taken from the Old Norse name ‘Anlaf’ and the Viking word ‘erg’ for a hill pasture or shieling. It has a lonely ring to it, and these days it is. At the 2001 census its population was just 22. On the surrounding heights lie the remains of 48 lost farms and there was a thriving little hamlet at White Coppice where now all that remains is a cricket ground and its team.

  About a century-and-a-half ago, this patchwork landscape of farm, field and river was transformed when first the Chorley Waterworks Company and then the civic might of Liverpool Council built the reservoir system. The building of these brought a massive influx of workmen stationed in shanty towns and huts on the moor. Hard-labouring navvies in the main, as well as engineers, surveyors and stone masons, and all had a thirst on when the day’s work was done.

  The old Clog Inn at Anglezarke didn’t know what had hit it, perhaps literally. Its two small beer parlours were crowded every night and the ‘Clog’ simply could not keep up with demand. Enterprising locals set up as unlicensed beer vendors, brewing their own ale and selling it from their back doors, raking in big profits. There were illicit stills secreted away in the hills where a rough, potent ‘poteen’ whisky was distilled, for those who preferred spirits and weren’t overburdened by an excessively refined palette.

  The men have gone but that era of rampant industry gives the area its flavour and geography now, though much quieter of course. Anglezarke now is a place of secretive sylvan glades and small hills folded together over several high glittering sheets of water; Yarrow, Healey Nab, High Bullough, Lower Rivington, Anglezarke itself and more, some bold and wide, some shy and hidden. The ‘Little Lake District’, some locals have called it; a trifle imaginatively maybe, but it is a magical place, especially tonight.

  I arrive at the first settling of dusk, that lambent phase of a golden summer midweek evening, between the demands of work and the routines of home. This is when the discerning local people come up to Anglezarke.

  A bloke in his thirties in dusty overall and work boots gets out of a battered estate car, lifting his tired face to the last of the sun before then pulling a hefty, expensive looking camera out of its case and stomping off up the slope into the tree canopy. He’s been thinking of this all day, while he’s been smoothing plaster or grouting a bathroom or driving a forklift round an echoing warehouse stacked with pallets; his time, an hour in the open air, him and the camera and whatever it is that he comes to capture – birds, sunsets, who knows – and then a couple of pints at the bar to reflect. Of course, this could be just me seeing the scene through a gauzy filter of urban romanticism. He could be a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer on assignment from Time magazine who fell in a pile of flour on the way here. We shouldn’t jump to conclusions.

  Anglezarke is never as busy as its neighbour Rivington, where Lord Lever built a series of summerhouses and terraces and which on an Easter Monday can seem like the Golden Mile at Blackpool. Anglezarke is more of a connoisseur’s hideout, perhaps for the simple reason that it’s more awkward to get to; asking directions from a kindly soul en route involved him grimacing and sucking in his breath and indicating wide arcs with waves of his arms.

  I got here in the end though, and on the winding hidden track that leads from the car park down to the reservoir, I bump into a woman bringing a sodden, delirious dog back from his evening dip. She’s no stranger to the outdoors evidently; shorthaired, skinny and freckly in tight black Lycra. The dog is daft and boisterous.

  ‘He’s a Rhodie without a ridge,’ she tells me. ‘Got him off a friend. Couldn’t handle him. He tore up the kennel. I’ve had him a couple of years though and he’s alright now, aren’t you?’ She lifts a hand and, besotted, he bounds towards her, giving us a refreshing little shower as she does. She’s rescued 60 dogs over the years, she reckons. Doesn’t know what magic she works on them but ‘it must be something right I guess. He’s too skinny though,’ she adds, narrowing her eyes in concern, ‘you can see that when he’s in the water.’

  That’s the water I’m headed towards now, and as I go I mentally tick off the music I can call to mind inspired by Anglezarke. A musician and artist called Richard Skelton has made a serious of sombre and affecting word-and-music pieces based around how this landscape and his immersion in it gave him solace at a time of bereavement and grief. Then Thickens have an album cheerily entitled Death Cap At Anglezarke. It’s a morbid ode to the poisonous mushroom growing hereabouts, whose toxicity is not lessened by cooking, drying, freezing or curing, and that will kill you in the most horrible and lingering way should you mistake it for something else. Several people do just that every year, making it the fungus most responsible for human deaths. Even Doves’ ‘Winter Hill’, a ‘chartbound s
ound’ and hit single no less in 2009, has a chill about it.

  Nothing of that tonight though. The hills are bathed in light and the sun glows warm on my grateful skin, falling huge and blazing across Anglezarke Reservoir. If this is the Little Lake District, Anglezarke ‘Rezsy’ is its Windermere, expansive and serene, blinding in the sunset, and surrounded by bosky twilit hills, too inviting not to venture into and linger for a while as the day and the world slipped away. It is an unforgettable, blissful end to the day.

  After a while, and after all this rapture, as I return reluctantly to the tarmac road that winds along the shore, I realise that I’m starving. There’s a gastropub called The Yew Tree over the brow of the hill but they seem to lack the enterprising nature of the old Anglezarkians with their homebrew and moonshine. On a gorgeous evening, as thirsty and hungry folk are tramping, cycling and driving back down the hill from Rivington, the pub naturally isn’t doing food. The north of England has undergone a dining revolution over the last couple of decades, as discussed a few chapters back. But there are still lingering hints of the bad old days. I’m reminded of a couple of occasions when I’d ‘dined out’ in my home town and found them caught uneasily between the old worlds and the new.

  Ordering a single espresso in a Standish restaurant, I was brought it in a mug full to the brim. ‘You’re in luck,’ I was told. ‘We’re all out of those stupid little cups so you’ve got a decent drink.’ It was a thick black drink of a volume that would have kept me awake, saucer-eyed and twitching, for a month. Then there was the time I took my folks for lunch in Wigan having been assured by some friends that a certain place in town was terrific. On arrival, I gathered from the menu that the lunch deal promised three courses with choices at each stage. But I could only see soup offered as a starter. Do you have an option for every course, I asked the friendly local waitress. ‘Oh yes,’ she replied. Thought so, I replied, but you don’t seem have anything except soup as a starter. What’s the option there? ‘Well, you don’t have to have it,’ she said, brightly. After a moment’s reflection, I had it.

  ‘Little Lake District’ is a charming nickname, but it doesn’t really make sense. Before the boundary changes that created Cumbria, much of the South Lakes, from the brooding massif of Black Combe on the Furness peninsula to the airy promenades of the Coniston Fells and the Old Man himself, were actually in Lancashire. (Rooted in the reality of an ancient kingdom called Rheged, Cumbria has been much more successful a creation than some of the other invented counties. Cumbrian folk call themselves just that, and they talk of Cumbria in a way that the people of Hartlepool never spoke of Cleveland, and Wiganers never declare an allegiance to Greater Manchester.)

  I once threatened that, though the shelves of bookshops are already groaning with Lake District literature, I was sure I’d add to that before too long with my own book on the place that I love. That day still hasn’t come yet, but I couldn’t in all seriousness write a chapter about outdoor recreation and northern folk without mentioning the Lake District.

  In my part of the world, if we fancied stretching our legs a little further than the West Pennine moors and seeing some real mountains, or just fancied a boat trip, an ice cream and a bit of Peter Rabbit, we would throw the travel blanket in the back and head north up the M6 for the Lake District, shielding our eyes as we passed the siren call of the Blackpool turn-off.

  Lancashire lads and lasses have been coming to ‘The Lakes’ for generations though Lakes laureate William Wordsworth wasn’t keen on this at all. Snob and establishment lickspittle that he was in his old age, he fought hard against the coming of the railways to Cumbria, which he thought would bring the wrong sort of people here. By this, he meant the workers of industrial Lancashire of course. He failed, as all of his kind who set their face against the people are doomed to fail, and we bloody well came, first in our bonnets and hobnails, and then in our clinkered boots and our flip flops, to a clatter of walking poles and car radio; the great, unstoppable caravanserai of the north on the move in search of a good time and healthy diversion. Sorry William.

  To a degree, of course, this was all William’s fault, for writing such celebrated paeans to the landscape and, furthermore, a travel guide. By 1835, when his guide was in its fifth printing (and no longer anonymous, his poetry and fame by now firmly established), guesthouses had sprung up. ‘The lakes,’ he wrote, ‘had now become celebrated; visitors flocked hither from all parts of England… and [the lakes] were instantly defaced by the intrusion.’ It wasn’t long before charabancs and trains and then eventually the private motorcar, plus of course cheap B&B’s and Youth Hostels, meant that the average person rather than the aristocrat could visit the Lakes in vast numbers and, inevitably, change the nature of the place.

  It’s a dilemma that was wrestled with constantly by the greatest of all Lakes guide book writers Alfred Wainwright. A Blackburn lad, he first came in 1930 when he was 23. He walked up a small height called Orrest Head and was instantly smitten, like many of us since. His seven volume Pictorial Guides have become the definitive work of Lake District and fell walking literature, precise and useful as field guides but, more than this, a beguiling blend of lyricism and bluffness that made him an institution and a millionaire. He gave all the considerable money he made away and set up an animal charity, asking ‘what kind of man would want payment for a love letter’?

  When this Lancashire lad came as a teenager, I came for the fishing, beer and camaraderie, and the distant, largely unrealised prospect of girls. We came in Joe Mather’s van and poached eels from Esthwaite Water through the night, and boiled them, grilled them, sautéed, fricasseed and fried them every which way in the campsite in the morning until I was heartily sick of them. These tales I have told elsewhere and I mention them again now just to make the point; Lancashire people feel the ‘Lakes’ is their playground and their birth right, and we come in Gore-Tex and Armani to enjoy it how we will.

  They come in their droves to the fleshpots of Bowness, Windermere and Ambleside, which can seem as brash as Blackpool if you came to wander lonely as a cloud in your frock coat. But push on further north, over Dunmail Raise – named after an ancient king who lobbed his crown in Grisedale Tarn, they say – and you meet up with the Geordies and West Cumbrians and Scots. In fact you’ll meet up with everyone, in Keswick.

  Keswick is all the fabulous contradictions of the Lake District in one. It’s unmistakably a working town, though now that work tends to be feeding and clothing rather than wool and mining. But then it’s also got a holistic, Hebden Bridge/Haight-Ashbury feel too. You could definitely get your chakra realigned here, as well as your boots re-soled. But you will struggle to find peace. There’s just too many of those walking poles clattering along its streets 365 days of the year.

  Pretty and busy and almost alpine, sheltering under Skiddaw, Keswick’s streets are packed with mountain equipment shops and its pavements crowded with people kitted out for Annapurna in winter but going no further than Bryson’s cake shop for a Cumberland rum-butter tea. Uncharitably, you may be reminded of the phrase ‘all the gear, no idea’ but that would be mean-spirited of you. At some point, surely these good folk will take to the hills, and the hill they take to will probably be Catbells.

  Compared to the hairy, macho mountains roundabout, Catbells is a squirt. But, like Anglezarke, the name will surely cast a spell on you, and once you’d seen its fine summit outlined against the sky across Derwentwater you’d be eulogising like Wainwright himself: ‘It is one of the great favourites, a family fell where grandmothers and infants can climb the heights together, a place beloved. Its popularity is well deserved, its shapely topknott attracts the eye offering a steep but obviously simple scramble.’

  On this bright bank holiday morning, the Keswick Launch would have groaned under the weight of its human cargo across the lake – the young, the old, crying babies and yapping dogs – if this elegant old craft could ever do something so uncouth. The aristocratic Annie Mellor, Princess Margaret
Rose, Lady Derwentwater and Iris crisscross the lake all day long, Derwentwater being one of three of the lakes that have regular powered services for the public, along with the Ullswater Steamers and the Coniston Gondola. Each of them has their leaflets, encouraging you to use the boats as the basis of walks in the surrounding hills, and in the Keswick Launch’s case you will find ‘Hawse End to Brandlehow via Catbells. Strenuous walk to top of Catbells but you are met with some of the most beautiful views in the Lakes. Time: 3 – 4 hours. Grading: Difficult.’

  This would bring a snort of derision from those bearded types who are even now negotiating crablike the rocky razor fin of Sharp Edge on Blencathra, or gingerly creeping up the exposed flank of Jack’s Rake. But the Keswick Launch is popular with all, and the writers of this little leaflet don’t want to be accused of underestimating the effort. Catbells is a proper mountain and will be the highest thing most of the folk setting off for it today have ever scaled under their own power. The Mountain Rescue reports are full of casualties who took the hills for granted. Do that, and they will bite you.

  I once stood by amused and appalled in the climbers shop at the head of Wasdale while the young staff member tried to gently dissuade a balding granddad in a cardigan and pipe from setting off to the summit of Scafell Pike with his wife and tiny granddaughter. ‘But it’s only three and a half miles. We can walk that!’ blustered Granddad, as the lad tried to explain that it was not so much the distance, which would be nothing along a towpath or pavement, but the 3,500 feet of elevation and constant climbing in some of the most inhospitable terrain in Britain. I think he succeeded in putting them off. I didn’t notice Granddad in the deaths section of the ‘Lake District Mountain Rescue Incidents Annual Report’ anyway, my favourite yearly reading.