I'll Love You Tomorrow

by Welby Thomas Cox, Jr.

  Still for a little place, England has been the source of great pain and world domination in slave trade and other dehumanizing features. But since World War II there has been a reformation afoot and Britain seems to be emerging from the traditional shadow of world bully toward a kinder, gentler nation content with protecting what it has and making the world a better place to live. It has not gone as far as the late Pope John Paul to apologize to the Irish, the Indians, the Africans, the Welsh and the Scots for atrocities in the name of expansion but it has entered into meaningful treaties, which appear to be working…at last!

  Of course this is too little, too late for my family and the millions of other Irish Catholics whose land was taken for Protestant settlers, and that will never be forgiven by this writer for the pain and suffering caused my grandparents on both sides for more than seven generations and seven hundred years.

  But Britain is a compact country, the distance from land’s End in the far south-west to John O’Groats in the far north-east is little under 600 miles or nine hours by car and the greatest east-west dimension is about 350 miles. In keeping with the great Shakespeare’s play…” Much Ado about Nothing!”

  Much like the United States, there is great areas of population…people on top of each other but there are also vast areas of thinly populated countryside…a great deal of which is located in Scotland and Wales. Even around London, there are still places so rural and peaceful that wild animals abound.

  England is unable to compete with the outstanding natural grandeur of such marvels as the Grand Canyon or the Himalayas. Her specialty is the man-made scene: the ordered landscape, the compact view, the happy juxtaposition of church and village green, cottage and tree, wood and hillside, house and park.

  Englishmen created the towns and cities but he also fashioned much of the countryside of Britain when he carved fields out of the forest land, drained swamps and planted hedgerows. Man made as well, the parks and pleasure-grounds, which surround the great houses of the ‘landed gentry’ and which are such an agreeable feature of the British scene.

  Since England is an island and nowhere is more than 80 miles from the sea, the sea and the seacoast occupy an exceptional position in the affections and in the recreational life of her people. In all Britain has 6,000 miles of coastline and its energetic tidal system scours the coast clean twice a day. Significantly, in contrast to the United States, every citizen of Britain has access to the sea, there is virtually no private foreshore in Britain.

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  A map of Scotland, which indicates the new administrative boundaries reveals that the largest county is now called ‘highland’. It enfolds the former counties of Caithness, Sutherland, Ross and Comarty and Inverness and is probably as near as officialdom will ever come to defining the limits of the Highlands. There are Scots that will tell you that the highlands are nothing to do with the boundaries, that they are a state of mind. That is too esoteric an attitude for most people to comprehend and those who like their definitions to be tidy if not precise are prepared to agree that everything north and west of Caledonian Canal is Highlands.

  Beyond the canal, which stretches 60 miles from Beauly Firth to Fort William, there is a world that is totally different from the rest of Britain-grander, wider, freer, older, and positively primeval. And beyond the Highlands are most of Scotland’s 787 islands of which more than 100 are inhabited. To the far north are the 117 island of the Shetland group, 100 miles north of the 49 island of the Orkney group. Both groups are likely to experience radical changes in their life patterns as a result of the North Sea exploitation by the oil companies. In the epigamic words of Moray McLaren, “the Arcadian is a farmer with a boat while the Shetlander is a fisherman with a piece of land.” To the west the island group themselves into the Outer and Inner Hebrides, names that have gained romantic overtones from the lifting music of sad Gaelic songs and from the legends of the Bonnie Prince Charles Mendelssohn, too, has added an outsider’s contribution with his Herbridean Overture inspired by the sight of Fingal’s Cave. The Inner islands, of which Skye is the largest, are almost as mountainous as the mainland but parts of uist and lewis are relatively level while Tiree, the southernmost island of all, has a Gaelic nickname which means, in rough translation, ‘the kingdom whose heights are lower than the waves’. Tiree is blessed with a very mild climate.

  Back on the mainland there is one part of Highland-country that is notably ‘un-highland’ the Thurs-Wick-John-O’Groats triangle. Inland from the rocky and spectacular coast there are extensive tracts of uninhabited and uninhabitable peat bogs. Here, between John O’Groats and Dunnet head, the Queen Mother had her favorite castle-home of Mey, which she bought in 1952 (Well, that is a step in the right direction, normally the Brits just confiscate whatever property the royals want). Formerly known as Barrogil Castle, it was built in the sixteenth century and belonged to the Earls of Caithness. John O’Groats (named after John de Groot, a Dutchman who ran the Orkney ferry) is popularly thought of as the northern most point of mainland Scotland, a distinction, which rightly belongs to Dunnet head, which is two miles nearer the North Pole. From Dunnet Head’s precipitous cliffs 300-foot-high, a lighthouse throws its steady beam across the turbulent waters of the Pentland Firth to Hoy, Flotta (at the entrance to Scapa Flow) and mainland Orkney.

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  Mid-Scotland is altogether too prosaic a title for all that lies south of the Great Glen and north of the Fourth-Clyde basin. The grandeur of its scenery and the rich embroidery that history has stitched into its towns calls for some more resounding description. Grampians are the mountains but Grampion is the new name for the old county of Aberdeenshire and it’s near neighbors. The county of Argyll has also been enlarged and renamed Strathclyde. Few welcome the changes so there can be no harm in ignoring them when it is convenient. ‘From Grampion to Argyll and the Isles’ is one description which, while not strictly conformist, does sound like the clash of the clamore and the shout of clansman that once echoed from one end to another of these lovely but turbulent hills and valleys.

  The somewhat aloof Fife region, cut off from the mainstream of north-south tourist traffic, is now firmly on the tourist route, especially for the growing army who follow golf and come to St. Andrews to worship at the shrine. But there are other attractions: beautiful sands at St. Andrews itself; a fascinating coast from Crail almost to Kirkcaldy-a chain of fishing ports looking over the firth of Forth to North Berwick and the Bass rock; Lock Levin beside the Lomond Hills, renowned for its trout and historically famous for the ruined castle on Castle Island. It was from here in 1658 that Mary Queen of Scots, with the help of Willy Douglas, made her dramatic escape to what she hoped would be freedom, but which turned out to be nearly 20 years of detention and ultimate execution at the hands of Elizabeth, Queen of England.

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  Despite the richness and variety of her landscapes, mountains, lochs and moorlands, the extent of her forests, lonely coasts and islands, the diversity of her wildlife, and the productivity of her lands and seas, Scotland is an industrial country. Wisely-or fortuitously- she concentrates her industry into a central belt roughly between Glasgow and Edinburgh but with a few industrial towns, such as Perth and Dundee, straying from the enclosure. But even within this industrial area there are places of beauty and interest. To its north, Sterling, known as the ‘Gateway to the highlands’, has, like Edinburgh, a formidable castle on a volcanic crag towering strategically over the Forth. It was in Sterling Castle that the infant Mary was crowned, Queen of Scots soon after her world weary father, James V, had turned his face to the wall and died in Falkland Palace. A few miles from Sterling, Doune is one of the best preserved medieval castles in Scotland. Glasgow itself should not be ignored for its civic architecture for the revival of better Victorian era buildings. Edinburgh is a special case: a Centre of industry but one where industry plays a secondary role in a city that is in every sense a capital-in its position, in
its planning, in its architecture and in the pageant of historical events which have shaped its character.

  To the east and south of Edinburgh the Great North Road seeps up from England, crossing the border just north of Berwick-upon-Tweed and skirting the Lammermuir Hills whose heather-glowing slopes gives the visitor from the south his first sight of authentic Scotland. At Dunbar, in whose castle Mary stayed with Darnley after Rizzo’s murder and later with Bothwell after Darnley’s murder, the road swerves west through lovely East Linton and Haddington is a distinguished town with an architectural legacy that has been faithfully preserved. Nearby is Lennoxlove, originally the home of Maitland of Lethington, Mary Queen of Scots’ Secretary of State, and now owned by the Duke of Hambrion. There are many relics of the Queen in the house, including her death mask.

  Also among the castles where Mary stayed is the beautiful Traquair House dating back to the tenth century. And, on rising ground beside the town loch, Linlithlgow Palace, the spectacular birth-place of Mary Queen of Scots, still wears an air of majesty in spite of all that has occurred there. It was the favorite palace of the Stuarts, the charm of its interior is still evident while the views from the many windows must be virtually unchanged.

  Between the two rivers Humber and Tweed and between the crests of the Pennines and the North Sea coast lies one of England’s most characterful regions. At the northern end is the ancient Saxon kingdom of Northumbria ruled over in times with myth and history were inextricably mixed by such colorful named kings as Edwin, Ecgfried and Oswald. These Anglo-Saxon monarchs took over when the Romans left Britain and, having subdued the resident tribes, spent much of their time warring with their fellow kings in Mercia or Wessex and with the Picts who came marauding from time to time out of what is now known as Scotland.

  King Oswald turned out to be a significant ruler. He sent St. Aidan to Northumbria to save the unruly northerners, hoping to make them good Christians, eventually reaching far enough South to merge with the mission of Canterbury by St. Augustine. From these two Points-Lindisfarne, now known as the Holy Island, and Canterbury-the conversion of England can be said to have been sprung. Perhaps the beginning, as well for the reign of Christianity and violence existing side by side. But in spite of the menacing castles and the defensive solidity of Hadrian’s Wall, (constructed by Emperor Hadrian in 122AD) … an air of sanctity pervades the scene.

  The southern half of this region is Yorkshire, England’s largest county though now segmented for administrative purpose.

  The conflicts of these times are epitomized in Durham Cathedral where St. Cuthbert, is buried. Stronger still in St. Paul’s church, Jarrow, where the venerable Bede, author of England’s earliest written history, lived and worked for 50 years up to his death in 753 AD.

  When the Pennines were squeezed up to form the backbone of northern England, the counties in the east got a bigger share of moorland and fell than the counties to the west. As if to compensate for the lop-sided territorial division, a featureless area near the Irish Sea coast erupted to create England’s only mountainous region, a miniature Switzerland of incomparable beauty known as the Lake District.

  It is not a large Area-Switzerland itself is 25 times larger-and from the 3118-foot Strange of Helvellyn, it is possible on a clear day to see it all-and beyond to the hills of Scotland and the Irish Sea. But within the Lake District’s 700 square miles there are some 100 Peaks over 2000 feet, 15 lakes (Windermere is over 10 miles long) and there are ten spectacular waterfalls; a concentration of scenic raw materials that would be hard to duplicate anywhere. Interestingly, as naturally industrious people who have designed and landscaped some of the world’s most beautiful gardens, the English had no hand in this design of the Master…it is left to them to only ruin.

  Inland from Blackpool and north towards Lancaster lies one of those stretches of countryside that, is unexpected in Lancaster; the Forest of Bowland, a green and brown wilderness of high pasture and fell stretching from close to Clitheroe almost to Lancaster. The only road across the Forest climbs through the Trough of Bowland, and for those blessed with the “seeing eye,” a stream bordered, tree lined valley sheltering under the steep flank of Blaze Moss, a 1700-foot high hill.

  There is much beauty to be found as well in the harbor city of Liverpool which boast two great cathedrals but is no doubt most widely known as the birth-place of the Beatles from whose rocket like careers the whole ‘pop’ idiom in Britain seems to have sprung. In 2005, the world paused to remember John Lennon, who had been assassinated twenty-five years earlier in 1980. There was no talk of the drug culture which the Beatles and its brilliant leader had brought with them to America…on this day they spoke only of the foursome whose combined talent brought such joy to the world and opened hearts and minds to the prospects for peace in a world continually driven by aggression, known well in England.

  The central counties of England, known as the Midlands. The centre of which is the village of Meriden in Warwickshire whose medieval cross on the green is said to be the exact geographical center of England. Within the circle of 60 miles around the cross there is an area of 10,000 square miles made up of the counties of Cheshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire, Warwickshire, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire, Straffordshire and Shropshire. A whole lot of shires for sure…Touristically the Midlands suffer from the widely-held canard that the only good thing they possess is Stratford-upon0Avon and the Shakespeare cult upon which it thrives.

  In East Anglia the sky comes into its own: clear, luminous blue arching up from limitless horizons to proclaim that East Anglia has no end and no beginning. On its east side, the hungry sea gnaws away at its cliffs and dunes while to the west, where hugh shallow meres and marshes once cut it off from the rest of England, today’s fenland fields-hedgeless acres of rich dark soil-spread endlessly outward towards the sky.

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  Of all the historically correct documentation which I have read of England, that of London is the most difficult for me to write about…not that I have difficulty with the beauty, the grandeur, the opulence, the gardens and parks, cathedrals and monasteries, the bridges and jails, the statues and history…I certainly can take no issue with any of that. It is the political history that crowds my throat and blurs the image of London.

  Just as London may be hailed as the world’s greatest capital by some…and the most magnetic by others, my own bitter image of London prevents me from seeing it as anything more than the centre of a mean spirited nation intent on the enslavement of the world to its selfish needs.

  But if you have carefully read the previous chapters you know that I have never failed to divulge a prejudice forged by the flames of hatred for this Isle who took the very heart from my forefathers, seduced its women in the name of “Prima Nocta,” pillaged, stole and otherwise destroyed the very nature of the Irish culture.

  It is therefore impossible for me not to approach this chapter with a certain prejudice, but forewarned is forearmed.

  The city that has everything probably best sums up London’s appeal. But in addition, London in recent years, has developed-and this is impossible to quantify-an informality about its daily life which seems to suit the present generation of tourist.

  London’s road traffic is certainly informal but this is due to a great extent to the unplanned nature of the city or, to be precise, cities. For London was truly, and aptly named in the novel by Charles Dickens “The Tale of Two Cities,” whereas Dickens began with a city in pain and ended in a city of shame, the modern interpretation of history has one beginning as a Roman settlement and forming the basis of what is known today as the city of London, the other, about two miles to the west, growing up around the abbey which Edward the confessor founded in 1050 (though scholars believe there was an earlier abbey on the site).

  The City of London filled to capacity by workers during the day, relatively unoccupied at night, is bounded by the Tham
es to the south and covers rather more than 330 acres which the Romans enclosed within their defensive wall. When William the Conqueror arrived in 1066 he found huge gaps in the Roman wall where the Londoners of Anglo-Saxon times had helped themselves to useful blocks of Kentish ragstone and Roman bricks, so he plugged one gap with the White Tower which is part of the present day Tower of London and the earliest surviving building in London.

  While the city busied itself in commerce, Westminster, the city around the Abbey, became the centre of government. Westminster Hall, adjacent to the present House of parliament and built by William Rufus, is the only remaining building of the palace of Westminster to which the kings of England moved from Winchester. Here King Charles I was sentenced to death in 1649. Although Westminster retains its boundaries, the city has, in effect, grown to absorb all of what is known as the West End where most of ‘visitors’ London’ is to be found.

  Both these cities have grown and prospered and have lived together for close to 1000 years, they have never made up their minds to become legally married. The City of London maintains its independence in many ways. For instance, before the Queen may enter the City she must stop at Temple Bar and ask permission of the Lord Mayor of London who, symbolically, surrenders the Sword of State to her. It is only a formality but it emphasizes the city’s status.

  Outer London-the suburbs, which, the visitor rarely sees-are former villages, which have been absorbed into the body of the great spreading monster. Some, like Dulwick and Hampstead, have preserved their individuality, many are amorphous. But beyond the suburbs, though now officially in London, places like Richmond and Hampton Court, Kew Gardens and Syon House are high on the tourist list and well worth the journey.