*
West Cumbria: the North West of England, almost as far north and west as it was possible to go in England. There, on the overlooked edge of the Lake District, was a place that was both strange and unfamiliar to me. But it was here that I found myself, digging my way through the abstractions: graphics, virtual renderings, lots of maps. Road atlases, Ordnance Survey maps – from the 1800s, the early 1900s – fragments of geological maps found during interminable internet forays, very old maps that looked as if they were illustrated with allegorical figurines floating over the landscape and mythical giant fish breaking the surface of the water just off the coast, maps of Roman Britain, maps found in old tourist guide books, a tattered 1950s Mobil road map of Northern England, dynamic interactive maps conjured up on computers and smartphones that allowed me to pinch and zoom – seemingly getting closer and closer – and to watch as roads and place names suddenly surfaced. Like a child digging a hole in the garden in the hope of reaching Australia, I was beginning to think all this effort was going nowhere fast.
It was a plunge into strangeness, something I couldn’t easily make sense of, certainly not at the beginning, nor for months afterwards. But lately – I had to keep reminding myself – I had become much more familiar with my surroundings. One question nonetheless continued to preoccupy me: what was this place? It was enough to send me out on the road, heightening my receptivity to the little details that various people whose paths I crossed would volunteer.
In some of those older maps, particularly those from the 17th and 18th centuries, I couldn’t help but observe the proximity of Scotland in the spaces that cartographers of previous ages tended to leave blank just because they were not the places being represented. Sometimes the empty space would be marked with just enough information to identify an otherwise blanked out territory. ‘Part of Scotland’, one of them read, the words being all that occupied a blank space that was cut off as the squared-off map reached its edge. On one map, I noticed with interest a handful of place names that had some personal resonance, which were dotted around the blankness where the words ‘Part of Scotland’ might otherwise appear.
These impressions – broadly geographical, as I groped around for something more substantial – would soon become clearer as I absorbed a welter of other information that allowed me to see the same thing in a different light. I discovered a place as unique in character as any other place once it becomes the focus of attention. I seemed to have arrived at a place of exploding mines and collapsing streets, of red men in iron fields, of cottaged rows that stand like exposed dry-stone dykes in fields where the flatlands meet the more familiar Cumbrian hills, of intense coastal sunsets and creeping darkness moving over the plains on summer nights, of military science and weapons testing, of urban horses grazing in the most unlikely places – as if the surrounding townscapes were merely a stage set plonked down in the middle of fields – of old mine works that look like appendages to baronial homes, of Roman forts and ruins whose remains now lie beneath other, newer, buildings and farmland, of the fleeing Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, concerned for the safety of her neck, of shipwrecks and sailors, sea bathers and salt panners, of coal and tobacco barons whose names live on in street and place names everywhere, of Georgian towns in pastel colours and of 17th-century visitors searching out new, exotic experiences descending into the deepest mines in the world at Whitehaven. And, not least, perhaps, this was the place of the ‘Atomic Men’, who have, for more than half a century, nurtured – whether they are aware of it or not – a vision of what might be called the technological sublime, which is now inseparable from perceptions of this place. Their arrival was not just the source of a particular history, but also a sci-fi future that is as near infinite as human experience – whose rhythms of seasons, years and anniversaries maintain a connection between the present and the immediate future – can probably comprehend.