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Cumbria is not only of the north, it is beyond ‘The North’, which is to say, a distance further on from that supposedly grim, cold and (the further north one goes) sparsely populated territory that has, for centuries, loomed in the English imagination. It is certainly true to say that if the parts of Cumbria that belong to the Lake District National Park supply your image of this place, then yes, it very much seems to possess the qualities of northerness. But, even then, it is not really that far north – people live further north in Scotland, in Shetland and beyond. And what’s more important, certainly for understanding how misleading common perceptions can be, is that beyond the Cumbria that is known is a place whose character and identity has been determined far more by its western location than the fact that it lies north of most of the country.
If there are varieties of north, then it is no less the case that there are varieties of west. Interestingly enough, the revised and updated version of the ‘Pevsner Guide’ to Cumbria – containing new material from Matthew Hyde that fleshes out and adds detail to the often brief insights of the original text – described Millom not only as a town on the west coast of Cumbria, but also as a place that had the air of ‘a Wild West town’, meaning, presumably, the Wild West of Hollywood movies. The Market Square of ‘grand facades’ that seem to have ‘nothing much behind them’ struck Hyde as being reminiscent of the backless facades of a film set. That perhaps says something about how hollowed-out Millom had become after its steelworks vanished, but it no less points towards its position on the edge of a frontier.
Further up the coast, the A595 road from Carlisle out to the west runs over an old Roman road that once connected the garrison in Carlisle to its western Cumbrian outposts – places like Maryport and Ravenglass that now form part of the ‘Frontiers of the Roman Empire’ World Heritage landscape. There, in the middle of farmland and approaching a small settlement called Red Dial, you may see a sign that reads, simply, ‘Westward’. For a time, I was entertained by thoughts that this name could have been the result of some weary Roman commander or medieval pilgrim naming this spot on the land as a campsite on the road, within sight of the sun going down over the sea in the distance; one last place to stop before embarking on the last leg of the journey. Sadly, it turns out that the name was simply derived from the fact that the place was once the western ward of a medieval administrative unit of land called Inglewood – a local hunting ground – that came to be called Westward. If your imagination allows, though, its mythopoeic resonance may enliven a contemporary journey west, over land where Romans once trudged.
The sense of a Cumbria that primarily existed on the western margins, or even as a west-facing society, was, in so many ways, later overwritten and concealed by the more powerfully resonating image of ‘Lakeland’, this inland mountainous place, which began to take hold in the mid-to-late 18th century. This was followed some 200 years later by the merging of Cumberland and Westmorland with other parts of Northumberland and Lancashire to make the new administrative county of Cumbria, in 1974, stretching the Cumberland that had once been described as a ‘maritime county’ into a new, imaginative construction.