Islands

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There are certain places that seem to become more or less cut off from what exists around them. Even places that are not surrounded largely or entirely by water might be thought of as being rather like peninsulas or islands.

Southern California, bounded by the Pacific to its west, the Yosemite and Death Valley National Parks and the Mojave Desert to its east and Mexico to the south, has been famously described as ‘an island on the land.’ It is a description, though, that arises as much from a sense of historical and cultural uniqueness as it does from its obvious geographical separateness. Berlin, too, provides another kind of example. It existed, for much of the 20th century, as an extreme example of how places can be defined or circumscribed by factors that have more influence on what they are, and on how people are able to live, than mere geography does. In that case, it was the existence of geopolitical forces and the armature of military might that kept the world beyond outside and shaped Berlin as a kind of island – perhaps even a number of islands, an ‘archipelago’ – that became as inaccessible as any island separated from land by a body of water that surrounds it on all sides.

In addition to the natural and political boundaries that had set it apart as a remote or unwelcoming place, what we would refer to today as West Cumbria was – as a cultural landscape – also, like Southern California or Berlin, separated from the body of land that it formed a part of, whether this was conceived of as ‘the North’, as ‘England’ or as ‘Britain’. West Cumbria, too, had something of the character of an island at certain points in its history. Economically and culturally, West Cumbria faced westwards; a recognition of the fact that trade and communications over the Irish Sea, and outward to the Atlantic, were simply more capable of being realised than were similar connections to inland population centres and markets elsewhere in England. The West Cumbrians who found themselves at home in this place often arrived as migrants from other places dotted around the rim of the Irish Sea. It had existed as an area of economic and cultural exchange that went back to prehistoric times, and as such had long predated modern geographical–political notions of place identity (such as England, Britain or even the British Isles).

Modern ideas such as the nation state – linked to particular lands or territories – may be the historical novelty here, especially if we try to understand the perhaps different or unique character of places that are found on the outward-looking western coastal periphery of Britain. The nation state, in fact, usually projects the sea as something that divides and separates, rather than existing itself as another ‘human realm’ that in important ways came first, preceding the land. In this kind of view, the sea, as a great mediator of exchange and meeting, was ‘the uniter of people.’

West Cumbria’s economic and cultural exchange across these western waters, with a number of ports acting as points of entry and departure around the Irish Sea, saw it once characterised as part of a ‘British Mediterranean.’ It was an idea developed by a geographer named Halford Mackinder, who wrote that for the west of Britain, Ireland and the Isle of Man, the Irish Sea was more like an inland body of water that facilitated the economic and cultural exchange of these places. ‘The Irish Sea is a British Mediterranean’, he wrote in 1905, ‘whose four sides are England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. The mountains of all are visible from Snae Fell – the peak of which rises from the midst of the Irish Sea to a height of two thousand feet, forming the summit of the Isle of Man, a fifth part of Britain, neither English, Scottish, Irish nor Welsh, but Manx.’

To think in this way is to regard the sea as something that connects more than it separates, and that – of course – relates to a time in history when the sea was the principal means of communication. The world that West Cumbria would rise up in, and became part of, was akin to this British Mediterranean.

Mackinder’s idea obviously had much to do with the historic economic and communication links, the ease of access to markets afforded by the sea. It particularly reflected the truth of the fact that the most prosperous ports or nations once thrived on control of the oceans and waterways, which were used to expand economies, consolidate political power and spread cultural influences. It might be common to conjure up an image of the Mediterranean as the holiday destination of pleasure seekers that we are familiar with today, a place seemingly far from the colder northern shores of the Atlantic and the Irish Sea, but Mackinder meant to identify the role of the sea in establishing something of a common territory that gave rise to a different sense of place. In the Mediterranean itself, as Fernand Braudel showed in The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, a common culture that had little to do with the idea of the nation state had in fact arisen over thousands of years.

But, if it is historically accurate to view the Irish Sea as something akin to a mini-Mediterranean, whose existence as a distinctive cultural entity was founded on trade and commerce, then it is no less true to note that like the Mediterranean it was also subject to the vicissitudes of time and change. It was always likely to face the threat of economic decline when new forms of exchange and communication were developed, and when newer and more profitable trade routes opened up. The fact remains that the character of any place is the result of many complex factors that develop over time and history.