Side-saddle with Celia, the first Lake District tourist
Eccentric ancestor of the Harry Potter actor Ralph did not mince her words about "lazy" Cumbrians and delicious potted fish as she traversed Westmorland in 1698
Not many people travelled to the far north west of England for pleasure before the late 18th Century. So it comes as a surprise to learn that the pioneer of Lakeland tourism was a woman who traversed the mountains riding side-saddle on horseback at least eighty years before the first guidebook inspired the Romantic vision of scenic wildness we celebrate today.
That woman was the indefatigable Celia Fiennes, an ancestor of the magisterial Harry Potter actor Ralph Fiennes and the world’s greatest living explorer Sir Ranulph. She made what she called a “Great Journey” through the Lake District and Cumbria in 1698 and recorded her adventures meticulously in a book called “Through England on a Sidesaddle in the Times of William and Mary”.
In line with her eccentric family’s character she offers a distinctive, not to say acerbic, picture of the region as it at last started to recover from the devastation and penury inflicted by the devastating English Civil Wars fifty years before.
She is unafraid to put her prejudices on show. Many Cumbrians, she writes, languish in poverty because they are lazy. Their homes are cold because they build them out of stone rather than nice warm lath and plaster.
They call their locally woven cloth “cotton” when it is actually made of wool. They are forced to ride around in horse-drawn carts no bigger than wheelbarrows because their roads are undeveloped, and their lanes are so narrow.
But they serve delicious potted fish that they catch in Lake Windermere, they bake lovely flat oatmeal “clapbread” on iron griddles and their aristocrats inhabit some of the finest great houses in the land. Yet their bed and breakfast charges are the dearest in England. Celia was not one to mince her words.
Celia never married and it is remarkable that she began her solo travels at thirty-six which was for most people at that time advanced middle age. She said her aim was “to regain my health by variety and change of aire and exercise”. Yet she actually seems to have been hugely energetic and uninterruptedly hale and hearty.
At that time travel for its own sake was virtually unknown in England. Popular moralists also asserted that women who strayed too far afield were suspicious, dishonest, and unchaste. Sometimes she bowed to convention and travelled with relatives. But she made her Great Journey accompanied only by a couple of servants and without a male companion equal to her in status - as was traditionally expected - so she would have stood out.
But her strong Nonconformist heritage seems to have given her courage. In line with her fitness programme, Celia drank and bathed at every available “spaw” (spa) or medicinal spring across England and this wellness regime clearly worked for her because she lived until she was 79.
Her zestful account of her journey along Cumbria’s shoreline, up its mountains through its towns and over its moors from Lancaster to Carlisle is today revered by historians as one of the most extensive, detailed, and, in many respects sole surviving portraits of the unique conditions of life in Cumberland and Westmorland in the late 17th Century.
Born in Newton Toney, Salisbury, Celia was the grand-daughter of the 8th Baron of Sale and Sele, a staunch Puritan. She was the daughter of Nathaniel Fiennes, a politician and Parliamentarian Colonel in the Civil War. Being a thoroughly modern woman she had a keen interest in the new industries, processes and practices springing up in what later would be seen as the start of the industrial revolution.
We pick up her story as she rode north from Lancaster in the direction of Kendal “over steep stony hills all like rocks 6 miles to one Lady Middleton”, an important aristocrat who lived at Leighton Hall, about three miles north of Carnforth. Celia’s route took her over the limestone outcrop known as Wharton Crag that affords spectacular views over the vast expanse of Morecambe Bay sands. At that time, most travellers were obliged to make their way along what was little more than a rocky track that skirted the marshy area known as Leighton Moss, now an RSPB nature reserve providing habitats for rare bitterns, avocets and a lot of bullrushes.
Fortunately, she met some gentlemen who were going in the same direction. They were friends of Ann Middleton and so at their invitation Celia “had the advantage of going through her parks and saved the going round a stony passage; it was very pleasant under the shade of the tall trees.”
Leighton Hall was then “an old timber house” with a fortified tower dating back to 1246. The handsome stone mansion in the Georgian neo-classical style that we see today was built in 1759–61 for the wealthy George Townley.
“Lady Middleton was a papist”, Celia noted. In fact the Middletons’ commitment to the Catholic cause was profound and potentially ruinous. In the English Civil Wars which ended in 1651 Ann’s husband, Sir George, had been a Colonel in King Charles I’s army and he was knighted for his loyalty to the King at the start of the fighting in 1642. But in the wake of the King’s defeat and execution the Cromwell regime fined Sir George a hefty £2,646 (2020: £6 million) as a punishment for supporting the Crown.
“Thence to Kendal ten mile more, most of the way in lanes when I was out of the stony hills, and then into inclosed lands.” Within six miles of the town she found “you have very good rich land enclosed, little round green hills and grass as green and fresh being in the prime season in July.” She noticed that there were “not much woods” but the hedgerow that enclosed the fields “looks very fine.”
The cool local climate limited the crops the farmers could grow. “In these Northern Countrys they have only summer grain as barley, oats, peas, beans and lentils.” There was “noe wheat or rye, for they are so cold and late in their year they cannot venture that sort of tillage, so have none but what they are supply’d out of other country adjacent.”
Families baked their bread with “much rhye” in Lancashire, Yorkshire, Staffordshire, Hereford and Worcestershire, which wasn’t to Celia’s taste. It was a grain “which I found very troublesome in my journeys, for they would not own they had any such thing in their bread but it so disagrees with me as always to make me sick when ever I met with any tho’ I did not discern it by the taste…but in these parts it is altogether the oatbread.”
The pioneering traveller then arrived in town. “Kendall is a town built all of stone, one very broad street in which is the Market Crosse, its a goode tradeing town mostly famed for the cottons. Kendall Cotton is used for blankets and the Scotts use them for their plods (plaids).”
Despite the name, Kendal cotton was not cotton at all but a kind of coarse woollen cloth woven by hand on massive looms in the town. It was softened by being brushed vigorously with teasels, a flowering plant that when dried produces brown, prickly stems and conical seed heads. The resulting cloth resembled fluffy cotton fibre although it could be sheared, dressed or cropped to make all kinds of surface finishes. The cloth was originally known as Kendal Coatins but the name got changed with use - probably as a marketing ploy. The term ‘blanquet’ was applied to the white version but the cloth became famous for coming in many colours.
Celia finds it hard to shake off the idea that mountain landscapes are a real disadvantage, complaining that rocks were everywhere: “The River Can (Kent), which gives its name to the town is pretty large but full of rocks and stones that makes shelves and falls in the water.”
However she discovers the pools they form are “stored with plenty of good fish” and the locals enlarge these water holes by putting in more stones “in manner of wires (weirs) at which they catch salmon when they leave with speares.” She is also impressed by the “roareing” of the water that helps the townsfolk forecast the weather. When the sound is loudest on the north side of the town “it will be faire” and if on the south side “it will be wet.” Some of the falls are “as high as a house”.
Her views on architecture are aristocratic: “there are 3 or 4 good houses in the town, the rest are like good traders houses very neat and tight.” She says all Kendal’s roads are “pitch’d” which seems to mean cobbled and angled so that rain and mud drain off to the sides. She reckons that Kendal’s roads would be “extreme easy to be “repair’d” because the whole country “is like one entire rock (f)or pitching almost all the roads.” At the town’s King’s Arms Hotel Celia enjoyed a delicious breakfast delicacy: baked char (a fish closely related to trout caught in nearby Lake Windermere), boned and flaked, pressed into pots, covered with clarified butter and served with toast.
“One Mrs Rowlandson does pot up the charr fish the best of any in the country. I was curious to have some and so bespoke some of her.” Celia was also keen to see the lake the fish came from “and so went from Kendal to Bondor (Bowness) 6 miles through narrow lanes.” At that time the undeveloped roads were often less than six feet wide, restricting the width of any vehicles that could travel on them. “But here can be noe carriages but very narrow ones like little wheel-barrows,” she said.
Andrew Pringle of the British Board of Agriculture confirmed this in 1794 when he published a report stating that a Cumbrian cart could typically carry “less than sixteen cubic feet” of cargo. A lot of supplies such as fuel had to be transported by horses where the lanes were too stony and hilly for carriages to pass. Celia wrote: “They use horses on which they have sort of panniers some close some open that they strew full of hay turff and lime and dung and everything else they would use, and the reason is plaine from the narrowness of the lanes.”
This explains the “abundance of horses I see all about Kendall streets with their burdens,” she writes. Kendal is seven miles from her next objective, the “great lake Wiandermer (Windermere) or great standing water which is 10 mile long and near half a mile over in some places; it has many little hills or isles on it, one of a great bigness of 30 acres of ground on which is a house, the Gentleman that is Lord of Manor in it Sir Christopher Phillips (Philipson).”
The Philipsons were the most important gentry family in Windermere and, like most of their kind, Catholics. They had been minor Westmorland landholders since the fourteenth century. In the Civil War, Christopher’s father was a captain in the Royalist garrison at Carlisle and Christopher was arrested as a suspected Jacobite (a supporter of restoring the Catholic Stuarts to the throne) in 1696, but he took the oath of loyalty to the Protestant King William after the death of James II. He was a Justice of the Peace and was briefly elected as MP for Westmorland in 1679.
But he didn’t make much of a mark. He delivered no speeches and was appointed to no committees. His letters, however, reveal him to have been a shrewd observer, whatever that is worth. Celia was impressed by Philipson’s apparent power and hospitality, although she did not apparently know that behind the scenes the family was fast running out of money and their line would die out in the early eighteenth century: “He has a great command of the water, and of the villages thereabout, and many privileges, he makes a Major (Mayor) or Bailiff of the place during life; its but a small mean place, Mr Majors was the best entertaining place where I was.”
She visited Belle Isle, the largest island in the lake, to find it being farmed. “The isle did not look to be so big at the shore but taking boat I went on it and found it as large and very good barley and oates and grass.” The unusual drum-shaped Belle Air house that is so prominent today was not started until 1774, a generation after Celia wrote her book.
She noted that “the water is very clear and full of good fish” though the season for her favourite charr was between Michaelmas and Christmas so they were not available for her to eat. “If they are in season their taste is very rich and fatt tho’ not so strong or clogging as the lampreys (an eel-like fish a surfeit of which is supposed to have killed King Henry I) are.”
Encountering such a huge body of inland water was clearly a new experience even for an educated and experienced traveller such as Celia. It is fascinating to find her debating with herself whether the lake might behave like the sea, a river or some other kind of watery entity. Windermere “seems to flow and wave about with the wind or in one motion but it does not ebb and flow like the sea with the tyde.” Nor, she noted, did it run in a particular direction like a river “tho’ at the end of it (Newby Bridge) a little rivulet trills from it into the sea, but it seems to be a standing lake encompass’d with vast high hills that are perfect rocks and barren ground.”
She is clearly astonished so see just how much water tumbles down the sides of the valleys without apparently raising the level of the lake. She assumes the excess must flow out at the southern end during heavy rain. She noticed the “vast height from which many little springs out of the rock does bubble up and descend down and fall into the water: notwithstanding great Raines the water does not seem much increased, tho’ it must be so, then it does draine off more at the end of the lake.”
This is an extract. You can read the rest of this piece in my book called People of the Sacred Valley. You can buy the book at The New Bookshop, Main Street, Cockermouth, at the Moon & Sixpence cafe at Lakeside, Keswick, Bookends in Keswick and Carlisle, and Sam Read in Grasmere.
Or you can get a copy instantly here:
https://www.fletcherchristianbooks.com/product/secrets-of-the-lost-kingdom
Also you could buy my latest book, Secrets of the Lost Kingdom:
https://www.fletcherchristianbooks.com/product/secrets-of-the-lost-kingdom
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