Why can't you read about Cumbria in normal history books?
The mountainous, myth-haunted north west of England has a spectacular history studded with violence, intrigue, heroism and creative genius - so why has been edited out of mainstream literature?
Tracking down something lively to read about the real history of Cumbria and the Lake District can be frustrating.
There are good books about the beautiful region that began earning a reputation as a visitor destination in the late 18th Century. But the vast majority of those available on bookshop shelves are sightseeing or coffee table-type publications. One bestseller reveals how to visit twelve Lake District pubs in 24 hours and another shows you all the best routes by which you can transport a corpse over the fells.
If, like me, you want to get beyond the tourist commonplaces and seriously investigate the people and places, chronicles and culture of Cumbria you have to bury yourself in hefty biographies or comb through thumping great histories in which northern events are often treated as a footnote or not at all. Quite a lot of what makes the place important has been neglected or forgotten.
Ever since the Napoleonic wars, the business of mainstream British history has been to tell the story of our national rise to greatness. Anything that does not contribute to the patriotic narrative tends to be excluded.
That assumes events in the so called regions of England are unimportant, which is emphatically not true of Cumbria. Another reason for this neglect is that Cumbria is historically, genetically and culturally a part of what the Establishment in London chooses to deride as the Celtic Fringe.
Yet in fact Cumbria has been the stage set for the Roman, Viking, Anglo-Saxon and Norman invasions. Robert the Bruce, Edward I, Athelstan, Dunmail the Emperors Hadrian and Septimus Severus fought for supremacy across these lands. The greatest modern artistic movement, the Romantic Revolution, was born here. Cumbria has often been the pivot on which British history has turned.
That’s why I set about deeply researching and writing a series of books with the collective title “Hidden Cumbrian Histories”. I started the first one - Secrets of the Crooked River - with what I thought was the faint hope of raising money to support a community paper called the Cockermouth Curiosity. To my surprise the book has sold hundreds and hundreds of copies. The paper was killed by Covid-19 but the book revenue continued and it has enabled me to publish three more titles.
In case you are wondering, I plough all the revenue, including the subscriptions to this Substack account, into publishing the books. There are no profits. Sales of all four books have been strong and a fifth book, The Trophy at the End of the World, will be coming out officially on September 5, 2023. I will post more details about what’s in that one soon.
Here’s a bit more about the four existing books, and where you can get them.
“Secrets of the Crooked River” is a witty and atmospheric biography of the key Cumbrian town of Cockermouth that draws readers into a hidden world.
Stone Age residents try magic to stop floods. Mary, Queen of Scots spends her last day of freedom in the town writing desperately to Elizabeth I. The skeleton of a 2,000-year-old murder victim emerges from under Papcastle Roman Fort’s bathhouse.
Wicked Jimmy Lowther, the “Tyrant of the North” keeps his dead mistress at home in a glass coffin.
An exasperated and betrayed Edward I dies on a desolate Cumbrian marsh. Lady Maria Callcott triggers an earthquake in male-dominated science.
Anna Maria Radcliffe, Lady Derwentwater, tries to bribe a Prime Minister and seduce a king to save her Jacobite husband from the gallows, John Walker overcomes a jealous boss to conquer smallpox.
Fearon Fallows saves the Royal Navy from sinking in the Southern Hemisphere.
When you add Viking invaders, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert the Bruce, Tennyson and atom scientist John Dalton, “Secrets of the Crooked River” tells the story not just of this glorious patch of the Lake District but of Britain itself.
£8.99
You can buy Secrets of the Crooked River here:
Why does Cumbria produce such remarkable people?
What inspired the visionary poet but selfish man, William Wordsworth, or cause the brilliant storytelling but tragic love affair of Beatrix Potter?
How did Cumbria’s challenging character trigger Fetcher Christian’s Mutiny on
the Bounty, motivate the rebels who almost toppled Henry VIII or drive
Maryport’s feuding Ismay family to build the Titanic - and sink it?
Drawing on research, letters, diaries and archaeology this book, Huge & Mighty Forms explores a 13,000-year timespan. It examines how the hauntingly beautiful Lake District, its pioneering Altlantic-facing origins and its rich Celtic culture helped forge some extraordinarily original people.
How did the first feminist, Lady Anne Clifford, defy a king to inherit four
Cumbrian castles, or colourist Winifred Nicholson triumph over scorn from male
critics? This book suggests Cumbria’s distance from London, its deep artistic and
religious traditions and its mountainous impregnability endowed Cumbrians
with a distinctly different outlook to South-East England.
This book charts how Cumbria’s Iron Age Queen Cartimandua rose through
political mastery, but fell in a sex scandal, how Druids wielded terrifying power
along the River Derwent, why William the Conqueror steered clear of invading
Cumbria in 1066, and the fateful role it played for Suffragists and Suffragettes.
We meet the Cockermouth rent collector who masterminded the Gunpowder
Plot, discover how devout Lake District geologist Adam Sedgwick trained Charles
Darwin, only for his student to devastate Christianity, and visit German refugee
Kurt Schwitters who transformed world art from “idyllic” Elterwater.
We learn how Charles I’s “rabble of gentility” lost the Civil War against the
disciplined defenders of Cockermouth, how Ewanrigg inspired Wilkie Collins’s
The Woman In White, how the hills and a libertine aristocrat with 43 children
from 15 mistresses helped make JMW Turner our greatest painter, and how
Ambleside helped cigar smoking, ear trumpet waving Harriet Martineau become
a world famous journalist.
This is the story of how an extraordinary place made an exceptional people.
£9.99
You can buy Huge & Mighty Forms here:
It might seem to be a picture-perfect, serene and utterly remote fragment of rural England.
Yet the towns and villages along the sixty-mile course of the beautiful Derwent River inspired a lot of remarkable people - and saw a lot of trouble.
Some of the inhabitants of Keswick, Cockermouth, Workington and their neighbours Maryport and Whitehaven created world-famous art and literature. Others built fortunes, wielded enormous political power, created industries or steered world-changing events.
But these achievements often came at a heavy price. The twenty-one real-life stories in this work of Cumbrian history include:
A corrupt moneybags accidentally made a town beautiful as he sneakily bought up an election.
A pioneering doctor gave everything she had to establish a hospital for the poor, only to find her own Government was killing the people she aimed to save.
An innocent German miner was bludgeoned to death by a jealous Cumbrian mob after he and his Continental colleagues left the local girls swooning.
A cautious General narrowly escaped a firing squad after he volunteered to carry out a King’s impossible military fantasy.
A brilliant girl was savagely beaten by her tyrant father grew up to start the tabloid tradition of woman-hating columnists.
A lecherous slaveowner’s pretensions to gentility collapsed when two girls he imported for his own pleasure escaped into the night…
People of the Sacred Valley features famous names such as John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Sara Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Hardwicke Rawnsley, Emperor Hadrian, Sheila Fell and Hugh Walpole.
Queen Elizabeth I, William Pitt the Elder, Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, William Hazlitt, John Maynard Keynes and L.S.Lowry play major roles.
It also shines new light on others whose stories have become obscured by time such as William Senhouse, Dame Edith Brown, Eliza Lynn Linton, Richard Graham, Viscount Preston, Sir John Mordaunt, Arthur Pigou, Celia Fiennes, Cumbria’s Viking invaders... and the barmaid of the Royal Oak Hotel, Keswick.
You can buy People of the Sacred Valley here:
A huge part of our history has gone missing…
Has there been a cover-up? Why are people struggling to discover the true story of the past?
The reason is simple. Official histories ignore regional narratives. They reduce our national story to a patriotic uniformity. But the edited version means we don’t know who we are.
Cumberland, Westmorland and Furness are very different from the rest of Britain. For five hundred years after the Romans left, Cumbria resisted takeover by the English empire. It remained a separate kingdom with its own language, tax system, culture and institutions.
That autonomy ended with the defeat of Dunmail, the last King of Cumbria in 945 AD. His Lost Kingdom was the final piece of territory forced into England in 1092. But that means Cumbria had more time to develop a unique identity than any other part of England.
This book argues that difference influenced what happened afterwards, and that distinctiveness still can be detected today.
Secrets of the Lost Kingdom also reveals the life of a man in a lead casket; why building Hadrian’s Wall was a mistake; how farming brought violence to Cumbria; how Mary Queen of Scots committed a fatal blunder in Carlisle; how Lady Hamilton inspired and destroyed an artistic genius; how a hesitant haberdasher stitched up the Nazis and whether a hero of exploration was a lunatic bungler.
“A renowned writer and journalist, Paul brings forgotten local history to life in a way that is not only eye-opening but also breathtaking, exciting and inspiring” - Cumbria Guide.
The latest book in the Hidden Cumbrian Histories series.