Читать книгу Britain: The Lake District - Vivienne Crow - Страница 23

Cumbria was slow to pick up on the changes that swept the rest of England during the Agricultural Revolution – partly because of its isolation and partly because its mountainous landscape made its circumstances very different from those in the arable south. Even the rebuilding of wooden farmhouses in stone came later than it did to the rest of the country, finally occurring in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. These sometimes quaint buildings, often in beautiful surroundings, are still dotted around the modern county and are now listed buildings, protected from development and adding to the image of the Lake District as a land caught in a time warp. Also much in evidence today are the drystone walls that started appearing from about 1750. Snaking up and down even the steepest of fellsides, these ‘enclosures’ were stimulated by a combination of factors. While the ever-rising and increasingly urban-based population needed more and more food, Britain’s ability to import was restricted by the Napoleonic Wars of 1793–1815. With rising food prices, farmers were encouraged to reclaim wasteland and commons.

If Cumbria was a little slow to join the Agricultural Revolution, it was one of the first in line when it came to the Industrial Revolution. Mining for lead and copper had been thriving in the Lake District for some time, but it was the exploitation of west Cumbria’s rich coal seams, particularly by the Lowther family in the Whitehaven area (see here), that brought a new type of prosperity to the area. In east Cumbria too, especially in the North Pennines around Alston Moor, lead mining provided employment for hundreds of people (see here). In the south of the county, in what was then Lancashire, Barrow-in-Furness had the largest steelworks in the world and was a major player in the shipbuilding industry. Meanwhile, the area’s wealth of water, in the form of fast-flowing rivers and becks, allowed it to play a significant role in the textile industry – either by providing bobbins for the huge mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire, or, in the case of the Carlisle area, joining the big boys in the making of cloth.

The coming of the railways was one of the main catalysts for industrial development on such a massive scale. Cumbria’s first public railway, connecting Carlisle with Newcastle, was completed in 1838, but it was in the 1840s that what we know today as the West Coast Main Line first sliced through the Lune Gorge, up and over the 914ft Shap Summit and on to Carlisle. The city promptly became one of Britain’s busiest railway junctions, handling thousands of tonnes of cargo every week. But the new-fangled steam trains didn’t only carry industrial goods; in 1847, despite much opposition, the railway reached Windermere, opening up the Lake District proper to mass tourism.