Walking with Ghosts in Flimby Great Wood 2019

 Walking With Ghosts in Flimby Great Wood 

Read at the 2019 Celebration of the Lives and Friendship of Norman Nicholson and Percy Kelly, held at The Settlement, Maryport 

Though Norman Nicholson wrote about the Lake District as passionately as anyone since Wordsworth, and though Percy Kelly eventually left Cumbria entirely and moved to Norfolk, both produced their most significant work when they dealt with the very different landscape in which both had grown up: the landscape of the coastal strip, in and around Millom and Barrow in Nicholson’s case, in and around Workington and Maryport in Kelly’s. 
It was, and is, not only a very different landscape but one in which human beings lived very different lives from the sturdy pastoral world of Wordsworth’s Lake District farmers of two hundred years ago. These coastal folk of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries lived lives of hard physical labour – in mines, foundries and docks and out on the sea on fishing boats - for poor financial returns. And they lived them, mostly, not in scattered, atmospheric farmhouses but in cheek-by-jowl terraces of plain little houses which often seem to huddle into the landscape to escape the bitter winds and rain driving in from the Solway.  

When we moved to Maryport over thirty years ago, much of that industrial past had already gone: wiped away as though it had never existed – pits and foundries closed and demolished, rail-tracks ripped up, harbours become redundant and abandoned. But the evidence was still there – not only in Nicolson’s poems and Kelly’s paintings, but on the ground, where landscapes apparently of untouched rurality often hide clues to the hard lives lived there in the past. I should have realised and been ready to spot that, since we came here from Derbyshire’s Peak District, where ancient lead mining and later textile manufacture had left similar plentiful, if half-hidden signs, on the ground. But I didn’t. I only began to appreciate it when I met Mr Peacock and through him discovered Flimby Great Wood. 

Flimby Great Wood lies to the north of Flimby village. Setting out one morning from Maryport, quite randomly following a lonning leading off Ellenbrough Road, just walking out to see what I could see, I met another walker, an elderly man going in the same direction. We fell to chatting and he, finding that I was new to Maryport, began to tell me about what I’d see along this route. After a while, passing fields on either side, we came to a narrow grassy track which took us down to Risehow on the main road. Mr. Peacock showed me the disused red brick buildings, including the baths and offices, of the Risehow Mine where he had worked before retirement. (All of those buildings, by the way, were completely demolished only a couple of years ago.) 

Back up the track, we followed a path into fields until we came to woodland. But there were few broadleaf trees, just stumps and scrubby undergrowth, birch and alder saplings colonising the cleared land (to be followed later by serried ranks of newly planted conifers). Mr. Peacock told me that the then owner of the wood, the Lowther Estate, had carried out a major felling three years before, leaving that part of the wood as we saw it. (The wood has since been sold to a private owner, who has done more felling, this time of the conifers which were planted after that felling of broadleaves. Encouragingly, he has replaced the conifers with many thousands of native hardwoods. And the several public tracks through the wood remain open.) We followed another track, leading from farmland to an isolated cottage, which, as Mr. Peacock told me, had once been the woodman’s cottage. His friend, who now lived there, invited us in for tea and biscuits. 

We chatted amiably – but, decades too late, I think now of the questions I should have asked Mr Peacock and his friend. But don’t we all, as we grow older, regret the unasked questions? My own family history includes, for example, Cornish farmers and shopkeepers, Glaswegian trades union activists and German Jewish immigrants. Elderly representatives of all those strands were still alive when I was a girl and young woman. Did I ask them about what they remembered from when they were young? I did not. Impossible now, since all are long dead.) 

Certainly thirty years ago I knew little about West Cumbria’s industrial history, and can’t claim to know a great deal more now. However, returning later to the woods alone, I found, among the conifer plantations which had replaced the felled broadleaf trees, evidence of the mining activity which had extended over large parts of the woods: the massive granite walls which had housed the mechanism for hauling the coal trucks up and down, the mine-heads and ventilation shafts fenced off by the Coal Authority, and other ruins, solid, stone-built structures lost in thickets of nettles and brambles. What function did those buildings serve? What had gone on in them? There is still so much I don’t know, so for me, even today, the woods remain a place of mysterious, only-half-understood echoes from the past.  

Some facts, at least, are easily unearthed from local archives and, especially, from the records housed in the Durham Mining Museum. The main pit actually inside Flimby Great Wood was called Robin Hood Pit, which closed over a century ago, in 1909. (And, no, I don’t know why it was called Robin Hood Pit. Perhaps simply because it was in a wood and Robin Hood’s home patch was Sherwood Forest?) However, the Risehow Pit, just south of the wood, on the outskirts of Flimby, operated until 1966 - so thirty years ago, as well as Mr. Peacock, others who had worked there would still have been alive. Indeed, probably some of Percy Kelly’s customers, when he was sub-postmaster at nearby Great Broughton between 1952 and 1958, would have worked there. Even today, local people have memories of their fathers' and grandfathers', lives in the collieries. 

But the history of mining here goes back at least to the eighteenth century. Edward Hughes’ book, North Country Life in the Eighteenth Century,1700-1830, charts its development. The first efforts to establish a colliery near Ellenborough were made by Humphrey Senhouse of Netherhall in the early 1770s and his letters and other records reveal the difficulty and danger involved in creating the pits in the first place. They also provide evidence of the bitter reality of the lives of those who worked there: harsh working conditions for pitiful wages. 

In April, leaving the main tracks and footpaths, I make forays into wild places, nostalgically hunting for clumps of primroses to remind me of my Cornish childhood. Although the ground I walk on feels solid enough, the fenced-off pit-heads and ventilation shafts remind me that I’m walking over a dark labyrinth of abandoned underground roads, tunnels and tracks, where once men and boys, and ponies, laboured long and hard, lit only by lamplight. Today the reservoir which once fed the colliery is a wide and tranquil lake, known locally as Robin Pond, haunt of ducks and herons, carpeted with water lilies, edged with watermint, where fishermen spend long, slow hours sitting patiently on the banks. After rain, the woods are loud with the sound of water gushing along the gills. From Robin Pond, Furnace Gill cascades over a ruined weir and runs all the way down through the wood and then through Flimby village to the coast. It’s hard work to follow it, clambering over fallen branches, boots slipping on wet boulders. Along the banks, I find more crumbled walls and stumble on bricks lying in the stream. I’m looking for any evidence of the furnace which gives the Gill its name. There are other gills running through the woods: Penny Gill and Risehow Gill. Beside Risehow Gill there are more extensive ruins of stone buildings, whose history and use are still mysterious to me.  

On fine summer mornings I wonder if even those long-dead miners may have enjoyed their walk to work, if they took hidden paths edged with wild flowers and with a haze of bluebells under the trees, before coming within sound of the racket of men and machines which must have surrounded the mine workings. The woods are not much frequented nowadays and later, in Autumn and Winter, as the wind and rain blows straight in from the Solway and the paths I trudge turn to deep mud, I am usually the only one there. At least, the only one alive. It is easy, though, to feel the presence here still of those long-gone, hard-scrabble lives and the often dreadful deaths which ended them. Between 1833 and 1906 The Durham Mining Museum records 23 deaths in Robin Hood colliery. There appear to be no records of those injured. 

 Here are just a few of the ghosts I walk with in Flimby Great Wood – some of which ghosts haunt the paintings of Percy Kelly and the poems of Norman Nicolson: 

Mary Hines, aged 40, a greaser, who was crushed by tubs on a surface incline on 28th August 1869. A greaser was employed in greasing the axles of the coal wagons. 

Thomas Lanchester, age unknown, died on 25th April 1854, when a pickaxe fell on his head from the top of the shaft. He left a wife and four children. 

In February 1864, a large quantity of coal fell on Robert Milburn, age unknown. His foot was amputated, but he subsequently died. 

Thomas Armstrong, aged 14, was killed by a fall of coal on 16th December, 1870. He was employed as a driver. (A driver was a boy, usually aged 14 or 15, employed to manage the ponies on the main road underground.) 

John Cooper, aged 40, died on 26th August 1869 when he slipped from a rope to the bottom of the shaft he was inspecting. The report adds: ‘Death, of course, was instantaneous. The poor fellow has left a widow and eight children.’ 

Allan Cameron, aged 14, in 1906 slipped into the Robin Hood reservoir and was drowned while attempting to replace derailed coal tubs on the bridge crossing the water. The inquest report makes special mention of the fact that he was wearing clogs. 

Hard lives and hard deaths, some of them reflected in poems and paintings. Echoes of an almost vanished world. But a part of our history that we should never forget.