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.