If you could call the thing a horse.
If it hadn’t shown a flash of speed in the straight, it would have got mixed up
in the next race. P.G. Wodehouse, Very
Good, Jeeves
I don’t know the
first thing about horseracing. Furthermore I am not a betting man. So why should
I attend a race meeting in Cartmel? Being invited by a kinswoman living three
miles from the picturesque racetrack was a good enough reason. With the
additional attraction of a day tramping on the gentle southern fells in late
summer in fine walking weather, plus tea and cake at Sizergh Castle, I was
drawn once again to the Lake District. And the Cartmel peninsula was a part of
Lakeland I had never been, a node of Britain that demanded inspection.
The village of Cartmel
gives its name to the peninsula in the remoter south of Lakeland. This is a flat
spit of land jutting south into Morecambe Bay. Modern day Cartmel is known for
its Michelin starred restaurant and being the home of sticky toffee pudding.
However, being a user of neither of these populist inventions, I am more
interested in the founding of the community when a priory was established on
the banks of the River Eea, close to the site of the racecourse. In 1190 The
First Earl of Pembroke commissioned the priory and thus laid down the
foundation of eight hundred years of a typically English heritage. For Cartmel
you can substitute any one of hundreds of other villages in Britain that grew
in a similar fashion, even if each one has its own setting, culture and
mysteries. There is, however, one aspect of British life that binds these
villages together. The horse, and Cartmel ‘does’ horses.
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| Morecambe Bay near Cartmel |
By nurture I am a city boy. My earliest encounter with an herbivorous quadruped was being seated, aged two, on the back of a Gorleston donkey when on a family holiday in Norfolk. Reports and photographs reveal I was unimpressed with this experience. So when I married a country girl who believes the horse is “the most beautiful creature on earth” I decided to learn more about these animals. A trade off one time with my future wife resulted in my giving her driving lessons and she taking me for a few sessions of horse riding. The former went well with no mishaps. The latter are remembered for two hair-raising incidents. The first was when I lost control of my nag, which took off at great speed on a downhill and grassy track and forced its passage between my teacher and a ditch – ‘totally infra dig, my dear sir, you scoundrel!’ The second resulted in the traffic on the crammed Fosse Way being halted as my mount was spooked by a burned out lorry tyre lying in the grass verge and so it backed out on to the tarmac. It had a point, where else was there to go? Following the advice of top sportsmen down the ages, which is ‘get out at the top”, I retired from horse riding. This was a good move because as soon as I did I began to appreciate what intriguing and graceful animals they are. (Horses can be obstinate, nasty and cantankerous too but they probably learned such traits from their drivers.)
The horse has
shaped the English landscape. The growth of the economy, the exploitation of
the land and the expansion of farming were, for nineteen hundred years, heavily
dependent on the horse. Horses enabled people to travel from town to town in
far less time than it took to walk. Farmers hitched ploughs and threshers to
heavy horses thus managing to till the land more quickly and efficiently.
Ponies were sent underground to pull coal trucks away from the face of the
seam. In warfare cavalry achieved superiority over infantry. Soldiers, idling
away the time between battles, started to race their mounts and found that
horses galloping in a straight line could run fast. It was in the reign of King
Henry II that the racing of horses became common.
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| Three Kings |
By 1680 regular race meetings
were being held in Lincoln. By 1750 steeplechasing across country was popular.
The term ‘steeplechasing’ referred to the fact that a visible church steeple
was used as a marker for the horse and its rider to pinpoint in their cross
country race over hedges, dykes and ditches. Onlookers discovered they could
make money off their mates by running a book on the outcome. Breeders
discovered they could make even more money by pairing speedy stallions with
fertile mares.
Would a first
time visitor to the Cartmel area think that this landscape is still dependent
on horses? Probably he or she would not. Set in the southern extent of The Lake
District, (a name sadly in decreasing use, now folk refer to Cumbria – a modern
and soulless name), Cartmel is ringed by romantically denominated villages such
as Holker, Birkby, Allithwaite, Stribers, Eggerslack and Howbarrow. Few houses
here, some small farms, many woods; this is not a wealthy land, especially when
comparing with Newmarket, Epsom, Aintree and Sandown. Yet horseracing thrives.
Horseracing is the second largest spectator sport in Britain. As we found out
on a warm and late summer day in Cartmel, race meetings bring together peoples
of all types and class, regardless of wealth, to have a flutter and some fun
along the way. They have done for a long time. The earliest record of racing
here is in 1856. Yet mule racing probably took place on this site in the
fifteenth century, organized by the monks in the adjacent Cartmel Priory. Cartmel
racecourse is small but attracts one of the highest crowd’s for any jumps track
in the country, with up to 20,000 people attending a public holiday meeting.
Mountains,
rivers, lakes, and meadows - nature’s living and vibrant emblems - all are
found in their natural beauty in The Lake District. Cartmel looks north to the
fells where death on the slopes is too often an occurrence as some tourists - inappropriately
shod and ill prepared for rough terrain - discover too late. Cartmel also looks
to the south where the sands of Morecambe Bay look benign when the tidal waters
retreat leaving a vast flat area holding cockles and flounders. For all its
quaint beauty the peninsula has witnessed terrible deaths of men and women
drawn, with their horses, to the cockle beds in the sands between Grange and
Poulton-le-Sands, now Morecambe. In 1769 Thomas Gray wrote of a Cockler in
Poulton
“driving a
little cart with two daughters in it, and his wife on horse-back following, set
out one day to pass the seven mile sands, as they had frequently used to do:
when they were half-way over, a thick fog rose, and as they advanced they found
the water much deeper than they had expected: the old man was puzzled; he
stopped, and said he would go a little way to find some mark he was acquainted
with; they staid a while for him, but in vain; they called aloud, but no reply:
at last the young women pressed their mother to think where they were, and go
on; she would not leave the place; she would not quit her horse and get into
the cart with them.”
The old woman was
washed away and perished. The daughters clung to their cart and drove the horse
on; sometimes it swam, sometimes it waded. Finally the cart was brought to land
and safety. The brave horse and the girls survived. The bodies of the parents
were found when the tide ebbed, that of the father just a few yards from where
he had left family. In February 2004 twenty-one Chinese illegal immigrant
workers were drowned near the same spot as Gray’s Cockler over two hundred
years before. This shocking tragedy inspired films to be made and songs to be
written. In the decades between the two catastrophes numerous other fishermen,
tourists and daredevils have died in the sands.
Yet this Lakeland
landscape always entices the walker, the poet and the painter. Elsewhere in The
Lake District motorists queue to enter the National Park, running their engines
and spewing fumes, in order that they may eat fish and chips in Ambleside or
feed the ducks at Bowness-on-Windermere. Fortunate and blessed are the
residents of Cartmel and nearby Field Broughton which fewer tourists find. Apart
from on seven racing days a year here motorists and gargantuan coaches do not
clog the lanes. Even on race days the wily locals block the village, directing
the motorized racegoers to parking at distance from the track.
My equine
education has taught me far more than the horse being pivotal to the
development of the English form of agriculture. That the hedges of Leicestershire
are sculptured for jumping over is now easy to see. That the racecourse at
Catterick provides entertainment for squaddies and North Yorkshire gentry
fascinated me on an earlier racing event. That the Thoroughbred breed has been
developed for speed and that the beast loves to race are now familiar to me.
The city boy has now had the scales lifted from his eyes. I have learned of the
completely English folklore and culture – to say nothing of the separate
language - that surrounds people, places and horses that stretch back two
thousand years. For Henry II’s successors the horse was an essential component
of the English landscape too. Henry VII forbade the export of any horse without
royal permission. Henry VIII made horse stealing an offence that ranked with
the transgressions of two of his wives – punishable by beheading. Elizabeth I
introduced coaches drawn by horse (in 1555 a first carriage was made for the
Earl of Rutland). By the seventeenth century horse-drawn carriages ousted the
sedan-chair and hansom cabs, the stanhope, tilbury, gig, brougham, landau and
phaeton were all developments of a basic idea – that of the conveyance of
people by horse through the landscape. It is said that Elizabeth II is never happier
than when out racing her Thoroughbreds.
P.G. Wodehouse’s
words should have warned me. A farmer we met at Cartmel, who keeps horses for
his wife and daughter to ride and also trains horses to harness, is a wise man
and my saviour at the track. When we asked him tentatively for his tip for the last
race (my one wager in the second race resulting in a last place) he replied, “Oh
aye, aye… Keep your money in your pocket”.
