Cartmel: a landscape with horses & betting folk

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.

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. 

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”.