Big-Sea-Water

On Friday 5^th August 1859 a three-masted steamship, the Admella left the port of Adelaide, South Australia on her fortieth journey to Melbourne in Victoria. She carried eighty-four passengers, twenty-nine crew and seven horses. Deep in her hold was nearly a hundred tons of copper. There were also bags of flour to feed the prospectors in the Victorian goldfields. From this cargo the gold diggers saw not one loaf.

Friday 13^th December 1907 was a fateful night for an American ship’s crew, that of the seven-masted steel schooner Thomas W Lawson. She had left an oil refinery south of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on 19^th November with a crew of eighteen and 58,000 barrels of paraffin oil aboard bound for London. The Thomas W Lawson is forever linked with the first ecological disaster involving spillage of oil from a ship.

The SS Edmund Fitzgerald set sail from Duluth, Minnesota, in the afternoon gloom on 9^th November 1975. She was loaded with iron ore destined, via Lake Superior, for an iron works in Detroit. This lakes freighter had numerous nicknames but ‘Pride of the American Side’ does justice to her power, strength and speed. Waves that night nearly twenty feet high accounted for a modern maritime tragedy.

The sinkings of the Admella, the Thomas W Lawson and the Edmund Fitzgerald remind us not only of the little hope of survival men used to have when seascapes turned wild but also gigantic storms and heaving seas often led too often to misery and pain felt by the families of those who died. I have stood on the shores overlooking these three tragedies; my visits to these lonely places have spanned forty-eight years. Each took place in spring sunshine. Yet I could feel the thunderous seas through my toes as my tramp along these shores revealed nature at its cruelest. The English writer, John Fowles, wrote in 1974 of the Isles of Scilly (yet it applies equally to the other two sites) “that these reefs and coasts remain hungry we still have evidence every year”. His words were written only seven years after the infamous wreck of the Torrey Canyon.

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The Admella was close to Carpenter Reef, some thirty-five miles west of the South Australia/Victoria state line, when one of the horses aboard lost its balance in a heavy swell and  fell on to its side. To enable the horse to be put back on its feet Captain McEwan altered the ship’s course. The ship was perilously close to the Cape Banks lighthouse but McEwan inexplicably thought he was far from land. At 5:00 a.m. on 6^th August the ship hit Carpenter Reef and keeled over. The three lifeboats were either smashed or lost immediately. By 5:15 a.m. the ship broke into three sections, a number of passengers drowned instantly. At daybreak the survivors glimpsed, across the churning waters, the mainland coast little more than half a mile away. The crew of a sister ship to the Admella passing by in the angry ocean saw nothing and shouts from the survivors went unheard.

Dawn on Sunday 7^th August rose over quieter seas. Two of the crew made a raft and struggled successfully to reach the mainland. The land is desolate here, there is little human habitation to be seen today; a hundred and sixty years ago there was none. Through Sunday night Robert Knapman and John Leach trudged through the barren landscape heading for the Cape Northumberland lighthouse twenty-five miles east along the coast. I can only imagine the shuddering sense of disbelief that Knapman and Leach felt when, on reaching the lighthouse on Monday they learned there was no telegraph. However such Australians that do work in the wilderness are made tough; the lighthouse keeper, Ben Germein, set off to ride the eighteen miles to Mount Gambier post office. Yet another delay was forced upon the wretched survivors when Ben’s horse threw him off.

SS Admella on Carpenter Reef

Whilst the drama on land played out the sixty odd survivors aboard portions of the ship were beginning to die of thirst, exhaustion and exposure. On Tuesday, three days after disaster struck, the Northumberland lighthouse keeper together with Knapman and Leach set off back up the coast to the wreck and found one of the Admella’s lifeboats. They set about to try and repair it. On Wednesday one steamship appeared on the scene with the Adelaide pilot boat and another came from Portland. Through that day and the next multiple attempts were made to both fire rocket lines aboard the stricken vessel and to launch the repaired lifeboat but all efforts failed. On Saturday 13^th August the pilot boat and the lifeboat struggled through the still raging sea. Ben Germein, now back on the scene, steered the lifeboat and managed to bring aboard Captain McEwan and two passengers. They were taken to the beach. Once more he turned back to the wreck. He succeeded in rescuing one other survivor but on the trip back the boat capsized and the passenger was lost.

The Portland lifeboat was a robust craft. By Saturday night it was able to get close to the wreck and it’s crew could lift off more survivors. Through a number of trips back and forth, by Sunday – an incredible eight days after the shipwreck – the last remaining survivors were brought ashore.

Thirteen passengers, thirteen crew and three horses survived the wreck of the Admella. Visiting a nearby beach at Carpenter Rocks and Portland last year I was humbled by the bravery and fortitude of the passengers on the ship and of the folk on land who bent every sinew to render help. I looked across the southern ocean and thought of the unimaginable pain, suffering and desperation the passengers experienced possibly matched, in a different way, by the anguish felt by the rescuers. Today sections of the meagre landscape overlooking the site of the wreck are planted with pines, others are left to fester in the salty air, whilst the southern ocean forever pounds away at the shoreline. Where modern arboriculture is evident it is leading to the loss of indigenous birdlife. This is a forlorn part of South Australia. Of the few people who once inhabited this land most have gone to the cities in search of work.

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Gentle waves from a deep turquoise sea lap along a rocky beach bathed in brilliant sunshine. Black rocks are visible half a mile away, they lurk like phantoms. In May 2016 I am tramping around the tiny Scillonian island of St. Agnes. The circular walk, at a leisurely pace stopping to enjoy the sight of seabirds soaring and wild flowers bobbing in a gentle breeze, takes two hours with the sea constantly in sight. The land is flat; the highest point is only sixty feet above the seashore. A tiny hamlet of white washed cottages includes a low built church in Lower Town. My tramping party enters. At first there is a familiar church sight - small pews, a pulpit and confined spaces to worship. Then I look up and see a rustic wooden plaque. I read terrible words – of disaster, shipwreck and death. I am transported to be a bystander on St Agnes 13^th December 1907:

After helping to prepare the church for Christmas with some village folk I left the squat building in blackness, the wind roaring in my ears. I could hear the storm whistling through the hedges and stunted trees but I could see nothing. Spray from the sea drenched everything in its path inland. Rounding a street corner all of a sudden I heard voices coming towards me. One belonged to Charlie Hicks. He and a bunch of men were shouting something about a ship in trouble. ‘Not another one’ I thought. We had witnessed three wrecks off St Martins the previous summer of 1906 and it seemed we were overdue another disaster on St Agnes. Needing to get back to The Turk’s Head to secure the windows from the gale I then went back to my cottage to shut out the latest storm from my consciousness.

The next morning my imaginary self and the other residents of St Agnes would have discovered the awful story. The Thomas B. Lawson had been making its way just to the south of St. Agnes at Annett. She was caught in the fierce seas and currents. The captain (grandly named George Washington Dow) dropped anchors, amongst the rocks of Minmanueth that he could not have known, to wait for the storm to abate. The lifeboat crews from St Agnes and St Marys were alerted and they made their way to the ship off the North West Porth. Captain Dow refused requests to abandon ship. I can surmise that the local lifeboatmen would have cursed him for a fool as they returned to their ports, the St Agnes boat having left one of their own, William Thomas Hicks, as pilot on board the ship. During the night one anchor broke free. The ship, despite her power and size, was now at the mercy of the tempestuous sea. Dragged onto Shag Rock the seven masts of the ship all snapped, taking with them into the broiling maelstrom most of the crew and “Billy” Hicks. They had all been sent up the rigging ‘for safety’! Fifteen men drowned - what a horrible death. The next day Billy Hick’s son, Frederick Charles Hicks, set out in a pilot gig boat to look for his father. At Hellweather Rock Charlie found not his father but Captain Dow and the ship’s engineer, both alive and clinging miserably to life and rocks with decreasing certainty. Both were saved, the only two survivors of this needless disaster. What thoughts must have gone through Charlie Hicks’ mind when he met the foolhardy captain but no sign of his father.

The Thomas W Lawson

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One Friday evening in late April 1968 I became co-driver of a three quarter race-trimmed MGB Roadster making a non-stop journey from Vancouver on the west coast of Canada to Toronto in Ontario. The objective was to drive the 3,000 miles across the Trans Canada Highway in forty-six hours. We were once stopped by police in Kenora, western Ontario - they use aerial surveillance colleagues to measure car speeds and spot from above - we survived as the car had been mistaken for an identical vehicle involved in a robbery. It took twenty-four hours to drive from Vancouver to the western border of Ontario and a further twenty-four hours to reach Toronto, but my friend Rick, the MGB’s owner, got to his family party on time. We returned a month later at a more leisurely pace and stopped at the industrial border town of Sault Ste. Marie on the Canadian side of Lake Superior. We paused to take in the vastness of the lake and the waterways that feed it. I found it difficult to comprehend that huge merchant vessels steamed from Duluth in Minnesota across the lake, threading their way down through the locks at the split city of Sault Ste. Marie and then on southwestwards to Lake Huron, finally  ending their voyages in Detroit, Michigan, USA.

My contemplation across Lake Superior (‘the big lake they called Gitchee Gumee’) was in benign weather conditions. The water lay smooth and tranquil, silver and black in the mist. The land on the north shore of Superior is covered with forest, home in Hiawatha’s time of the Ojibwe indigenous people. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s long poem written in trochaic tetrameter was read to me when I was eight years of age and its rhythm mesmerizes me still:

By the shores of Gitchee Gumee

By the shining Big Sea-Water…

Dark behind it rose the forest

Rose the black and gloomy pine trees

On this land the Great Lake imposes its Big-Sea presence on all who come near. Seven years after my brief May homage to Gitchee Gumee, in November 1975, ‘the gales of November came slashin’. The SS Edmund Fitzgerald had set sail from Duluth in the afternoon gloom on 9^th November. She was loaded with iron ore, destined for an iron works in Detroit. This freighter had made the journey across the lake on numerous trips before. But as with the Thomas W. Lawson, the Edmund Fitzgerald was no match for the ‘hurricane west wind’ that tore into her at the eastern end of the lake in the early hours of 10^th November. There has never been a conclusive account of why she sank near Whitefish Bay, just fifteen miles from safety at Sault Ste. Marie. Captain McSorley radioed that some of the hatches had been blown off the freighter. Lake water penetrated the hold causing the ship to list so allowing more water in to do its damage. All twenty-nine crew went down with their ship.

The Edmund Fitzgerald

There is a poignant commemoration to this disaster. The Canadian folksinger Gordon Lightfoot’s song, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, remains one of the best folk-rock ballads ever recorded. His interest in the families of the men who died keep alive the memory of the ship and its men who sailed her. He spoke for all victims of shipwrecks, never more than for the passengers aboard the Admella for eight days and the crew of the Thomas W Lawson cast upon the black rocks in the English Channel:

Does anyone know where the love of God goes

when the waves turn the minutes to hours?

…and all that remains is the faces and the names

of the wives and the sons and the daughters

Sitting in the comfort of our landlubber’s homes we read every month of natural disasters that kill multiple and unfortunate sacrificial humans. It is a basic instinct to want to know all about the circumstances. Yet we have a terror of being caught in any such circumstance. An aeroplane crash off Guernsey two weeks ago, a terrorist bombing in Iran last week, a fire in a high-rise building in Paris this week – we search ghoulishly for details and think all the while that we are relieved not to be part of it. Drowning may be lead to a quick death but reflect on the lives of the families left behind.

Big-Sea-Water

References:

Longfellow’s Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by Gordon Lightfoot from the album, Summertime Dream, 1976

www.admella.org.au

Shipwreck; John Fowles. 1974

Bohemian Paradise

Britons have little sense of growing up in a country invaded many times, marched over by countless army boots and living under numerous hegemonies. Those of us born and schooled in Britain have lived with the notion that whilst the British Isles have been invaded by Romans, Germanic tribes, some Vikings and some Norsemen, none of these subjugated our ancestors to a tyrannical yoke or foreign regime that altered our country’s destiny forever. The Romans ran both out of ideas for governance and patience with our ghastly climate; they turned their back on Britain. This made it easier for the westward marching Germanic tribes who arrived after A.D. 410 leading to the establishment of Anglo-Saxon Britain. The Vikings tried to absorb us into their kingdom in the eleventh century but good King Edward the Confessor, an Anglo-Saxon, sent them packing. For over two thousand years my family’s Britishness has developed and remained intact. Along the way we gladly took on board some welcome civilizing influences from Rome, Germany, Denmark and (post-1975), from Brussels and Strasbourg. Yet some time in the past twenty-five years, a slim majority of English cooled on being receptive to regional European arts, law, business and philosophy. Sadly, absorbing some of the best features of culture over La Manche (separated distinctly from the dreadful ones) seems anathema to many English.

Bohemian Paradise

Bohemia (found on a modern map with difficulty, the Paradise is then just 200 square kilometres of it) has a very different history. These were our thoughts as four of us prepared a five-day tramp through the Bohemian Paradise. In every account of Bohemia, in every guide and history book the would be explorer is confronted with the numerous occasions of occupying peoples being pushed out of this part of what is now the Czech Republic. First it was the Boii tribe of Celts being moved on by Germanic tribes (whose successors took on the Romans in Britain in the fifth century) in the first century A.D. Around the turn of the 5^th to 6^th century Slavs moved in when the Germans moved out. By 700 Slavonic tribes were starting to federate even beating off invasion from the Franks and by so doing gaining influence and assistance from the Pope in Rome. Ah, ha, the Roman Catholic Church was never slow to get in on the act of geographical influence. In the 9^th century Byzantine Christian missionaries were on the scene but the Papacy in Rome took a hold on the people in Bohemia. However, by 1300 a Czech state was being formed. Then some acquisitive Germans returned. For the hapless Bohemians their country lay at a busy mainland European crossroads for restless conquerors - a landscape feature of which Britain has no experience.

King Otakar

There were kings of Bohemia from 1212 starting with Otakar I, followed by Otakar II, Wenceslases I and II, John of Luxembourg. Following them was Charles IV who gave his name to not only a famous bridge in Prague but also a university and a square. Another Wenceslas (IV) followed Charles when economic and political matters turned sour. The Hussite reform movement was born as a consequence of these bad times, so named after Jan Hus, whose statue still stands proudly in the old Prague town square. Master Hus met a fiery end as a result of the growth in prosperity of a landowning aristocracy and civic institutions. If Bohemian history was complicated before, it became doubly so now. Fighting broke out in the towns between the ordinary citizens and the rich, land-owning gentry (a similar situation to France in November 2018), as well as between the Hussites and the Catholics. Again, this was all very un-British; fighting in the towns was not something we did, at least only rarely such as in 1381 and at Peterloo in 1819. Maybe such fighting will feature once more in the English shires by 2020 if the national politicians in London continue to fail us north of the Trent.

The Hussites had a huge influence on the way that Bohemians lived, although they did not have it all their own way with many citizens preferring the Catholic style. In 1458 something else happened that would never occur in Britain; a Czech noble (George of Podebrady) with political skills was elected King of Bohemia. Next up on the throne was a Pole by the name of Vladislav Jagellon but royalty was in constant conflict with common peoples and urban centres and the Jagellons also gave up on Bohemia. This temporary vacuum gave way to the all conquering and dominant Habsburgs. The Habsburgs came from Austria and they reasserted the Catholic faith in Bohemia. By absorbing the kingdom of Bohemia into their empire the Habsburgs ruled until the First World War. Phew. That is a rushed précis of nearly two thousand years. And all this before the Munich Betrayal, the Nazis and German occupation, the influx of Communism and Soviet occupation, the Velvet Revolution of 1989 and finally Bohemia – as part of the 1993 creation of a Czech Republic – becoming welcomed in to the EU in 2004.

As we began our tramp through a small part of the region known as the Bohemian Paradise I pondered why we had come all this way for a five day walk in a pleasant rural setting when there are many pretty walks in Britain. What is so special about this Paradise? Why is it so different and how has man and the landscape collided in a distinctively different way to that of say, the Lake District in England?

Rock town

This landscape developed from a submerged plain around 66 million years ago. When the waters receded and mountains were formed to the north, sand and silt built up, eventually leading to the creation of huge sandstone blocks. So called ‘rock towns’ were formed, characterized by sandstone rock towers as high as 55 metres and canyons with sheer sides. Our dramatic walk took us through these towns – they are not populated today – and then up to explore castles perched precariously on crags. After day one we knew that England has no countryside like this. Kentmere, Langdale and Borrowdale never boasted any castles. Sandy tracks through stands of birch, fir and spruce alternated with open fields and dense forests. I felt almost a sense of being in an Alpine setting yet without the snow-capped mountains of Switzerland, just gently rolling hills.

Trosky Castle

Our first castle we visited was at Frydstejn. Now a ruin it was built in the 14^th century. It dominates the skyline on a prominent ridge. Next up was Vranov, constructed in the 15^th century. We ticked off Valdstejn, Hruba Skala, Kost, Trosky and Parez – lonely fortifications atop sandstone heights, visited now only by climbers, tourists and buzzards. The social history of these castles is quite unlike those in England and Wales where most remained in a single, family ownership through centuries of plague, famine and civil war. Reading the history of Valdstejn it is typical of how Bohemian castles changed ownership frequently. The Wallenstein branch of the wealthy Markvatics family started out from Valdstejn. The castle had been built in the late 13^th century. It was built on massive sandstone towers from which the word Waldenstein, meaning ‘forest stone’, is derived. In the ensuing two hundred years ownership changed many times. In around 1550 the castle burnt down. The wealthy regional landowners were defeated in an uprising in 1620 when Albrecht of Wallenstein bought the Valdstejn estate. Subsequent owners and occupiers were Vaclav Holan Rovensky, Jan Antonin Lexa of Aehrenthal. Finally in 1824 the property was made accessible to the people, it was confiscated from the Aehrenthals. The community in the town of Turnov now owns it.

We discovered the Bohemia landscape to be still populated thinly with small farms and villages.  Not much has changed since the end of the First World War. Apple orchards abound providing smallholders with an income and passing trampers with a free lunch. (In my mind, along the way during our Bohemian tramp, I envisioned Josef Schweik, a soldier of the First World War from Prague, bumbling his way through the landscape, picking apples and doing all he could to avoid being called to actually fight. The Good Soldier Schweik is a brilliantly comic piece of fiction by Jaroslav Hasek first published in 1930. Its real humour is the satire on army life, the military career of a fat dog fancier, Schweik, from the city and the buffoons running the military machine in 1914. Schweik was a malingerer and contrived to get himself lost in the Bohemian landscape, travelling in the opposite direction to which he should have been.) The cost of living today is low, compared to England, but economic growth is assured. The locally brewed beers are some of the best I have tasted anywhere in the world. The country’s population of ten million is concentrated in cities such as Prague, Brno and Pilsen where, amongst other activities, they profitably manufacture Skoda cars and computer security systems. The Bohemian Paradise is popular with climbers, trampers and film makers – drawn to the dramatic rock formations and rolling landscape largely untouched by the spoils of industrialization such as pylons, wind turbines and factories.

Brexit leaver

Tramping through the Bohemian Paradise I further became envious of the tranquility we found both in the villages and with the people. After its turbulent history and hosting reluctantly dozens of warring peoples, who swept across its landscape with little respect for local traditions, it is now a landlocked community peacefully knowing its place in the world next to neighbours which do not, at last, threaten it – Germany, Poland, Austria and Slovakia. The Bohemians of today are largely irreligious, law abiding, educated and welcoming to foreigners. In their historic yet peaceful landscape their modest prosperity and political stability is desirable. In contrast we unconquered people now live in a politically fractured state, riven with suspicion of anyone we don’t agree with, deriding all politicians and not at all sure where we fit in our landscape. I guess that most Britons could not identify Bohemia on a map (I struggled to do so before our visit) yet they would do well to learn to where their plumbers, builders and care workers are returning, back to their Paradise. Bohemians have it all as we set about earnestly despoiling our country for a generation.

Brexit remainer

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”.