This is the first of two draft chapters dating from early-to-mid 2018 originally written for an earlier version of West Cumbria: On the Edge (which was almost twice the length of the one that was finally published in April 2019). The discussion of Daniel Defoe in what is presented here was later significantly reduced and incorporated into an article I published in Places journal in 2019, which was about the A66 road through Cumbria. The original impetus behind these examinations of routes through what we now know as Cumbria was to get a better sense of just how isolated the towns on the coast were before the 20th century.
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Until the mid-18th century, the roads that connected Britain internally still existed, in common with those in most of Europe it seems, “more or less in a state of nature.”{1} The counties that today make up Cumbria enjoyed “the unenviable reputation of having some of the poorest roads in the kingdom.”{2} Around Whitehaven in the late 18th century, long after it had established itself as a thriving port, the roads to nearby places — Egremont, St. Bees and Distington — remained narrow and bumpy country tracks, in a “ruinous” state that was made worse by traffic from the thriving harbour.{3} In an age when horses were the main source of motive power, travelling over distance was not easy and not least in those parts of the country that were remote; in addition to bad or non-existent travelling surfaces — comprised of mud and hardcore tracks — there could be more challenging obstacles depending on the terrain that presented itself. Cumbria was a case in point.
Modern day West Cumbria contained — according to the evidence of John Ogilby’s 1675 road atlas, Britannia, Volume the First, or an Illustration of the Kingdom of England and Dominion of Wales — only two roads worth mentioning. One that connected Egremont, Whitehaven, Cockermouth and Workington; and another that linked Cockermouth to Ambleside and Kendal via Keswick. It wouldn’t necessarily have been the case that these were roads that could always accommodate wheeled vehicles, and it was likely that “travelling was undertaken on horseback and goods transported on the backs of pack-horses.”{4}
A plate from Ogilby’s 1675 road atlas, showing routes in Cumberland.
As well as being known as dangerous frontier country for long periods of its history, Cumbria could easily impress the traveller as impassable country. The point of entry to modern day Cumbria from the south, proceeding “north of manufacturing Lancashire, north of rural Lancashire” into what was Westmorland rose into view as a primitive wilderness, a “Hyperborean elsewhere,” which seemed to present a different and far more remote north that seemed to belong to another country.{5}
Writing of a journey taken at around the turn of the 18th century, when Ogilby’s atlas might have provided the most likely guide to the routes into northern Britain, Daniel Defoe recorded his impression of the road ahead as he left Lancashire — presumably on horseback — and caught sight of the mountainous terrain of Cumbria, a land of high mountains, and the prospect of countless steep descents into valleys that could not yet be seen. “I could not but be apprehensive for my neck,” Defoe later wrote.{6} “Unpassable” snow-capped hills stood in a vast emptiness all around, and suggested that “the pleasant part of England was at an end.”{7} Looking towards the Furness Fells, and flanked to the east by “the mountains of Yorkshire North Riding,” he experienced a place “eminent only for being the wildest, most barren, and frightful of any that I have passed over in England or Wales.”{8}
It was irredeemably wild and inhospitable country, where even thriving market towns outside of the mountainous terrain, such as Penrith, still seemed distant from the heart of England.
Defoe was one of the earliest visitors to the newly industrious Cumbrian coast to record his impressions of places like Whitehaven; a town not even mentioned in earlier surveys of the country, such as William Camden’s Britannia (1701), which was probably one of the most up-to- date written sources available before the publication of Defoe’s own survey of the Great Britain. On Ogilby’s atlas, Whitehaven is a terminal point where a minor road runs out, less prominent than Egremont and Cockermouth. Defoe’s travels provided the basis for the impressions that made up his three-volume Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (published 1724-27) a primary source for understanding the state of the nation at that time, although one that has been the source doubts as to its accuracy, as many have long since disputed both the veracity of his impressions — he was, indeed, “famous for his skill in passing off other people’s experiences as his own” — and the dates he was supposed to have visited the various places he discusses.{9} But his Tour, which also compresses into a period of five years (1722-1727) observations that were probably gather over a period of two decades, today remains “by far the most often quoted source for early eighteenth-century English social and economic history.”{10} And it was the latter aspects of his times — the changing economy and society — that really interested him; the world that was turning and churning before his own eyes.
Defoe, of course, was to become a novelist — something that happened later in his life — and is now perhaps better known for works like Robinson Crusoe (1719) than he is for his Tour. He was a remarkable individual who lived an eventful life that carried him from poverty to riches and into close relationships with people at the highest level of power. This “fertile-minded and reckless man, with a gift for disguise” may, in fact, have been travelling through what we know as Cumbria today in his capacity as a kind of government spy, but whatever the case, he was no doubt able to satisfy a genuine interest in seeing how the new manufacturing towns had begun to rise up across the land during his life-time.{11}
The title page of the Tour and a portrait of Defoe.
The sense of desolation he experienced as he eyed the Cumbrian landscape on the horizon might have reflected a desire to seek out through his travels evidence of improvements to “the lands, the trade, and manufactures” had been taking place, if not the signs that nature had been made to give up its bountiful riches.{12} Cumbria, standing apart from everywhere else, seemed to be irredeemably wild and inhospitable country, where even thriving market towns outside of the mountainous terrain, such as Penrith, still seemed distant from the heart of England, subject as it had recently been to raids from marauding Scots at the start of the 18th century.{13} This sense of a world apart was echoed by others — even those who welcomed its wildernesses. On his 1769 journey through the Lake District, Thomas Gray — a writer who had, some decades earlier, already been one of the first to communicate the experience of touring through the Alps — was forced to retreat after being unable to negotiate a particularly hazardous route between Borrowdale and Ravenglass that passed alongside Scafell Pike and Wasdale Head. “All further access is here barred to prying mortals,” he noted. The mountains and those guides who protected them, he wrote — alluding to Milton’s “Paradise Lost” — enjoyed the “reign of chaos and old night” that kept the sense of wilderness intact.{14}
In the Tour, Defoe proceeds along a route that seems to keep him on the fringes of the Lake District, through the towns of Kendal and Penrith as he heads towards Carlisle. West Cumbria, as we know it now, was presented to his readers as almost an afterthought, possibly because most of them would have had little sense that there was any life in that part of the country. “Before I go on to speak of Carlisle,” Defoe wrote, “I must return to the sea coast.”{15} The Cumbrian coast, he wrote, was “more remarkable” than the Lancashire coast because it could boast several thriving ports to Lancashire’s one (Liverpool was its sole port of any significance).{16} Whitehaven, he noted, was the “most eminent” coal trading port in England after Newcastle, and it wasn’t unusual at this time to look over the harbour and see “200 sail of ships at a time” making out for Dublin, laden with the coals that had brought wealth to the town.{17} Due to the rapid transformation of Whitehaven from a fishing village into a burgeoning customs port, it provided an excellent example, in Defoe’s eyes, of the benefits of trade. In fact it stood in marked contrast to the places of the Lake District, such as Keswick — a town “in decay” that was languishing miles from the bustling life of coastal Cumbria.{18}
Unlike subsequent visitors to the Lake District whose spirits soared at the experience of finding themselves in these vast, wild, landscapes, Defoe was not much interested in the kind of mountain country that he saw in Cumbria, and barely mentioned its natural attractions. The Cumbria away from the towns and the trading ports represented the world as it had always been, not as it was becoming everywhere else — a place of commerce, industry and continual economic improvement. Its own future industry and commerce — tourism — had yet to be invented.
Notes
1 See Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce (Civilization and Capitalism, Vol. 2), trans. Siân Reynolds (London, 1982), p. 350.
2 Rollinson, A History of Cumberland and Westmorland, p. 89.
3 As noted in John Campbell, A Political Survey of Britain (London, 1774), p. 315.
4 Rollinson, A History of Cumberland and Westmorland, p. 89.
5 Davidson, The Idea of North, p. 224.
6 Defoe, A Tour, p. 260.
7 Ibid., p. 262.
8 Ibid., p. 258.
9 See J.H. Andrews, “Defoe and the Sources of his Tour,” The Geographical Journal, Vol. 126, No. 3 (Sep., 1960), p. 271.
10 P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens, “Introduction,” Daniel Defoe, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (Abridged), eds. P.N. Furbank, W.R. Owens and A.J. Coulson (New Haven and London, 1991), p. xii.
11 Ibid., p. vii.
12 Defoe, A Tour. The words quoted are detailed on the title page summary. 13 Ibid., p. 263.
13 Ibid., p. 263.
14 William Mason, The Works of Thomas Gray, with Memoirs of His Life and Writings (London, 1827), p. 292.
15 Defoe, A Tour, p. 264. 16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., p. 266.
18 Ibid., p. 267.