Dirt Roads and Other Obstacles

This is the second 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 original impetus behind these examinations of routes through what we now know as Cumbria was to reveal just how isolated the towns on the coast were before the 20th century.

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If Defoe travelled during much of his Tour on horseback, it was probably due to the unsatisfactory nature of travel by any other means. In the century that followed the publication of his book, the expansion of a coaching network across trunk routes connecting major towns and cities eventually led to much improved travelling conditions in most places, and reduced the time it took to go from one place to another. Yet, despite gradual improvements, travel remained — especially in the more rural and remote parts of the country like Cumbria — a precarious and risky endeavour. If we are apt to unfavourably compare the past with the present and see in it only deficiencies, we need also to keep in mind that its apparent inefficiency is only a “comparative inefficiency.”{1}

Illustration of an early 18th century road.

Illustration of an early 18th century road.

The archaic transport networks of those times connected the country during a transitional period of capitalist development when Defoe’s was making his travels. They corresponded to their economic needs. Means of transport were varied and often ad-hoc, which meant that “vehicles, beasts of burden, couriers, messengers and post-horses all played their part in relation to a specific demand.”{2}

While improvements in road networks and coach services made travel for business or leisure more of an option — and by the late 18th century Whitehaven, a Customs Port, was served by Royal Mail coaches — it was not yet always a desirable one. The traveller’s experience was, as often as not, one of being confined to vehicles that hadn’t exactly been built for comfort, and which would be subjected to the “severe pendulum-like jolting” — even over the best surfaces of the day — that usually resulted in nausea.{3} A road that might take a visitor from Preston or Manchester to the Cumbrian coast by way of the kind of routes Defoe would have taken in the early 1700s was, in many places, often little more than “a few rough tracks, less than six feet wide,” and, at worst, might be made up of many surfaces that were “deep in fluid sludge.”{4}

To ride in vehicles sporting names like 'The Royal Neptune, The Eclipse, and The Perseverance must have been to imagine life beyond the earthly limitations of impassable country roads.

Yet, curiously, on such archaic terrain, when coaching networks did begin to link up the country more efficiently it was through services that promised a kind of transcendence, and whose names offered the hint — no less than those Intergalactic caravans and motor homes that today cut through the Lake District — of journeys that might elude the slow and ineluctable grip of reality. To ride in vehicles sporting names like The Royal Neptune, The Eclipse, and The Perseverance must have been to imagine life beyond the earthly limitations of impassable country roads.

In Britain, before the arrival of the railways, no one travelled any- where very fast, a fact that ensured that travel over long distances had to have some purpose beyond simple leisure that could justify putting up with the unavoidable discomforts and dangers that venturing into strange places entailed. Roads, after all, were also used by those “of reck- less buoyancy” — memorably represented by Defoe himself in Moll Flanders — who “had the happy knack of enlightening the way by lightening the weight of the pocket.”{5} The inhospitable and terrifying landscapes of Cumbria would remain so until the upsurge in tourist interest that dates from around the middle of the 18th century. It benefitted from a spate of road building that had been undertaken to better link Scotland and England after the union of 1707, which led to new routes in and through Lakes.{6} But that in itself was not enough to remake this place into the Lake District we now know.

The Lake District was a place that was written and imagined into its modern existence largely through the work of poets like William Wordsworth and through other artistic representations. Through the images poets and artists produced, the Lake District found a ready market amongst educated classes who had been filled with Enlightenment notions of a newly enlarged — an infinite — universe.

What went along with this was the pursuit of experiences that might make it possible to come into contact with the sense of the infinite in nature, which was best achieved through travels to wild, remote and extreme places. These, as the history of the art of the time reveals, soon became the most picturesque of places in the Romantic imagination.{7} The natural surroundings found in the Lake District were one place where the power of infinite nature could be felt; and for those who valued the experience, it would be one means of going against that other Enlightenment tendency to view nature as an accumulation of untapped resources that new kinds of scientific knowledge might subjugate and harness for some calculable human end.{8} Where Wordsworth contemplated the infinity of nature in something like a river that had carried on in motion since time immemorial — a source of life with no beginning and no end that could become, to the Romantic imagination, a means of connecting the individual to something universal — the other calculating mind bequeathed by the Enlightenment might see in that same river, as Defoe no doubt would have, “the plenty of nature” that could power new kinds of human endeavour.{9}

A late 19th century postcard showing Grasmere from Dunmail Raise, illustrating a route through the Lake District.

A late 19th century postcard showing Grasmere from Dunmail Raise, illustrating a route through the Lake District.

The connections through the Lake District and to the towns on the Cumbrian coast would remain unsatisfactory — to those who shared Defoe’s desire to see nature at the service of industry — right into the 20th century, always seeming to lag behind what was thought to best ensure the most efficient transit in and through the mountainous region, right up until the A66 was upgraded in the early 1970s. It is something that contributed to the sense of West Cumbria’s being significantly cut-off from the rest of the country, especially since Cumbria’s inland water- ways — aside from the Eden and “estuarine portions” of other rivers — were for the most part unnavigable.{10}

It is, of course, difficult to say with any certainty how widely the roads that connected the west coast to other parts of the country were used or what their exact condition was. If we suppose for the sake of argument that traveller numbers probably increased over the years, what little information can be found seems to suggest that the Cumbrian coast was little known and little visited — leaving aside what we can’t say for those who travelled on foot, by use of farm horses that were not classified as transport animals, or by whatever other ad hoc means. Leaping forward to the middle of the 19th century, by which time coach travel was already well-established, an estimated 3,755 passengers travelled — in the year 1843-44 — from the main staging post at Kendal along one route that ran to the Cumbrian coast (via Keswick, Cockermouth and Workington) and which terminated in Whitehaven.{11} That figure suggests an average of around only ten persons per day, many of whom we might guess were frequent or returning merchants and traders on business trips. The fact was that Cumbria was still, significantly, a maritime county.


Notes

1 Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce (Civilization and Capitalism, Vol. 2), trans. Siân Reynolds (London, 1982), p. 350.

2 Ibid.

3 Richard Brown, Society and Economy in Modern Britain, 1700-1850 (London and New York, 2002), p. 84.

4 See John F. Curwen, Kirkbie-Kendall (Kendal, 1900), p. 15, reflecting on the roads in and out of Kendal, then in Westmorland, and today part of Cumbria.

5 Ibid., p. 15.

6 Grevel Lindop, A Literary Guide to the Lake District (London, 1993), p. 7.

7 Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: the Development of an Aesthetics of the Infinite (Seattle, WA and London, 1959), p. 140.

8 See Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (London, 2000), p. 139. 9 Furbank and Owens, “Introduction,” p. x.

10 See Marr, Cumberland, p. 5.

11 Curwen, Kirkbie-Kendall, p. 377