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There And Back Again
If you live as I do on the borders of East Lancashire, West Yorkshire is foreign parts. A mere six centuries ago there was a war between the so-called House of Lancaster and the so-called House of York and- as those of you who live on either side of the Mason-Dixon line can attest- these things never wholly die away. Stories- probably apochryphal- are told of streams in the Pennine borderlands running red with blood. For all that our subsequent histories- centuries of sheepy goodness followed by the bouleversement of the industrial revolution- are remarkably similar- we don't trust them and they don't trust us.
Here in Oldham we live so close to the county line that people at the edge of the Borough- a mix of hill-farming in-breds and wealthy white-flighters- have been campaigning for years to have themselves re-allocated to Yorkshire. God, but I hate those people!
And yet, as always- as with England and France, as with Confederate and Yankee- there's a fascination that goes along with the animosity. If we want to take a nice, Sunday afternoon drive we automatically head into Yorkshire. It's prettier over there. They have tough little mill towns with Palladian town halls squeezed into river valleys. Yesterday we took a road we'd never taken before and found ourselves in a valley that had been dammed up to make a reservoir. The reservoir was full and the water was slopping over the top of the dam and sliding down the hundred feet of slithery wall like- like an incoming tide that had been stood on end. It was marvellous. I found a gap in the fence and trekked to the foot of the falls and took photos and got the spray in my face and then all but gave myself a heart attack climbing back up to the road. Lancashire has nothing to show like that.
We wound up in a place called Sowerby Bridge. Now, that's another thing they've got.: place names. Our towns have names like Oldham, Rochdale, Littleborough, Burnley; There's no oomph to them. But Sowerby Bridge- there's a guy in Dickens called Sowerby; he's an undertaker. And a mean, sour, tight-fisted, little, twisted bastard ( a typical Yorkshire man in fact). Sowerby Bridge: It's onomatoepaic; it expresses something about the soul of the place.
And on the way back we passed a fingerpost pointing to places called Lumbutts and Manikinholes. No doubt these are wholly disappointing, blink-and -you'll-miss-them agglomerations of council houses and service stations, but the names, the names!
Which brings us to poets. West Yorkshire breeds 'em . This is Bronte country. Also the stomping ground of the unspeakable Ted Hughes. I don't like him, but no-one has expressed this damp, craggy, cruel landscape as vividly as he did. And his sometime wife, Sylvia Plath, is buried here. On a windy hillside In a place called Mytholmroyd. Pause to savour and deconstruct that name.
I'm glad to come home. We're less melodramatic over here. East Lancs is real and West Yorkshire isn't quite. Here's where the humans live and over there- well, what species do creatures like Heathcliff and Ted Hughes belong to? It was in some god-forsaken corner of West Yorkshire that the American Werewolf got the bite that turned him feral. But there's envy mixed up in it. Why can't we have a dam like that? Would they miss a crag or two? Let's go dig up Sylvia Plath and bring her home to civilisation.
Here in Oldham we live so close to the county line that people at the edge of the Borough- a mix of hill-farming in-breds and wealthy white-flighters- have been campaigning for years to have themselves re-allocated to Yorkshire. God, but I hate those people!
And yet, as always- as with England and France, as with Confederate and Yankee- there's a fascination that goes along with the animosity. If we want to take a nice, Sunday afternoon drive we automatically head into Yorkshire. It's prettier over there. They have tough little mill towns with Palladian town halls squeezed into river valleys. Yesterday we took a road we'd never taken before and found ourselves in a valley that had been dammed up to make a reservoir. The reservoir was full and the water was slopping over the top of the dam and sliding down the hundred feet of slithery wall like- like an incoming tide that had been stood on end. It was marvellous. I found a gap in the fence and trekked to the foot of the falls and took photos and got the spray in my face and then all but gave myself a heart attack climbing back up to the road. Lancashire has nothing to show like that.
We wound up in a place called Sowerby Bridge. Now, that's another thing they've got.: place names. Our towns have names like Oldham, Rochdale, Littleborough, Burnley; There's no oomph to them. But Sowerby Bridge- there's a guy in Dickens called Sowerby; he's an undertaker. And a mean, sour, tight-fisted, little, twisted bastard ( a typical Yorkshire man in fact). Sowerby Bridge: It's onomatoepaic; it expresses something about the soul of the place.
And on the way back we passed a fingerpost pointing to places called Lumbutts and Manikinholes. No doubt these are wholly disappointing, blink-and -you'll-miss-them agglomerations of council houses and service stations, but the names, the names!
Which brings us to poets. West Yorkshire breeds 'em . This is Bronte country. Also the stomping ground of the unspeakable Ted Hughes. I don't like him, but no-one has expressed this damp, craggy, cruel landscape as vividly as he did. And his sometime wife, Sylvia Plath, is buried here. On a windy hillside In a place called Mytholmroyd. Pause to savour and deconstruct that name.
I'm glad to come home. We're less melodramatic over here. East Lancs is real and West Yorkshire isn't quite. Here's where the humans live and over there- well, what species do creatures like Heathcliff and Ted Hughes belong to? It was in some god-forsaken corner of West Yorkshire that the American Werewolf got the bite that turned him feral. But there's envy mixed up in it. Why can't we have a dam like that? Would they miss a crag or two? Let's go dig up Sylvia Plath and bring her home to civilisation.
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I'm a South Yorkshire lass...with a dash of Derbyshire borders thrown in... and as beautiful as West/North Yorks is... them there folk ar reight forign - a different tribe all together!
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Richard Duke of York's family seat was in barely-Northampton -- Fotheringhay, near the border of Cambridgeshire -- the northern connections, I believe, were more from his inlaws, the Nevilles.
The battle of Towton (1461, if memory serves) is purported to have resulted in 28,000 slain. That's probably a bit of an exaggeration, but it doesn't take a lot of imagination to envision hundreds or thousands of panicked Lancastrians being driven down the hill to the flooded Cock Beck and the stream running red with blood. Doesn't take all that much blood to turn the water red.
Some photos --
Fotheringhay:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/alistairandrachel/208373527/
Towton:
http://www.r3.org/archives/ricardian_britain/towton/index.html
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Even today the Pennines present quite a barrier. OK, you can get through them in a car or train in about 20 minutes- but look out the window and that's a wasteland out there.
I don't think the War between the Lancastrians and the Yorkists was ever really a war between the two counties, but it's remembered as such. And the counties still use the red and white roses as their emblems. As I drive up into the hills I pass a sign surmounted by a white rose, "welcoming" me to West Yorkshire. It feels like a challenge.
Thanks for the photos. You can feel the chill. I'd like to visit Towton. Have you seen the TV film about the archaeology of the battlefield- "Blood Red Roses"? It contains marvellously graphic reenactments of the fighting and (rightly) won awards.
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As I think about it, the Stanleys hailed from Lancashire and the Nevilles from the North Riding. That would explain a lot about Bosworth, wouldn't it?
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An interesting point that- about the Stanleys and Nevilles. Do historians factor in regional loyalties and animosities when they consider the politics of the middle ages?
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Heaps of stuff on the "loyalty, lordship, and law" theme. You could start with Pollard, A. J., _North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses._
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Some of the Towton photos were my husband's; the ones from other sources, such as the panorama of the Cock Beck in flood, are well marked, I think.
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We have regional rivalries here in the same city - our school can beat your school at basketball, football, baseball, etc because "you kids are a bunch of rich spoiled sissies and we are all the children of blue collar workers and know how to play this game the way it should be played."
Which doesn't take away from the fact that I would really like to see your part of England. And the part you drove through, yesterday.
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She was the better poet I think.
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But her poetry is not to my taste so much.
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We don't always understand them ourselves. We just feel the consequences of things that happened in the far distant past.
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I live in a house that's nearly a hundred years old. The ground underneath it is full of 19th century mine-workings.
I walk to the end of our street and I'm on Honeywell Lane- a name which probably indicates the presence somewhere in the area of a medieval holy well.
Honeywell Lane is a Roman road...
Transplanted Englishmen
Just names. No history.
Re: Transplanted Englishmen
Given that I'd been rocketing around the house fulminating about those skeevy Lancastrians since, oh, 1961, I was dumbounded.
Re: Transplanted Englishmen
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One of the many things that draws me back to England time and time again is the regional diversity. Oh, we have that here in Spain although in my own homeland, vistas aside, the USA is a more homogeneous place. My very first visit to England was to Lancashire but north, to Lancaster itself. We haven´t ventured into Yorkshire yet but your post pulls me in that direction. Oh, the wildness!
I really need to convince Manolo that we should take road trips in England and not just fly up there and rely on National Express to get us around but we´re both a bit afraid of getting all jumbled up driving on the left side of the road.
*chuckle*
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Yorkshire is arguably the most beautiful English county. It's also the largest. So yes, you probably would need a car to get into the interesting out of the way corners.
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And of the West Country...
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And then there were the famous Moors Murders, scary places, those.
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It used to be a very isolated place; Ailz lived there for a time and found the locals hostile to in-comers- which is why I'm not entirely kind in my account of them- but now it's filling up with the Manchester glitterati.
Ailz knew the family of John Kirkbride- one of the victims of the Moors murderers. Those killings cast a gloom over her childhood. Suddenly she and her friends were no longer allowed to roam freely.
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Interestingly, the city next door to mine (Pasadena, California) also has as its symbol a red rose. Anti-Yorkishness apparently follows me everywhere. :)
Although since it's a "conflict" to which I'm really not a party, I must say that York is a really lovely town ...
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So I do my best to be nice to the Yorkies. Yes, York is a very handsome city. And what a history- Roman, Viking, medieval; I really ought to treat myself to a weekend break there, sometime soon.
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Still. Hrrumph.
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