Images of a lost empire

Published 18 July 2008

Decoding the graffiti of the long-gone

Published 11 July 2008

We all leave a trace. These days our traces seem to threaten our liberty – closed circuit television, phone and bank records and all the endless documents of our bureaucratic society.

Five gifted men make a church in a million

Published 4 July 2008

St Martin’s Church in Brampton is probably one of the finest works of art in Cumbria. Five remarkable men were responsible for its creation.

Two great men of the Lake District

Published 27 June 2008

The High Places: Leaves from a Lakeland Notebook, by A. Harry Griffin with illustrations by A Wainwright. Edited by Peter Hardy (Frances Lincoln. £12.99)Harry Griffin wrote in 1947: “There’s no more pleasant way of spending a summer Sunday afternoon than climbing, in old clothes and well-worn rubber shoes, the clean, sunny face of Gimmer Crag in Langdale and enjoying long smokes in the sunshine between pitches.”

Feeling the pain, smelling the sweat

Published 20 June 2008

The Wall: Rome’s Greatest Frontier by Alistair Moffat. Birlinn. £16.99Alistair Moffat sees Hadrian’s Wall as “a monument to human sweat.” And he imagines the sweat. He visualises the teams of men who actually laid stone on stone.

Lakeland, made safe by framing

Published 13 June 2008

In the 18th century a gentleman might be seen walking purposefully across the fields where Keswick’s Theatre by the Lake is today, and down to Derwentwater shore.

The ice that carved our county

Published 6 June 2008

Geologists have a different perspective on life to us mere mortals. Alan Smith says our climate is getting colder. That is in the short term. His short term. And his short term is ten thousand years.

Off the wall and down the coast

Published 30 May 2008

Walks can be solitary occasions, time to reflect on the ways of the world as you pace out the miles. Or they can be sociable, a few hours spent preferably with a knowledgeable, lively companion who, if you’re in country you don’t know, not only is sure which path to follow, but can fill you in on all sorts of local detail and draw your attention to the rocks and trees and birds.

From the book of Abraham

Published 23 May 2008

It took four seconds to take a photograph. The subject had to freeze, not move a muscle, stay absolutely motionless, as the photographer focussed the wooden box of the camera perched solidly on its heavy tripod, and placing his head beneath the thick black cloth, he captured the scene that lay before him in light-responsive chemicals on a glass-plate.

The lives and souls of the Solway

Published 16 May 2008

All the barnacle geese on the island of Svalbard, way up beyond the Arctic Circle, take an annual winter break on the waters of the Solway. Other birds who fly further south, to winter on African shores, also break their migratory flights on the sands of the Solway.

Coal mining: The dark ages

Published 8 May 2008

They always appear in photographs or grainy old films as a group of men walking solidly towards the cameras. They wear old jackets and waistcoats and mufflers, their heavy boots are caked with sludge and their flat caps are planted firmly on their heads, sometimes at a jaunty angle and their faces are grimed with coal dust.

Detailed book to be welcomed

Published 1 May 2008

Great Mountain Days in the Lake District by Mark Richards. Cicerone. £16.99. If you laid all the books on walking in the Lake District end to end you could pave all the well-trodden routes over the fells and the morass of soggy paper might do something to halt the erosion caused by the relentless tread of boots.

Gone but not forgotten, the cathedral builders made sure of that

Published 24 April 2008

Who built Carlisle Cathedral? The finishing touches were put to this magnificent building 600 years ago and little documentation survives.

The devil is in the detail

Published 24 April 2008

Life was never easy for monks in the great abbeys and cathedrals of medieval England. They were required to attend the eight divine offices every day and there may well have been additional services, masses and psalms.

The story of Cumbria, set in stone

Published 17 April 2008

There is everything to be said for beginning a story at the very beginning and this enterprising book does just that. “The story of Cumbria begins,” we are told in the opening sentence, “about 480 million years ago in the Ordovician Period near a small continent called Avalonia, which lay in high latitudes in the southern hemisphere.” There was little if any vegetable life on the land. The rocks eroded rapidly in the periodic storms that carried sediments into the ocean to the north. These sediments built up to a great thickness. They eventually lithified, or turned into stone, and during eons of geological time, when vast continents inched their ways to inevitable and monumental collisions, these layers of mud were shifted, pushed and shaped to become the familiar forms we know today as Skiddaw and Blencathra.

Words on and off the wall

Published 17 April 2008

Today Hadrian’s Wall is a World Heritage Site visited, walked, clambered and climbed on, tramped along, dug, explored, examined in every last archaeological detail – one of the great monuments of ancient time.

Not a flinch as Lord Bragg looks back

Published 3 April 2008

Joe Richardson, Wigton scholarship boy made good in the Oxford University of the Fifties and now mixing it with the literary/media intelligentsia in London, is having an early evening drink in a pub and discussing the ways of the world and provincial novels.

The yeoman farmer who made Pillar his own

Published 27 March 2008

John Wilson Robinson would get up at three or four o’clock of a morning to walk the length of Lorton Vale, go over Scarth Gap, cross Ennerdale and proceed to Pillar Rock. There he would spend the whole day climbing on that isolated and endlessly challenging crag.

Here be rainforests, bonsai and forgotten fairy glades

Published 20 March 2008