Lancashire and the Lakes [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION T HE north-west of England is marked by diversity rather than unity. Lancashire itself mirrors the diversity of the country as a whole and, indeed, Lancashire has been charged with being a county that gives itself the airs of a continent. The late Haslam Mills, the author of this charge, pointed out that disparity, contrast and variation are the most striking characteristics of the county throughout town and countryside. The traveller from Liverpool to Manchester may have noted, as he did, what he called "the pecuUar vacancy of the view from the carriage window as the train travels across fields which seem to have no purpose except to hold the earth together and grow celery. It is a frontier between the two cities of Manchester and Liverpool, two cities which are not and never have been really on speaking terms—on writing and telephoning terms but not on speaking terms!" Despite the miracles of communication that have been achieved from canals and railways to airways and the arterial East Lancashire road, it remains curiously the fact that the last tolerable train from Liverpool to Manchester is still at 10.50 p.m., and the two cities are entirely different. And so it is, as he points out, with ever-widening variations throughout the county. One of the boundaries of Lancashire on the north is the River Duddon, which runs in a veritable viaduct of sonnets by Wordsworth, while its southeastern boundary is the River Tame, and the waters of that highly industrialised river are very different from the pellucid blue-green waters of the more northern reaches of our area. Under its bridges much more or less filtered effluent flows. Haslam Mills goes on tD comment how it would be possible to cause the reader, by merely reciting a list of place-names, such a violent change of idea and association as would be quite impossible in Somerset or Westmorland or even in Yorkshire. Thus there is the North Shore at Blackpool. There used to be a peremptory frontier at Blackpool between North and South—those who promenaded and conversed and flirted to the music of