Something strange happens when you catch the train from Preston to Barrow-in-Furness. Somewhere north of Carnforth, you start feeling a bit posher, more rural, even slightly twee or fey. You might also sense you’re a shade less humorous, a tiny bit less working class perhaps. For, on crossing the River Kent, you enter what, since 1974, has been a twilight zone of geography and identity. Though the towns on the other side – including Grange-over-Sands and Stan Laurel’s Ulverston – are still in the Historic County of Lancashire, they are, for many people, in a place called Cumbria, near the Lake District.
The borders of historic Lancashire started to really matter to me when I began to do research for a book about my home county. Proper Lancashire has more than five million, mainly urban residents; the current county council area, which is largely rural, has less than a third of that. Moreover, the bit of Lancashire I come from – the village of Burtonwood – was hoofed, along with nearby Warrington, into a dubious, newly enlarged 'Cheshire' in 1974. So I set off to beat the bounds there first, walking the Sankey Canal – England’s first true canal – from St Helens to Widnes, doing long hikes along the Mersey and Manchester Ship Canal, taking in the World of Glass and the Warrington Academy, which once made the town the 'Athens of the North'.
Many of Liverpool’s key heritage sites underline its symbiotic relationship with Lancashire. The docks where coal and cotton were loaded and unloaded; the beginning of the Leeds-Liverpool Canal, which sweeps through Wigan and Burnley; the East Lancs road. Ditto Manchester, which couldn’t have become Cottonopolis without the string of textile-manufacturing towns that zigzag up from the city through Bolton and Rochdale to Nelson, Colne and Blackburn; and which tapped the talents of Lancastrians to become the world’s greatest post-punk music mecca. The original Station Agent’s House, built beside the epoch-making Liverpool and Manchester railway – opened in 1830 – is now an upmarket holiday let. There are red roses, the symbol of the county, on the doorway of the Salford Lads Club.
I live near Clitheroe, a town where there’s never been a question of where it belongs – well, not since about the 12th century, when Scotland had an eye on it. But even close to here, frontiers become tenuous. The north side of the River Ribble was split between the West Riding (of Yorkshire) and Lancashire, and after 1974, the latter was theoretically enlarged. In fact, the Forest of Bowland is shared by the neighbouring counties; when the Tour de France powers through next July, the most dramatic parts of the route will be along the famous glacial cleft known as the Trough. A late Victorian boundary marker called the Grey Stone of Trough marks the historic border.
But it’s that southern slice of the Lakes that sometimes seems in danger of accepting it is now Westmorland rather than Lancashire. This is sad and wrong, as Coniston Water and the Old Man of Coniston, as well as the Esthwaite Water and the west bank of Lake Windermere, are historically in Lancashire. Counties should never have to give up their highest peaks or biggest bodies of water. Also, if you stay on that train from Preston all the way to Barrow, on alighting you are left in no doubt that this is a Lancashire town. There is industry, living as well as historical (the excellent Dock Museum recounts the gritty story of iron, shipbuilding and submarines) and leisure is sought mainly on the seaside rather than up on the fells.
