Tundra

At the end of February, the snow fell. And fell. The Pennine communities were snowed in with drifts higher than people. The passes were closed. The schools were closed. Even Seascale was reported to have seen snow.

Because I have always understood that it doesn't snow in Seascale, I have also understood that it doesn't snow by the sea. After my brother moved to Estonia and  I learnt that it snows by the sea there (and the sea freezes), I believed that it doesn't snow by our sea.

So, it rarely snows on the Solway coastal plain (up to and including Carlisle), and when it does snow, it isn't deep and doesn't stay long. I read something about snow on the marshes in the 1960s, and I was sceptical.

At one point on 28th February 2018, it was snowing at an inch an hour in my garden, settling at about four inches deep, or more in the little drifts. By the second day of being stuck at home, I had to escape the house and see just how close to the estuary the snow had fallen. No way was I driving down the lane - Swedish snowboots and a brisk walk would be required.

Drifts at the edge of the village	Field edge drifts
Farm lane - the milk wagon came along it a few minutes later	Lambs - we'd been surprised to see them a week earlier as they're born later in the central fells
The monument in the snow with snow across the marshes as far as I could see	Knee deep virgin drifts. I turned back at this point.
A beck, with partial ice covering	A creek, frozen
Microdrift

Marshes

Marshes

The path disappears into the snow sea.	The whiter lines are the creeks, filled with snow.

Astonishing being alone in the big flat white space - reminded me of being alone in the desert. And another reminder of how unusual this landscape is for this county. I didn't get to the sea - when the path disappeared, the risk of falling in a creek was high. But it looked as though the snow went right up to the tidal limit.

The following day, the thaw began, and by 4th March the garden was thawing so quickly I could almost watch it without timelapse photography. Driving to Wigton I decided to go via Glasson, partly because the roads were more likely to be ice-free and partly because it was the last chance to see the snow by the sea. I stopped at Drumburgh minutes after the highest tide of the week, having driven the sea road open mouthed.

	Danger: no bathing!

The wind was icy and I took these in about three minutes. As I took the last one, a yellow flood warning for Drumburgh came up on my phone screen, and it seemed like a good moment to move on. But I could now be certain that the snow really had gone right to the seashore.

Bridges and Walls

Bridges - gates - they now built a wall from one sea to the other

A weekend of protests on several continents; a weekend designated for making marmalade, a quintessentially British preserve with a Portuguese name made from Spanish oranges and Caribbean sugar. I went into town to buy more oranges, and on autopilot got into the wrong lane and had to drive round the one-way system to get to the supermarket. I realised an exhibition at Tullie House that I kept meaning to see was due to end in a few days, so I went to look at a painting of Carlisle's Eden bridges*.

The painting is one of two from around 1800 and shows the city from Rickerby Park below Stanwix fort on the Roman border wall with the two Eden bridges in the foreground and the mountains behind. Leaving aside the river, I'm struck, oddly, by the similarity to Marrakech - another red walled medieval city with snowy mountains behind and places of worship rising above the houses.

The bridges brought traffic from Scotland to the former Sands island where the cattle marts were held - and customs duties paid (or not, if the drovers avoided the city) - and off the Sands island past the pinfold to Scotchgate. The city still has Scotchgate and Englishgate, but until today I didn't know there was an Irishgate too. I go through it every day. The actual gate was demolished in 1811 and its name lost in the building of the semi-ring road in the 1970s - although it was reincarnated in the unloved "millennium bridge", officially the Irishgate Bridge.

All three gates are double-named: English Gate is Botchergate (the road to Botcherby); Scotchgate is Rickergate (the road to Rickerby, Richard's farmstead); Irishgate is Caldewgate (the road over the river Caldew). There was no Danegate: the stone walls came after the norsemen had stopped being a threat, or had assimilated.

And after the bridges I looked at the exhibits about the shifting border, the reivers, and the original border wall.

They now built a wall across the island from one sea to the other, which being manned with a proper force, might be a terror to the foes which it was intended to repel, and a protection to their friends whom it covered...

After the Romans left and before the Normans arrived, we were one realm in these middlelands. The wall wasn't needed. When the Normans arrived, the North was harried, and emptied. The wall had a role to play again and the city walls were rebuilt in stone and frequently repaired. The Scots and the English were different folks, and fought. And the Irish, with their gate?

One day I shall walk these walls.

Nowadays we know the border is permeable; we know people who live in one country and work in the other; we know people who currently live and work in England but are thinking of moving to live in Scotland because it's more politically pleasant to them, or because their child's higher education will be more affordable, or for the chance to vote in the second referendum when it comes.

I look north for the views; my neighbours drive north for their holidays where the mountains are higher, the wilderness is greater and the eagles still fly. I look north as well as south to understand the history of the land I stand on; I get the travel news from Scotland as well as Cumbria, but my TV news comes from Newcastle and doesn't cover the whole of Cumbria, let alone the country five miles away as the curlew flies. Professionally we look south: Scotland is creating distinctiveness in its institutions and its public services compared to England, and somehow though the border on the ground is diminished, the border in the mind is strengthening. And as a result, sometime in the not too distant future, the border on the ground may return.

This year's marmalade is a whisky one, with more whisky than most recipes. Made in England, with Scotch. Before we had customs union in 1707, we had smuggling across this border. Whisky as well as cattle.

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*Three days after I published this, Sir Ian McKellen on Who Do You Think You Are found that the artist James Lowes was his ancestor, and visited Tullie House to look at some of his engravings.

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Read: Peter Roebuck, Cattle Droving through Cumbria 1600-1900, Bookcase 2015;
Rory Stewart, The Marches, Jonathan Cape 2016

Everything tastes better with rum

Rum butter - rum nickies - Cumberland sweet pie - Cumberland pilaf

Although I was brought up in Cumbria, I wasn't brought up with rum butter. When I was about 11, a school friend gave me some for Christmas, and I ate it with digestive biscuits (which were thus much improved). Last time I hosted Christmas, I made rum butter instead of brandy sauce to go with the Christmas pudding, and that's now my tradition.

This year I added rum nickies to the tradition. The coin toss had dictated that my dad made mince pies and Christmas cake, and I made the pudding - but this meant no mince pies before the visitors arrived, and as our rule is no mince pies after Christmas morning (and there were rather fewer mince pies at work this year than when I worked in London!), it meant almost no mince pies. But rum nickies aren't mince pies so we could have them before and after.

Rum nickies have come to a certain amount of attention in recent years - not exactly sticky toffee pudding, but plenty of links to recipes and products, including rum-nicky-in-a-jar. I've now got five small books of Cumbrian/Lakeland recipes (two modern ones available in all good tourist bookshops, and three local publications from the 1960s-70s).

All but one include recipes for rum nickies, and all of them concur that:

• rum nickies are individual pastries, like mince pies
• the filling is currants (and only currants) soaked in rum and spices

All of the online recipes concur that:

• rum nickies are large shared pies, commonly with a lattice topping (rather than a sheet of pastry with nicks in)
• the filling is primarily dates, with candied stem ginger and sometimes currants, sultanas or even dried apricots, soaked in rum, and surprisingly, an absence of spices

I'm intrigued by this clear split. The dates and ginger sound yummy and I'll try those another time, but I went with the currants and mine were just fine.

One of the cookbooks is a 1960s WI cookbook from my Grandma's shelf. It doesn't show the date, but it's pre-decimalisation, pre-metrification and pre-Cumbria. Many of the recipes indicate which WI contributed them - Linstock, Dacre, Scotby, Moor Row, Newton Arlosh... We particularly enjoyed some of the Gamblesby contributions, which included two separate recipes for burnet wine - we imagined two ladies competing to get their recipe included. We're still not sure what these very plentiful burnets are, we're fascinated by the function of the piece of toast, and we prefer the recipe that ends "A little rum greatly improves the wine". The more of the book you read, the more you suspect that a little rum would greatly improve many things.

Gamblesby Burnet wine 1	Gamblesby Burnet wine 2
Fowl or foul?	Rook or yuck?

• Gamblesby (in Glassonby) or Gamelsby (by Aikton) is one of my favourite village names as it's so little altered from the Norse. I'm tempted to buy the Ikea Gamleby shelf purely for its name. When I went to Copenhagen some years ago, flying to an airport in the budget airport definition of 'near' and catching a train to the city, the similarity of the placenames meant I could have been on the Settle-Carlisle line. Although with newer carriages and more passengers. And our views are better.

One of Grandma's celebrated recipes was Boxing Day pasty. Every year, regardless of who was hosting Christmas, Grandma made Boxing Day pasty for our Boxing Day walk. A tray-bake mince and carrot pasty, ideally still a bit warm in the years when we had white Christmases (sledging over Devoke water, snow on top of ice), it was nothing special, but it was traditional. My brother having declared a wish to swim in the Solway on New Year's Day, some sort of pasty was going to be needed. Could I make Grandma's pasty? Or was it time to make my own tradition?

And then I read: ...Cumberland gave us rum butter to have with our Christmas pudding, and also from Cumberland came "standing pie" or "sweet pie", filled with chopped mutton, apples and raisins, the grandfather of the mince pie. Back to the historic cookbooks to find a recipe - meat and fruit together are quite fashionable at present and this one has to be tried. Although the recipes are clear that this is a large plate pie (i.e. pastry lid but not base), that wouldn't meet my need for an outdoor pasty, so individual handheld pasties were the way to go. I used the WI recipe with a cross-reference to Jane Grigson. I haven't made handheld pasties for years, and I overfilled them as usual (but I take heart from the note about avoiding headriggs from another recipe) and a couple exploded.

The recipe includes really quite a small quantity of meat to fruit, so I made double quantities, enough for nine handheld pasties, one large pie to serve 6-8 and one smaller pie for 2-4. Next time I make it I'll use more meat to fruit (tastes have changed) and include better meat and more fat (supermarket meat too lean and this needs something more to bind it and carry the flavour of the meat). And think about whether there's anything else that could bind the filling a bit more.

For example, could you use rice in a pie filling? I used a Diana Henry recipe for lamb pilaf to use up some of my roast goose glut, and then realised it was already quite close to being a recipe for Cumberland pilaf - just adjust the fruits and add rum!

A bridge too far: Carlisle’s Eden Bridges

Abstractions - holmes - floods - folk speech - rivers changing course - bridges - droving

Walking back into the city from the Vallum Gallery on Brampton Road through Rickerby Park in early October 2016, I was struck by standing water on the floodplain. Reflecting still on some of the pictures I’d been looking at, I thought about how the landscape and river route had changed, or been changed here, and about the floods. I’m thinking about abstracted map representations of Cumbria (e.g. abstracting the rivers and becks from the rest, like an arterial/venal map of the body, as part of understanding flooding), and about embellishments – embroidering over printed maps to show the floods, or embroidering over pictures to show where things happened – there I capsized my canoe, here my parents dropped my brother in a beck.

Rickerby floodplain / Carlisle from the North East	Here I capsized my canoe

The lower Eden is characterised by meanders and holmes, flat semi-islands that are attractive locations for cricket pitches. Whilst the Norse 'holmr' means small island (think Stockholm), here they've become semi islands, dry patches surrounded by marshy/fen land. The shape of the land suggests the river has been flooding for very many years, and the old OS maps of Carlisle have 'liable to flooding' marked on every holme. I remember the water from the same river coming up through our cellar in Temple Sowerby when the water table rose – if there was standing water on the floodplain by the bridge, there would be water in our cellar soon.

Bizarrely, the Google satellite map of much of Carlisle is taken in the immediate aftermath of Desmond, stitched onto the next picture to the north taken at another time, and showing water where water shouldn't be. The roads have been hand-drawn back onto the image.

A strange rectangular cloud over the city	Floodwater in Rickerby park suddenly ending where the pictures are joined

One of the things that stuck in my mind post-floods was a magazine writer being annoyed at Carlisle people referring to their bridge that was shut as “Eden Bridges” – when there’s only one bridge. And it’s true, I’ve observed one of my colleagues, who lives over the bridge, calling it Eden Bridges. Search for the reports from 7th December 2015 and half the headlines pluralised the bridge. It’s a folk memory in speech, of when there were two end-to-end bridges crossing this branch of the river, originally known as the Priest Beck, and the branch that ran round the back of the islanded Sands, where the cattle markets and bull baitings were held.

A map forming the back screen at Borderlines shows the old route of the river in the days when the city stayed within its walls and Botcherby, Etterby, Rickerby and Harraby were villages nearby. Transposed onto a modern map, the river route was something like this:

Carlisle today	The walled city and divided river

Remembering pre-GCSE Geography and the theory of oxbow lakes, a far as I can currently work out, something like this happened:

• Original route of river meanders, Priestbeck doesn't exist
• River breaks out and creates Priestbeck, probably after a flood event - possibly around 1572 (this sketch map from 1572, south at the top, shows a breach of the river in need of repair, without a bridge over it, where Priest beck would otherwise be). On the other hand, Magna Britannica (1816) reports: "The two bridges over the Eden at Carlisle, called Eden Bridge and Prestbeck Bridge, were of wood in the reign of Queen Elizabeth; when one of them having fallen down, and the other being in a state of great decay, an act of parliament passed for rebuilding them at the expence of the county in 1600. It is probable that they were then first constructed of stone."
• For a time, river flow is divided between the Priestbeck and the Old Eden loop (e.g. George Smith 1746 & 1752 maps , reproduced in Cattle Droving through Cumbria, Peter Roebuck, Bookcase 2016), but eventually the main flow goes over Priestbeck and the Old Eden starts to dry up (in theory forming an oxbow lake which shrinks away over time)
• The island of the Sands is likely to be marshy and prone to flooding (as the 1752 George Smith map suggests), limiting the ways the city could use it
• There are two bridges and frequent calls for them to be repaired and rebuilt throughout the eighteenth century, perhaps indicative of flood damage (and failure to cope with the volume of traffic, notably droving)
• 1807 Act of Parliament approves funding of £10,000 towards the rebuilding of Priestbeck Bridge, given its strategic importance to the northbound road. The new bridge was built 1812-15 and doubled in width in 1932
• Old Eden Bridge (south) was removed "and a raised and partly arched causeway ...formed, connecting the town with the new bridge".
• 1865 OS has a municipal boundary (ward boundary) following (probably) the line of the old Eden. No physical sign of the old river.
• 1898 OS has cattle market, one bridge, old racecourse and the first Hardwicke Circus roundabout which opened in 1892/93. Oddly no Drovers Lane.
• Civic Centre opened 1964, late 1970 new road layout opened (rebuilt Hardwicke Circus, Georgian Way; Castle Way opened in 1974); Sands Centres opened 1985. Presumably further land drainage (building on stilts might have been a good idea) to secure the foundations of these various structures?

In 1997 as part of the Arch/Millennium Sheepfolds projects, Andy Goldsworthy tried to find the location of the pinfold at the civic centre - and decided it was probably under the civic centre. After photographing the journey of the Arch, the project aimed to (re)build sheepfolds in the places they once were; the Carlisle pinfold has not yet been rebuilt. With the arrival of Debenhams in 2000, Drover's Lane was built over and moved northwards and the view Goldsworthy took there is gone.

Volcano hat, glacier hat, beck & foss hat

I've finally taken a break from the blanket projects (while waiting for new yarn to arrive) and started the volcano hat. Here's the initial sketch:

The colour version is in my head. It's a grey hat with lava flows from the top and down the sides. After yesterdays snowy fells, I think a glacier version is also possible.

I got some (quite scratchy) Noro yarn a year or more ago; now I think a few days enforced break from the blankets is enough for a hat, so for the first time I've made a gauge square* to check the pattern.

For the main body of the hat (US notation):
Foundation chain 38 chain on 4.5mm hook (or as required for gauge);
Row 1: chain 3 (counts as dc1), dc37;
Row 2: turn & ch4, [dc3tog, ch2] 11 times, dc3tog, ch1, dc into turning chain;
Row 3: turn & ch1, sc into ch1 space, [sc, 2sc into ch2 space] 11 times, sc, sc into ch1 space, sc into turning chain;
Row 4: turn & ch4, tr3 into third sc (into top of dc3tog), [skip two sc, tr3] 11 times, skip last sc, dc into turning chain.

Repeat rows 1-4 9 or 10 more times until rectangle measures c. 30 cm x 55cm. Pin or loosely attach short sides together to check it fits head comfortably and adjust if necessary.

Chain 1 and sc along long edge to neaten (this will be the top edge). Stitch as required to give a neat edge, likely to be 1sc into last stitch on each sc row, 2sc into each dc (or ch3) and 3sc into each tr (or ch4). Catch in any yarn ends along the way.

With right side to the inside, fold to make a tube. Chain 1 and slip stitch through back loop (the one nearest you!) of tr and back loop of corresponding foundation chain. (Using back loops only gives a very flat seam on the right side.)

Wrong side	Right side

Now for the lava (or ice, or water) flows. This could use 2-3 different yarns from stash (or it could be an excuse to buy single balls of fancy yarn in the sales), or one single yarn.

Firmly attach the flow thread to a ch3 or ch4 space on the lower edge and, using a hook appropriate to the yarn, make a foundation chain that is a bit longer than the height of the hat (each one will likely end up a different length so see what feels right - I started off about 10cm longer), turn and sc in second chain from hook and sc to end, sc round lower edge of hat, cut yarn and weave ends in. Thread the flow ribbon through the openings in the row it's attached to, keeping it loose and keeping any twistiness that has crept into the ribbon and varying the in and out pattern - missing some holes, meandering onto the next row etc. I didn't expect all my flow ends to go curly but it really enhanced the hat so I tried not let them flatten out when I wove them through the openings.

Make ribbons for each row of openings (20-22 in total) of varying lengths (and yarns if desired). When complete, bind the lower edge of the hat with two rows of sc, using slightly fewer stitches than the top edge. Finally using the grey yarn, make a ribbon of about 35-40cm in length and weave through a line of openings near the top edge - I took a couple of attempts and ended up using a line about 7cm from the top edge. Pull ends up and tie in an overhand knot.

Mad volcano hat, finished!

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*Gauge square - 14 stitches and 8 rows over 10cm square using yarn 50g=100m and 4.5mm hook.
Circumference of hat 55cm, height 30cm including explosion peak. I used about 230m of grey yarn  and about 135m of mixed orange yarns.

Fellscapes and snowscapes

Snow down south, snow on the tops - 360 degree mountains - patterns - frozen bog - thaw

A long-planned post-Christmas trip to the in-laws in Fenland was cancelled owing to predicted poor driving conditions in thundersnow, leaving me with an unexpectedly free weekend. Our snow was light and I drove as far as Lancaster for work, straight into bright sunshine and blue skies, with the white fells to the right – never seen Shap look so good.

Before the weather changed on Sunday I wanted to see the snowy tops from more than lakeshore, less than high tops, and chose Lord's Seat and Barf from Whinlatter ("Low Fells" walk 1). Swedish boots against the bogs and plenty of layers against the windchill.

East-South-West from Lord's Seat

A quick walk through the forest, past the fairy circle, the families and the people finishing their walks as I started mine, to the views, of fells, Pennines and Scottish hills, and to the silence, broken by birds and becks.

Skiddaw from NP boundary	Northwestern fells
Derwentwater and Helvellyn range	The path towards Keswick
Whinlatter forest	The Lake and the sea
Scottish mountains, reminding me of Turkey at New Year 2006	Criffel imitating Mount Fuji

The open ground was quite boggy, with very light snow. The snow has fallen onto the frozen boggy paths and frozen again, resisting the thaw longer than the snow on the drier heath and heather, and leaving the paths outlined in white across the slopes.

Heather and me	Frozen boggy path from Lord's Seat

Skiddaw from Whinlatter forest

Heather and bilberries are regrowing in the forest edges and across the boggy lands. Bilberries at this stage look like wiry samphire, bright green but not fleshy.

Snow fungus	Ici-gmites melting

The forest paths are marked by human tracks - feet, bike wheels (why do they wobble so?), forestry vehicles, dogs. Approaching the visitor centre there are piles of boxes, flat such as might be used to contain tiles. On investigation, it turns out they have lots of plug-grown baby trees with labels confirming that they are approved by Santa (which seemed a surprising mark of quality for the Forestry Commission).

Tracks	Tracks
Icy path	Snowy tree

This is the first time I remember walking on semi-frozen bog, needing slightly altered techniques to read the land and stay on the surface (but the Swedish boots are good when I get it wrong)

Ice	Thaw

Western fells

And as the sun set, and the evening mountain bikers set off on the red routes, the clouds came in. Rain and thaw tomorrow.

Weather closing in...	...a few minutes later