Sunday’s Flower Walk
following Norman Nicholson and his Father and his Uncle Jim in 1925, in 1981 and today …
The Bloody Cranesbill
Norman Nicholson published ‘The Bloody Cranesbill’ in 1981 as part of the collection Sea to the West, his last book of poems. Hodbarrow Mine had closed in March 1968 as was expected due to dwindling production of iron ore. Less expectedly, Millom Ironworks closed in the September of that year.
By 1981, concerted efforts had been made to clear away and clean-up the resulting industrial dereliction. Preparations for renewal caused the demolition and loss of features which are now regretted.
It is a mid-point between the boyhood walk where nature was re-taking land from the declining industry and today now the natural process has had time to work again.
Home
The walk begins at 14 St George’s Terrace, Millom here Norman’s Father, Joe had a Gent’s Outfitter’s shop. Norman Nicholson lived and worked there for all of his life.
Library Lane
They would likely leave through the back yard rather than the closed shop and walk down Library Lane to Lapstone Road.
Rottington
Soon they would reach a cross road with Lapstone Road School and the Welsh Miners’ ‘Tin Tabernacle’.
To the sea
They would turn left to visit Uncle Jim at 50 Devonshire Road and leave through the back to Argyll Street. Jim would take them through allotments to the countryside … or rather the smirched and scruffy workland at the town's fraying edge.
Boundary Lane
‘Then through the allotments, the playing-field, the lonning’
They would reach Boundary Lane – not to be attempted in Sunday Best today.
The school sport field
Crossing the field to a stile.
Red Hills
‘[…] To the links and warrens and foreshore of the already dying mine’
Following a lonning to Red Hills Farm and crossing a ‘Clapham Common’ of railway lines.
The Mains
Across the ancient manorial demesne land, ‘The Mains.’ This is today more agricultural but the track beds can be detected. It was industrial but wilder with shrubs and gorse and courting couples.
Duddon Estuary
To the beach below the Hodbarrow Mine’s shipping pier. Today pre-historic footprints are found in the mud when favourable tides reveal ancient remains.
The Point
‘To Cumberland's southernmost point, a headland, half-blasted-away,
Where the limestone met the tide.’
‘Here, on the seaward side,
Wave-action moulds the rocks, thumbs them like plasticine;’
‘Landward the crag splits vertical down to the old workings.
We traversed the yard-wide col between quicksand and quarry,’
‘and there,
In a cockle-shell dip in the limestone, matted with thrift and rock-rose,
Was Sunday's flower, the Bloody Cranesbill, red as the ore
It grew from, fragile as Venetian glass, pencilled with metal- thread
Haematite-purple veins. The frail cups lay so gently
On their small glazed saucer-bracts that a whisper would have
tipped them over’
The Outer Barrier
The mega-structures of the Mine’s sea barriers remain as ‘Millom’s Seaside Promenade.’
Nicholson returned to this place often and set elements of two of his novels here.
and all the lovely resistance
Of blackberry, blackthorn, heather and willow grubbed up and
flattened.
Beyond this flooded quarry, the shrubs now
cover two mines and the main workshops
and engine sheds.
Lakeland’s latest lake - Hollowmere
And it's hard to tell there ever was a mine: pit-heads
Demolished, pit-banks levelled, railway-lines ripped up,
Quarries choked and flooded,
A barren slack of clay is slurried and scaled-out over
All that living fracas of top-soil and rock. A town's
Purpose subsides with the mine; my father and my Uncle Jim
Lie a quarter of a century dead; but out on its stubborn skerry,
In a lagoon of despoliation, that same flower
Still grows today.
New uses are found for the former mine which is now Millom’s informal country park and RSPB Nature Reserve.
Mainsgate Road was the limit of the mine and the countryside has remained throughout.
Tin Tabernacle
A Victorian pre-fab chapel.
Turn right and pay regards to Uncle Jim and
Aunty Tot on the way back?
Millom Library
Along St George’s Road to the Library and Library Lane and home.
Nicholson lived and studied and worked and networked from this tiny provincial base where he made his art and impact on the literary world.
This photo essay includes lines quoted from Norman Nicholson, ‘The Bloody Cranesbill’, originally published in Sea to the West (London: Faber & Faber, 1981). Their use within the context of this photo work conforms to ‘fair dealing’ exceptions under UK copyright law.