Barrow-in-Furness: at the borders of farmland and foundries

It was the Summer of 1972 when London bureaucrats, in pressed suits and with pompous chatter, sliced up and remolded the United Kingdom with pencils on an oversized map. With sips of tea and compasses in hand, the ceremonial counties that had shaped a nation over centuries bygone were partitioned, frankensteined together in the interests of proper management of local governments. This was how the proud county of Lancashire, whose ancestors had birthed kings of England and clashed shields with the white rose of York, lost so many of its children. Manchester, Salford, Stockport, all amalgamated into the metropolitan modernity of Manchester. Southport and St Helens were ceded to Merseyside's growing form.

In the farthest North-West territories of England, a place of grey rain upon rolling fells, three counties were brought together - in spite of their differences and united by kinship. To the East, Westmorland - bringing with it the Pennine peaks, mint cake from Kendal, and ale from Penrith. To the West, the county of Cumberland, from the rugged mountains of the central lakes to the fisheries of the Irish sea - with Herdwick sheep, cheeses from Keswick, and the Dunmail valleys where ancient Cumbric kings watched over their lands. And may we not forget, a small chunk of Yorkshire - Sedbergh, nestled in the crook of Dentdale valley under the shadow of the Yorkshire dales.

And to the South, the small yet mighty Lancashire-over-sands. Stretching from the swells of Lake Windermere and the tiny villages which dot the young fells to the town of Barrow-in-Furness. My hometown. When the boundaries commission shifted England all those decades ago, Lancashire said farewell to its northernmost limb; Cumbria gave a welcome to its newest.

I was born in Cumbria, raised at the foot of the Lake District and lived much of my life within the borders of that infant and maturing state. 

And yet, I wonder if I can view myself as a 'Cumbrian'. In my heart I adore the Lakes, its fells and cliffsides with all my being, and I share a bond with brethren in Cumberland, Westmorland...but do we share an identity? Brethren, similar and yet separated, central Cumbria and Furness paradoxically parallel each other in a state of contrast. My father, mother, grandparents, aunts, uncles; they all hail from Lancashire-over-sands and all of us still share so very much with mother Lancashire.

Barrow-in-Furness. Down at the dockside in the nippy early morn, behemoth cranes shift brick and lumber, seagulls hover and their warbling cries echo through the yards, through the enormous steel halls where submarines are forged, over the industrial yards and factory sites and down the narrow rows of brown terraced homes. The farmhand has his sheepdog, but here the hard hat and hammer are man's best friend. The old timers down the pub or betting shop come noon are not ex-farmers nor butchers, cheese mongers - but instead welders, draftsmen and scaffolders whose familiarities lay in drydocks, not hillsides. The trough of a river valley that teems with nature versus the trough of a dock which forges boats. In our history the generations before built a land of red brick, i
ronworks, railroads shunting coal.

Compare this to the ole Cumberland working class of the lakes - the baker, the shepherd, the butter-churning housewife. They all have their Barrovian counterparts, toiling instead over machine and molten metal, riveting and crafting ocean-faring beasts to carry thousands of tons of cargo. A modern parallel to the beasts of burden used for hundreds of years to heave goods up and over the hills of the valleys.

The sea serves all of the North-West as a crucial life force. The Whitehaven fisherman heads out in his colorful trawler, battles swells to haul in Herring to go to market. Down in Furness the ocean cools the labyrinthian machinery of the factories - it welcomes in the ships with open arms and upon its concrete docksides, clad in overalls, the men responsible slurp milky tea, chuff cigarettes, tuck in to their sarnies.

As it was in years bygone and persists today, the sun rises to flood the Lakeland
glacial valleys with golden warmth, melting away the dew, nourishing bluebells and ferns alike. The sheep cry out to their lambs, eating the cud of the fells far above the white thatched-roof cottages in the valley floors. Valleys where milkmen do their rounds, where farmers markets become a fayre for all around. The way of life is older there - and just as Lancashire birthed the Dukes of the Red Rose county who conquered all of England, so too did the Cumberland moors raise the old Gaelic chiefs of Rheged, Dunmail and Malcolm. 

Though we do share much, despite our contrast; within that unmistakable North-West dialect exists influence from all across the region. My grandma Merle would always announce to 'Look over here', or that she would 'Cook some nice tea' - the 'oo' rhyming with 'flu' - in an almost Northumbrian way. My mum still sometimes says, half-comically, that 'It int' 'alf warm today' (It isn't half warm today), rhyming with 'lip balm' and with a distinct rhotic R. And it's not rare to hear the older populace of Barrow say 'water' as 'watter' - sounding just like 'fatter'. These quirks all come from old Cumbrian fell-speak, harking back to a time without internet and before telephones, before even proper roads could penetrate into the heart of the Lakes. Under isolation, shut off from the rest of the nation, the accent retained a sing-songy inflection, influenced by old Cumbrian and Scottish Gaelic, Northumbrian and even Irish. The old Cumbrian dialect is, in many ways, almost a different language entirely. 

But down in Barrow proper, we mostly speak in a broad Lancashire accent. Myself, my friends, my grandfather Tony, who lived his life in amongst that industrial, red brick and old-time Barrow. A man who built warships, and who lost fingers to machinery in doing so. Whose slow , fluid, bold dialect is unmistakably similar to that of his idol, Bolton's Fred Dibnah.

The industrial revolution separated Barrow-in-Furness from the rest of the Lake District, and its demand for workers re-cast people from farmhands to dockhands. Barrow is a young town and melting pot of  dialects, trades, and cultures - where identity is shared between the smokestack mills of Lancashire, and the eternal mountains of Cumbria.