Unfenced Borders To Die For

Posted on: 28 March 2017 by Geoffrey Mann in Posts

Whether it’s George Osborne in hi-viz or Theresa May in Barbour, power-hungry Conservatives wanting to influence voting patterns in new battlegrounds of post-industrial England have been keen to badge themselves Northern.

We take it for granted that this North is a culturally distinct place; but where exactly is it? The minister responsible in George’s day advised that ‘the exact extent of the north in the context of the northern powerhouse is not prescribed by the government.’ Cultural commentators have tried to be more precise, but with mixed results.

Like a colonial administrator drawing lines across continents, Melvyn Bragg—in his 10-part Radio 4 series The Matter of The North—declared that the southern border of England’s North is a line between the Dee and Humber estuaries on the west and east coasts; he then claimed Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as a northern poem, and discussed it as such with Yorkshire poet Simon Armitage while on location at Lud’s Church, where much of the poem’s action is thought to have happened, some 10 miles south of Bragg’s line.

Writing about northern literature in The Guardian, Philip Hensher was less exact with his latitude than Bragg when placing his line between the counties of Yorkshire and Derbyshire, but adamant in declaring Arnold Bennett the greatest northern writer of them all, seemingly unaware of the location of his home town—Stoke-on-Trent—another 10 miles south of Lud’s Church.

I’ve set myself the early retirement goal of trying to link a series of day walks along lines that make more rigorous sense of The North’s southside, or which at least map the existing variations and confusions, starting from my home in landlocked mid-Derbyshire, heading both east and west.

Compared to Ilya Kaminsky’s experiences in the territories of Putinist expansion and those of Trump’s wannabe exclusion, or with Kapka Kassabova’s stories from the borderzone of Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece, mine is a secluded and parochial exploration. While having the heart of a citizen of everywhere I am becalmed in Belper. A subarachnoid haemorrhage has left me blissfully alive and able to walk long distances, but with a cerebellum that can’t comfortably cope with the complex soundworlds of long distance travel, or of anywhere else when more than one person is speaking.

It can be dispiriting, but it’s a privileged disability. I try to keep in mind a point emphasised by the founder of Citizens of Everywhere Sandeep Parmar, who, in an essay at the back of Eidolon—her re-imagination of the story of Helen of Troy—suggests that we are still creatively inspired by the Classics precisely because their characters are dictated not by will, but by fate. And so my acquired neurological impairment is the result of an act of pure fate visited on me as a violent and unexplainable brain haemorrhage.

Besides, a focus on the local can shed surprising light. Wandering semi-pointedly in Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Nottinghamshire, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Cheshire and Lincolnshire may sound semi-pointless, but it is at least to explore what a border can be like if it isn’t fenced like Kapka’s or an obstacle to the mingling of people and ideas that so troubles those aroused by America’s gold-plated wall-building elite. The accumulation of cultural artefacts has been extraordinary.

Beneath my window is UNESCO’s Cradle of the Industrial Revolution. Within a long day’s walk over the hills across the valley are the landscapes of D. H. Lawrence, Alan Sillitoe and Lord Byron. That’s all a bit white male, but the valley that helped give birth to the modern era has also been home to Bess of Hardwick, Mary Queen of Scots, Florence Nightingale, Helen Mort’s Alison Hargreaves, Helen herself and Parmar’s Mum. I’m in conversation with two local groups about how to celebrate these and other less celebrated but no less important women history makers.

Four days’ walk to the west takes me across the river fished by the hagiographer of George Herbert (Walton) and the translator of Montaigne (Cotton), through the village of George Eliot’s Adam Bede, across hills walked by the philosopher Rousseau, to Pugin’s architectural masterpiece and the waters favoured by William Morris for dyeing… even before arriving at Arnold Bennett’s Five Towns, and Lud’s Church.

Just downriver from my home is Derby, still home to several of Parmar’s aunties, in what she has called the ghettoised Midlands. But if it is indeed Midland rather than North, the river running through it is stained by the peat of iconic northern moors, and for much of its history it has been at or close to borders. Between the River Trent, which for Defoe was where The North started, and the Pennine Hills whose distinct geology runs uninterrupted to the Scottish border, it has been at the frontier of struggles between Romans and Brigantians, Northumbrians and Mercians, Saxons and Vikings; and has seen castles built nearby by Normans, so famous for their Harrying of The North, and by those who wanted to split the north into a separate principality during the Anarchy of King Stephen. It’s where Bonnie Prince Charlie’s invading army began its retreat.

In the era of global conflict, Viscount Curzon of the Great War cabinet, and feminist pacifist Alice Wheeldon, who was stitched up and imprisoned for allegedly plotting to kill his prime minister, have lived across town from each other. But, among the long years of comparative local peace since the Cavaliers fought Roundheads, it has been home to the Lunar Society, and its profound influence on the beginnings of industrialisation (Arkwright and Strutt) and the sciences of evolution (Erasmus Darwin) and geology (Whitehurst), all celebrated in the art of Joseph Wright; to say nothing of—at other times in this long era—being the location of startling developments in astronomy (Flamsteed), sociology (Spencer) and modern drama (Osborne).

If this is enlightenment, on clear nights, when I get up after periods of restless wakefulness, beyond the lights of Belper rising up the valley sides, tucked between the inverted gentle parabola of these last northern gritstone hills and the dark arc of the sky, I can see it as a milky glow with just a trace of streetlight orange, shading into the heavens.

Ahead of me on my walk are the comparable and arguably even greater cultural conurbations of the border towns of Nottingham, Sheffield, Hull, Stoke, Manchester… and the home of Citizens of Everywhere, The North’s face to the world, Liverpool.

In between and around them is walking along unfenced borders to die for.