North-Country Notebook
A Tour in Westmorland. By Sir Clement Jones. With a-Poem by Margaret Cropper. Illustrated. (Titus Wilson, Kendal. 25s.)
'IF you wish to make a memorable record of a journey, it is as well to be a poet or to take one with you. Sir Clement Jones did the latter, and his amiable book is enriched by a poem which must stir the hearts of all who know the valleys of the Lune and the Eden. iIt is a delightful, conversational poem, in which the poet lights 'other folk's memories from her own, as one with a taper flits from lamp to lamp winning a flame from each. I should have liked to .have had this poem to read long ago when, in distant countries, ;I used to look up to the North Star at night and remind myself that below it, and a, little to the left, lay those well-known hills. " Falling water to end and to begin it The country of which Sir Clement writes is the river country east and south of the Lakes. It is better known by fishermen than by tourists, and fishermen as a rule are too busy in the rivers to notice much that Sir Clement, who travels without a fishing-rod, so piously and- pleasantly records: He begins his book with an essay on travel and modes of travelling, and decides that today it is best to combine walking with motoring. So it is, if the object is to visit in a short time a number of places of interest, but it leads to a reversal of Stevenson's maxim that it 'is . better to travel hopefully than to arrive. To go from one point to another in a motor-car is a little like skipping in reading. The thread of the narrative is likely to be lost.
No matter. There remains a very pleasant book in which the traveller has made notes of what he has read, heard and seen in and about the places where, without much ado, his magic carpet popped him down. Here, for example, is something about the shepherds, their dogs and their sheep in the great snow of 1947:' Here is an admirable, affectionate portrait of that redoubtable West- morland patriot, Lady Anne Clifford, who left her mark all over the district and died in 1676, after repairing or rebuilding six of her castles and seven of her kirks. Here are tales of the old families,. Fothergills, Musgraves, Middletons and Flemings, and accounts of the ancient houses so many of which have fallen into neglect. North to the Cumberland border, east into Durham and Yorkshire, south and west to Arnside and the shores of Morecambe Bay—Sir Clement refuses to be bound by precise geographical limits. And why should he ? His is a north-country book, printed and published in the north, a book of north-country folk, north-country places and north- • country stories, with the authentic tang. I like the tale of the parson who asked the verger what was wrong. Should he put more fire into his sermons ? "Nay," said the verger. " There's some folks thinks it 'ud be better if ye put more of t' sermons into t' fire." And that other tale of the farmer who boasted to his friend that each of his three daughters was
to have £3,000 on her wedding day, and all the young men would be wanting to marry them. "Nay," said the friend, "you'll never.
git your daughters wed without you raffle 'em, and I'll see as none,
of my lads takes a ticket." This is a book that will be well liked by north-country men everywhere, and I think that north-country, men in exile will turn again and again to Miss Cropper's poem to
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