Winter Journey
Travelling to Preston on business related to the Film Festival: early morning approaching Carlisle I noticed for the first time a sight which I must have passed hundreds of times. A patch of waste ground just south of the station has been colonised by silver birch. Their trunks caught the light of the early Cumbrian morning and seemed to burn with a hue of rich peach, exactly what you wouldn't expect and not at all the Old Russia / Ivan's Childhood associations one naturally makes with such a landscape. Later in the day, returning north through the Howgill Fells and over Shap, I watched another landscape, of limestone edges, drystone walls and long drifts of deep snow, pass by. Then I discovered that the grinning pullover has branded each of his trains with the name of a 'legendary voyager'. Yes, I was travelling on The Robert Scott . The perfect tutelar to safeguard a return journey through snow and ice.
posted by Nick at 12:38 pm
4 Comments:
Young lochinvar, is available, I have tried to reconcile his trip, with my knowledge of west cumberland geography, and it doesn't fit.
Big Al - I think Young Lochinvar was Sir Walter Scott, not Robert Falcon. Perhaps a confused sense of direction ran in the family? If YL came in from the west on his horse then he must have rode out of the Solway Firth . . .
Another famous, or notorious traveller, of cumberland origin, from t'port, was Mr Christian. The Green Knight was fictional, so he doesn't count, but he made an extra-ordinary journey. He must have lived near Grisdale, or Mungrisdale.
Big Al - I was always impressed by Marlon Brando's sensitive & accurate rendition of the Cumbrian accent in the film. I'm not sure I understand the Green Knight / Grisdale mconnection - I thought he was associated with Tarn Wadlyn?
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