The Eddie Stobart Story. Hunter Davies

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WHERE IT ALL BEGAN …

      Caldbeck and Hesket Newmarket are two small neighbouring villages on the northern fringes of the Lake District in Cumbria, England. They are known as fell villages, being on the edges of the fells, or hills, where the laid out, captured fields and civilized hedges and obedient tarmac roads give way to unreconstructed, open countryside. A place where neatness and tidiness meet the rough and the unregimented. A bit like some of the people.

      The first of the two most prominent local fells is High Pike, 2159 feet high, which looms over Caldbeck and Hesket, with Carrock Fell hovering round the side. Behind them, in the interior, there are further fells, unfolding in the distance, till you reach Skiddaw, 3053 feet high, Big Brother of the Northern Fells. A mere pimple compared with mountains in the Himalayas, but Skiddaw dominates the landscape and the minds of the natives who have always referred to themselves as living ‘Back O’ Skiddaw’.

      Once you leave the fields, the little empty roads, and get on to the fell side, in half an hour you can be on your own, communing with nature. People think it can’t be done, that the whole of Lakeland is full, the kagouls rule, but this corner is always empty. My wife and I had a cottage at Caldbeck for ten years and we used to do fifteen-mile walks, up and across the Caldbeck Fells, round Skiddaw, down to Keswick and, in eight hours, meet only two or three other walkers. Then we got a taxi back, being cheats.

      You see few people because this is not the glamorous, touristy Lake District. There are no local lakes. It’s hard to get to, especially if you are coming up from the South, as most of the hordes do. There used to be a lot of mining, so you still come across scarred valleys, jagged holes, dumps of debris. It’s an acquired taste, being rather barren and treeless, often windy and misty, colourless for much of the year, though, in the autumn, the fell slopes turn a paler shade of yellow.

      At first sight, first impression, it’s not exactly a welcoming place. The people and the landscape tend to hide their delights away. Like the fells, friendships unfold. ‘They’ll winter you, summer you, winter you again,’ so we were told when we first moved to Caldbeck. ‘Then they might say hello.’

      The nearest big town is Carlisle, some fifteen miles away, a historic city with a castle and cathedral, small as cities go, with only 70,000 citizens. It is, however, important as the capital of Cumbria, the second largest county in England – only in area, though; in population, Cumbria is one of the smallest, with only 400,000 people. Carlisle is in the far north-western corner of England, hidden away on the map and in the minds of many English people, who usually know the name but aren’t quite sure if it might be in Scotland or even Wales.

      The region, it would seem at first glance, is an unlikely, unpromising setting to produce such a family as the Stobarts. At a second glance, when you look further into their two home villages, you find more colour, more depth, more riches hidden away.

      Caldbeck is the bigger village of the two, population six hundred, and has a busy, semi-industrial past. The old mill buildings have now been nicely refurbished to provide smart homes or workshops. It still is a thriving village, a genuine, working village, as all the locals will tell you. It does not depend on tourists, trippers or second-homers. It’s got a very active Young Farmers Club, a tennis club, amateur dramatics. There are agricultural families who have been there for centuries, mixing well with a good sprinkling of newer, middle-class professionals who work in Carlisle.

      Caldbeck’s claims to national fame lie in its graveyard. At the parish church is buried the body of John Peel, a local huntsman, commemorated in a song which is Cumbria’s national anthem and gets sung all round the English-speaking world. (Peel never heard it himself – the words were put to the present tune after his death.) Near him lies Mary Robinson, the Maid of Buttermere, a Lakeland beauty who was wronged by a rotter in 1802. He bigamously married her and was later hanged, a drama which thrilled the nation and became a London musical. More recently, it was turned into a successful novel by Melvyn Bragg. Lord Bragg, as he now is called, was brought up and educated at Wigton, a small town, about ten miles from Caldbeck. He is a great lover of the Caldbeck Fells and still has a country home locally at Ireby.

      Caldbeck’s church is named after St Kentigern, known as St Mungo in Scotland, who was a bishop of Glasgow. He visited the Caldbeck area in 553 and did a spot of converting after he heard that, ‘many amongst the mountains were given to idolatory’. Much later, the early СКАЧАТЬ