David Mckie: Elsewhere
To anyone who has lived in the north, it’s a matter for wonder and awe that, until Alun Michael, the rural affairs minister, was effectively banned from going there, many people down south had never heard of the Forest of Bowland. Michael’s destination for this thwarted tryst with the ramblers was Abbeystead, in the north-west corner, where the Duke of Westminster has one of his opulent homes and fine estates.
But when I was there on a dazzling evening in early September, with the sense that a summer that had hardly been born was now dying, the villages in the south-east were a match for any part of the tract of moorland, woods and dazzling rivers known as the Forest. At Dunsop Bridge, where people sat in the sun enjoying that sense of peace and harmony that such places engender, the green by the river was covered in ducks (no rare occurrence, apparently: the post office/shop calls itself Puddleduck’s).
Slaidburn, a solid stone community on the top of the hill, has a pub called Hark to Bounty, a church that is warmly commended by Simon Jenkins and an 18th century grammar school now converted into the village primary. And beyond them is no less enchanting Bolton by Bowland. About the best thing in Lancashire, one is tempted to say. Except that for some who live in these parts, it’s still, 30 years after the government shifted the county boundary, essentially Yorkshire.
People still yearn for the restoration of Yorkshire as some used to yearn through the commonwealth years for the restoration of kingship. Slaidburn’s website makes its Lancashire allegiance sound temporary. “A small hill village in the Bowland region of the historic county of Yorkshire,” it says. “The area is currently administered by Lancashire County Council … “
The 1974 dispensation that moved these villages, along with Grindleton, Waddington and others, from white rose to red rose territory was part of a wider plan that lopped sizeable chunks off Lancashire to go into the great conurbations, or into Cumbria and Cheshire. This favoured corner of what until then had been the West Riding was no doubt regarded in Whitehall as some form of compensation.
The restiveness that can be found in Lancashire-that-used-to-be-Yorkshire is replicated in Saddleworth, which was unwillingly thrust into Greater Manchester in 1974. The parish council passed a resolution at the end of its last year making its official address: Civic Hall, Lee Street, Uppermill, Saddleworth, Yorkshire.
The council (only one of whose members dissented) can claim an official, even a royal, warrant for that: “I can confirm,” the then local government minister, a Mr Portillo, would later assure the Commons, “that the local authority areas and boundaries introduced in April 1974 do not alter the boundaries of counties. The 1974 boundaries are entirely administrative and need not affect long-standing loyalties and affinities.” While in September 2001, Prince Charles, opening a Yorkshire canal, said: “The fact that Saddleworth is still part of the historic West Riding is extremely important.”
There’s a name for such territories: debatable lands. That’s a 15th or 16th century designation, which Walter Scott’s novels made popular, and which originally applied to a stretch of land between the rivers Esk and Sark, north of Carlisle and south of Langholm. This was sometimes England, sometimes Scotland, and often effectively neither, since the writ of neither country applied as the great border families fought and feuded across it.
The term “debatable lands” has always seemed to me a deeply romantic concept, with the same emotional pull as knights at arms, alone and palely loitering. So it’s no surprise to discover that the British Association for Romantic Studies will be holding a conference next July, organised by Professor Claire Lamont and Dr Michael Rossington of the University of Newcastle, on the theme of debatable lands – at home and abroad ( ncl.ac.uk/bars2005/debatable_lands/).
It’s a concept that goes beyond mere geography. As the conference site on the internet indicates, it applies to all kinds of areas where borders are hazy or in some way disputed. Macaulay wrote of history as “the debatable land between reason and imagination”. A classic spiritualist work, commended by Alfred Russel Wallace, was called “The debatable land between this world and the next”.
Bids to speak at the conference have to be in by mid-October. As you’d expect where debatable lands are involved, there are no arbitrary boundaries on its agenda.
