HERDWICK SWANSONG

Dave Pogson

For 50 years until retirement Dave practiced as a surveyor in Lancashire and Cumbria, becoming a Fellow of the RICS and working for the Department of the Environment, Lancashire County Council, South Lakeland District Council and the NPS Group. During that time, he wrote articles on surveying topics and work experiences which allowed him to introduce some controversy, humour, and the odd bit of fiction. https://davidlewispogson.wordpress.com

I can hardly believe that this is the last of Dave’s ‘Selwyn’ series. It’s his lifetime of experiences that underpinned the series. As Dave modestly said: “The young, modern, urban generation of public sector estates surveyors won't have a clue what I'm writing about, but you can't say that I don't give you variety…. If the approach of Christmas reduces the contributions from your other writers and you need to fill space…” 

The biggest of thank yous, Dave, for all the entertainment you’ve given your most avid reader – the Editor – and no doubt lots of other ACES’ Terrier readers. I will miss you, Selwyn, Walter, and his colleagues. 

‘The Selwyn Series’, ‘Herdwick Tales’ and ‘Selwyn – The Early Years’ that precede ‘Selwyn – The Middle Years’ were written specifically for ACES’ Terrier. Each story was a self-contained episode in the life of a council property manager from 2001 to the present day and beyond, as he approached and enjoyed early retirement from the fictional Herdwick District Council. They can still be read in back-issues of ACES’ Terrier, starting from ‘The Final Vote’ in 2017/18 Winter Terrier.

The characters often presented controversial and outspoken opinions on local and central government policy and practice. The stories were fictitious and occasional historical background details may have been changed to fit the chronology. The views expressed were those of the author, not those of ACES. The author offers thanks to former ACES member Martin Haworth (ex Lancashire County Council) for contributing suggestions to help improve this series.

Lake District man and boy 

Those of you who have followed my stories in ACES’ Terrier may wonder what on earth inspired such an otherwise well-respected and well-experienced chartered surveyor to plumb those depths. And why, in particular, did I write about people who seem to speak a different language to the rest of the country? Well, I write from some experience and - let this be a lesson to you - when you retire this is what you descend to in order to fill the time. 

I’ve lived almost my entire life within and around the bottom edge of the Lake District. I worked summers in Carnforth Woolshed near to where I was born, about four miles inside Lancashire below the Westmorland border. I played rugby in many of its small towns. I’ve walked some of its fells, driven around most of them and fallen into its biggest lake. As a young surveyor, I bought telephone exchange sites in its villages for the Post Office and as an old surveyor, I managed South Lakeland District Council’s property services group in Kendal. I married a girl who was born and raised in the Lakes. Recently, pursuing my hobby of genealogy, I even discovered that I'm descended from a line of Cumbrians on my mother's side. So, I tend not to notice nor to struggle too much with the local dialect, which can be a challenge for off-comers. However, while my ear is relatively attuned to roughly understanding its meaning from meeting many farmers and other local characters, I don’t knowingly speak in it nor write in it. Spelling it is nigh-on impossible. 

Helvellyn summit. L-R Pete, Mick, Paul, and author on the floor trying to light a fag in a steady breeze (Ed – dog not named)

My first conscious recollection of meeting a Lakeland farmer was after a 1964 summer hike over Helvellyn with my sixth-form mates. We missed the last bus home from Grasmere and were stranded. We met the farmer along the roadside and he let us sleep the night in his hay barn for free, provided we promised not to smoke in there. I think, as much as anything, that gesture formed my opinion of Lakelanders as decent human beings. It was a fine night so I didn’t abuse his trust and went outside to smoke. 

Working for Scottish, English and Welsh Woolgrowers in Carnforth Woolshed in the summers as a sixth-former and later as a student, unloading wagons full of fleeces from Cumberland and Westmorland and chatting with the hauliers and farmers, confirmed that opinion. It was also an education. On a grading table I can still pick out a sheared Herdwick fleece from a Masham Hogg or a Light or Dark Scotch. I’m not so accurate when the fleece has four legs and a head and is in the distance halfway up a fell – they all look the same then. 

Lakelanders have a sense of humour. I can still picture a driver laughing at me … after I’d stepped backwards into the void between the side of the loading bay and his wagon while struggling with a sheet (a hessian sack as big as a king-size mattress stuffed full of fleeces) following a Friday lunchtime visit to the local pub … once he knew that I’d suffered nothing worse than knocks and bruises. That’s all part of life for a Lakelander. 

The dialect changes even within its own geographical area, with variations between Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire north of the Sands (Furness). In my village pub was a character who had strayed southwards from west Cumberland. His dialect was so embedded that very few of us local youths could fully understand him as he stood at the bar telling tales about his past life. He seemed to be on a loop because the tales, or the bits we could understand of them, always seemed to be the same every time that we saw him there. The more he drank, the harder it became to understand the dialect. But we never knew his real name and the locals all referred to him as ‘Marra’ because that’s what he called us. Eventually we worked out that ‘Marra’ was the west Cumbrian dialect word for ‘Mate’ or ‘Friend’. 

Front row antics 

Playing rugby for the local grammar school and later for the city rugby club against schools and clubs from many of the small regional towns like Ambleside, Windermere, Kirkby Lonsdale and Barrow-in-Furness in the south, or Workington, Carlisle, Kirkby Stephen and Penrith in the north, was an experience. Front row conversations against burly farmers’ sons, who looked like they could run with an adult pig under each arm without struggling, were often short and pointed. It’s notable that the only time that I was sent off, in 17 years of playing against teams from all over Britain, was early in my career for retaliating against a Heversham Grammar school forward from just up the road who had descended from the Westmorland hills intent on converting me from the human equivalent of a ‘tup’ into a ‘wether’. At the subsequent inquiry, the headmaster accepted my explanation of self-defence and did not punish me. I think that he was impressed by my delicately-prepared and anatomically-correct description of the initial assault which reflected well on the education that I had received from the school’s English department. He also knew what Lakelanders were like. They may have been decent human beings in daily life but on the pitch they were not to be messed with. 

Apart from three college years in Yorkshire and three years in Preston in the early 1970s when first married, because I couldn’t afford to commute and buy my first house, my entire 70-odd year life has been lived within about 2 miles of where I was born. 

Rent review negotiations 

My year out from college in Sheffield for practical surveying experience saw me back living with my parents, and commuting south daily by train away from the edge of Lakeland and into central Lancashire with the Ministry of Works. My first negotiation, in 1969, was with a farmer in the Ribble Valley. Representing the Post Office, I had to travel from the office in Preston about six miles to the village of Grimsargh to agree a rent increase for a small grazing paddock retained for future expansion purposes next to the newly constructed telephone exchange. The passing rent was 10 shillings per annum. Fresh from college and in a strange town, I had no comparables: no-one in the office who knew anything about grazing land rentals; and no outside contacts to ask, so I guessed that doubling the rent must be a result. I walked from the bus stop to the farm and as I approached it I could see the top half of a man looming over a huge, evil-smelling midden heap. I figured that he was standing on a wagon hidden behind the midden as he was shovelling something up from below him onto the top of the heap. I wasn’t about to squelch around it in my shoes for closer contact so I shouted: 

‘Hello, are you the owner?’ 

‘Aye.’ 

‘If you got my letter then you’ll know that I’ve come about the rent increase.’ 

‘Ow much?’ 

‘How about £1 a year?’ 

‘Reet.’ 

‘I’ll send you a letter to sign.’ 

And that was it. For over 50 years I’ve regretted that I hadn’t asked for more and made him put down his shovel to haggle. He’d been too quick to agree. Still, it had been short and sweet and with a man who spoke the same Lancashire twang as me so I hadn’t embarrassed myself. It was a lesson for future negotiations, especially with those Lakeland farmers for later in my career: engage them in conversation first, even if it is in their own dialect, and ask for more than you want, even if that means taking your wellies with you to get up close. Those farmers won’t refuse a bargain if you are daft enough to offer one. 

Back working from Preston after my finals, and armed with a driving licence, I progressed onto locating and buying new telephone exchange sites in Cumberland and Westmorland. One prospective site located on my travels at Selside near Kendal, some 21 miles north of my home, demonstrated the speed of the Lakeland grapevine. On that occasion I got inside the farmhouse door and had a proper negotiation. Even though I signed off early that day and went straight home, my parents already knew where I’d been, what I’d been doing, and who I’d met. The farmer turned out to be the brother of their next-door neighbour. Lakelanders are tight-knit. 

Local Government Reorganisation opportunities 

Local Government Reorganisation in 1974 saw an opportunity for me to move from central government across to a new Lancashire County Council (LCC) which had been stripped of its Lake District extensions. But even that did not exclude me from working on property in the Lakes. My story ‘The Fee Generation Game’ in ‘Herdwick Tales’ has my main character Selwyn walking up the fictitious Shepdale Horseshoe in winter. This was based on a real experience when I had to conduct an inspection for a rent review of a satellite LCC outdoor pursuits building up in the Kentmere Horseshoe. I drove up to the end of civilisation and asked the farmer for permission to park in his yard and told him what I was about to do. He looked me up and down but didn’t bat an eyelid at my intention, despite the climatic conditions. I then walked in deep snow for about two miles along the track up the valley dressed in suit, shirt and tie, this time with wellies, and with a briefcase. The only people that I saw were a party of appropriately-clad hikers coming down … and they really did laugh at the sight of me. Real Lakelanders don’t let a bit of snow get in the way of life. 

Moving on to South Lakeland District Council (SLDC) in the 1980s was a return to some familiar territory from my Ministry days. I just turned left at the edge of my home village to go to Kendal each morning instead of turning right to Preston. The daily commute became 15 miles north instead of 30 miles south. That’s when my encounter with Lakeland characters and their dialect really took off. Over time I reconnected with former friends, old rugby acquaintances and a part of the world that I’d forgotten how much I loved. Eventually I directed that feeling into the short stories that make up my book ‘Herdwick Tales’, inspired by those Lakeland characters that I’d met. I even encountered some familiar properties, such as the redundant Lakeland stone and slate telephone exchange which I’d sold pre-1974 for the Post Office to Windermere UDC to house the Lake Warden’s patrol boat. Now I found myself selling it again for SLDC when it was replaced by the newly-constructed warden’s boathouse on the lakeshore at Ferry Nab, Bowness. 

Dialect and Walter Winster 

If you get into conversation with a Lakelander, after a while he might ask you ‘Dusta sithee?’ meaning do you understand what I’m saying. If you try to paraphrase your understanding of that conversation he may say ‘Nay, thars gitten wrang smoot’ meaning that you have misunderstood him (a smoot being a specially-constructed hole in a dry-stone wall for a sheep to pass through). He will explain it again but there’s little to be gained by continuing. Just thank him politely and move on in the hope of finding someone who speaks standard English. The definitions below explain why: 

The origins of the Lakeland Dialect are summed up in 'The Philology of The Lakeland Dialect' by Canon E. D. Ellwood (c/o the Lakeland Dialect Society at https://lakelanddialectsociety.co.uk/ ) as follows: 

"The fact is that the Anglo-Saxon and Norse elements in our dialect consist mainly of derivative words and certain usages of speech; but there is enough both of scattered words and ways of talk to warrant our statement that the dialect of Lakeland shews indubitable signs of its Norse origin, and in a lesser degree the Anglo-Saxon or Old English is clearly shewn to have had its influence." 

The Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus clarifies that: 

"A dialect is a form of the language that is spoken in a particular part of the country or by a particular group of people. There are many different dialects of English and they have different words and grammar. Most learners of English learn the standard dialects of the language" ... "A dialect is not the same as an accent. An accent refers to the way we pronounce words and the standard dialect of a language can be spoken with different accents". 

My favourite character in my book is Walter Winster (1889-1945), the drunken, brawling Herdwick-dialect poet who features as a soldier, publican, town councillor and ghost. When attempting to create that character I found that I had to cheat a bit and resort to googling translations and spellings of various dialect words, many of which were discarded from my final drafts. It was particularly challenging to try and write his poetry in dialect and I acknowledge the reliance I placed upon the website of the Lakeland Dialect Society. However, my drafts were pretty-lightweight dialect. I needed more help, as you will see..… 

Although Walter Winster is an amalgam of all the Lakelanders whom I have ever met, I have to admit that there was one local councillor/farmer (who will remain anonymous) that I drew heavily upon. He was a lifelong friend of my father-in-law. His sense of humour, his outrageous tales, his ability to talk endlessly without pausing, and his skill at turning every committee debate into a discussion about the poor state of the drains in his village, were either wonderfully amusing or frustratingly annoying, depending upon whether you were in a hurry or not when you encountered him. I’ll never forget his apology for being late to one committee meeting because he’d been ‘wrestling a stag from a dyke’. As he explained after the meeting, the deer had become entangled by its antlers in a hedge on his land so he had shot it, dragged it out and butchered it for his freezer. And that aptly illustrates the need to understand dialect because in Lakeland a ‘dyke’ is a hedge; in neighbouring Lancashire it’s a watercourse; but on a badly-organised bachelor night out with conflicting bookings in the adjacent urban fleshpots of Barrow-in-Furness, that whole phrase can mean something completely different [Ed – I’ll let that one go!]. 

Only the last verse of Winster's most famous dialect poem is quoted in my book. However the full version, in which he uses his First World War experiences to rail against modern industrialisation in agriculture, and which brought him to the notice of the fledgling Green Movement, is reproduced below. My thanks go to Louise Green of the Lakeland Dialect Society (LDS) who advised me that my first draft ‘Ode to t’Erdwick’ was ‘closer to the Lancashire/Yorkshire dialect than Cumberland’ and kindly offered to correct it for authenticity before publishing it in the LDS 2024 journal. So, see what you make of this:  

Ode T’ T’ Herdy 

Oot on’t fells and doon i’ t’valleys, oor weary heart fairly rallies 

Frae t’soond o’ bleating whenivver we’re meeten’, 

T’maist bless’t a’ greeten frae yon laal grey sheep. 

Bit ‘t weren’t allus lyke this, yance when t’world was split apart 

An’ nations got ter scrappen’ lyke a hoss n cart pulled apart, 

Neither yan enny use widoot a join’d up pair 

Mun as weel be ya abeun, an’ t’other ‘un downstair 

Ah’ve skenned it aw, an’ mair aside, I’on monsters riven’ lumps 

Frae lads whea should hev tekken brides, bit teuk a grave asteed. 

An’ yon’s a sign o’ things tae cum, t’will nivver be t’ syeame, 

Them monsters’ll devour aw t’fells, as them deny awl bleame. 

Tae foul aw t’grass ‘n’ watter, tae spoil waat’s pure, an’ geud 

Tae split t’flocks ‘n’ scatter – there’s nae wool when the’ve spil’t thur blud. 

Sae it’s us as gat tae stop’t, tae save waat’s theer jist noo.  

Tae carry on wid heftten an’ nivver use modern ploo. 

Thur’s some things divvent need alt’rin’. Best left alone tae thrive 

Ya man, ya dog, ya crook an’ t’ sheep wad keep yon fells alive. 

Tis t’grandest seet a man can see - yon herdies oot on t’ fell. 

Then we ken there’s scran on t’tyable, an’ aw i’ England’s well. 

But hark t’ warning yan an’ aw, ‘bout herdies oot on t’ fell. 

Their luck’ll only be kept gaan while we ken hear t’Shepdyale Bell. 

Further reading 

Ed – Dave has assembled his collection of short stories in ‘Herdwick Tales’ and Walter Winster (among others) zappears as a character in 'Herdwick Tales'. If you ever visit the Lake District then I recommend that you obtain a copy of the Walter Winster Heritage Trail Map to be published soon J 

Herdwick Tales