Day Two: Blood, Sweat and Tears

When I am supreme ruler of the universe (this day will come, MARK MY WORDS) I will insist that all railway bridges have a footpath alongside.  It's not a difficult, or even very expensive, provision.  Just a little wooden bridge hanging off the side so that walkers and cyclists don't have to go round the long way at estuaries and rivers.  That's fine if you're in a car - you don't care about a bit of extra distance - but it's incredibly frustrating, as a pedestrian, to look ahead of yourself and see a lovely great bridge you can't use.  (Unless you decide to trespass, cough cough).  

I had to miss out Cark & Cartmel as part of my usual jump off the train, walk on to the next station pattern, because there was a blimming great river in the way.  It takes the train seven minutes to get from Cark to Ulverston, via a bridge over the mouth of the estuary; if I'd walked via the footbridge much further upstream, it would have taken me about four hours.

Despite its name, this is pretty much a station just for the village of Cark.  Cartmel is larger, but it's also a fair distance away - it's as far from there to Grange-over-Sands station as it is to this one.  As a result, the name is often just shortened to just Cark on timetables and train announcements.  I also cannot let it pass without noting that the three letter National Rail code for the station is CAK.

I passed out of the car park, past a pile of stones that was probably once a wall until someone took the corner too fast, and into the village.  I had low expectations, but fortunately, Cark defied them.  Built around a bridge over a tumbling river, the village made a great impression.

I walked from one end of the village to the other - a process that took me about five minutes.  The houses were well-groomed, the roads quiet, the view across the hills predictably stunning.  I got to the fringe and then turned back and went to the pub.

I had an hour to kill.  What did you expect me to do - take up residence outside the public toilet and chat to passers by?  The Engine seemed like a perfectly suitable place to stop and have a bit of a rest.  The landlord and his wife were sat in the front, eating their lunch and watching Dickinson's Real Deal on the flatscreen.  I got a pint and found myself a quiet corner.  Carrie tweeted excitedly when she realised where I was, "CARK <3 STICKY TOFFEE PUDDING <3".  I had to reply that even though it might be the finest pudding known to man, I couldn't purchase anything from a menu that spelt "desserts" as "deserts".  I have to be strict like that or these people will never learn.

A little light headed - for some reason, beer before six o'clock heads straight into my bloodstream - I went back to the station for my last train of the day.  Avoiding the platform signposted "Trains to Lancaster AND BEYOND", which sounded a bit metaphysical to me, I boarded the train towards Barrow.

Roose sounds like something Scottish people do to one another after the lights are out.  It's Barrow's other station, a perfunctory suburban halt behind a Tesco.  I disembarked with a load of schoolkids, all evidently on their way back from some public school in Grange.  There was one young man, about 12, sat with two girls; I felt like leaning over and tapping him on the shoulder and saying "You do realise you're a homosexual, don't you?"  He had fabulousness shining out of every flaming pore; I thought I might save him some teenage angst by letting him know early on.

With the station sign under my belt, all I had to do was walk across town to my hotel.  Unfortunately, "under my belt" was the problem.  My trousers were trying to injure me.

All day, I'd felt a seam on the inside of my walking trousers scraping against the inside of my leg.  Over and over, rasping away.  Though I didn't know it until I got back to the hotel, it was in fact stripping layers of flesh off my thighs, like an oilskin bacon slicer.  When I finally peeled them off that night I found they were soaked with blood, and I had to wash them in the sink (and indeed, every night after that, as I only had one pair of trousers with me).

It started off fine but after the first mile or so it started to become agonising.  The hot sun didn't help, causing sweat to run into the scraped inside leg - I was literally rubbing salt into the wound.

As I hobbled along, Barrow shifted around me.  Roose seemed like a good, sensible working class neighbourhood.  Grass verges and big family homes with a spot of garden outside.  An off licence called "Betty Booze" (which got me a reply on Twitter from Betty Boo herself!).  A sandwich shop called "Buttylicious" (clearly pop puns are big with Barrow's retailers).  A couple strolling away from Aldi, arm in arm.

Cross the road, and things immediately shot up the social scale.  Barrow's planned layout meant that its suburbs felt like distinct entities: a main road separated one group of workers from the other.  I'd definitely crossed into the middle class - there was a park, plenty of greenery, and a proud looking high school.  That was getting a new, large building; as it didn't make me want to dry heave, I guess work started before Michael Gove swept in and insisted school buildings shouldn't have luxuries like windows or corridors or lighting.  The houses meanwhile had elegant curves and whitewashed fronts, very between the wars.

It made the shift across another main road even more jarring.  Suddenly it was terraces, tiny yards out front, shops with thick metal shutters (where they were still open).  One was called Fax-a-Snack; I had visions of sandwiches being sent down phone lines.  Then again, who even has a fax machine these days?  They probably haven't had an order since 2007 and can't work out why.

The heady scent of chips from Mattie's was calling to me, even from across the street, but by now my eyes were watering with the pain.  The idea of crossing the road, instead of just pushing on, was ridiculous.  The buildings became more and more grim as I advanced - streets with pretty names and ugly maisonettes, a pub called the Tally Ho! that should really have been called Glassing Ahoy!.  A huge electrical substation beneath high pylons.  At a railway bridge, I got a good look into the wide expanse of Barrow LMD, a train maintenance area.  It meant row after row of empty tracks right in the middle of town, land no-one wanted to be close to.

The final stretch took me past the Furness Building Society Stadium, home to Barrow AFC.  I think "stadium" is a bit of an ambitious description, personally.  It was absolutely plastered with adverts - every square inch was covered.  Awwww, at least they try, I thought in an utterly patronising way.

Then - blessed relief! - there was the Travelodge, and I could finally collapse on my bed.  Once I'd got the key to work.  And once I'd remade the bed because the maid hadn't bothered.  But after all that, it was a relief to drop my trousers and relax.

I've said that too many times.

Day One: City on the Edge of Forever

For some reason, I'd always wanted to visit Barrow-in-Furness.  There probably aren't too many people who've said that.

There was just something about this town that appealed to me.  Its position at the very extreme of England, perched on a spit of land, shielded by an island.  It's a cul-de-sac, and I like that, the finality, the distance.  It takes an hour for a train to get to Barrow from Lancaster, and you pass through open, empty landscapes before you reach the station.

It's not much to look at from the outside, though for once, this isn't down to over-enthusiastic modernisation by British Rail.  A bombing raid in 1941 obliterated the station, a fact commemorated in the hall.  A sandstone memorial to the fallen of the Great War comes with a plaque at the bottom: The damage to this memorial was caused by enemy action in World War II.  Chips and chunks have been carved out of it by explosives and shrapnel.

The rest of the station has been modernised fairly recently, and is pleasing enough.  There's a shop and lifts and waiting rooms.  It's all very efficient and calm.  Despite its position in the middle of nowhere, Barrow's importance as a centre for industry - and especially the defence industry - means it gets a good, frequent service to Manchester.  You can tell this isn't another backwater station to FirstTranspennine Express.

I arrived on a Sunday, and wandered into the town centre for a look round.  The railways brought riches to Barrow, linking its iron ore deposits and the massive dockyards to the rest of Britain.  What had been a small fishing port for millennia transformed itself during the Industrial Revolution into a centre for living and working.  Instead of it haphazardly springing up, the manager of the Furness Railway proposed a planned community; he laid out streets and avenues.  Barrow's a railway town in the most literal sense; until the Town Hall was built, the local worthies met in the train company's offices.  Sir James Ramsden, the owner of the Furness Railway and the town's first mayor, is now commemorated in a statue at the centre of the town, where its main avenues cross.

Immediately outside the station is a statue to a very different kind of civic worthy - Emlyn Hughes.  Now I liked the chirpy footballer in his appearances on A Question of Sport in the 1980s, pawing Princess Anne; the BF, as a committed Liverpool fan, still speaks of him in hushed tones.  Hughes was born in Barrow, and died too early, so you can see why people would want to commemorate him.  I just think it's too soon to do it.  I think you need to leave it at least twenty years after a person's died to see if their legacy has lived on.  Now celebrities are hardly in the ground before they start pouring out the bronze.  I'm not saying Emlyn Hughes doesn't deserve a statue; I just think it's too soon for us to judge properly.  If Katie Price got hit by a bus tomorrow, wouldn't there be a large contingent of people wanting her to be memorialised?  Wait a while and then we'll see if anyone still cares.

I turned off Abbey Road, with its fine civic buildings, into the shopping area.  Barrow's not a Sunday shopping town.  Most of the shops were closed.  It meant I couldn't sample some of their more interesting stores, like this innovatively named shop:

Like most Northern towns, Barrow's suffered from the collapse of traditional industries.  Unemployment's high, and regeneration is key.  There are parts of the town with that slightly desperate air of over management.  Places with brick paving and elaborate seating and fancy lampposts with flying buttresses for some reason.  I'm not sure why lampposts are always the first thing to be replaced when a town is "done up".  Do you ever pay attention to the light fixtures in a town centre?  It's like spending a load of money making the drainpipes look nice.  So long as they're doing their job, no-one's really bothered what they look like.

Of course, there's more public art: this time, The Spirit of Barrow, a tribute to the workers of the town.  The ones that are left.

The dignity of the tribute is undermined by the seagull, but it's impossible to get away from them.  The soundtrack to the town is a cawing, shrieking cacophony of birds.  They swoop in and above you everywhere you go.  I passed an empty plot of wasteground that was almost completely covered with gulls; they seemed to eye me suspiciously as I walked by, cold yellow balls rotating towards me.  Sizing me up for food potential.  Seagulls are huge; you don't realise when you see them in the sky just how big they are.  (Although these might be mutated gulls, fed on Sellafield's outflow, with teeth and lasers and the ability to talk).

No town is at its best on a quiet wet Sunday.  I followed silent streets round the pedestrianised area, where even national chains like New Look and WH Smith couldn't be bothered opening.  Slowly my route rotated outwards, towards the edges, until I saw a street that was so Northern it actually took my breath away.  It really needed a Dream Academy soundtrack and some urchins playing with a hoop and a stick for the full effect, but it was still pretty awesome.

You can just about see the Devonshire Dock buildings in the background of that shot.  The huge hall was built so that nuclear submarines could be constructed in the town, and it dominates the view.  Almost everywhere you go you can see it poking up over the rooftops.

Later that evening, once I'd dumped my bag at the Travelodge, I returned to the docks to have another look at it.  It's a truly impressive building, massive in every sense, a vast five-chambered incubator for subs.  Under the angry skies it looked even more imposing.

You can never forget that this is a naval town.  It's not just the Devonshire Dock Hall, it's the streets named after Nelson and Drake, it's the cranes on the horizon, it's the MoD signs warning you that trespassers will be  dealt with most severely.  Whole sections were walled off and protected under the "Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005".  I was almost tempted to climb over one, just for a laugh.

The BAe complex stretches across Barrow Island, the other side of the dock, but here it's much more old fashioned.  The buildings are red brick leftovers from when this was all Vickers'.  It looks bedraggled and abandoned at first glance, but look closer and you can see the CCTV cameras and the modern security entrances tucked away.  As is appropriate for a submarine works, it keeps its weaponry hidden.

Across the road were a surprise: tenements.  A little bit of Glasgow had somehow come adrift and escaped across the border.  Their symmetry and stolidness pleased me; I wondered if they were as well preserved inside as they looked.  I hoped they hadn't been subdivided into tiny bedsits.

Soon even the industry ended, and I had reached the Walney Channel.  Wild winds tore at me as I looked out over the empty shore.  The tip of Walney Island curved off in the distance, dotted with houses and industry.

 
If I take just one memory from Barrow, it'll be the skies.  Huge, epic, rolling skies that stretch forever without anything to obstruct them.  Sad skies, cold ones, vistas of loneliness and heartbreak.  The sky and the town are suffused with melancholy.  A beautiful, abandoned feeling.  A town that's unwanted but industrious.  It works hard, isolated, unattractive, on the edge of the world.  I fell for its ugly face and its pretty soul.

Back through Barrow Island, where the chip shops and Chinese takeaways were filling up, and across the dock bridge.  The road back out to my hotel was astonishingly horrible.  The old docks have been filled with retail sheds, ugly behemoths built out of tin.  There was a never ending cube of a Tesco Extra, blaring its logo at passers by, turning its back on the town so that it could face the car park.

I never walked that way again, preferring the narrow back streets.  The houses there were also ugly, embarrassingly so, but at least there was life.  Kids on scooters.  Women with pushchairs.  A basketball court playing host to a noisy game of football (this is England: it doesn't matter how many hoops you put in, we're still going to use it for a kickabout).

For some reason, I'd always wanted to visit Barrow-in-Furness.  I'm glad I finally made it.