England's North

About midway through our stay in England Susan and I made the decision to concentrate our travels in the north.  We did have a long list of places in the south we had hoped to visit -- Stratford, Bristol, The Cotswolds, Cambridge, Dartmoor -- but having only three-day weekends to travel we decided instead to save the south of England for a later visit.  Here are a few highlights of our final few weeks.

It was a lot more interesting than I thought it would be.

Learning how they made millions of bobbins every day for the thousands of mills was fascinating.

We learned that a moor is a featureless, barren felltop.  Or in American, it's a cold, windy mountain crest where it is easy to get lost.

 

We watched canalboats using locks to climb over the Pennine Mountain range.

Closer to home we hiked in Arneside and Silverdale, but...

...we obeyed the speed limit.

An old cemetery by the sea not far from home.

England!

We watched England beat South Africa at Cricket.

It was a short match-up.  8 hours.

Twice, I took an early train to London.

To give sourdough workshops at Selfridge's, one of London's poshest department stores.

There were whole rooms just for watches that cost 10,000 quid.

Workshop 1: Fermentation.

Workshop 2: Dough.

We are going to miss Lancaster.  A lot.

Bruno teaching Sue how to make long distance phone calls.

On the canal at the end of the block.

Sue and John launching a daring rescue of Dexter's soccer ball from the sewer.

I know it is an advertisement.  For what though?

I agree.

We sail off tomorrow.  Back to Meadville in a week. (Also the canal at the end of the block. In Lancaster where it is always sunny.)

We would be remiss if we did not give a big shoutout to the UK - US Fulbright Commission who not only made all this possible, but also encouraged us to live among the English.

Hip Hip Hoorah!

Hadrian's Wall

The northern limit of the Roman Empire lies only about forty miles north of us.  To demarcate territory conquered by Rome from territory overrun by Barbarians, Emperor Hadrian had his army construct a stone wall.

The wall was 80 miles long running from coast to coast, east to west across northern England.

Originally, it was 20 feet high, but most of the stones have been taken to be used in other walls, houses, and roads.

The wall was built on top of cliff.  Here looking east.  To the left, in the lowlands is where there were Barbarians.

The cliff -- a basalt sill -- looking west.

There is some debate about the purpose of the wall.  It might have served as a trade barrier, siphoning market men toward guarded passageways in the wall.  The Romans would have collected taxes there.  It could have been a work project for the army.  It might have been for defensive purposes, but its intermittent weaknesses make that uncertain.

Nevertheless, there are forts at regular intervals along the wall.

The archaeological remains on the ground and in a series of museums are stunning.  One museum has six hundred leather shoes.

Museum photo, not ours.

A bread oven currently being excavated.  Note the preserved wooden posts in front of the oven.  They held the roof of the house in place.

A replica tombstone.

Interpretive sign of communal baking undertaken by Roman soldiers inside the fort walls.

A very clear day.

At the beginning of our treks.

At the end of our treks.

Cotton

Early in our visit to England we took a tour of Liverpool, a city whose strikingly large buildings were constructed with profits accumulated by traders.  British magnates financed ships to England's West African colonies to pack slaves into ships.  Ship captains dropped those that survived The Middle Passage onto British colonies in the Caribbean and onto British colonies we now call the southern states.

Enslaved Africans picked cotton that went back into the empty holds.  It arrived in Liverpool's port from where it was transported to textile mills.  Lancashire Country, where we are located, at one time had nearly 2,000 mills and more than 300,000 mill workers.  We visited one preserved mill called Quarry Bank, a National Trust site near Manchester.

A bale of cotton looks like this and while admiring its mass it is sobering to consider how many enslaved people it must have taken to produce millions of these bales.

A bale of cotton weighs 500 pounds.  Slaves would have picked 216,000 bolls for every bale.

A still active waterwheel turned an axle to power the mill machinery before the age of coal-powered steam engines.  

The axle was this large.

Quarry Bank mill looks like this on the outside.

Inside Quarry Bank still has working machinery.

Wads of cotton are stretched and twisted.

Children were responsible for cleaning machines.

The fibers were pulled and twisted into tiny threads.

Those threads were spindled.

Threads collected on spindles at left are drawn toward a textile on the right.

And weaving machines went to work.

Here is what the first machine-made fabrics looked like.

The factory floor would have been deafening.

Men, women, and children worked 12-hour days.  Quarry Bank had a home for children who worked in the factory.  The children were taken from orphanages or from so-called "work houses" where parents who were too poor to care for them left them.  It was the job of children to run under the moving machines to reattach broken threads.  

A docent calls in tourists.  She was brilliant.

She made it very clear that children this age would have been living in this room with scores of others.

Today, there are also beautiful gardens.

 

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For those of you wondering, yes, I'm still baking breads.   

This sourdough focaccia is made with feta, sprigs of rosemary picked from the neighbor's front garden, meaty green olives, and fresh olive oil just imported from Greece.