William Brockbank
Shaun Castle 28 June 2007
Portrait of William Brockbank from photograph by J. Hargreaves of Millom. Original transcription published by The Whitehaven News, May 19, 1899.
Foxcroft is for sale through Lakes & Country 01228 516409.
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Regency Splendour
Shaun Castle 27 June 2007
Birkby Lodge is a fine example of 19th century polite architecture in the Regency manner, a classic composite of house, interior and gardens surrounded by its own land. Ideally located on the Solway Coast, the property is tucked into a natural prominence with expansive views west to the sea and Galloway ranges of Criffel and Cairnsmore of Fleet, and east to the Lakeland ranges of Skiddaw and Grisedale Pike.
Noted by Pevsner in The Buildings of England: Cumberland and Westmorland (1967), Birkby Lodge is believed to date from 1844, occupying a site of much earlier provenance, being the original seat of the Bigland and Beeby family. Reflecting the maritime prosperity of early 19th century Maryport, Birkby Lodge stands along the promontary of fine mansions and villas overlooking the sea built during this period by merchants, ship builders and sea masters. Thought to have been built for the Scaife family, of Bigland and Beeby descent, the property finally passed out of the ancestral line at the end of the 19th century.
The house is of rendered sandstone construction under a hipped slate roof with deep overhanging eaves. Symmetrically ‘Regency’ in massing and proportion, the three-storey, three-bay house has a part raised basement with side railing entrance, Graeco-Italian portico of unfluted Ionic columns and blank arched window recesses to ground floor. Equally ‘Regency’ in its interior, the elegantly proportioned arrangement of rooms have shuttered sash windows with fine glazing bars, ornate fireplaces, decorative stucco moulding, cornicing and drapery of classical motif.
Carefully restored and furnished in the classical repertoire, the house is augemented by restoration of the formal gardens, and complemented by an ongoing programme of new planting, opening each year to the public as an NGS garden.
Birkby Lodge is for sale through Lakes & Country 01228 516409.
Black Combe
Shaun Castle 25 June 2007
Black Combe from Millom, early 20th century postcard.
The air clarifies. Rain
Has clocked off for the day.
The wind scolds in from Sligo,
Ripping the calico-grey from a pale sky.
Black Combe holds tight
To its tuft of cloud, but over the three-legged island
All the west is shining.
An hour goes by,
And now the starched collars of the eastern pikes
Streak up into a rinse of blue. Every
Inland fell is glinting;
Black Combe alone still hides
Its bold, bleak forehead, balaclava’d out of sight.
Slick fingers of wind
Tease and fidget at wool-end and wisp,
Picking the mist to bits.
Strings and whiskers
Fray off from the cleft hill’s
Bilberried brow, disintegrate, dissolve
Into blue liquidity -
Only a matter of time
Before the white is wholly worried away
And Black Combe starts to earn its name again.
But where, in the west, a tide
Of moist and clear-as-a-vacuum air is piling
High on the corried slopes, a light
Fret and haar of hazy whiteness
Sweats off the cold rock; in a cloudless sky
A cloud emulsifies,
Junkets on sill and dyke.
Wool-end and wisp materialize
Like ectoplasm, are twined
And crocheted to an off-white,
Over-the-lughole hug-me-tight;
And Black Combe’s ram’s-head, butting at the bright
Turfed and brackeny brine,
Gathers its own wool, plucks shadow out of shine.
What the wind blows away
The wind blows back again.
Cloud on Black Combe by Norman Nicholson
From Sea to the West (1981)
Norman Nicholson. Selected Poems 1940-1982, Faber and Faber.
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