New book has introduction penned by Dame Vivienne
WITH special thanks to all those readers who have patiently been waiting for my book, ‘The Waterman’s Tale’, it’s here at last, and here’s a little sample to whet your appetite.
There is a small launch at the Laughing Badger Gallery this Friday, December 14, from 6pm, the book will also be available in the George Street Community Bookshop, a fantastic local resource saved from closure by a local collective of like-minded people, from Saturday morning – December 15.
Other locations to be announced soon and news of a larger launch party with the wonderful Dame Vivienne Westwood in the New Year.
Dame Vivienne has written a very evocative Introduction to the book, where she links her idyllic childhood in Tintwistle with my time at Crowden. I feel very honoured.
She says when describing winter in the Valley, ‘But best was when the flocks of snow came whirling down ever faster, and when I looked up into the sky the window went up like a lift to the land of the Snow Queen’. And then a lovely glimpse into a day in the meadow, ‘I remember one morning in May, climbing up this path into the morning sun of Cooper’s meadow and sitting in the grass as the dew rose up, skylarks high in the sky and the scent of hawthorn in the hedges. I said to myself ‘I am happy’ Sean, she said, ‘You’ve been living life to the full and you have now enlarged my crucible for me because I am so connected to what you tell’.
Daniel Defoe, 16601731, should perhaps wash his mouth out as he once described Longdendale as, ‘Perhaps the most desolate, wild and abandoned country in England’, and although Dan undoubtedly had a fantastic imagination, most famous for his novel Robinson Crusoe, he was miles out with the Valley.
The same was true of his latter-day compatriot, Alfred Wainwright, 1907-1991, renowned for his eulogies to the Lake District, when he claimed that, after he passed through Crowden on the Pennine Way, the best thing to do was get out of Longdendale as fast as you could, and be careful to look over your shoulder for ‘Big Brother’.
Defoe, to his credit had a wonderfully varied CV, as in no particular order he was a trader, writer, journalist, pamphleteer, spy and inmate of Newgate Prison.
One week after his release from jail Defoe witnessed the Great Storm of 1703, which raged through the night of November 26/27. The storm caused severe damage to London and Bristol, uprooted millions of trees and killed more than 8,000 people, mostly at sea.
The event became the subject of Defoe’s ‘The Storm’ (1704), which includes a collection of witness accounts, often regarded as the world’s first example of modern journalism.
In 1987, I was privy to another great storm which once again robbed the British landscape of millions of trees, and I described the aftermath a year later in the Sunday Times newspaper, as leaving the countryside with just the... ‘Shades of glades gone by’.
I was proud of that line, still am. Crowden, with hardly any trees, thanks to hundreds of years clearing for the incoming sheep, and virtually none at all compared to the time of the Doomsday Book, when a squirrel could have jumped from branch to branch, from Sherwood to Woodhead without touching the ground got off lightly in ‘87.
The sessile oaks suffered no damage whatsoever, not least because they are a kind of dwarf oak and they snuggle up to the hillside in small plantations impervious to the most tormenting north easterlies.
The valley was a very different place in days of old, packed with not only trees, including oak, ash and willow but all the attendant wildlife that goes with it.
Wolves, wild boar, red deer, lynx and even brown bear up to 1,000 years ago. For further details call 07736 175866.