A Grumpy Old Man’s Tale 51 Coneys, Bees and Fish
Continued on from GOM 50 on a Saturday evening in the Green Dragon Inn taproom
A Grumpy Old Man’s Tale 51⅒ So Just Where is Bearthwaite? is included before the footnotes
Chance said, “I’ve been asked by a lot folks recently where we’re at with the coneys, the bees and the fish, so I’m going to try to have some of the lads who know more about those than I do to give you an idea of what’s going on. I’ll help out where I can, and I’ll maybe threw in a bit of other stuff on the way too. The coneys, bees and fish have become of much greater economic significance to us over the last two or three decades because they keep a considerable number of folk in work these days, so it’s understandable that folk are asking for information. This way the lads in here the night can pass on what they hear. I’d like to tackle them in that order, coneys, bees and fish, because that’s how I’ve written my notes, though I’ve bits of other stuff added in too. If any has owt to add please chip in and tell us. For any as don’t know a coney is an adult rabbit. First, Liam, is there any chance of you bringing us up to date on your missus’ and her sisters’ coney raising enterprise? You’ll know the details better than I, and if I tell it it’ll be as dry as dust and about as interesting, because I wasn’t living here for most of the events. If you do it, you can go back to the beginning and make a proper tale of it. A tale of interest to us all, and it’s unlikely any not from here will know any of it, and few of us from here will know all of it.”
“Aye okay, Chance. My missus Rhona has bred large coneys of a New Zealand white strain since not long after we moved here which was many years ago. The breed actually originated in California, from stock some folk say possibly came from New Zealand, hence the name. She bought her original stock of forty does from a bloke somewhere in Cheshire. I recall they were kept in an old world war two aircraft hanger, but I’ve no idea where it was now. Her four bucks came from a woman somewhere near Lincoln. She’s bought the odd buck or two from all over since to prevent too much inbreeding. She got into it because she’s been poor on her pins(1) since she was a schoolgirl, and reckoned it would bring a few bob(2) in and her legs would be up to it as they got worse with age. She’s always selt ’em through Vincent at his butchers’ shop. Several years ago Rhona’s younger sisters Lacey and Dinah came to live with us here at Bearthwaite. Lacey, the youngest of the three lasses, had been separated and divorced from a husband who’d left her for a younger woman years before. Lacey telt me years ago that he’d left her for a highly intelligent younger woman who’d kept her brains in her bra and made a point of shewing off just how clever she was at every opportunity.” Chuckles went around the room at that, for the locals knew that was exactly the kind of remark that Lacey would make.
“Dinah lived not far away from Lacey in Huntingdonshire(3) and had been happily married till her husband of thirty years had died from heart problems. Rhona asked her sisters if they would like to live with us, for we had more than enough room. She’d asked me about it first, and I’d said aye why not, for I’d always got on with them. Rhona missed her sisters because she hadn’t seen much of them for years, and it had always seemed daft to me that lasses who were that close lived so far apart. Zoom is okay, but it ain’t the same as having a hug. Lacey and Dinah after talking the matter over decided to uproot and move to Bearthwaite. The lasses had no family and no other reason to stay in Huntingdonshire for the three of them had originated in Torquay Devon where they now had no living family either. The three of them were all they had in terms of blood kin. They weren’t living with us for long though, for Lacey met and wed Buthar the computer guru after six months and Dinah met and wed Ralph the games teacher at the school a twelvemonth later.
“Neither Lacey nor Dinah were near to retirement age, so shortly before they moved up here they’d asked Rhona what there was in the way of employment possibilities here. Rhona had looked into the matter for them, and found numerous possibilities, but she’d suggested that if her sisters were prepared to help her expand her business the three of them could raise enough coneys to provide them all with a decent living. The idea was explored and found to be good, so her sisters selt up and moved to Bearthwaite. Lacey and Dinah were surprised at the low cost of living, low prices and the low wages too in the valley. Most folk are when they move here, but they soon come to realise the benefits to us of keeping things that way. They put the money in to expand Rhona’s coney operation and were surprised at how little was required. All the newborn does and a few extra bucks were retained for breeding purposes and within fifteen months their business was doing well enough to support all of them and they were selling meat in volume again. Rhona telt her sisters that other than right at the beginning she’d never been able to keep up with demand and since Bearthwaite’s population was still expanding quite quickly it was unlikely that they would be able to for the foreseeable future. Fact is they still can’t keep up with demand. Vincent’s van driver takes maybe two hundred out every week. Few of them are ordered, but none ever come back unselt.”
Vincent interrupted to say, “Three hundred these days and they all get selt, so I’m going to send Ken out with four hundred next week and see where we go from there. If need be I’ll ask Alf to find me a bigger van or maybe even two of ’em, for Ian as skippers the trout boat has stood in for Ken a time or two and is after more work.”
Liam nodded to Vincent and continued, “Any surplus Vincent doesn’t want in the shop he butches and sends to Christine who cans it to make canned coney legs and half a dozen different soups and stews with the rest that rarely leave Bearthwaite because they are popular here with locals and visitors too. Mostly the visitors first taste coney at the café in the visitor centre and then buy it from the shop at the visitor centre to take home. Many buy a pack of cans, which is a dozen litres [21 imperial pints, US 12 quarts], to take home.
“The lasses’ cuniculture business, that word(4) always makes me snigger, but honest to god it is what the tax man refers to it as, seemingly that’s an official term in their dictionary of businesses, so maybe they’ve not all had their senses of humour surgically removed. Anyway, snigger over, the cuniculture business has long provided more employment than just for the three lasses. I suppose this is the bit that Chance wants me to rabbit(5) on about, if you’ll pardon the pun. Rhona pays some of the local kids to forage fresh greens using lawn mowers, scythes, sickles and the like for the coneys which she reckons keeps ’em healthy. Greg Armstrong is a local farmer, stand up and tek a bow, Greg.” Greg smiled and did as he’d been telt to the cheers of the drinkers most of who knew him well. “Oh aye I mind what I was saying now. Greg is a local farmer who, other than a few free range hens for his family’s use, doesn’t keep livestock…. Greg, why the hell am I saying this? Tell folk what you do, Lad, and what it has to do with the coneys.”
Greg laughed and took over, “I focus on growing fodder and feed stuffs, mostly hay, some of which I have wrapped as haylage(6) and maybe half of which is the major constituent of livestock feed nuts produced by a plant at the farm. There’re me, Della my missus, our three lads and Marigold making a living from it.” Greg grinned and added “At nineteen, Marigold is the youngest, we just kept trying for a lass to make Della happy.” There were smiles and chuckles at that. “We do keep some livestock besides the hens, or at least Marigold and the lads do. She keeps goats that folk use for trashing(7) and she milks her nannies. The Peabody dairy teks the milk and produces a high value yoghurt from it. If the goats have been eating nettles the milk and owt made from it tingles in your mouth and it’s very popular with Bearthwaite folk and outsiders too. Marigold has been on to a good thing since she first got into goats when she was ten I think. The lads keep some fell ponies, all mares, that the visitors hire for pony trekking with Francis and Ryan. The lads don’t breed ’em as yet but are looking around for a decent stallion at the right price. I’ve telt ’em just to find the right stallion and bugger the price because if need be I’ll borrow the money from Beebell(8) and pay it back in deer and pheasant feed which Harwell considered to be an excellent idea as it suits both of us. Murray said from his point of view it was the sensible way to do it. For them as don’t know them, Harwell is the lad in charge of the Bearthwaite rangers who feed the game in the bad weather, and Murray is the Beebell boss bean counter.
“Most outsiders think the plume of steam that goes up from the hay drying plant chimney stack is smoke. The plant operates twenty-four seven every day of the year now, and its automated mechanisms require very little operator attention. All we have to do is feed it and take away the bags of nuts to stack on pallets. Some of the nuts are selt in bulk and collected by tanker or trailer loads out of a conveyor loaded silo hopper which is easier for us than handling the bags, but we don’t get as good a price selling that way. Most of our output is selt to buyers from outside the valley, but, with the increasing number of Bearthwaite folk recruited from all over, Vincent and his slaughtermen have a bigger demand for meat. To meet it the local farmers are raising more stock using the land outside of the valley that Beebell has not long since bought. As a result an increasingly larger proportion of my feed is selt local which is a good thing. And I’m tekin more grass and the like from our newly acquired land for winter feed too. It’s all working out quite well really. Some of what I produce is traded direct for other ingredients like the trace elements that go into the nuts which is more cost efficient that buying the trace elements with money that I won’t have till the end of the season when I start selling stuff in quantity. Even here it costs money to borrow money because it’ll mostly be money belonging to the kids that they are having invested for them, and they have a right to expect interest. One of our biggest customers is Harold’s Agricultural Logistics, a feed merchant who operates out of Exeter which is three hundred and fifty miles away. He takes two bloody great artic trailer loads of nuts every week, one of palletised bags of nuts of various formulations and the other a bulk tanker of nuts formulated for dairy cows in milk. I get a better price from Harold than from most local feed merchants because years ago I put him in touch with customers his drivers could deliver to on the way home. These days by the time his waggons arrive back at Exeter they’re empty ready for a load to haul back up country. His bulk tankers bring feed cereals north, mostly maize, and his flat bed trailer units carry owt he can get. It’s fuel efficient for him and because I’m well known to be able to put farmers in touch with a decent haulier they ring me up to give me their details which I pass on to one of the hauliers, mostly Harold. Because I keep providing him with more customers I get a better price off him. Harry takes two or three occasionally more trailer loads of bags away every week usually to somewhere within a hundred miles or so.
“When the combines harvest the cereals there is always a small proportion of weed seed with the grain. As it’s augured out of the trailers into the silos the weed seed drops out through the sieve holes and is collected in a hopper at the base. An auger is a motor driven spiral screw that elevates the grain as it turns. It turns inside a tube that is mostly small holes that are too small for cereal grain to fall through but the weed seeds do. All that is in a bigger tube that acts as a chute allowing the weed seeds to drop down into a hopper whilst the now weed seed free grain is delivered to the top of the silo. We take all weed seed from the entire Bearthwaite valley and farther afield too. Altogether it’s a few hundreds of tons of seed a year that we get for the cost of its transport to us at most. Local lads don’t charge us because they know what we do with it. We have a plant to roller crush and parch the weed seed that makes sure it isn’t viable and can’t germinate in the shite if it passes undigested via an animal’s guts. Pigs need more trace elements like copper than other animals, and though the base trace elements mix is delivered ready mixed the extras required by pigs arrive separately and we add them in to the base mix for batches intended for pigs. Pigs can eat nuts formulated for other animals, but it’s not sensible to feed pig nuts to other animals for too long or they’ll be poisoned by the higher metallic trace elements content. When we mix the trace elements into the nut making plant feed hopper it’s convenient to mix in the roller crushed and parched weed seed at the same time. The weed seed goes into the pig nuts because the content is variable and other animals don’t always like the taste, but pigs don’t care. Like I said there’re only ever a few hundred tons of it available in a year, but it makes for high quality, cheap pig feed, so we reserve it to supply the local kids raising pigs. The Peabody lads take any left over from the previous year as the new harvest is coming in, which is only reasonable. The kids need the encouragement and support that the cheaper feed provides and most of the weed seed comes from the Peabodys since most of our grain comes from them and like all local farmers they pay for everything they have off us in grain or other feed stuffs they grow which is a mutually beneficial arrangement.
“These last few years have been good to us because we’ve been selling large quantities of nuts to Beebell via the rangers for the deer and the game birds’ over winter requirements. Doubtless they’re feeding the coneys too, but hell the kids have to have something besides gray squirrels to hunt. That’s been really convenient because we can keep operating all year round and any over production we just store ready for winter in the silos we’ve been able to have erected for the job courtesy of a Beebell loan that we’re paying off with deer nuts. We deliver deer feed by the trailer load, some bagged some loose, to wherever the rangers want it. Some of the places they want feed delivered to would be a bit dodgy for a wheeled vehicle, so we borrow the Aveling Marshall track layer from the quarry for that. If ever we are short of owt for other customers we can supply some of the deer nuts from the silos. They’d rather have nuts formulated for a different animal than have nowt, and, other than nuts formulated for pigs, there’s not that much difference amongst the rest. Not enough to make any difference in the short term anyway. Every now and again we produce specially formulated batches for various buyers’ particular requirements most of who raise unusual animals with specific dietary requirements, camelids and the like. In particular we produce five ton [5000Kg, 11200 pounds] batches of coney feed for Rhona, Lacey and Dinah from time to time. Some of the kids take a few bags of that for their coneys too. I think that’s what I was expected is say isn’t it, Liam?”
“Aye, thanks, Lad. I know what a camel is, but what the hell is a camel lid?”
“Don’t forget you asked, Liam, and it’s a camelid not a camel lid. Camelid is a general name for any of seven animals, all of which are related to camels. Llamas, alpacas, vicuñas and guanacos come from the new world, the Americas. The other three come from the old world, Eurasia. They are dromedary camels with one hump, domesticated bactrian camels with two humps and wild bactrian camels with two humps which are a different species from the domesticated ones and said to be critically endangered. I know we provide feed for all of the first six I mentioned, some are farmed by commercial outfits and some are in zoos, private collections and the like. Some are just pets. Annalísa, yon solicitor lass, Bruce’s missus, as is writing down the shepherds’ tales in High Fell, says she’s going to buy the kids some llamas and alpacas as soon as someone on Murray’s staff can find some at the right price with veterinary certificates of health that Hamilton says are okay. She’s said she’ll be wanting feed available for ’em all year round, but I looked it up and what we provide for the deer will do the trick. As far as I’m aware there are no wild bactrian camels in captivity anywhere and they all live in some remote parts of China and Mongolia, so I doubt if we provide feed for any of them.”
Liam shook his head and said, “Thanks, Greg, I think.” At that there was a round of laughter and a pause for glasses to be washed and replenished.
Eventually, after glancing at his notes, Chance resumed, “Quinn tans leather from locally produced hides, and, back to coneys, he also cures coney pelts, both domesticated ones from Rhona and her sisters and wild ones mostly from the kids. A number of Bearthwaite women buy cured coney pelts to make warm clothing with. Some have a nice little earner making erotic lingerie that sells for stupid money on the internet, presumably there’re folk out there who enjoy being tickled as part of an evening’s entertainment. I must remember to try it some time.” When the laughter faded Chance looked at his notes again and continued, “Eric, wave Eric,” Eric stood up and bowed to some acclaim. “Eric is the village cobbler and he buys leather to make bespoke shoes and boots and some coney pelts for ladies foot wear too. Stephanie tells me he does a nice line in ladies’ bedroom slippers, and she’s got a couple of pairs and has recently bought some for Grace and Errin, our lasses, too. Others buy leather and coney pelts to make other goods with too. I’m telt by outsiders that it’s virtually impossible to obtain a decent leather belt at any price anywhere other than from here any more. Saddles, horse collars, horse tack, belts like I mentioned, heavy, protective aprons, like those used by the blacksmiths and the founders, and other work wear are all made in the valley from locally produced leather some of which incorporate coney pelts to prevent chafing.
“As already mentioned, Christine’s staff can various products containing coney. Apparently she is the only known producer of canned coney soups which sell as rabbit soups due to ignorance out there. To prevent any out there with an axe to grind raising a prosecution under the Trades Description Act Jimmy advised that the ingredients list specified coney followed by adult rabbit in brackets, but Elin’s crew of kids designed a label that explained about coney and rabbit. They create all the labels Christine’s canned soups use. The recently created Bearthwaite Valley Game soup took a while for sales to take off, probably due to its contents, but it’s remarkably popular and now sells well all over the UK and is making head way into Europe too.”
“So what’s in it to cause issues, Chance?”
Chance laught and said, “All the vegetables and the grain are grown here as you’d expect. However the barley is labelled as a brewing variety that the Peabodys grown for Gustav. Then there’s swede [rutabaga], carrot, onion, various other alliums all named on the label like Egyptian, Welsh, leeks, and various other odds and sods that most folk will never had heard of. Most are grown by Alf and his mates but some are picked by the kids from the wild including nettles and ramsons which also go into the Potato, Nettle and Ramson soup which is a huge seller. All are labelled as in varying proportions according to seasonal availability as is the meat content. As you’d expect in a game soup there’re venison, coney, pheasant, partridge and what was probably the sticking point gray squirrel. The kids had a brainwave and printed in big bold letters on the front of the label ‘Contains Alien Gray Squirrel’ Underneath was a wee bit of slightly smaller print that said ‘Help to eliminate the invader that is taking over from our Native Red Squirrel by eating them’. Christine was selling it okay locally, so she wasn’t bothered, but being completely up front about the squirrel content sent outsider sales through the roof. Now there’s a dedicated army of kids out there focussed on killing gray squirrels when ever they go out looking for fungi and owt else they can sell. Vincent trained up a few kids, mostly lads but not all, to prepare the squirrel for Christine and leave a good pelt for Quinn to deal with. Quinn cures ’em and some of the lasses buy ’em cured mostly to make hats with because Davy Crockett hats with the squirrel tail at the back are popular with our kids and sell well on the internet too. John Finkle the Bearthwaite conservation officer reckons it won’t be long before the kids clear ’em out of the valley completely and it’ll be unlikely that we are ever invaded by ’em again because the first lot were deliberately introduced here by one of the Gershambe family as owned the spot in early Victorian times.
“The lasses who helped Vincent’s missus Rosie in the back of the butchers’ shop during Covid have continued to do so, because it was mutually beneficial for a goodly number of folk. They make, amongst loads of other things, coney and potato pasties and venison and potato pasties which are both popular food for working men’s bait, especially with the shepherds and the wallers. Like the visitor centre café, the establishment we are currently drinking in and Jeremy’s restaurante, The Granary, both serve coney from time to time.
“And finally to the arse end of it, and the pun is deliberate, the coney dung and bedding is removed by the allotmenteers and dumped into their compost pits to be covered with milking parlour slurry as is done with all of the pits courtesy of one of the local farms. It always takes a few years before they benefit from that, but they aren’t bothered, for Alf has telt me that eventually benefit they do. The farmers are happy because dumping thousands of gallons of liquid cow shite into a pit involves considerably less work and time than spraying it onto or injecting it into the land.”
After a decent pull on his pint Chance asked, “If some one will pour me a glass of chemic please I’ll resume. This will be a bit bitty, Lads, but I’ll do my best and ask others to help me out. There are several bee keepers with over a hundred hives apiece in the Bearthwaite valley and any number with around a dozen hives each too. There are probably about the same number of Bearthwaite folk who live and keep bees on Beebell land outside the valley. All have access to our heather for a late season crop of honey in comb sections(9) that are in high demand and command a premium price. However, the viscosity of heather honey is so high that it makes the extraction of the honey from the comb very difficult. I’m telt that heather honey is jellylike and thixotropic in nature. It’s a bit like non drip pent(10) but thicker. It can be liquefied by vibration or agitation and there are are gadgets available to do that, but they are expensive and the process of using them is a pain in the arse, so our beekeepers prefer not to bother and to sell heather honey in sections. I’m telt that sections are the best way to have the bees work the heather because a full section needs no processing other than packaging. However, getting the bees to fill sections is problematic.
“The section racks, which are the special boxes that contain the individual sections, are the same size, twenty by twenty inches [508mm x 508mm], as the rest of the hives. They are delivered when full to Christine’s staff at the bobbin mill for processing which just involves removing the full sections for packaging ready for sale. Any sections that remain unfilled or that have unsealed cells have their weight encoded on a bar code label affixed to them and are returned to the bee keepers who have the bees fill and finish capping them by feeding liquid honey extracted from other nectar sources earlier in the year. Once full and sealed they again are dealt with at the mill. After reweighing they are selt labelled as mixed heather and blossom honey for a reduced price that is based on the proportions of heather and blossom honeys. They have a label affixed that provides an explanation and the weights before and after topping up with blossom honey and that of an empty section. The process from Christine’s staffs’ point of view is quick and easy, for the calculation of the percentages of the different honeys and the subsequent price is all done by the fancy digital computerised scales they use which instructs the label printer. All they have to do is scan the section label which enters the original weight before they were filled. They sell well and the price is good enough to make the process worth while for the bee keepers. Our larger bee keeping operations are mostly family businesses. The smaller operations tend to have one or two persons involved and overall we probably have slightly more women than men involved in bee keeping. Anybody got owt they want to add to that?”
“Aye,” said Gee Shaw. “My teenage lasses have four hives and love keeping bees. I love it too because it keeps ’em out of at least some trouble and prevents ’em from giving me a bloody heart attack too often. At least if they are buggering about with their bees I know they ain’t causing mayhem and getting into trouble somewhere else. I’m not exactly sure what a mixed metaphor is, which is why I’m a welder and a farmer and not a boffin, but they say it’s money for jam. If that’s one of those mixed metaphor thingies, sorry, Lads, but I’m just repeating what the girls said.” Michaela and Janine, Gee’s twin daughters, were known to be a handful and Gee had been heard to say many times, “Thank god for Theo and Finn,” who were their far more sensible, responsible and well behaved boyfriends. Sam, Gee’s wife, had no trouble with the girls who’d had their dad tightly wrapped around their little fingers for years, and despite their excess energy they were kind and helpful. Most of the outsider men were laughing at Gee’s plight whereas most of the locals were smiling and shaking their heads, for they knew the reality was Gee wouldn’t have his daughters any other way and Samantha thought the way her daughters manipulated their dad to be rather amusing.
Gee obviously having finished Chance resumed, “Bee keeping also employs many others now. Most of the honey extracting, processing, bottling and packaging is done by the same folk who make, process and package jams, pickles, sauces, chutneys and the like in Christine’s canning kitchens in the old bobbin mill, for they are equipped there with locally made versions of commercial equipment that is suitable for handling honey on a huge scale. Our honey is labelled with labels designed by Elin that are printed at the bobbin mill mostly by her crew of children at the weekends. Deciding on a unified brand name for marketing our honey and other products too was the subject of much discussion. The points raised boiled down to, one, since Bearthwaite Valley is not in the Lake District National Park, though strictly speaking totally legal, it would be problematic to use Lake District Honey as a designation for our honey. Two, most folk outside Cumbria associate Cumbria with the nuclear power station at Sellafield which does not make using Cumbrian Honey as a name a particularly sensible idea. Three, we used to be in the Eden administrative area till the county reorganisations did away with it, but unless you lived in the area it’s doubtful if other Cumbrians never mind others from outside the county even knew where Eden was, so Eden Honey was a non starter, and Garden of Eden Honey had potential legal issues. The old administrative area was named Eden because the river Eden wanders all over the spot in it, but again most folk will never have heard of the river Eden.
“Four, we are in the Westmorland & Furness administrative area now, which as I understand it means Westmorland & Furness is a county now, but any number of bee keepers sell honey branded as Westmorland Honey or Furness Honey. We are in the Westmorland section, but branding ours Westmorland Honey would not enable it to stand out from the crowd. So all those older options were dismissed years ago and the new Westmorland Honey option was recently rejected too. Funny thing is years ago, pre nineteen seventy-four(11) I think, Furness was that part of Lancashire that was this side of Morecambe Bay, and we were in Cumberland, but Cumberland Honey was rejected along side of Westmorland Honey because it too is widely used by others and for obvious legal implications. In the end the obvious prevailed, and our honey is selt as Bearthwaite Valley Honey. The name is over an attractive watermark image of the force(12) at the valley head in a thunderstorm. On the rear of the jars, along with all the information required by law, is an outline map of the British Isles indicating where the valley is. The workers at the mill also package a significant quantity of honey in glazed pots threwn by Celia who is a studio potter whose workshop is at the flour mill. The honey in glazed pots is a volume seller both from our website and the tourist shop in the bobbin mill. Bearthwaite Valley is now the brand name that has been adopted by all our food producers and others too, which enables a concerted marketing approach to benefit all of us. For goods produced by our folk outside the valley the use of Bearthwaite Valley Community keeps us on the right side of the law. Tony, you willing to pick it up from here and tell folk about the wax?”
“Aye okay, Chance. Years ago I imported a beeswax foundation roller from China. It was an expensive piece of kit. I seem to recall at the time I paid over five hundred quid for it, but the same machine was well over two thousand from the regular European sources. UK sources were even dearer because they bought from Germany who’d imported from China. Basically it embosses hexagonal bee cells on both sides of a sheet of beeswax when it is passed between the two adjustable rollers. You put the embossed wax sheets into wooden frames and hang them in your hive. The bees use the sheets to start building new combs. You can use flat sheets of wax but using embossed foundation saves the bees time and effort, though either enables higher yields of honey because bees are said to use ten pounds of honey to produce one pound of beeswax. The combs produced are vertical inside the frames and easy to handle and inspect. Stepping back a moment, having my honey extracted and dealt with at the mill makes things more enjoyable for me too because the bit I enjoy the most is working with and just watching my bees. I enjoy beekeeping, but I’d been making my own foundation for a few years before I moved here, so I’d nothing to prove to myself, and for me it was probably the least enjoyable aspect of what to me is just a hobby. For those who don’t know my wife Beth and I are dentists here at Bearthwaite.”
“I’m not speaking out of turn here because Janice Halifax, as used to be Janice Campbell, has never made any secret of her life before she came here. When she first came here, Janice was looking to find a job to give her a place here after a grim life outside as a single mum working as a poorly paid shop assistant. She’d been dumped by her husband as soon as he’d found out she was pregnant with Mary. Mary has never met her dad and Janice reckons she got lucky. She’s always said that Morgan is a far better dad than whatever his name was could ever have been. Janice was sacked by one bastard, and the pair of them were made homeless by another, neither had any good reason for doing that other than that Janice was no whore. I’m sure I don’t need to go into any more detail there. I reckon a lass can’t get much unluckier than that. Husband, landlord and employer, a prial(13) of bastards not worthy of being called men. Any roads, Janice had heard of this place and decided to take a chance on a life here because she reckoned it couldn’t be any worse than what she would be literally walking away from. She and Mary, who would have been maybe eleven or twelve then, walked here from a not too salubrious area of Carlisle, Harraby I think, but I could be wrong. Ellery Graham the hairdresser picked them up on the lonning in late afternoon as she was coming home from supermarket shopping somewhere with Shauna, Eric’s missus.
“Cutting a long tale short Janice and Mary were found somewhere to live and a few quid to tide Janice over, and she started looking for something to do. A lot of folk whilst wishing her nowt but well withheld judgement because they wished to know if she could become one of us. Most folk who come to live here are invited. Few just walk in in dire need of some humanity, for most who know where the valley is have heard all the shite that folk outside talk about regarding us, and that scares the crap out of most of ’em. That Janice started looking for work so soon was regarded as a good sign, and that our lasses said that despite her obvious poverty she was a good mother was another. A number of employment possibilities were considered for her, but before anyone could do owt about it she solved her own problems. Before coming here she’d made scented paraffin wax candles in her spare time to sell at her local market to earn a bit of extra money, and that led her to the bee keepers here and I was one of them. Clearly she knew how to handle hot wax, which isn’t as easy as most think, so I suggested that I lent her my foundation roller to process our bee keepers’ wax. I telt her they would be more than happy to have someone else do it because it was tedious and messy unless one were tooled up to do the job properly. My side of the deal was she would make my foundation for me from wax I supplied at no cost. I shewed her how to use it and the deal was struck.
“Beeswax is expensive and most churches only use beeswax candles on special occasions. It burns with a distinctive fragrance that adds significance on those special occasions to churchy types. The candles they use are large and they only burn down a little when they are used, but the churches prefer to start a service with new candles. Janice has a deal with cathedrals and big churches of all flavours all over the country whereby they send their used candles back to her for reprocessing and she sends them new ones. The churches are happy because it means they can use beeswax candles much more often, and it’s a nice little earner for Janice. Sasha, you do the bits about Janice and her family will you? I’m not comfortable with that sort of stuff.”
Sasha nodded and took up the tale, “As is obvious, Janice is not a lass to let the grass grow under her feet and she immediately started looking for a man. That’s the way we live and if nowt else her thinking the same tells you she was one of us from the start. She went to one of the antenatal clinics because she thought she may get some support and aid there. She met Sun’s entire nursing team there, as well as all the retired nurses and midwives who attend every meeting to help out and enjoy the craic.(14) She explained that she wasn’t pregnant, but was considering it. She said she was looking for a father for Mary and a man for herself and though she realised that men were different here she was still nervous after what she’d been through. Seemingly it was my missus Elle who suggested that Janice was introduced to Morgan Halifax because even if they just became friends with maybe benefits too all the children involved would benefit and Morgan could probably use some female help with his three lasses who’d all just hit puberty.
“Morgan as I’m sure all the locals know provided some aid when that big, Dublin, Roman Catholic church, child abuse scandal hit the media. A Roman Catholic orphanage with twenty-odd kids having been sexually, physically and emotionally abused from the moment they entered the spot by a bunch of perverse priests. Seems the Irish government finally bit the bullet and lost patience with the church who they said contrary to past assurances were obviously not sorting out the perverts as promised. The church went ballistic when the then recently appointed Director of Irish Public Prosecutions put the whole lot in the dock, and the whole bunch of ’em, all four priests, the nuns and the other staff that either took part in the abuse or enabled it to happen were subsequently gaoled. The media claimed the Taoiseach(15) had refused to bow to pressure from the Vatican, but that was neither confirmed nor denied, by either Rome or the Irish government.
“With independent child psychologists and social workers from the Isle of Man assisting they found decent homes for all the kids in the republic except for a group of four siblings who’d been orphaned more than six years before. I said independent child psychologists and social workers because the Isle of Man is not in the UK and a team from there was more acceptable to the Irish authorities than a UK team. Not wishing to inflict any more shit on the kids the Manx(16) social workers refused to even consider separating the siblings. They got very heavy handed with the Irish authorities and asked the NCSG for assistance. The NCSG for those who don’t know is the National Children’s Support Group, an independent adoption agency and investigator into matters of child abuse that is immune to pressure from any outside sources. The NCSG can be difficult for authorities anywhere to deal with because their only concern is the well being of children, and they don’t play politics. They are highly thought of by both the police and the courts. Apparently they telt a concerned Irish Social Services that they didn’t give a fuck if what they did caused the collapse of the Irish government because the Irish people would have future opportunities to elect a decent government, but children only had one chance at a decent childhood and for these kids too much of their childhood had already been destroyed and lost to them forever. The Irish Social Services had signed up years before to be able to access the NCSG’s services, but had rarely used them. The NCSG had only ever provided a limited amount of help in the Republic before, and had never been asked to find homes for children from there. The problem was the Irish authorities knew that the odds were the children would be taken to the UK and be granted dual nationality which would take them out of Irish control. Yet again another case of the children’s weal being put right to the bottom of the list of priorities. Morgan had been cleared with NCSG for adoption for several months and once contacted by them he agreed to take the kids and immediately flew to Dublin with half a dozen of our kids of similar ages to help settle the orphans.
“I’m not sure how it works, but the NCSG has a working agreement with the UK authorities for kids in urgent need of aid to be dealt with immediately, and when the four kids flew back with Morgan and the others they flew on UK passports issued in the surname of Halifax. It was all done and dusted before they left. Apparently it only took a few hours because the UK authorities, I presume that’s the passport office under orders from the Home Secretary,(17) transferred all the necessary temporary documentation electronically to the UK embassy in Dublin. Morgan reckoned he’d got the kids back home before the Irish Social Services were aware they were on their way to the airport. NCSG telt him not to worry because the Irish Social workers would calm down once they realised they weren’t going to get their arses kicked all over the front page of the Irish Times for something they been powerless to even investigate till it hit the fan. He was asked to avoid the media and refuse to comment, so that if the NCSG were needed in Eire again they’d not have any resentment to deal with. That being the case they reckoned they’d probably be asked to assist in future similar cases, of which there were sure to be any number still in the woodwork, if and only if the Irish Social Services trusted them. Morgan said it choked him to agree, but he did because it was in the interests of children that he did.
“This is the point at which it all gets a bit grim. Morgan’s eldest is a sixteen year old lad and the lasses are fourteen, thirteen and twelve. They’d all been subjected to daily abuse for over six years, had received no education and had never had any contact with the outside world since they’d entered the spot. Lara one of our lasses who went over with Morgan was thirteen at the time. She discovered the three girls knew nothing about menstruation and feminine hygiene, had no idea what was happening to all three of them and had just been telt it was normal and to live with it. Seems they had to use rags and toilet paper, which was what the nuns said they did. When Karen and Susanna discovered that they went ballistic. I suspect it’s a good thing they hadn’t gone to Dublin with the others. For those who don’t know, Karen is our senior nurse and Susanna our senior midwife. The kids have all decided they wish to be Halifaxes, but retain their original given names. As far as I’m aware we’ve never had an Oisin, Aoibhe, Niamh nor a Roisin living here before.”
Pat in his rich brogue said, “If it be up to me I’d burn every last one of the filthy, deviant bastards at the stake and use the bloody protestant clergy for kindling along with ’em too. Saint Pat, though I bear his name, was the biggest curse to ever enter Ireland, so he was. We should have kept the snakes and chased the Christians off the cliff edge.(18) I was damned glad to leave the bloody place and the bigots of both flavours behind me so I was, though I wouldn’t want to be falling out with Sean.” At that there was a lot of appreciative laughter. Sean was a cousin of Siobhan, Pat wife’s, who made an exceedingly fine poteen which they all enjoyed. “I’ll give you another laugh, Lads. I’m not saying that Janice is vindictive, but those are her kids, and all mums worth a damn get bloody unpleasant, if not to say outright viciously evil, when someone hurts any of their family especially their kids. If you are anything to do with the Catholics your candles cost twice as much as she charges any other bugger and she gives the money to Murray’s staff to invest for the kids.”
Sasha continued, “That’s fair enough, make the buggers pay restitution to the victims. Anyway before we allow ourselves to get more wound up, someone pour Pat a glass of something seriously potent and we’ll move on. The kids were all brought up to speed as regards how we live here and were amazed that they could eat as much as they wanted when they wanted. Karen said to start with they could only eat tiny portions because their stomachs had shrunk due to not receiving enough to eat. She telt them they needed to eat small amounts frequently, but their teachers would understand if they had to eat during lessons. They were in school the day after they arrived here dressed in decent and clean clothes appropriate to kids of their ages for the first time in years and Janice telt Elle that the girls cried when they were given underwear that took account of their emerging womanhood. I’ll not repeat what Janice said, but it was a lot stronger than what Karen and Susanna had said. They took to learning like ducklings to the village pond. Right from the word go they never made any secret of what had happened to them, but if I were a cleric of any flavour I’d stay well away from them all because they all do martial arts with Felicity and she says they are not to be messed with.
“Even worse Roisin, the twelve year old, had English homework that night. They had to write about their favourite food. She apologised to her teacher Jill Levens the day after, and said though she didn’t know anything about either cooking or food she and her siblings had asked their dad how to go on the internet on their laptops and they’d put a list of meals together to form a restaurante menu for their imaginary restaurante, The Savoury Sacrifice. I’ve had this for a while and kept it quiet to protect any other kids in Ireland, but I reckon it’ll be safe to read it out now. This should make you feel better Pat, so here goes, Abbott Au Gratin, Air Fried Archbishop, Augustinian Artichokes, Baked Benedictine, Boiled Bishop, Broiled Brothers, Caramelised Carmelites, Cistercian Consommé, Creamed Caponised Cardinal, Curate Casserole, Curried Chaplain, Deep Fried Dominicans, Fricasséed Franciscan, Fried Friars, Jugged Jesuit, Microwaved Monk, Monsignor Meatballs, Macerated Mother Superior Meatloaf, Nun Nuggets, Pan Fried Pontiff, Parboiled Parson, Pickled Priest Pie, Padre Pretzels, Poached Pope, Preacher Paella, Pressure Cooked Primate, Puréed Prelate, Rector Ravioli, Sautéed Sisters, and finally Vicar Vinaigrette. What do you reckon to that then, Pat?”
“Holy Mary, mother of God. Jugged Jesuit bejesus! ’Tis a work of art, so it is. Morgan has a bunch of kids there that can surely be trusted to take care of the world properly, starting with the church. Pass me that bottle, Sasha.” Pat poured himself a glass of a cloudy, dark green, viscous liquid and passed it on before saying, “Here’s to Morgan’s kids.” Amidst much laughter the men drank to Morgan’s kids. “Hellfire, I feel much better already for having heard you read that out, Sasha. Carry on, Lad, carry on.”
“As I said they were learning rapidly. The spellings were all correct, so they’d worked out how to look stuff up and spell check it. And they’d sorted the list alphabetically. When Jill Levens read the list to say she was a bit worried was an understatement, but when she rang Grayson our educational psychologist he said if they were writing it down they were getting it out of their systems and he’d have a chat with them sometime, but he reckoned there was nowt to worry about. They’ve made a lot of friends here and took part in harvesting the carp from the village pond not long after they arrived. Getting wet and dirty along with all the other kids seemed to settle them into the place well. All four were said to be seriously looking for a romantic interest. It would appear that Oisin had a head start on his sisters with Janice’s lass Mary. At that point their only issue was their friends had mums and they didn’t. None of our women folk were involved. The whole thing was organised by the five kids. As I understand it Morgan was doomed from the moment his kids laid eyes on Janice and Mary telt them she didn’t have a dad. The kids all regarded sharing their dad with Mary in return for her sharing her mum was a good deal. Morgan and Janice were uneasy about things but not for long. It’s all a while back now, but Adelaide their little one will be starting nursery school a year this September.
“Germain Beattie, our local director of Social Services, technically is too high up the food chain to have owt to do with any of our children here. However, she has been helpful rather than obnoxious in the past, and is regarded as a friend by many of our adoptive parents and their children too. Sun and his team all believe it is in our interests and especially those of the children that we have a friendly voice advocating for us within Social Services and Germain is ideal. She has met all six of Janice and Morgan’s kids regularly, and opines that they couldn’t be in a better environment. Funny thing is Dougie is interested in her. She’s not averse to his interest and she’s never married which may or may not explain why she spends the odd weekend at his place. You never know we may just end up running the area Social Services department from here which would be a hell of a turn up for the books wouldn’t it?” At that the laughter at the irony of it all took a goodly while to dissipate, for though Germain Beattie had proven to be a good friend, in general relationships between Bearthwaite and local Social Services had not been good for decades. “Tell you something that’ll make you chuckle. Three Irish lasses, Roisin, Niamh and Aoibhe soon took up with Bjørn, Odin and Ulf, every one a pagan name and from the sublime to the ridiculous their brother Oisin is going out with Janice’s lass Mary, but they’re still all together, which definitely adds another dimension to multi faith ecumenism don’t it? Tony, you ready for carrying on?”
Tony nodded, “Aye. First though, talking of youngsters getting together, has any seen the lad that Gerry’s granddaughter Daisy has started sneaking off with when she thinks none is looking? It’s Kåre, one of Vinney’s lads. He’s the one who translates the words for the comic producers into High Fell. High Fell for those who don’t know is the dialect or maybe I should say the language our shepherds and dry stone waller speak, and they have a lot of young teenagers that were rescued from living rough on the streets of towns and cities all over the UK apprenticing with them. Few are over bright, all enjoy comics and all now speak High Fell. At that age total immersion in a new language enables fluency gey rapidly. Kåre as some of us will know means curly haired. It’s curly all right, but it’s as bright red as Daisy’s too. She may as well do her kissing in public because those two will never manage to sneak off anywhere without being seen.” When the laughter died Tony resumed, “Eventually I realised I never wanted to use the foundation machine again, and by then Janice with Mary who’d left school were makings foundation all year round in the bobbin mill next to where Christine’s folk uncapped the honeycombs that were in the frames. All the cappings are left overnight in huge stainless steel sieves for the honey to drain off them and then washed with cold rain water. All the equipment is washed with cold water after use too. The water is cold so it doen’t soften or even worse melt any wax which would make it impossible to remove. They use rainwater because the stuff in the tap water that makes the scale in kettles does something undesirable to the wax. The cappings are removed for Janice to make foundation with and the wash water containing the residual honey is sent to the brewery along with some honey for Clarence’s folk to make mead with. Janice and Mary were just about managing to turn the last of one year’s wax into foundation before the first of the next year’s wax arrived. I wasn’t going to use it, and I’d had my five hundred quid’s worth of fun out of it, so I gave them the machine. She still doesn’t charge me for converting my wax into foundation. Bertie, you want to take it from here talking about the bee keeping equipment your lads made?”
“Nay bother, Lad. Tony’s machine was a hand cranked model, but Janice had seen motorised ones being used on Youtube in Hawaii,(19) and her old man Morgan is one of my associates. As has been said that’s Morgan Halifax not Carlisle Morgan. It can be confusing because Morgan is a machinist and Carlisle is an engineer and I work with both of ’em. He telt me she wanted some stuff doing and said he’d be willing to do it in his spare time. I telt him that was daft and just to tell her to come down to the workshop and we’d see what was needed and how was best to go about it. She asked me to fit a small motor on her foundation roller to speed the process up a little. She telt me that she either needed another embossing roller or to have a flat roller to use first. That way she would be able to thin the sheets with the flat roller before bringing them down to final size with the embossing roller which would give the foundation cells sharper, more defined edges. Those Chinese embossing rolls are CNC(20) laser machined to incredibly tight tolerances, but a pair of flat rolls were easy enough to make.
“I asked her if she could buy the embossing rolls separate from the rest of the machine because if she could I suggested she order a dozen and the staff in Granddad’s workshops could easily make the rest. She ordered the rolls with a variety of cell sizes. She said that was because not all bees were the same and the bees needed bigger cells to raise drones in than they used to raise workers in. The rolls were delivered inside a fortnight, and the lads had the machines finished in another fortnight. The only tricky thing was registering the two rollers so that the cell corners on one side were opposite to bang in the middle of the cells on the other because that's how bees build comb for maximum strength using minimal wax. Rather than try to get an absolute fixed register which could conceivably alter with time we went for an adjustable mechanism that could always be tweaked if the rolls went out of register. A while after that she asked me if she could have a larger version of Kathleen’s converted spin dryer that years ago Granddad had fitted with a steam supply to enable Kathleen to centrifuge the wax out of old brood combs and leave the cocoons behind in cheese cloth bags. I telt her it would be no problem and the lads would just make another of the huge honey extractors with appropriate receptacles for dropping the muslin bags filled with the old combs into and fit it with steam connections. That way if under pressure at harvesting time she could extract honey using two machines. After extracting all the wax the cocoons still in the biodegradable cotton bags are sent to the allotments for composting.
“We also made her a pressure vessel to clean up boxes full of used but empty frames for reuse. It has a hoist to pick the boxes up and lower them into the water which contains washing soda. That had to be stainless, all the fittings too, to resist the soda. Once in the lid is screwed down on to the seal, the water is brought up to temperature and allowed to reach fifteen pounds per square inch. [100 000 Pa] At that pressure water boils at a hundred and twenty-five Celsius [257℉]. Any propolis resin,(21) wax, bugs and bug debris are totally dissolved and the wood comes out pristine. After rinsing in clean water and leaving to dry all is ready for reuse. You were right, Chance, this tale is a bit bitty because this is the point at which Harry takes it forward for his missus. Harry?”
“Okay, but it’s time for a pint, Lad.” After the men had settled with newly filled glasses, Harry said, “To those of you who don’t know, the Kathleen that Bertie referred to is my missus who runs one of the larger bee keeping operations here in the valley. At some point Kathleen offered Janice her steam wax extractor. I’m not sure when that was, but I know it was a while before she had the big one made by Bertie’s lads. The deal was Janice could have the machine as long as she would supply Kathleen with enough beeswax for her to make the furniture polish that was used by just about every woman in Bearthwaite. I know it was, and still is, also used by a goodly few men too for a host of purposes many of which are for rust prevention and lubrication on steel tools and machinery. Eventually Kathleen asked Janice if she wished to make the furniture polish too because she needed the time it took for her bee keeping. Janice didn’t have the time either, but said she’d be happy to employ a youngster to help out as she and Mary were under a bit of pressure too and likely to be under more soon as many of the bee keepers whose wax she processed were expanding their operations due to the availability of cheap, quality, PDB(22) free foundation that they didn’t have to produce themselves.
“PDB is an insecticide that was widely used for decades to protect empty combs in frames against wax moths. Trouble was it built up in the wax. Since it’s an insecticide it’s obviously not good for bees. It’s still available from the suppliers though less widely used because honey is not allowed to contain any, but there seems to still be residual amounts in foundation bought from the bee keepers’ suppliers. The only certain way to avoid it is by only using foundation or comb that has never been exposed to it. Since the suppliers buy most of their wax from UK bee keepers to reprocess you don’t know what you are getting. Interestingly at one time foundation purely made from wax imported from Africa was much dearer than wax from the UK and Europe because it was guaranteed to be totally PDB free. Nowadays the problem is not as bad and premium quality foundation is a mix of African, European and UK waxes whereas standard quality is describes as being from a variety of unspecified sources. I’ve no idea what that means.
“All the wax Janice receives from our bee keepers and uses for the foundation she provides them with is totally PDB free. A couple of our bee keepers keep bees of a strain that are heavy producers of bees wax which more than makes up for the somewhat lower honey yield their bees produce. Rather than extract the honey, which is difficult for their bees wax tends to be anything but flat comb easy to extract from, the combs are crushed under warm water to dissolve the honey. The water is not warm enough to melt the wax and the honey solution is used for mead production in the brewery. The wax is washed three times to extract all the honey and then Janice processes it for foundation. These days Janice provides several tons of laboratory certified PDB free wax a year to a bee keepers’ supplier in Germany who pays considerably more than the UK suppliers. There is no money exchanged for the Germans pay with a significantly larger tonnage of wax heavily contaminated with PDB which Janice uses purely for candles and furniture polish. Who knows may be it kills flies in churches and is useful to keep the pews looking good and woodworm free.
“Again, I’m not certain of how long any of this took, but Kathleen telt me that not long after Janice took up with Morgan she took on Oisin as an apprentice, and it wasn’t long after that when Oisin and Mary announced their engagement. I think that’s all I can say. Sorry about being so vague about when things happened, but the truth is I don’t have owt to do with what Kathleen does regards working because I’ve too much on my own plate to do owt else. What time we can spend together we usually spend with the grandkids not talking about work.”
Chance said, “No that was fine, Harry. I’ve got a rough idea of when who did what and how it affects our economy here which is the question I’m trying to have answered with a little more detail than I am familiar with. I know that some of the sheet metal workers and panel beaters who work in Alf’s engineering workshops have been making metal bits and pieces for the bee keepers for quite a while. Mostly they make stuff like that when there’s little else to do. They reckon it’s useful work that keeps them going when things are a bit slack and if they get in front of themselves it doesn’t matter because sooner or later the bee keepers will want the stockpiled stuff. They use a lot of really thin, light, stainless steel sheet for hive roof covers and have a lot ready made up for the hive makers. I was telt that even though the hive roof wooden parts eventually need replacing the stainless steel covers get reused on new wooden parts, so presumably the demand for them will eventually slow down to next to nowt. Gilespie, I know you eventually dropped out of involvement with hive production, but Kathleen assured me that you know what happened regarding the development of the hives the bee keepers now use, so can you take it from here?”
“Aye. That’s true enough. I’m a carpenter and I have a decently kitted out workshop. Even back then I had all the necessary power tools to set up to make beehive bits with no bother. In the early days I did quite a bit of work for Kathleen on her hives. I’d always done a bit for our bee keepers, but not much because in those days there weren’t many of them and none of them had many hives. Half a dozen hives was considered to be a big apiary here in those days. Most bee keepers here bought their stuff second hand and gey(23) cheap from outside and fettled it themselves. Most of it was really old and at best only beginning to rot. In those day when a bee keeper died there was no youngster to step up, and the number of bee keepers in the country was decreasing rapidly, and it was no different here.
“To the south of here, Lancashire has been known by bee keepers as the great green desert for going on a century because the entire county has been focussed on dairy cattle for that long. Like here, Lancashire gets a lot of rain and mostly it’s low enough in altitude for lush grass to grow like buggery. Decades before all decent pasture had been ploughed in and the land seeded with high yielding grasses to feed dairy cows. By that time there was nary(24) a flower to be seen virtually from one end of the county to the other, and it was no place to keep bees even back then and it’s been all down bank(25) since. Nowadays a lot of the cows were calved inside and kept inside their entire lives. As long as their milk yield is high enough they never see the sky nor grass. The first time they see daylight is on their way to the abattoir at five or six years old. The fields are just grass factories used to produce feed for bags on legs(26) that are just units of milk production kept in milking factories too.
“There are farms with anything up to ten thousand cows and virtually all are foreign owned or controlled. They don’t even get to have a good time once a year, because bulls are only kept to provide the artificial insemination folk with semen. They don’t actually get to see cows and neither of ’em get to do what a beast’s supposed to do to produce a calf and bring about lactation. It’s bloody sick if you ask me. Mind if you want to hear some really tasty language on the matter talk to Auld Alan Peabody on it, and when he’s done swearing in English he’ll start in High Fell. He telt me once, that much to the dismay of his entire family, he paid a hundred and eighty thousand quid for the original population Dairy Shorthorn bull that had been the foundation of the Peabody original population Dairy Shorthorn herd. He always did have a rough sense of humour which was why he called it Richard.” The chuckles in the taproom took a while to fade as gradually all realised that Richard was often shortened to Dick.
“Quite. Seemingly the beast lived up to its name. He said that every time he saw Richard at work he got a deep sense of satisfaction out of it, for there in front of his eyes was his next generation of heifers and dairy cows in the making, and all was as it should be. Every Peabody bull since then has been bred and raised on the farm and is a descendant of Richard. The Peabody herd is famous for its quality over the entire British Isles, and the family have recovered Richard’s cost many many times over. Alan has always maintained that sooner or later industrial farming will fail because stock needs outside, and they need more than just grass. They need decent grazing which includes all the wild flowers that we still have here that are long gone in Lancashire. Sunshine and rain, calm and wind he reckons they need all that happens to make them healthy and that the quality low yielding grasses and the wild flowers, which provide nectar for the bees which pollinate our other crops are all necessary to ensure that all remain healthy, the farmed stock, the wild life, the pastures and all else too. We practice mixed farming here and Alan’s view is that even if we were to suffer a catastrophic failure of something one year the rest would see us through. And think on his family have been keeping bees here for centuries in that high yielding apple and pear orchard which has many trees over two centuries old in it.
“However, moving on. To the east of us are the Pennine hills which though they are a good source of heather they are sparsely populated with not many bee keepers, and there were even fewer in those days. To the north is the Solway estuary and the Borders which in those days had relatively few bee keepers. Like in Cumbria most bee keepers had died as old men and not been replaced by a younger generation. Obviously to the west of us is the now decayed, poverty stricken, industrial belt which is mostly derelict brown field sites and then the Irish sea. Our bee keepers were pretty isolated long before any of us were ever born, and most didn’t keep up to date with developments in bee keeping down country and abroad, not least because they couldn’t afford to.
“I reckon most of the equipment they were buying was of no use to the families of those deceased bee keepers and they could see it wasn’t worth much as a lot of it was near enough to firewood. Back then I’d been shewn bee hives you could crumble to dust with your fingers. A lot was given away to any who would clear it out. Frank Durham, one our bee keepers who died a long time ago, telt me he’d been given some hives of a type that hadn’t been made for at least a hundred and twenty years then, Conqueror and Double Conqueror hives he said they were called. Huge and heavy damned things by all accounts. Just to be able to bear their own weight they were made of timber at least an inch thick. However, towards the end of my involvement making hives and the like I had more than enough other work to do, and I was glad when Phœbe who’d always worked as a general carpenter decided to focus on making bee hive parts and then later on assembling them too. Isaac her son joined her when he left school, and both have been employed full time ever since making bee hives and the frames that go into them. From time to time they get a bit of help from some of the school kids to assemble stuff. They are glad of the help and the kids are glad of the money.
“Now going back to the early days, or at least as far back as I know about, after using straw skeps(27) Bearthwaite bee keepers like nearly every other UK bee keeper had always used the British Standard [BS] National bee hive, or the modified version of it. There were a few that used the WBC(28) hive, but even that used BS frames. However, when Kathleen decided to start bee keeping, not long after she moved to Bearthwaite with Harry, which was a long time ago, she decided that the BS National stuff was too expensive to buy and far too inconvenient for her to make herself and the WBC was a complete non starter. That I agreed with because the boxes are far more complicated than a bee hive box needs to be. She decided she was going to start keeping bees using the most widely used hive in the world, the Langstroth.(29) It’s simple to make and I could produce the four pieces of wood required for a box at a price that she considered rendered the idea of her trying to make them herself stupid. All she had to do was glue and nail the pieces together.
“Unfortunately, to start her bee keeping off she could only buy local bees on BS National frames in BS boxes. She’d decided she wanted local bees because genetically they would be used to our climate and environment. The BS frames were not of a size, nor of a design, that would suit her Langstroth boxes, and the BS boxes would neither fit below nor above Langstroth boxes without leaving large uncovered gaps exposed to the elements and potential robbing by wasps on both boxes. BS boxes are eighteen and an eighth inch square and Langstroth boxes are nineteen and seven-eighths by sixteen and a quarter. I produced a cheap and easy solution, twenty by twenty inch [508mm x 508mm] sheets of three-eighths [10mm] exterior grade ply with an appropriate hole cut out of their middles to allow bees to go from one sized box to the other and then she had working hives. Intelligent management of her bees soon had them working in her Langstroth hives with no loss of any that had been hatching out in the BS boxes from combs in BS frames. Then she gave the BS stuff back to bee keepers who could make better use of it.
“Kathleen rapidly became one of the most successful beekeepers in the valley which was a puzzle to all, including herself, given her limited experience. In the end it was put down to one simple issue, her boxes were more suitable than the BS boxes for the local strain of bees in the Bearthwaite valley environment. Before any others changed over to the Langstroth boxes I asked her what size boxes did she really wish to use? I understand the principles of bee keeping in outline, you have to know at least that much to produce decent boxes and hive parts, but I’m no bee keeper and never have been. My point of view was that it made no difference to me what size her boxes were, and as long as her top bars remained the same length and design it would make no difference and involve no work on her part to move frames from one box to another of the same size nor to put boxes one on top of the other, as bee keepers do when the bees need more room as their colonies build up in population during the summer, without the need for a sheet of exterior ply between them.
“She started reading up on what was available and what others elsewhere had used.(30) When she came across the hives used by Brother Adam the Benedictine monk at Buckfast Abbey, who’d bred bees under hostile climatic conditions on Dartmoor and kept them on a huge scale elsewhere decades before, she found what she wanted. A twenty by twenty inch [508mm x 508mm] hive that took twelve Langstroth top bars. Langstroth hives are all nominally nineteen and seven-eighths long if made from three-quarter timber. We use twenty inch to allow for a bit of leeway on the timber thickness because it changes a bit over the year with moisture content. The width of the hive depends on how many frames they are designed to take. The traditional Langstroth took ten frames and was sixteen and a quarter wide and nine and five-eighths deep, though in the States and to a lesser extent over here recently 8 frame versions have gained popularity as have shallower boxes too. Dadant(31) hives were similar but took eleven frames and were deeper and wider at eleven and three-quarter inches deep and eighteen and a half wide, and their frames were spaced a little wider apart. The Buckfast hive too was eleven and three-quarter inches deep, but Kathleen telt me that like others before her she decided on brood boxes a foot deep and honey super boxes half that deep, so two supers could be used as a brood box if required. A super is the name given to a usually shallower box used by the bees to store honey in.
“It wasn’t new, it wasn’t even novel, but it worked here, and since all her hive parts were made by me at the time it was an easy solution. If she wished to sell bees to outsiders or import bees on standard Langstroth frames of any depth there were no problems and if she wanted to import bees on any other sized frames in any other sized box there were always the conversion sheets I’d made for her to use in her first days of bee keeping still available. She never did buy in any more bees, but had she done so it wouldn’t have mattered what sized box or frames they came with because as long as they didn’t exceed twenty inches in either direction the same conversion pieces would have worked.
“That twenty by twenty by twelve inch hive with Langstroth top bars didn’t take long to become the Bearthwaite standard because it was easier to use and far cheaper to make than BS National stuff. It also suits our bees better and produces higher yields of honey. It can take thirteen frames but is better used with twelve leaving a bit of manipulation room to avoid winding the bees up. I made dozens of hives for her, floors, boxes of both sizes, roofs and all the other wooden bits and pieces that bee keepers use too, but as I said I was more than happy when Phœbe took on the job because I was running myself ragged try to keep up with everything I had to do. What is interesting to myself and many others is Tim Rowe’s Rose hive(32) and OSB, that’s One Size Box, concept of bee keeping. Based around the BS National concept but using boxes half way between a brood box and a super for both boxes, so frames were completely inter changeable. In the same time period in the US medium depth Langstroth frames emerged, half way between Dadant brood box depth and that of Langstroth supers. The idea of both Rowe’s and whoever conceived mediums was that a hive could be worked with just one size of box and frame which made life much easier.
“Janice considered using mediums but decided not to bother, for her twelve inch deep brood boxes suited her bees and if need be as she aged she could get help to lift them. However surprisingly word came back concerning outsiders who were using her twenty by twenty box concept, but using her six inch deep super boxes under a one size box regime. They had to modify their existing super box sides to be a little deeper, and it didn’t take much work to turn their brood boxes into two six inch boxes. They could use standard Langstroth super side bars for their frames if they weren’t prepared to make or order new ones three-thirty-seconds of an inch deeper. The price they paid for that was a little bit more propolis and wax they had to clean of the top bars. Yes, the frames were heavy in terms of the honey they contained, but there were twelve of them to the box, and given the UK history of adjustable frame spacers the frames could be gradually moved apart till two inch and a five sixteenths of an inch separation was achieved giving eight honey super frames with just over two inches of honey in each. Two such initially spaced boxes would produce three boxes giving twenty-four frames of nearly solid honey.
“To experienced bee keepers with an open mind it was a giant step forward, and the twenty by twenty six inches deep, became a concept that caught on enormously with bee keepers out there who worked on their own, for a twenty by twenty six inch deep box was seen to be an ideal compromise between weight and economy. These days Phœbe and Isaac are taking virtually all of Janice’s foundation and installing it in the frames they make to sell to bee keepers as ready to go frames. They’ve made jigs that makes it a very fast process to wax a dozen frames at a time, and a few school kids can produce thousands over a weekend. Most of our bee keepers buy their frames that way now because it’s not worth their while to wax frames themselves. Phœbe hasn’t selt boxes and hive parts in the flat for our bee keepers to assemble themselves for years now. Everything she sells for here is fully assembled. It’s only stuff intended for sale outside that goes by carrier or the post that is offered flat packed. If there’s owt else going on these days I don’t know about it, so that’s it for me, Chance.”
Chance said, “Thanks, Gilespie. I was right about the tale being bitty but I think that gives the right idea concerning just how many folk are involved and making a living from bee keeping. I finally wish to add that honey is not the only product of bee keeping. Our bee keepers have major sales of bees, queens, royal jelly, propolis, wax, foundation and various other products too like for example the furniture polish. Too, many of our makers of equipment are now selling it to bee keepers all over the UK and even into Europe recently, and mead is being sold by the brewery in ever increasing quantities too. Bee keeping provides a valuable source of income for many of us. Tommy, would you like to start us off with what the fish are now doing for us?”
“Sure though for a full tale you’re expecting a bit much, Chance. A lot of it was quite a while back and I’m not sure I remember it all that well, but I’ll do what I can. For those who don’t know I’m Tommy, and I have the Bearthwaite post office with my wife Sarah. I first proposed the weekend angling holidays years ago. That was long before the folk who became the Beebell directors had started to think about recovering our rights to the reservoir water and the subsequent legal battle with the utilities company which, as most of you I suspect are already aware, we won. Though I say it myself, the clever part of my idea even then was to combine the fishing with room and full board, breakfast, packed lunch with a flask of tea or coffee, dinner and supper at the Green Dragon. On the Saturday evening supper would be with either the story tellers here in the taproom or with the ladies in the far more genteel environment of the best side. I knew some ladies who enjoyed fishing and my idea was to create an essentially similar holiday that catered for them too. The only difference being where they spent Saturday evening which made no difference from our point of view.
“The real genius part of the idea when it was finalised, and I truly can’t remember who initiated it, but I do know that a number of us played a part in honing and refining it, was to advertise the holidays in the LGBTP media stating that however visitors perceived themselves to be as long as they were courteous and polite they were welcome. It also stated that Bearthwaite was a little old fashioned and that although visitors would be made welcome in the ladies environment if they wore trousers our ladies would feel uneasy about that, so we would be grateful if the visitors who considered themselves to be ladies and joined us in the lounge wore a dress or a skirt and blouse. It also said there were some terrible, lowlife, local scruffs inhabiting the taproom who wouldn’t give a damn what visitors wore and that included a dress or a skirt, but they would be welcome and doubly so if they had a tale to tell, for we were getting tired of the sounds of our own voices, and new folk and their tales were always welcome. I think I would be correct in saying all those lowlifes are in here as I speak.”
When the roars of laughter quietened enough for speech to be heard, Dave asked, “I hope you’re including yourself there, Tommy?”
“Actually it was you and I that I had in mind, Dave.” When it was quiet enough for Tommy to continue, he said, “The angling holidays were and still are hugely successful especially over bank holiday three day weekends like this one Look around you, the evidence of that is here. Above two dozen of the visitors in here tonight are here for the fishing and there are a couple of lady anglers in the best side too. Easter weekend which is four days is always fully booked months in advance. Word soon circulated nationally, and indeed further afield too, amongst the LGBTP folk that we offer a safe and enjoyable place to spend a weekend or longer dressed any way they liked as long as ladies didn’t wear trousers next door. The lasses have never had to deal with any wearing trousers in the room, for there have never been any thus attired. We in the tap(33) here have had visitors wearing frocks and skirts, and some had pretty impressive beards too. It’s never bothered any of us and some of them telt cracking good tales. Many have become welcome friends and visit three or four times a year. I’m surprised none are in the night.
“Any who don’t like their presence don’t have to be here and are free to leave. We would not tolerate any abusing a friend and guest. It is our way to look after and protect our friends anywhere, but once welcomed under one of our roofs they become a guest. It is obligatory for us to protect a guest, for that is a centuries old code that we have always lived by. As has been pointed out more than once by local lads, ‘They are no more different from us than we are to most of the folk who live out there. Like us they harm none and just wish to be left in peace to live life the way they wish to live it. Only thing is you can see their difference, whereas you have to wait till we speak to hear ours. Even then it’s only Cumbrians from outside who can hear that we speak differently. The rest of the country either doesn’t know where any Cumbrian comes from or think we’re all Geordies(34) from the north east coast’ The angling holidays extended to other similar weekends that didn’t involve angling amongst not just the LGBTP folks but many other folks from various interest groups too.
“A long time ago one Saturday evening in here Pete said to Gustav that what baffled him was there had only been a handful of folk amongst the thousands of guests who’d stayed at the Dragon who had been any problem, which is a hell of a sight better than most pubs can say. The rest had been exactly the type of persons who were welcome. They were polite, respectful, interested and interesting folk. Gustav replied that he suspected the blunt descriptions of Bearthwaite and its residents and the candid photographs of scruffy looking men in their work clothes with their dogs in the sawdust strewn taproom, especially the later photos that included blokes dressed in skirts or frocks, and the elegantly gowned but perhaps somewhat old fashioned looking ladies in the room with not a pair of trousers in sight probably kept the idiots away. Pete snorted and said no doubt no overly high skirts and overly low blouses had helped to keep undesirables away too, for there’d be nowt here of interest to them.
“As I said that was all a long time ago, but we are still making money from decent, welcome visitors more than willing to pay for what they regard as excellent value for money, wonderful holidays. Some of our better and more successful activities available were initially suggested by visitors. We have several campers up on Gee and Sam’s spot, Pant Pedwar, enjoying the fishing too now, and there are numerous walks that take in various farms, the fish hatchery, the bobbin mill and the flour mill and its bakery where there are all sorts of activities for folks to enjoy. Many focus on family entertainment where children and adults don’t have to engage in the same activities, and they are very popular with many folks returning year after year. As their children grow older there are still activities they can enjoy engaging with. The Peabody family have all sorts of activities available depending upon the time of year. Bottle feeding lambs and calves, working with their Shire horses, making cheese and other dairy product making including non dairy products from pulses. Even the dairy farm inspectors were interested in the making of tofu.
“There are any number of craftsmen and women who can be observed working, some offer opportunities to try one’s hand at whatever it is they do. The Peabody ladies started offering cream teas and other menus too a long time ago, but such can be enjoyed in any number of places now. There is always someone willing to shew visitors around the model railway society’s still developing layout, the fish hatchery, and other places. And many of the eco visitors say that it’s pleasant to be able to have other options available especially when the weather is poor, such as dancing and our many sporting options, both indoor and outdoor. Some activities are not frequent, so have to be advertised on our website, activities like carp harvesting and our community celebration barbecues. However, having said all that, most, and by that I mean residents and visitors alike, seem to believe that in the main we are doing as well as we can. Though I should add that all our significant folk have said we should always be open to suggestions.
“As an aside we’ve only had two serious incidents in more than twenty years. Both involved the police and an ambulance. The last we had was with an estranged family member who came back to cause trouble and without wishing to go into any details at all, the crowner(35) was involved. The other incident involved four lads from Carlisle who’d had too much to drink and were making sexually inappropriate remarks to Harriet. When one of them laid hands on her Gustav asked them to leave. When the groper insulted Gustav he did nothing. When the idiot took a swing at him Gustav laid him out cold for nearly an hour with one punch. The other three were escorted off the premises and the fool was taken away in an ambulance. The groper received a police caution, but other than that in the end nothing came of the incident, yet even that cloud had a silver lining, for that was the event that brought Harriet and Gustav together as a couple.
“As to the future, the work on increasing the reservoir’s capacity so as to be able to provide and sell more water for down south where recent droughts seem to be more severe and more frequent too of late than ever on record is well under way. The decision to do so was taken as a result of the belief that the recent droughts are going to become even more increasingly severe and frequent. Since even under drought conditions we don’t suffer a shortage of rainfall here it seemed to be a wise investment. Interestingly, Georgette our structural engineer who’s overseeing the dam work, she’s Carlisle Morgan’s missus not Morgan Halifax’s, he’s wed to Janice if you mind on, has telt me that the dam experts she’s working with say that once complete when the reservoir reaches its new level that will create a small island to the left and rear of the reservoir as seen from here. I’m thinking before the water level rises maybe Saul’s demolition lads can provide some large chunks of concrete to make the island a little larger and firm up its edges so it doesn’t get washed away into the reservoir by the rain. Too, the anglers’ boats should be provided with a jetty for tieing up against and fishing from. Maybe to accommodate more than one boat, for it’ll make a change from fishing from a boat. I also think a few trees on the island for the ospreys to perch on would be a good idea, for the ospreys and the visiting photographers.” All the locals knew that though what Tommy had said about selling more water was correct the real reason more water was desired was to enable the lonning to be flooded all year round if required for security purposes.
“Digressing a bit, Georgette has finalised the plans for the pile driving of sheet piles that she’s going to have done to retain the banking on The Needles Fell side of the lonning during heavy rain to stabilise the passing places on that side and likewise the sheet piles(36) that will be on the beck side of the lonning to stop the passing places on that side falling into the beck as a result of heavy rain. The soft engineering approach using willow spiling(37) to stabilise the banks works well along the banks, but it’s not so good on the passing places due to the extra loads imposed by vehicles there. I know the road signs say cars have to give way to commercial and agricultural vehicles to keep the heavier vehicles on the lonning itself and the lighter ones on the passing places, and on the rare occasions that two heavy vehicles meet one backs up to a passing place on the fell side, but even the cars have an adverse effect on the passing places on the beck side, because they had to be built up with whatever rubble Saul’s lads had at the time and they are relatively soft, especially if we’ve had some rain. Fact is they still have to be maintained with whatever rubble Saul’s lads have at the time because they can’t use what they don’t have. I’m telt the sheet piles have a design life expectancy in excess of a hundred and fifty years.
“The piling crew will be starting work early next month. Georgette is now working on how to enable Saul’s lads to obtain as much clay as Celia needs for her pottery studio from the banking on The Needles Fell side without having to go to any effort. She wants the rain to wash it down to somewhere at the side of the lonning where the lads can pick it up with the front end shovel on one of their tractors. If she ever runs out I know where I can get a good water cannon from in Germany like the ones they use to wash porcelain clay out with in Cornwall. It may be a good idea to get one just in case before we actually need it. I thinks that’s all I’ve got to say, Chance. I’d rather some one else spoke about the hatchery because I don’t know too much about it.”
“Thanks, Tommy, you did us proud lad. I dare say most of us as live here knew most of that at some time, but you did a good job of stringing it together into a decent tale. Thanks too for the addition of Georgette’s work. Most of us, like myself, were probably aware she was working on that, but had no idea where she was up to. Any one any idea how Georgette ended up here? It all happened gey fast.”
Pete said, “Why not let Carlisle tell the tale, Chance? He’s in the dinning room and everything is hooked up. You up for that, Carlisle Lad?”
After the usual squawks from the sound system had been resolved by Pat, Carlisle could be heard as well as seen on the huge screen. “Aye okay. I’ve know Georgette for going on five years. We both went to Newcastle to do our degrees. She studied structural engineering and I did mechanical and electrical engineering, but there were a lot of lecture courses that various types of engineering students had in common. Unlike a lot of others we were both pretty hardcore students and took it all seriously. That meant we studied together a lot, because it made life easier. Our first year we were in student accommodation provided by the university. We had rooms that were close to each other’s and that made life easy. The university only guaranteed one of their rooms for the first year and rather than get into a mad rush at the end of the year when loads of others would be looking too, we decided to see what we could find in advance. All we could come up with was a flat for four students. We didn’t want to share with idiots who’d live like pigs and get drunk every night, so Georgette said she’d find us a couple of quiet girls to share with. It didn’t take her long. The girls were glad to have a bloke around because it made them feel a bit safer.”
Carlisle who was aware that the barmaids would relay his words to the rest of the Bearthwaite womenfolk said truthfully, “Georgette said it took her a while to convince Sandy and Pip that we weren’t an item and a bit longer to convince them they’d be wasting their time because we were serious about our studies and in particular I wasn’t prepared to commit any of my time to a relationship. Eventually we both graduated with first class honours degrees and left. Georgette went home to just outside Durham which wasn’t so far away. We wrote to each other every few weeks and seemingly she was as poor at picking men as I was at picking women. We were both damned poor at it and couldn’t find anything that didn’t peter out after a few weeks. Neither of us had come within radar distance of a long term relationship which we both knew we were looking for. After graduation Georgette had, unlike me, gone from one temporary job to the next. She was earning good money, but wasn’t at all settled or happy with life. On the other hand as seen from outside I wasn’t earning that much, but I was settled and happy working and living here.
“There was a one day conference at Durham University this March gone that I wanted to go to, and after phoning her Georgette said she’d meet up with me there. The conference ended and we went for a drink. I thought she was still living at home with her mum and dad, but she said her parents and younger sister had driven her mad, and it was reciprocated, so she’d got a bedsit some months before. After last orders(38) she took me back to her place. There was only the one bed, but it was a double. It was entirely possible that years before we hadn’t been as disinterested in each other as we’d thought, but we’d wisely put that interest to one side so as to concentrate on our studies. I’d had too much to drink that night to drive home, but not too much to drink, and a wise man, nay a decent man, says nay mere about such matters.
“Georgette came back with me to Bearthwaite for a fortnight’s holiday, and we had a really enjoyable few days till Gustav got at her as soon as he heard what she did for a living. I admit that Gustav is just about the best recruiter of clever folk that Bearthwaite has ever had, but it does feel different when you’re as close to his manipulations as I’ve been. He took no time at all to twist Georgette’s arm into joining our professional nerd think tank group on the first floor [US 2nd floor] of the bobbin mill. You hear some interesting talk there, that is if you can understand a bloody word of it. If it’s not engineers of a dozen different flavours blowing off in equation speak, it’s the medics discussing what can go wrong with human body parts, ugh! or the shysters and bean counters planning their next bank robbery.(39) Ah well it’s an old, old story isn’t it? You know how it goes, some poor unsuspecting bloke buys a pretty girl a drink just so he can talk to her, and before he knows where he is he’s been talked into paying her mortgage and fathering her kids, and she has a signed piece of paper that says he volunteered to do it. Well, for the first one at least anyway.
“Don’t get me wrong, Lads, I’m not complaining any more than all blokes have to do to manage a degree of self respect for all of us. I do love the lass, and Georgette’s three and a half month now, so she’s probably telt all the lasses in the room about it all already, so my future as a Bearthwaite bloke is completely sorted. As soon as she accepted the job and suspected she was pregnant we moved into forty-three Pastures View. She’s talking about having a few more herself and looking into adoption with NCSG too. I’ll never admit it to any of the lasses, but as a decent bloke of course I’m more than okay with all of that because I, like all of us, know and accept that the women folk know how to make family life as good as it can be for all of us. That’s no more than them doing what decent women do, and we as decent men are grateful for it. After all, if we as decent men do what we should we know they will be grateful, and more to the point from our point of view express their gratitude in the way that we appreciate. That’s more or less it, Chance. I’m for another pint and I’m going to try some of the Romanian paint thinner to go with it this time. I’ll leave off trying that furniture polish restorer till supper because it looks like I’ll need to tek a knife and fork to it.”
After the necessary interval, Chance asked, “Now, I know you’ve not been here that long, Hamilton, but would you have a go at the hatchery?”
“If you want me to, but obviously I don’t know much about its history nor of how it was set up. I can only really say anything about what it does now. Okay?” There were nods of agreement and understanding, so Hamilton started, “As you’ve probably already gathered from earlier, I’m Hamilton the Bearthwaite vet, so I don’t have much involvement with the day to day activities of the hatchery. I have an involvement with the wildlife, the coneys, the bees and the fish here as well as the usual farm animals and the small animal pet work. You have to realise that anything I’m involved with is usually because there are problems. However, Bearthwaite is the most interesting and challenging practice I have ever heard of. I operated on a polecat and set a goshawk’s wing within a month of coming here, though to be honest my work is not usually quite that exotic. A poorly dog or a cow having a bad calving are my more usual experiences. The little girl who loves that polecat is still hunting coneys with it, and that goshawk has successfully sat several clutches of eggs and raised the chicks since then. I also have a herd of bison on my list of patients and have delivered three of their calves. Seemingly I’ll be treating llama and alpaca too before too long.
“However, on to the fish that Chance wishes me to talk about. The Bearthwaite fish hatchery breeds a number of species of native fish besides brown trout that are desired in the reservoir for the anglers, all of which species have always been found in it. Grayling, common chub and common dace are three that spring to mind. Though it has always puzzled me how any fish ever made their way into the Bearthwaite beck given the presence of the Rise and the Calva Marsh on the other side of it. I can only assume that as the ice of the last ice age retreated the water level in these parts was at least fifteen feet higher than today, and when it eventually dropped that divided the water at the Rise leaving the fish trapped in the valley. However, the hatchery also breeds many species of no interest to fishing folk for the reservoir and for sale, most of them are small even at full maturity like the brook lamprey, stone loach, minnow of various species, bullhead and three spined stickleback. They are of importance for improving the resilience of the reservoir environment and as a food supply for bigger fish. Again all of those species have always been found in the reservoir.
“Still on water life but moving away from fish for a minute of two, I’d like Tommy to talk about the invertebrates here. All of which we are now attempting to breed at the hatchery. Tommy?”
“Okay, Hamilton, but there is much more that we don’t know than what we do. There are huge numbers of invertebrates of a large number of species found in the reservoir and Bearthwaite Beck and a smaller variety in the village pond. Despite them being a significant food source for many fish they are thriving. I’m putting together a wild life guide on them with the help of many folk, a lot of them children, but it is early days and I have no where near enough information as to exactly what we have, and am desperately short of decent photographs. If any of our guests with children would be interested, small nets on sticks and plastic buckets can be obtained free from the post office and I shall be delighted to see what the children have found. After photographing the beasties I shall have them taken to the hatchery for the staff there to look after.
“We have four or five fresh water bivalve shellfish in the upper and lower reaches of the beck and presumably in the reservoir too. I said four or five because two of them may turn out to be the same species. It’s not clear how the ones in the lower reach of the beck managed to survive the many decades when it ran dry. It is assumed the periodic flooding enabled them to not only survive, but to survive well enough deep in the damp mud that formed the beck bed to reproduce too once there was sufficient water in the beck to enable that. We also have at least one species of fresh water limpet in the upper reach of the beck. It is not clear how many species of fresh water snails we have, but I can say there are a lot of very different looking ones which I’m telt does not necessarily make them different species. However, I’m diligently taking photographs and measurements and sending them off to the experts. I’m also telt that the reservoir and the upper reach of the Bearthwaite Beck that has never run dry and feeds the reservoir have a number of rare species that are very sensitive to pollution. They probably survived because the industrial revolution barely noticed that we were here. I’m hoping to have the first version of the fresh water invertebrate guide available some time in the new year, possibly as late as Easter, but it will probably need frequent updating. I plan on selling it with a dozen or more blank pages, at a substantially reduced price that will be just to cover the cost of materials, so as to encourage folks to provide photographs and information. I’m also planning to produce a guide on the flying insects that are to be found near the waters here, but I haven’t got any further than thinking about it. We’ve at least one species of crayfish, and numerous smaller crustaceans, but I’m still after photographs and samples for the hatchery. God alone knows how many insects and arachnids spend at least part of their life cycles in our waters. I’ve not even started looking into either, but that’s me, Hamilton.”
“Thanks, Tommy. To resume, of most significance to the residents of Bearthwaite are the brown trout which we raise in large numbers because they form the basis of the recreational angling business on the reservoir and like all the other species we breed for the reservoir we sell a lot of trout fingerlings too. Though the reservoir also contains perch and pike the hatchery deals with neither. Perch are voracious predators and there have been a number landed from the reservoir that weighed in at over six pounds. Our anglers say they expect much bigger perch exist there and it is only a matter of time before one is landed. Pike are apex predators and some colossal specimens have been observed lurking in the shallows of the reservoir margins especially where the reed cover is only thin. Our wildlife experts consider the perch and the pike can manage their populations themselves.
“There are no rainbow trout in the Bearthwaite valley and we do not breed them here. Our hatchery is only a small set up and others with much larger establishments breed huge numbers of rainbow trout far more economically than we could. Too we do not require rainbows and need the space to breed what we do require both for the reservoir and for sale. Fortunately there are no zander in the valley. Zander are a member of the perch family, but with the predatory feeding behaviour of the pike. They are an undesirable alien that harm our native fish, and there is considerable doubt as to whether natural fish populations of species such as gudgeon will ever fully recover from the aggressive feeding of this top predator. If caught it is illegal to return them to the water, but they make for excellent eating. There are neither roach nor rudd in the reservoir and like other fish not found there we have no intention of introducing them though we do breed them in order to sell fingerlings. The staff at the hatchery have telt me they are currently discussing the economic viability of breeding various types or maybe I should have said species of ornamental fish, but no conclusions have as yet been arrived at. Our angling visitors say the native brown trout here are challenging and landing one of a goodly size provides a sense of achievement difficult to find elsewhere. I wouldn’t know as to be honest I have no interest in angling whatsoever. Fish yes, angling no.
“I suppose I’m a total Philistine regards angling, however, I do enjoy eating trout, but I prefer to ask Vincent to wrap them up in a newspaper for me. After I’ve paid him for them I ask him to throw them to me across his counter. Then when I get home I can truthfully say ‘Look at what I caught earlier today, Dear.’ ” There was amused, understanding laughter in the taproom at the old joke for most of the men there hadn’t much time for angling. Anglers were understood to be a little bit fanatical and masochistic, after all you had to be to sit out in the pouring rain trying to catch fish that more often than not had no intention of being caught. Hamilton resumed, “We net trout from time to time out of the reservoir for Bearthwaite tables using a boat to trawl for them. There is not enough room at the hatchery to raise the trout to a size worth eating, so it is part of the management plan to raise them in the hatchery to between two and four inches [100mm] in length before releasing them into the reservoir. We have discussed creating raising tanks, but for various reasons decided against it in favour of them growing in the more natural reservoir environment.
“When we first decided to exploit the trout by netting there was considerable discussion with the experts on how best to go about it. It was decided that in the interests of efficiency we would use a small trawl net with a mesh size that would allow the escape of all fish less than about a foot [330mm] in length towed by a medium powered motor boat with sufficient capacity to contain about a ton and a half of fish [1500Kg, 3360 pounds]. It was decided that the boat would follow a fixed route every time the fish were harvested thus most of the reservoir floor would never be disturbed. That was decided upon as a result of the video of the North Sea floor that we were shewn. The limit of a ton and a half was considered to be a conservative one arrived at after under water surveillance video had suggested to the experts that we would be okay harvesting about five tons of trout a year once the hatchery was providing fingerlings in the expected quantities. The experts advised that since limiting our catch by mass was a strategy that if in fact the limit were set even slightly too high for sustainability could eventually rapidly drive the fish to extinction it would be best to limit our catch by fishing effort rather than by a total allowable catch.
“The limit was initially set at four trawl hours and it was decided that would be constantly under review. That’s four hours when the trawl is operational, which doesn’t include the time spent emptying and redeploying it. If we had the required catch within four hours, we would stop fishing and possibly save the remaining trawl time for later in the year. If after four hours we had not netted our ton and a half of trout we would stop fishing and an immediate reëvaluation with the experts of our strategy would take place. Accurate records of what ends up in the net have been kept, both of harvested fish and those returned to the water. These days we stop trawling when we have a ton [1000Kg, 2240 pounds] of trout harvested. That has been done so as to enable the maximum amount of fish to be enjoyed fresh with only about a quarter of the catch being processed by Christine’s crafters to be available pressure canned for later in the year. It rarely takes much longer than a couple of hours trawling to achieve the desired catch. That is done by eight fifteen minute trawl sessions, so that fish are not lost to being out of the water for too long, and that usually covers between a half and a third of the area where trawling is permitted. These days we trawl twice a year altering the ends of the permitted trawl run. That produces a couple of tons [2000Kg, 4480 pounds] of trout a year.
“The experts say our level of exploitation of what is a valuable resource to us all is very low and could be much higher, but we have decided that we are more than happy to keep to the current set limits for all the foreseeable future. Maybe that will alter, but we can see no necessity for that, and it has been decided not to exploit the fish any harder when the reservoir contains significantly more water after the dam enlargement. The trawl is opened onto decking covered with stainless steel sheeting enabling easy separation of fish either back into the water or into the boat without them having to be handled possibly causing damage to their scales or skin. The size range of trout harvested is quite narrow. The net doen’t retain anything smaller than a foot long and any trout longer than about fifteen or sixteen inches [380-405mm] the trawl operators return to the water to provide anglers with the larger fish. That is how we know that there are some very large trout in there.
“I’ve been on the boat and recorded video footage for our records and for the experts to analyse and make any suggestions for improvement they can think of. It was an interesting experience, but even doing it that way, the easy way, I’m still not interested in fishing. The hatchery also breeds and raises much larger numbers of many species wanted elsewhere to sell as fingerlings which is a lucrative activity, for many are difficult to source, and as with all the hatchery’s activities it provides employment. As already mentioned it also raise some of the reservoir invertebrates, but that only started this year so none can tell you how that is going yet.
“Arctic charr have recently been discovered to inhabit the reservoir. This was discovered when the water was last trawled for trout. The trawl only yielded one charr, so we don’t even have guesstimates at this time of how many charr are there, nor do we have any idea of how long they have been there for. Though it’s possible, I think it unlikely they were present in what was originally just a beck before the first mill water was dammed many centuries ago. None of our residents are aware of any introductions in their life times, nor are they aware of their elders ever talking about such, nor even of any being caught in the reservoir, but we all suspect that the charr were an introduction in Victorian times, not long after the creation of the reservoir, probably from one of the Cumbrian waters not too far away. Arctic charr are under threat in Great Britain and numerous populations have already become extinct mostly in Ireland and Scotland. The only recorded extinctions of Arctic charr in England are those of Goat’s Water, Loweswater, Ullswater and Rydal Water all of which are in Cumbria. It is possible that our population was derived from one of those in which case that population is not extinct.
“I have been in touch with experts on the matter and it is being looked into. DNA fingerprints of all known arctic charr extant in the British Isles and those of most extinct populations too are available which includes all four extinct Cumbrian charr. Investigations to track down DNA fingerprints of the remaining extinct populations have been underway for a while. It is believed to be only a matter of time before a complete record of all charr, both extant and extinct, of the British Isles will be available. The samples from extinct populations were taken from stuffed fish in collections. Samples were taken from the only charr caught from the reservoir so far for comparison, the charr was returned tagged and unharmed minus a couple of scales to the water I hasten to add. We are awaiting the results of that work. In the mean while any and all charr caught by anglers must be returned to the water immediately, not put into a keep net,(40) nor removed for any reason, though as yet none have been caught. That is not surprising for they prefer to inhabit deeper water where few anglers bother to fish. It is not a matter of economic importance to us, though perhaps one day it may be. It is, however, a matter of great interest.”
A middle aged outsider in the dining room who was well known to the locals indicated he had something to add and Pete said, “Let’s hear it, Solomon Lad, but before we do let’s have a refill and some one pass Solomon a glass and a bottle of chemic to lubricate his vocal cords with. Any preference as to your poison, Lad?”
“Not really, but that pink stuff looks interesting, Pete.” A few minute later Solomon started, “As you must have gathered I’m Solomon and as you can probably tell from my accent I’m from Brum, that’s Birmingham to those that don’t know. I’ve been fishing and drinking here for a few years now. I try to get up here four times a year. I think I’m going to book my room before I go home this time. I thought I would have have no bother getting a double room, but when I phoned over a month ago the best I could manage was a single room with a reduced sized double bed. At four foot three [1295mm] wide it’s only about three inch [75mm] narrower that the normal double, but my old girl is of a comfortable size and takes up more room than normal when she’s been drinking and yacking with the girls next door, so I’m booking a big room with a king size bed for next time. I reckon that will make Sally a happy lady. Whenever we come up here we always make a three day weekend of it whether it’s a bank holiday or not. I’m a maintenance engineer for an engineering works and Sally’s a supervisor in a factory that makes frozen foods, so booking a day’s holiday is never a bother for either of us because there are plenty of others who will do the cover for a return favour some time.
“Last time I was here they were trawling for the trout. I’d never seen that done and though I’ve never fancied going into the North Sea on a trawler, to be honest I’m neither brave enough nor foolhardy enough to risk putting myself in to a position where the sea appears to be above the sky from time to time―” That caused considerable laughter, for the North Sea was infamous for its appalling weather and the courage of the North Sea trawler men had been legend for centuries. Eventually Solomon resumed, “Like I said, I just ain’t got the balls for that, but I thought a nice trip on a trawler here would be an interesting afternoon, so I went down to the boat and hitched a ride. Ian, the lad in charge, said I was welcome if I’d take the photos and shoot the video. That seemed a more than reasonable exchange to me, so after a few minutes to explain the photography gear to me we were off. Interesting‽ Christ, was I right. I’d never seen a charr before and I wondered what it was. Still I didn’t get a long look, a tape measure along side of it, a couple of scales removed, a numbered tag clipped on like they do with the biggest trout, some photos and video and it was back in the water. No way was it visible for more than a couple of minutes, and I’m looking forward to hearing more about exactly what it was and how many of them are here.
“Anyway back to fishing, there were some seriously impressive trout returned to the water too. Their food supply must be pretty good because there were any number returned that were between eighteen and twenty-four inches [450-600mm] with a couple significantly longer than that. Some would say that I’m not really a dedicated angler, and they’d be right. I enjoy fishing, the solitude gives me time to unwind my brain from all the shit I just have to live with as a result of work, but I don’t want to do it in a bloody thunderstorm no matter how big the fish are. Bearthwaite enables me to fish when the weather is okay or better and provides me with something else to do when there’s a hurricane or a monsoon going on outside. The reason I asked to tell a tale was I was going to suggest that you advertise the trips on the boat when trawling for trout, like you do the carp harvest. I’d have paid for that trip. The other thing was the skipper, if that’s the appropriate term for young Ian, said you were still trying to find a permanent name for the boat. Well even with the trawl working I could see there were large numbers of trout and other fish too rising for flies. I reckon ~The Dry Fly~ is a good name. That’s it. I’m done. Thanks for listening.”
Hamilton nodded and said, “Thanks, Solomon, that’s doubtless given some of us some things to think about and discuss. I’ll suggest The Dry Fly to the folk who are thinking on the matter. However, back to the charr. We know little for certain, however, we do have some interesting information, even if it raises more questions than it provides answers. Granny Dahlman as has the ice cream shop at Darkfell Village says she minds when she was a young lass, still learning her letters was how she put it, her granny talking about her granny, who was a maid in service to Lady Alice Gershambe at Fordshall Hall, being taken along with other servants to Goats Water to serve lunch to Lord Alfred Gershambe and his friends when they went there fishing. It seems Lord Gershambe, who owned the Bearthwaite valley estate back then, took some of his servants all over the county when he invited friends on a fishing party, but she doesn’t recall what they went fishing for, nor any talk of them bringing fish back to release. When questioned as to whether they ever went to Loweswater, Ullswater or Rydal Water too she said she had no specific memories of that her granny mentioning that, but doubtless they did and to every other water in the county too for he was renown for his fishing.
“We know that there had been a small dam to provide power for the original flour mill since long before the Doomsday Book survey was completed in ten eighty-six. The bigger dam that provided the water for the bobbin mill and the flour mill was created in seventeen ninety-eight and enlarged in eighteen fifty-two. It was enlarged again by a huge margin to provide drinking water in eighteen ninety-two, two years before the Thirlmere reservoir was completed though the water didn’t go to Manchester in those days. Lord Alfred was born in eighteen eighty-six and his father died when he was twenty-two when he took the title in nineteen oh-eight, just four years before the dam was enlarged to what it is we can see today when he was twenty-six. He died at the age of sixty-two in nineteen forty-eight. He was alive at the time we think the reservoir was likely stocked with charr. Indeed it was essentially created when he was a child, though we suspect it was not stocked till after its final enlargement in nineteen twelve, which gives us a thirty-six year window. Our experts are trying to work out how many charr we could expect to be present in the reservoir using nineteen eighteen, nineteen twenty-eight and nineteen thirty-eight as release dates for fifty and for a hundred charr. They admit they have little to go on in the way of breeding data, they call it recruitment and predation data, but hope to model the extreme edges and that what we have will lie somewhere inside that envelope.
“Lord Alfred’s journals which are archived at Lady Gillford’s House Petteril Bank Road in Carlisle are full of fishing trips and bear out Granny Dahlman’s tale, but there is no mention of releasing charr or anything else either in to the reservoir. It is possible that the release was recorded in one of the unfortunately missing volumes, some think they were lost when the records were moved from Carlisle Castle to their present home in twenty eleven, for it seems unlikely that if he had done it he would not have recorded it, for he was as fanatical a diarist as he was an angler, so we think we know who did it, but we have no clue yet as to where the charr came from. There are diary records of him fishing in every piece of water in Cumbria and farther afield too, so anything is possible. It’s also entirely possible charr were taken from a dozen or more waters to be released here and any in the reservoir are now hybrids. However, other than Lord Alfred Gershambe it is unlikely that any other populated the reservoir with charr.
“The last survivor of the main branch of the Gershambe family was Lord Edward, Lord Alfred’s only son, who died fifteen years after his father in nineteen sixty-three. Edward’s only sister Lady Aguila de Hempenstall White had lived abroad, in Monaco mainly, and died childless some years before. The Challacombes who came from Somerset then bought the estate and much else in nineteen sixty-four. As far as any are aware none of the Challacombes ever visited here, only their land agents. It was said to have been bought as an investment, for what is any’s guess. It was from the Challacombes that the valley was ultimately purchased by the Bearthwaite residents which started in nineteen eighty-four, when, as all who live here know, they selt off a lot of property to pay off death duties. The purchase was protracted and was essentially a legal agreement that as long as at least five percent of all outstanding debt was paid off each year the Challacombes would not, indeed could not, sell any part of what ever portions of the estate they still owned to any other. It suited us because we didn’t have much money and it suited the Challacombes because it gave them an income with virtually no tax to pay on it. In reality it was a very large and expensive mortgage that we only completed paying off a dozen years ago.
“Lower and Upper Fordshall villages, which comprised entirely tied cottages provided originally for the agricultural workers on the Fordshall estate, had been losing population for decades due to lack of local employment and by the time Fordshall Hall was deliberately burnt down in nineteen seventy-one, which by then had been abandoned and emptied of all contents several years before, both villages were completely abandoned. Murray says that Beebell are looking into buying the land probably with a view to restoring the old tied cottages and the Hall. Many of Lord Alfred’s taxidermied, if that’s a word, stuffed fish exhibits including a dozen or so charr were made available to the DNA testers by his family, so the DNA investigations should provide more information. However, moving on from the charr, there are carp in both Bearthwaite Beck and the village pond. Tony, will you take it from here? because I don’t really understand what happened to the village pond, nor why it was considered necessary.”
“Aye, nay bother lad, though I only understand what we did and why. I know nowt about fish. As a result of machine excavations, which we were telt were necessary for a number of drainage reasons higher up the slope to enable the land to be used for vegetable growing rather than as a swamp grazed by sheep from time to time when the land was less waterlogged, the village pond is now about four acres in size which is considerably larger than its original half acre. Surplus rainfall now overflows via a twelve inch pipe just under the surface of the lonning into the beck rather than making the entire area a muddy nightmare for mums with younger kids, who doubtless will find somewhere else to get themselves covered from head to toe with mud when it rains. I’m not psychic that’s just the nature of kids, especially lads. They will however have to go farther afield now than the area around the pond to do so. The original pond was only five to six feet deep in the middle and less than half that for over three-quarters of its area. That has not changed, and the new parts around its edge are less than three feet deep. The new part is vaguely annular in shape, and though the original pond is offset a little from the centre, that still leaves the deep section a long way from the edge which a number of mothers have telt me is a relief.
“The excavation spoil from around the pond was mostly high quality topsoil, and it has been taken to the allotments to be spread over the poorer soil that has been dumped there by myself and Joseph over the last few years. We’ve been waiting till we had enough material to level up the depression at the far end from the lonning. Various farmers have been dumping farmyard shite there for the job for a couple of years too. Madeline who manages the carp opines that their population will soon grow to occupy and exploit the new water which means the harvest will be larger. She telt me that the carp grow quickly fed on the water weed harvested from the reservoir by the lads who work up there. One of their jobs is to prevent the outlets from becoming blocked by the weed, and they take it to the pond and the beck to feed her carp. I’m telt the carp need no breeding help from the hatchery and have to be culled from time to time which we all know is a satisfactory state of affairs to those of us who enjoy eating carp on what to date has been the relatively rare occasions when it is available. The enlargement of the pond she hopes will make more and possibly larger table carp available more frequently. Hamilton, that’s me I think. I know nowt else. I suggest Chance takes it over again.”
At that Chance said, “Okay thanks, Tony. Because carp harvests always bring a lot of extra visitors, whichever member of the team who manage our website deals with this sort of thing, it’s probably Madeline, advertises the carp harvests months in advance, so visitors can arrange cover at work and so book days off work and make all other necessary arrangements, including booking rooms at the Dragon. Even at the back end,(41) carp harvests always bring a lot of extra visitors with kids who want to take part in what they know will be a cold, wet and dirty, and hence thoroughly enjoyable, activity the like of which they can’t experience anywhere else. Parents are happy to provide their kids with the fun because they know there will be hundreds of our adults keeping a close eye on all children to ensure theirs and ours are all safe and they don’t have to get cold, wet and dirty too because we will, although some are happy to join in. They also know that we will provide their kids with equally enjoyable clean up facilities afterwards which start with the kids washing each other off with hose pipes. For most of us it’s an exciting and enjoyable day with serious financial implications. The evening barbecue on the village green, or in the barns surrounding it if the weather is poor, is regarded as a perfect end to a perfect day by our visitors, especially those with children. The visitors bring money in for what they regard as a brilliant day that makes them extremely popular with their kids. I’ve been telt by a goodly few of them that the threat of not coming here the next time works wonders on their children’s behaviour.
“And of course there is the carp for us to enjoy eating and selling to the east European communities for Christmas dinner, though Madeline refuses to take money off Sasha for his fish which is always the largest available because he was the one who made her aware of that market. When she tried to find out what Elle felt about the matter she was telt, ‘Sasha is my man. I am his woman, so like any woman with sense I give him his victories that don’t really matter. I can always eat elk [moose in the US] another day. Too, I am happy to cook for all the folk he invites to ensure there is no carp left over. It is always a good party. A woman in command of her womanhood ensures that her daughters and granddaughters understand that there is no point in digging your heels in unless it truly matters.’ You may make what you will of that, but I notice Sasha is not reacting, so someone pour him something that will possibly, though I doubt it, relax his brain.” At that there was a lot of laughter from local men, but not from visitors who did not understand what Chance had said, for most knew nothing concerning Elle and had never met her.
“Too, a lot of the visitors now buy carp to take home which we are happy to provide frozen or fresh with sheets of recipes and cooking instructions. Even kids who say they don’t like fish can’t resist eating fish they helped to catch, and many insist on helping to cook it when they get home, for which many parents have expressed gratitude. What had initially been an insignificant village activity that helped us to feed some of our less wealthy residents has become a significant attraction that to Madeline’s surprise has become a financially significant event. Sasha reckons that many of our so called ancient and out of touch with reality activities actually resonate deeply with the hunter gatherer and early food husbander that is in us all, especially so with the remaining decent human beings who through no fault of their own live a life in cities devoid of that reality. He telt me we need to be looking closely at such folks when they return for a second or third experience of such reality, for they are probably Bearthwaite folk in disguise, and worthy of invitations to join us as one of us.”
The poorer soil referred to had indeed been dumped at the new allotments’ site over the last few years, but most of it had been dumped there recently from the footings excavations required for the foundations of the new terraced houses at the old allotments’ site. There had been a large depression in the land at one side of the new allotments’ site from which the top soil had been removed and pushed to one side before mixing farm yard manure into the subsoil. A mixture of farmyard manure and the poorer soil was levelled over the subsoil and covered with the topsoil, again mixed with more manure. All in all that had created about two and a half acres [1 ha] of quality fruit and vegetable growing land. The site would take some more soil over the years as the infill settled, but the job had essentially been done which made the site much larger for the depression had regularly filled with water making it useless for growing virtually anything other than reeds and duck weed. The site had not just been filled it had been drained in the process providing quality growing land in a convenient place for the allotmenteers.
“Carp in various communities in middle and eastern Europe(42) is the traditional Christmas day celebration meal and we sell the larger carp eviscerated and frozen whole to a large number of folk who live all over the country, now no longer just those who live outside the valley near Carlisle who were our first customers for carp. Most of our customers’ families originated from those communities. It usually costs more for the overnight carriage packed in dry ice for carp going to the far end of the country than the price of the carp, but still folk are more than happy to pay it, but our marketers were not happy about that. Since customers obviously wished to buy carp, not to pay greedy carriers’ costs, we have provided them with a customer email address list and advised them to talk to each other regarding their orders, so that they may minimise carriage costs, which has enhanced our reputation massively as an honest and helpful supplier of expensive foodstuffs. As a result of our reputation we have set up a website that all our customers can subscribe to and pay us via. The carrier we deal with is now Flash Carrier UK who combine and distribute all our and our customers’ carriage costs on a daily averaging weight mileage basis. The response has been huge, and has more than tripled our orders this year. We expect next year to be even better because the requests for details of what we can provide from presumably eastern European folks living in western Europe has been enormous. Interestingly none of those requests asked for prices. I would suggest that is not something we should try to profiteer from, for in the long term we’ll do much better and win friends too if we don’t. The demand for carp has always been much larger than what we can supply, but with luck the supply will soon increase and our income increase with it too, but that is no reason to poison our markets through greed.
“Harvesting carp as has been said is a community activity that our children look forward to and it is a cause for a celebration. Since it also attracts visitors, many of who wish to take part, we do it in the main on bank holiday weekend Saturday afternoons and post when it is going to be undertaken on the Bearthwaite website months in advance. There are no carp in the reservoir and it was decided a long time ago they were not desirable in there because it was considered they would probably be detrimental to the trout and other fishes’ environment because they churn the bottom up rooting for food and thus would cost the village money. They could be considered to be the underwater equivalent of the Tuskers, useful in the appropriate places but detrimental in other places.
“The folk who know about such things believe it was the abundance of fish due to the hatchery’s activities that brought the ospreys that nest in the trees at the cliff edge at the back of the valley, and the herons too that nest in the reed beds in the reservoir at the far side from the village. Otters have been seen from time to time taking fish and amphibians too at the reservoir, the beck and the village pond as have the resident kingfishers. However, the depredations on the fish and amphibians by the ospreys, the herons, the otters and the kingfishers are clearly not of significance. The eco visitors love them, and are willing to spend money here to so easily see and photograph what they are interested in. I hope that I have conveyed the impression to those of you who don’t live here that the animals that are farmed here, the entire wildlife of the valley and the economics that all depend upon are not separate from each other, but are all interdependent on each other, and that includes us, those humans that live here, and if I were to take a wider view than even we residents usually take it includes all the migratory life too, which isn’t just the swallows in summer and the swans in winter, but you too, the visitors that come at all months of the year for a whole variety of reasons.”
As he indicated he had finished to his surprise Hamilton received a round of cheering and hand clapping. “Well put, Hamilton Lad. Well put. Now some of these here migrants look as thirsty as the residents, so a few pints are in order.” As Pete stood to make his way to the bar others were following to help and a trolley of glasses was on its way from the dining room for washing.
To be continued
29023 words in all including footnotes and GOM 51⅒
A Grumpy Old Man’s Tale 51⅒ So Just Where is Bearthwaite?
As a result of the post from Jennifer Sue concerning GOM 50, I had a think on what to do concerning my ideas as to where Bearthwaite is. Was I going to post them or not? It took me a while to decide that since I had already taken so many liberties with not just the geography around where I’d positioned Bearthwaite, but with other places in Cumbria and indeed the world too, if I took any serious criticism I’d doubtless like to remind folk that GOM is just a set of fantasy tales written for entertainment. However, I know I’ll just ignore it because the fact that they are getting upset means they can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality, so there is no point in engaging with them. When I started writing GOM, which is a long time ago, I had no idea where Bearthwaite was other than in Cumbria somewhere. For a while I toyed with the idea that Sasha’s house could be the mansion set well back off to the left of the A595 going from Thursby roundabout to Carlisle, more from a desire to place Bearthwaite somewhere, almost anywhere, than because it made sense, but it wouldn’t do because there were too many major conflicts with what I had written and what I had notes on, both written and mental. That mansion was by the way the initial inspiration for The Towers near Millersthwaite, another imaginary Cumbrian village, when I wrote Elska. For a long time I just left Bearthwaite unplaced which was very frustrating. However, as I kept writing Bearthwaite almost positioned itself, which is another way of saying I painted myself into a corner.
One day in frustration due to a lack of inspiration that wouldn’t seriously restrict what I could write in the future I resorted to my Ordinance Survey Landranger maps. Bearthwaite had to be on number 90 somewhere. Number 90 is the Penrith, Keswick and Ambleside area map. I was hoping, almost against hope itself, that I would be able to find a site that matched enough of my criteria to be of further help when I was writing without me having to provide so much detail that I’d be hamstrung regards future tales. And lo and behold there it was. The map had a road running not quite north south through the hamlet of Mosedale where I could place Bearthwaite Lonning Ends. Surely no one would bother if I did away with the twenty-six dwellings to be found there would they? To the west lay a valley with a small road and the river Caldew running down it and some habitations partway up the valley, one of which shewn on the map is named Swineside. The valley was even running west from the road up into the northern fells, which although I had not specified that in writing anywhere was very clear in my mind. Too, just to the south of Mosedale the road runs through the village of Mungrisdale. The name Mungrisdale is also that of the dale or valley at the foot of which the village sits. The name of the dale, and hence the village, is from Old Norse. Gris dalr means pig valley, and the prefix mun refers to St Mungo, otherwise called St Kentigern, for whom the parish church is named. All in all the Mosedale valley was ideal from many points of view to become the basis for the Bearthwaite valley. That the real valley had a Viking association with pigs made it especially attractive as the home for Gunni Gris and his Tuskers. Too, it is a delightful place to visit.
I had been stupid, for I should have had the maps out a long time before I finally did, but in my defence I had written many of the tales without any ideas in mind about Bearthwaite at all, just ideas about what went on in the taproom of The Green Dragon Inn. It was the positioning of Bearthwaite that enabled me to write GOM 22, 38, 39, 43, 49, 54 and possibly 57 with the geographical and topological detail that I did and obviously this, GOM 51 & a bit, too. Presently 54, like 52, 53, 55 and 56, is in need of polishing and 57 at four thousand and odd words is barely started. I’m not sure if I wrote GOM 22 before or after that positioning, but I suspect at the least I knew in my mind that Bearthwaite Lonning Ends had to have a north south running road through it, and the Bearthwaite valley had to be to the east of a set of fells and it had to climb east to west with a road and a beck at its bottom, and a tarn, or reservoir up at its head somewhere to the west of Bearthwaite village. What I had already written meant those fells would have to be the northern fells and if I had been unable to find an appropriate setting I would have had to invent it wholesale. I am familiar with much of the north west of England and western Scotland going north from Warrington all the way as far as Unst Shetland in some detail, so I don’t find it surprising that things worked out as well as they did, although I was lucky. I have a copy of OS Landranger map number 90 on the wall in my office next to my computers for easy reference and it is amazing how much help it is.
So indeed I have a very clear idea of where Bearthwaite is although I admit to having taken numerous substantial liberties with the local geography. As I said the Ordinance Survey Landranger map number 90 is of the Penrith, Keswick and Ambleside area, and on that map at about grid reference 356323 can be found the hamlet Mosedale. The valley to the west, shewing first Swineside and then Roundhouse part way up it on the OS map, is nowhere near ten miles [16km] long, but it is the basis for the Bearthwaite Valley and it does go west up into the northern fells. The gully and the force that comes down it to become Bearthwaite Beck, that in the summer served as a pack pony trail in days gone by, I lifted from an existing pack pony trail up a steep scarp [see GOM 04] on the far side of Windermere from Bowness. The rest I’m afraid is purely my imagination based on numerous places I have lived and visited including The Rise [in Finland] and Bearthwaite Water, the reservoir [numerous examples of which exist in the UK]. Not all by any means of the distances and times I have quoted to numerous places in the GOM tales are entirely consistent with that positioning of Bearthwaite, but unfortunately reality is sometimes very inconvenient for a creator of the new truth. AA route planner knows where Mosedale hamlet is, so if I wish to know how far somewhere is from Bearthwaite these day I find how far it is from Mosedale and add ten miles, though sometimes I deliberately distort geography and use a different number if it suits the tale.
My appologies if this is of no interest to you. I am aware that in all likelihood this will only be of any interest to folk who have at least a passing acquaintanceship with Cumbria, or Westmorland & Furness as we must now learn to call the area that includes Bearthwaite. In reality the Caldew valley described above is in the LDNP, Lake District National Park, whereas for reasons connected with local authority planning permission regulations I have placed the Bearthwaite valley outside the LDNP. The real river Caldew like the imaginary Bearthwaite Beck does eventually run into the river Eden to the north of the city of Carlisle. I live in Cumberland, the other portion of the divided county that was Cumbria. Strange isn’t it, that prior to the creation of Cumbria in 1974 from the counties of Cumberland and Westmorland with the additions of Furness, which was a part of Lancashire, and a small part of the West Riding of Yorkshire too, Cumberland and Westmorland were deemed to be too small and inefficient to function properly, so they created Cumbria and promptly divided it up into six administrative areas with Cumbria County Council supposedly managing all the difficult stuff, like the highways.(43) There was a loud and powerful, though not powerful enough, voice that wanted to create a single unitary authority out of Cumbria. Too, the Councillors of all six of the administrative authorities were vociferously against the creation of any kind of unitary authority whether it be two of them or just one. Many folk believed and still do that the Councillors in those six administrative areas were against such ideas because they were on to too much of a good thing and they were concerned that they would lose their place at the trough that was filled with tax payers money. They were ignored in the end as were those who wanted a single unitary authority. The voice to create a single unitary authority out of what is now Cumberland and Westmorland & Furness has, however, not been silenced, and in smoke filled rooms the fight goes on. Truly there is nothing new. The old Cumberland was plagued by potholes in the roads, and Cumbria made things no better. I don’t suppose the phoenix like newly resurrected Cumberland will either. I also doubt that Westmorland & Furness away on the other side of those fells will usher in any improvement over there.
If you fancy a laugh try this, The Pothole Song by Seamus Moore.
It’s on Youtube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfJYb9beRmA
GOM 51⅒ 1645 words
PS I just discovered this which I posted concerning GOM 41 on 2023/03/09
I’m still trying to establish for myself where Bearthwaite is so that I don’t create any really gaping ‘plot holes’. There are bits of information through out the entire GOMT that help me. Times to Carlisle, Workington, the odd distance to other places too. I suppose I imagine it to be on the edge of the ‘fells’ south of Dalston and east of Bassenthwaite.
Regards
Eolwaen
1 Pins, slang for legs.
2 A bob, slang for a shilling. In pre decimal currency a shilling was what became five new pence 7 or 8 US cents at the time.
3 Huntingdonshire is a local government district in Cambridgeshire, England. It was historically a county in its own right.
4 Cuniculture, the reference here is to the culture or raising of rabbits, Oryctolagus cuniculus. The play on words causing the snigger is due to cunni being the plural of cunnus which is Latin for vulva. Many words relating to female genitalia are recognisably derived from cunni in English as used in the UK.
5 Rabbit on about, to continue talking about something that is not interesting to the person you are talking to. In this usage Liam is not being serious mere using the opportunity to use a humorous pun.
6 Haylage is a 40-60% moisture content hay that is preserved by fermentation. It is easier to make than dry hay.
7 Trashing, the practice of tying a goat up in or near a patch of weeds, often nettles around an agricultural implement that hasn’t been moved for some time. Goats are browsers and will eat the top few inches off what ever is there. Moving them around from one such patch to another before returning them to have another go at the first one will eventually clear all the weeds.
Section Honey, small sections of thin beeswax foundation sheet within some form of container that has been placed in the hive by the beekeeper for the bees to draw out into comb and fill with honey.
8 Beebell, a name originally used by the media for Bearthwaite Business Enterprises Ltd, BBEL, and subsequently adopted by Bearthwaite Business Enterprises Ltd. It is the holding company for all collectively owned assets of the Bearthwaite valley coöperative that every adult resident of Bearthwaite holds an equal share in.
9 Sections take a variety of forms. Round sections are the easiest to produce because bees are reluctant to fill the corners of rectangular or square sections. Having said that, sections are probably one of the hardest forms of saleable honey that a beekeeper produces. It is not at all uncommon for a beekeeper to place a box of thirty two sections onto a hive only to find that only three or four are of saleable quality when collected at the end of the season because the rest have not been filled.
10 Pent, dialectal paint.
11 HM Local Government Act 1972 came into force on the first of April 1974.
12 Force, this is an ancient use of the word. Used as a noun in this sense it means a powerful waterfall. There are any number of such permanent forces in northern England that are popular tourist destinations. Examples would be Aira Force and Force Jumb.
13 Prial, a prial is an informal shortening of pair royal, a set of three cards of the same denomination in some card games.
14 The craic or crack, a term for news, gossip, fun, entertainment, and enjoyable conversation.
15 Taoiseach, the Irish Prime Minister.
16 Manx, pertaining to the Isle of Man.
17 The Secretary of State for the Home Department, more commonly known as the Home Secretary, is a senior minister of the Crown in the Government of the UK and the head of the Home Office. The position is a Great Office of State, making the home secretary one of the most senior and influential ministers in the government. The incumbent is a statutory member of the British Cabinet and the National Security Council. The position is known as the interior minister in many other nations.
18 According to legend St. Patrick (circa 387–460 or 492 AD) banished all snakes from Ireland, chasing them into the sea of a cliff top after they attacked him during a 40 day fast atop a hill.
19 See VolcanoIsland Honey – part 4.
20 CNC, Computer Numerically Controlled. CNC.
21 Propolis is a resinous mixture that honey bees produce by mixing saliva and beeswax with exudates gathered from tree buds, sap flows, or other botanical sources. It is used as a sealant for unwanted open spaces in the beehive Propolis is used in traditional medicine and in varnish for stringed instruments of the violin family.
22 PDB, Paradichlorobenzene. 1,4, dichlorobenzene, also known as Para-Moth.
23 Gey, very.
24 Nary, non standard form of not, informal, dialectal and widely used.
25 Downbank, down hill, deteriorating.
26 Bags on legs, udders on legs, pejorative term for the black and white Holstein Friesian cows that make up 80 percent of the entire UK herd.
27 A skep is a traditional beehive made of coiled rope made of straw or similar material like bracken or willow. Few bee keepers, and no serious commercial bee keepers, use them today. They are illegal in the US and other countries too because the combs can’t be easily inspected for diseases. Having said that there are bee keepers who use them and they can put up very reasonable justifications for their use. The matter is not a black and white issue.
28 WBC hive, William Broughton Carr (WBC) published details of this hive in 1890. It is the classic telescopic English hive. Difficult and expensive to make and equally so to operate it takes 10 BS frames. It is a double walled hive and is used more for nostalgic and aesthetic reasons than any other.
29 Langstroth hive devised by the Reverend Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth (1810–1895).
30 For a comprehensive review of hives and beekeeping generally have a look at http://www.dave-cushman.net/.
31 Dadant hive devised by Charles Dadant (20 May 1817 – 26 July 1902).
32 Tim Rowe, developer of the Rose hive, used to be the one sized box hive. A National hive with all boxes 190mm deep.
33 The tap, the taproom. Tap rooms are many different things to many folk often connected with breweries. Some are like ‘Brown Cafés’ in the Netherlands, family friendly spaces where many different activities occur. Most in the UK are nearer to the one in the Green Dragon, but without the sawdust and the dogs these days.
34 Geordie is a nickname for a person from the Tyneside area of North East England and the dialect used by its inhabitants, also known in linguistics as Tyneside English or Newcastle English. There are different definitions of what constitutes a Geordie.
35 Crowner, archaic usage of the modern word coroner.
36.Sheet piles are, as the name suggests, narrow sheets of material, usually designed with an angular profile and with interlocking edges, so that multiple sheet piles can be fitted together to form a structurally sound and often watertight wall or barrier. They are usually made of steel but wood can also be used, as can precast reinforced concrete and even certain types of plastic. Steel sheet piles are often manufactured using sustainable recycled metals and, where soil chemistry requires it, they are sprayed with an anti-corrosive coating.
37 Spiling is a traditional technique used in temperate regions of the world for the prevention of erosion to river and stream banks. Willow spiling is currently used in the United Kingdom. Live willow rods are woven between live willow uprights and the area behind is filled with soil for the willow to root into.
38 Last orders, a traditionally announced phrase indicating that within a few minutes the bar will no longer accept requests for a drink.
39 The shysters and bean counters planning their next bank robbery. That translates as the solicitors [lawyers] and accountants planning their next financial (legal but sharp) coup that will take serious money from their opposition.
40 A keep net, is used to store fish in the water till the angler is ready to weigh or release them. They are used for temporarily holding the catch and commonly used in match fishing. They are long and designed to be able to hold a lot of fish.
41 Backend, refers to the back end of the year. Autumn [US fall].
42 Carp is an expensive delicacy all over central and eastern Europe and further east than that too. It’s traditional to eat carp for Christmas dinner in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland. But some families in Hungary, Austria, Germany and Croatia eat it at Christmas time too.
43 Cumbria County Council was responsible for the more strategic local services of the county, including education (schools, both primary and secondary), libraries and youth services, social services, highway maintenance, waste disposal, emergency planning, consumer protection, and town and country planning for minerals matters, waste and for highways.
Comments
A Thouroughly Enjoyable ...
...Continuation of GOMT 50,, thank you Eolwaen. I love the format of updating the changes and progress in the village by having those involved "briefing" those present in the Green Dragon on that Saturday evening with guests and visitors present too. Obviously there are no secrets in the way that the Bearthwaite folk work together, as a community, to the benefit of all and, since the community, to all intents and purposes is virtually self-governing, they are definitely working for themselves and not a money-grubbing corporate group of shareholders.
Brit