Something strange happens when you catch the train from Preston to Barrow-in-Furness. Somewhere north of Carnforth, you start feeling a bit posher, more rural, even slightly twee or fey (no, it’s not the Brief Encounter effect). You might also sense you’re a shade less humorous, a tiny bit less working class perhaps. For, on crossing the River Kent, you enter what, since 1974, has been a twilight zone of geography and identity. Though the towns on the other side – including Grange-over-Sands and Stan Laurel’s Ulverston – are still in the Historic County of Lancashire, they are, for many people, in a place called Cumbria, near the Lake District, “up there” where nothing is quite certain.
The borders of historic Lancashire started to really matter to me when I began to do research for a book about my home county. Writing a combined work of history, travelogue and memoir – I wanted a bit of all three – about this great territory, minus Liverpool and Manchester, especially, was unthinkable. Proper Lancashire has more than five million, mainly urban residents; the current county council area, which is largely rural, has less than a third of that. I couldn’t give away all those readers – or those two amazing cities.
