Huge & Mighty
£9.99 inc. tax
Why does Cumbria produce such remarkable people?
What inspired the visionary poet but selfish man, William Wordsworth, or cause the brilliant
storytelling but tragic love affair of Beatrix Potter?
How did Cumbria’s challenging character trigger Fetcher Christian’s Mutiny on
the Bounty, motivate the rebels who almost toppled Henry VIII or drive
Maryport’s feuding Ismay family to build the Titanic - and sink it?
Drawing on research, letters, diaries and archaeology this book explores a
13,000-year timespan. It examines how the hauntingly beautiful Lake District, its
pioneering Altlantic-facing origins and its rich Celtic culture helped forge some
extraordinarily original people.
How did the first feminist, Lady Anne Clifford, defy a king to inherit four
Cumbrian castles, or colourist Winifred Nicholson triumph over scorn from male
critics? This book suggests Cumbria’s distance from London, its deep artistic and
religious traditions and its mountainous impregnability endowed Cumbrians
with a distinctly different outlook to South-East England.
This book charts how Cumbria’s Iron Age Queen Cartimandua rose through
political mastery, but fell in a sex scandal, how Druids wielded terrifying power
along the River Derwent, why William the Conqueror steered clear of invading
Cumbria in 1066, and the fateful role it played for Suffragists and Suffragettes.
We meet the Cockermouth rent collector who masterminded the Gunpowder
Plot, discover how devout Lake District geologist Adam Sedgwick trained Charles
Darwin, only for his student to devastate Christianity, and visit German refugee
Kurt Schwitters who transformed world art from “idyllic” Elterwater.
We learn how Charles I’s “rabble of gentility” lost the Civil War against the
disciplined defenders of Cockermouth, how Ewanrigg inspired Wilkie Collins’s
The Woman In White, how the hills and a libertine aristocrat with 43 children
from 15 mistresses helped make JMW Turner our greatest painter, and how
Ambleside helped cigar smoking, ear trumpet waving Harriet Martineau become
a world famous journalist.
This is the story of how an extraordinary place made an exceptional people.
£9.99
