It's rare for Cumbria to be in the news these days. No one is still hiding in its hidden valleys waiting for the latest guerilla skirmish with the plundering Normans, there's nobody on the watch for cattle rustlers from the debatable land over the Esk, and the Eden's flood plain is no longer a hot bed of sedition. But its west coast coal has divided opinion. This really is coastal coal as the seams slant downwards under the Irish Sea off Whitehaven. My maternal grandfather hewed the black stuff in these mines for many years before he moved east to the Eden Valley where he continued to work (this time in the open air) for the Lowther family – which might explain why I have more than a passing interest in these matters, born as I was in the same valley.
The controversy is such that The Conversation devoted two articles to it last week: Cumbrian coal: the 18th-century poem that perfectly encapsulated Whitehaven’s mining culture – Christopher Donaldson, Lancaster University, and Cumbria coal mine: how to understand local support for the new pit – Pancho Lewis, Lancaster University.
I went back to Whitehaven in the Summer (after an absence of some 55 years) and it was just as Pancho Lewis describes. It just looked abandoned. The coal mine will be good for the local economy at least in the short-term, but whether it goes ahead will depend on decisions made by people who've never been to Whitehaven, who don't care about its people, but will mouth platitudes about sustainable development nonetheless.
Respond