Ivver Sen Find!
Ivver Sen is the Cumbrian dialect for ever since and is the title of a book published in 2008 and written by Keith Richardson who lives in Keswick. It has recently won the Lakeland Book of the Year competition and rightly so. This is a book about the people who have lived and worked the land over many years and who have kept alive the traditions of the hill farmers of Cumbria. These are fascinating stories of real Lakeland people and their lives and times which are both entertaining and warm, nostalgic and humorous. The book is illustrated by Keith Bowen's pastel drawings which are superb and capture the faces of the men and women who have helped to shape and preserve the landscape which we all love so much.
In the first chapter we meet Tommy 'Gravity' Graves and his pal Ike. Tommy and Ike met "on the fust day at school" and have been mates ever since. I used to live just near Tommy in Ambleside and can well remember the two pals taking their daily walk, weather permitting, around the village. At a shepherd's meet or on a show day Tommy would make a special effort and dress up with his checked cloth cap, check shirt with red tie beneath a grey sweater and a sports jacket with a hunting badge on the lapel. On a working day, or out with the hounds, he would have been wearing his old fell boots, all segs and laces and hard, dark brown leather with wonderful curving arcs to the soles. These are proper fell beutts and if Tommy had yan or two over the odds at a show or after a hunt it is said that it was impossible for him to topple over because the strength of his boots kept him upright. This was how he earned his nickname, 'Gravity' Graves. Tommy died recently and Lakeland has lost another of its great characters.
In other chapters we meet brother and sister Johnny and Betty Richardson who spent an idyllic childhood at Watendlath in the 1930s. There is also the dramatic story of Blencathra huntsman Johnny who was captured at Tobruk in 1941 and escaped from German POW camps in Italy and was pursued relentlessly by the Nazis across the Apennine mountain range. He finally made it back to Allied lines. I wonder if his familiarity with mountain landscape helped him in his bid for freedom - I like to think so.
And it's not just the people which make this book so special - meet Percy the Herdwick tup. Percy belongs to Jean and Derick Wilson who live at Douthwaite Head, Ullswater and is immortalised in another of Keith Bowen's wonderful pastel drawings. Percy was attacked by a carrion crow just after birth and was nursed back to health by Jean in the farmhouse kitchen so became a bit of a pet and acquired his name. There have been some notable award winning tups with equally splendid names - Dick's Permission, Derwent Once Again, Hollins Roamer, Nero, Nelson, Nautilus, Fearless, Wordsworth, Tyrant, Sherpa, Hercules, Goliath, Excalibur, Gatesgarth Ned, Westhead General, Saddleback Wedgwood, Watendlath Mussolini, Robinson Crusoe, Derwent Monarch and Hindscarth Merry John, to name but a few.
On the back cover of the book there is a passage from Eric Robson, the well-known writer and broadcaster who says "When it was decided to apply for World Heritage status for the Lake District it was on the basis of its cultural landscape. In this fine evocative book Keith Richardson puts figures in that landscape, figures that may reach for their pitchfork at the very mention of culture; but characters, faces that carry in their grain the Lake District's DNA."
This is what Reading Detectives is all about - an absolute gem of a book.
17 September 2009 from Mary Rossall
Finds
- On Lindale Hill
- Grange-over-Sands: The Story of a Gentle Township
- The Silent Traveller: A Chinese Artist in Lakeland
- Red Ike
- Cumbrian Privies
- Ethel Fisher's West Cumbrian Dialect titles
- The Embalmer's Book of Recipes by Ann Lingard
- Nella Last's Peace
- Riding the Stang by Dawn Robertson
- Life on the Fell - a pictorial chronicle of a Lakeland community
- About Scout Scar
- William Wilberforce - A Summer Diary 1779
- Beatrix Potter - the unknown years
- Smoke over Shap by Margaret Potter
- Songs of a Cragsman by George Basterfield
- The Grasmere Dialect Plays
- The Grizedale Experience: Sculpture, Art & Theatre in a Lakeland Forest
- An Atlas of The English Lakes
- How Hall. Poetry and Memories. A Passion for Ennerdale by Tom Rawling
- Stumpy, Hero of the Lakes
- The High Places by A. Harry Griffin
- The Highest House in Wathendale
- Kendal by Roger Bingham
- Secrets and Legends of Old Westmorland
- Reminiscences of Wordsworth Among the Peasantry of Westmorland by Canon Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley
- Little Gods by Jacob Polley
- A Lakeland Summer
- Hunter of Harter Fell by Joseph E Chipperfield
- And Nobody Woke Up Dead
- An accessible paradise
- The Fleming Family novels and Graham Sutton
- Excursion to Loweswater. A Lakeland Visit 1865
- Writing on the Wall
- Beyond Scafell by Alan Robinson
- Rogue Herries by Hugh Walpole
- Kendal In The Nineteenth Century by A Wainwright
- In There Somewhere
- The Bondwomen by W G Collingwood
- "Ah'd Gaa Back Tomorra!"
- A Cumbrian Copper by Ray Huddart
- The Arsenic Labyrinth by Martin Edwards
- Old Will Stories by Dudley Hoys
- The Shield Ring by Rosemary Sutcliff
- T'Bacca Queen by Theodora Wilson Wilson
- Furness and the Industrial Revolution
- The Shadow of Black Combe
- The Painted Letters of Percy Kelly
- Ivver Sen
- Lakeland in the 1830s
- Wasdale Climbing Book By Michael Cocker
- Riding High by Barbara Sneyd
- Deborah in Langdale
- Early Recollections of Grange
- Hazard's Way by Roger Hubank
- Yan, Tan, Tethera
- Talk of the Town
- Capturing the Mountains
- Hope On, Hope Ever
- Mildred Edwards: Our City Our People 1889 - 1978 Memories
- Lakeland Limericks
- Surrounding loveliness
- Haweswater by Sarah Hall
- Coast to Coast by Jan Minshull
- Sunshine To The Sunless
- Geese, cattle wallopers and secret Irish paths
- Anarchists, Angels and wet Bank Holiday Mondays
- A more unconventional kind of find...?
- Skiddaw Summit by Kathleen Jones
- Thorstein of the Mere: A Saga of the Northmen in Lakeland
- Wednesday Early Closing
- Smoke Across The Fell
- The Sand Pilot of Morecambe Bay
- The Chronicles of Boggerthwaite
- Carrock Fell
- Feet in the Clouds
- Hercules and the Farmer's Wife
- Shepherd's Warning
- The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices
- I've been so busy reading I haven't had time to blog!
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