Paul Eastham is Chronicling Cumbrians
Why does Cumbria produce such remarkable people? How did England’s most thinly-populated county nurture some of the world’s greatest poets, painters, scientists, rebels and storytellers?
Local author Paul Eastham has delved into Cumbria’s past in an attempt to explain why our beautiful county, with its towering mountains, silent lakes and deep woods has fostered its great inhabitants on to even greater feats.
After a lifetime working for mendacious national newspaper editors, Paul quit his job three years ago and moved to this uncanny place he has always loved. His assumption he would spend his days in the garden was off target when he started delving into neglected, misremembered and forgotten aspects of local history.
After hours trawling through letters, biographies, diaries and archaeology Paul realised that a rather large group of Cumbrian residents, who were not always good people, have changed the world in many ways.
His book, Huge and Mighty Forms, takes readers through his fascinating findings over 28 chapters that cover everything from the king-defying feminist Lady Anne Clifford to the religious fanatic and Gunpowder Plotter Thomas Percy or the Ismay family whose egotistical drive built the Titanic (and the internal feud that sank it).
Despite a sprinkling of Viking and Anglo Saxon incomers, Cumbrians are derived from the Atlantic Celts who sat out the last ice age around the Basque Region of Spain before heading north around 13,000 years ago. William Wordsworth’s’ visionary brilliance drew on this Celtic pantheism although his egotism destroyed his sister and daughter.
Iron Age Queen Cartimandua may have been toppled because she underestimated the Celtic Carvetii tribe but William the Conqueror did not make the same mistake when he left Cumbria well alone in 1066.
Why did Fletcher Christian lead a mutiny on the bounty? Was it because his sponsor Captain Bligh seemed to threaten his proud aristocratic pretensions?
Huge and Mighty Forms offers answers to all of the above and can be bought at the New Bookshop, the Moon & Sixpence coffee house or Percy House Gallery on Main Street, Cockermouth. Buy it online by Googling Huge and Mighty Forms freewebstore or clicking here.
