On Something

by Hilaire Belloc

This triangle of Lancashire, so cut off from the west and from the east, had for its base a barrier that completed its isolation. That barrier was the marshy valley of the Mersey. It could be outflanked only at its extreme eastern point, where the valley rises to the hundred-foot contour line. From that point the valley rises so rapidly within half a dozen miles into the eastern hills that it was dry even under primitive conditions, and the opportunity here afforded for a passage is marked by the topographical point of Stockport.

By that gate the main avenues of approach still enter the county. Through this gap passed the London Road, and passes to-day the London and North-Western Railway. It was this gate which gave its early strategic importance to Manchester, lying just north of it and holding the whole of this corner.

Historians have noted that to hold Manchester was ultimately to hold Lancashire itself. It was not the industrial importance of the town, for that was hardly existent until quite modern times: it was its strategic position which gave it such a character. The Roman fort at the junction of the two rivers near Knott Mill represented the first good defensible position commanding this gate upon the south-east.

To enter the county anywhere west of the hundred-foot contour and the Mersey Valley was, for an army deprived of modern methods, impossible: a little organized destruction would make it impossible again.

Two artificial causeways negotiated the valley. Each bears to this day (at Stretford and at Stretton) the proof of its old character, for both words indicate the passage of a "street," that is, of a hard-made way, over the soft and drowned land. Stretford was but the approach to Manchester from Chester—and Manchester thus commanded (by the way) the two south-eastern approaches to the county, the one natural, the other artificial. The approach by Stretton gave Warrington its strategic importance in the early history of the county; Warrington, the central point upon the Mersey, standing at a clear day's march from Liverpool, the port on the one hand, and a clear day's march from Manchester on the other. It was from Warrington that Lord Strange marched upon Manchester at the very beginning of the Civil War, and if by some accident this stretch of territory should again be a scene of warfare, Warrington, in spite of the close network of modern communications, would be the strategic centre of the county boundary.

So one might take the units out of which modern England has been built up one by one, showing that their boundaries were fixed by nature, and that their local separation was not the product of the pirate raids, but is something infinitely older, older than the Empire, and very probably (did we know what the Roman divisions of Britain were) accepted under the Empire. So one might prove or at least suggest that the strategical character of the English county and of its chief stronghold and barriers lay in an origin far beyond the limits of recorded history. To produce such a study would be to add to the truth and reality of our history, for England was not made nor even moulded by the Danish and the Saxon raids. The framework is far, far older and so strong that it still survives.

THE RELIC

It was upon an evening in Spain, but with nothing which that word evokes for us in the North—for it was merely a lessening of the light without dews, without mists, and without skies—that I came up a stony valley and saw against the random line of the plateau at its head the dome of a church. The road I travelled was but faintly marked, and was often lost and mingled with the rough boulders and the sand, and in the shallow depression of the valley there were but a few stagnant pools.

The shape of the dome was Italian, and it should have stood in an Italian landscape, drier indeed than that to which Northerners are accustomed, but still surrounded by trees, and with a distance that could render things lightly blue. Instead of that this large building stood in the complete waste which I have already described at such length, which is so appalling and so new to an European from any other province of Europe. As I approached the building I saw that there gathered round it a village, or rather a group of dependent houses; for the church was so much larger than anything in the place, and the material of which the church itself and the habitations were built was so similar, the flat old tiled roofs all mixed under the advance of darkness into so united a body, that one would have said, as was perhaps historically the truth, that the church was not built for the needs of the place, but that the borough had grown round the shrine, and had served for little save to house its servants.

When the long ascent was ended and the crest reached, where the head of the valley merged into the upper plain, I passed into the narrow first lanes. It was now quite dark. The darkness had come suddenly, and, to make all things consonant, there was no moon and there were not any stars; clouds had risen of an even and menacing sort, and one could see no heaven. Here and there lights began to show in the houses, but most people were in the street, talking loudly from their doorsteps to each other. They watched me as I came along because I was a foreigner, and I went down till I reached the central market-place, wondering how I should tell the best place for sleep. But long before my choice could be made my thoughts were turned in another direction by finding myself at a turn of the irregular paving, right in front of a vast façade, and behind it, somewhat belittled by the great length of the church itself, the dome just showed. I had come to the very steps of the church which had accompanied my thoughts and had been a goal before me during all the last hours of the day.