The Route

Click on the thumbnails for photo-credits and further links.

‘And among the hills, dales and mountains he came on, and convinced many of the Eternal Truth’ ¹

The Journals do not provide a detailed itinerary of Fox's route in 1652-1653. He moves from place to place, and from event to event: ‘And from thence I came to Preston Patrick Chapel: where there was a great meeting appointed’, ‘And after this I went to Lancaster with Judge Fell, to the Sessions’. He almost never mentions the road, or indeed the scenery.

Pendle Hill

Walney Channel: mud & stones

Brigham Church and yew trees

There are exceptions: Pendle Hill, the Glastonbury Tor of the North, is a striking example. Elsewhere the closest he comes to mentioning the environment is when it involves people or actions: when he is face down in Walney mud being pelted with stones by James Lancaster’s wife, or when he arrives at Brigham churchyard to find James Lancaster speaking under a yew tree. But as for roads, we are left to try and work out for ourselves how he may have got from A to B, or from C to D.

Where did he stay?

It is clear that, like most 17th-century travellers, he planned his route, if only on a very short-term basis, by where he could find ‘entertainment’,² whether this was provided by inns or by friends of Friends. There are casual mentions of incidents at ale-houses, or ‘the ale-wife woman’. He seems to have had enough money to pay for this. When he has to sleep rough, he tells us: ‘And the next day we [he and Richard Farnsworth] passed on; and at night we got a little ferns or brackens & lay upon a common’.^a But once he had established a basic network, he was clearly passed on from person to person: ‘And from thence I passed with an old man, James Dickson’s, that was convinced of the truth that day — and died in the truth — to his house; and from thence I came to James Taylor’s, of Newton in Cartmel in Lancashire’.^b

They all seem to have taken it as an obligation to take in travellers: ‘at night we came to a Country house; and there was no alehouse near, but they desired us to stay all night, where we had a good service there for the Lord, declaring his truth amongst them’.^c (In Catholic times, ‘Entertaining the Stranger’ was one of the Seven Corporal Works of Mercy.) Part of the function of a large household like Swarthmoor was to be hospitable: ‘our house being a place open to entertain ministers and religious people at, one of George Fox his Friends brought him hither’.³ The Fells were not alone in this: it was an accepted characteristic of the English gentleman ‘to maintaine honorable hospitality’.⁴ Funeral eulogies in contemporary Lancashire and Cheshire praise this:

Secondly, he was to be commended, for his Hospitalitie. It is well knowne, his house was seldome without strangers. I may in some sort compare him to Abraham and vnto Lot; they sate in their gates & at the doores of their tents, to inuite strangers. And this gentleman desired his friends & neighbours to come to his house, and they were vnto him welcome guests. In this respect he was like vnto Job, he did not eate his morsels alone.⁵

Margaret Fell not only took in Fox, she welcomed James Naylor and Richard Farnsworth when they came looking for him: ‘after James Naylor and Richard Farnsworth followed him, and enquired him out, till they came to Swarthmore, and there stayed a while with me at our house, and did me much good’.⁶ Other travellers confirm that one stayed with friends or relations where one could, and at inns for the rest of the time. We know the names of the inns (and often their landlords and landladies) in the 17th century all the way from London to Kendal.

How did he travel, and what were the roads like?

He seems to have walked or ridden a horse. When he goes from Kendal to Underbarrow to Miles Bateman’s, ‘as I came on the way several people came along with me and great disputings I had with them, especially with Edward Burrough’,^d which suggests they were all on foot. When he is attacked by the inhabitants of Walney, Margaret Fell sends a horse for him to ride back on, but ‘as I was riding the horse knocked his foot against a stone and stumbled that it shook me so and pained me: as it seemed worse to me than all my blows, my body was so tortured’.^e Most of the time he does not mention whether he walked or rode. We only find that he had a horse for his journey round the Cumbrian coast when he mentions casually that ‘I passed away about 2 miles to another great steeplehouse of Wilki[n]son’s that stood in a field [Embleton], and the people was mightily affected, and would have putt my horse in the steeplehouse yard; and I said, “No, the priest claims that; carry him to an inn”’. ^f

One would like to be able to calculate how far he could travel in a day, but his timekeeping is not often precise enough for that. Bootle to Brigham is 36 miles, but did he do it in one day (on horseback) or two? When Ralph Thoresby made his expedition on horseback from Leeds to West Cumbria in 1694, he appears to have covered about 37 miles a day, if he was not distracted by antiquarian pursuits. Even crossing the Lake District by Wrynose and Hardknott Passes, which he found terrifyng, he managed 37 miles, though partly because there was no hostelry before Calder Bridge. On foot, one First Day (Sunday) Fox tells us he went from Newton-in-Cartmel to Staveley and back (3.6 miles each way), and then in the afternooon to Lindale and back (2.4 miles each way: he says ‘two or three miles’), a not excessive walk, though he did combine it with a major altercation after the service at Staveley when he was thrown over the church wall but persisted with the conversation in the local alehouse, and another more successful intervention at Lindale.

Road conditions in the North West could be difficult if not downright dangerous at the best of times. Three travellers in 1634 came down the main route from Penrith to Kendal

through such wayes as wee hope wee never shall againe, being no other but clim(b)ing and stony, nothing but Bogs and Myres o'r the tops of those high hills so as wee were enforc’d to keepe these narrow, loose, stony, base wayes, though never so troublesome and dangerous ... On wee went for Kendall, desiring much to be releas’d of those difficult and dangerous wayes, which for the space of eight miles travelling a slow marching pace we pass'd over nothing but a most confus’d mixture of Rockes and Boggs.⁷

This is perhaps unfair, as it describes the road through Shap which later held up Prince Charles’ army in the ’45; but Celia Fiennes in 1698 found the road from Lancaster ‘to Kendall in Westmoreland over steepe stony hills all like rocks 6 miles to one Lady Middleton’ where they were able to detour through her park ‘on to the road againe much of which was stony and steep far worse than the Peake in Darbyshire’. However, further north ‘most of the way was in lanes when I was out of the stony hills’. The stones were a problem because they wore out the horses’ shoes very quickly. When she makes a side-trip to Windermere along the main road from Kendal to Bowness, she remarks that the lanes are so narrow the only wheeled vehicles are ‘very narrow ones like little wheel-barrows that with a horse they convey their fewell and all things else; they also use horses on which they have a sort of pannyers’.⁸ Coaches were not common, as they were in the South, though Lady Anne Clifford used hers to transport her female attendants over what even now seem highly unsuitable roads. When she became too old to travel on horseback, she used a horse litter; when she was housebound she loaned it out to a neighbour with a broken leg.⁹

All this makes it likely that he stuck to the beaten track. The post-Romantic image of him striding over the hilltops by untrodden ways is purely our fantasy. He was in any case looking for people, preferably in large numbers, not out to enjoy the scenery. There is no reason to believe that he did not behave like any other 17th-century traveller, planning his way by known routes, and when he decided to strike off into the unknown, putting himself in the hands of people who knew the way. His route moves from person to person (even if in the Yorkshire Dales he does not always remember their names) and (established) meeting-place to meeting-place, whether it is a chapel of ease, a market, or a hillside. We need to find out what these tracks were.

How do we know?

We look at these in detail on other linked pages; they are summarised here. The obvious evidence would be from maps. Unfortunately the maps which were around in the 1650s look strange to us because they do not show roads. They do however show rivers and bridges. As David Harrison points out,¹⁰ the existence of bridges implies a road system. His cartographical evidence, however, leaps straight from the medieval Gough Map to Ogilby (1675), who concentrates on the main (troop-carrying?) roads. Ogilby does however show all the turn-offs, and say where they are going to: ‘to Hestbanck and the sands’, ‘to Applebey’, ‘to Cockermouth ye worst way’, and rather too often in Lancashire, ‘to the Moss’. When minor roads appear, tentatively with Thomas Kitchin (1767-1770), and then in a rush with John Cary (1794), they reveal a complex network which we can fairly confidently use, provided we discount the later improvements of the turnpike system. (For all these cartographers, go to the page on Road Maps.)

If going by the main road does not sound very adventurous, we should remember that, as we have seen above, ‘main’ is a relative term. Besides this, some of the roads we take for granted now were not there then. The main North Road out of Lancaster did not follow its modern route along the A6 (now superseded by the M6), but branched right at Carnforth to go through Burton in Lonsdale and then up what is now a very minor road indeed through Crosscrake and Natland to Kendal. The modern stretch of the A6 from Carnforth to Milnthorpe was a moss (marsh), only conquered in 1819-1822 by Macadam. It still has unexpected teeth-rattling subsidence bumps by Beetham. The road from Wensleydale to north Craven was along the Roman road from Bainbridge to Gearstones, a main turnpike from 1751, now demoted to a ramblers’ route when the inhabitants of Hawes got a completely new turnpike (now the B6255) in 1795. The road from Westmorland to Durham, the A66, however, still runs along the old Roman road.

Then there are accounts by other travellers in roughly the same period. To mention only a few, the historian and antiquary William Camden visited Lancashire and Cumbria in 1582; the intrepid Celia Fiennes covered most of Britain on horseback in the late 17th century, visiting Lancashire, the Lake District, and the rest of Cumbria in 1698. In 1724, Daniel Defoe of Robinson Crusoe fame, was not impressed by Westmorland, ‘a County eminent only for being the wildest, most barren, and frightful of any that I have passed over in England, or in Wales’. Closer to home, in 1691-2, the Reverend Thomas Machell, vicar of Kirkby Thore in Westmorland, rode round the countryside making copious notes for what he hoped would be the definitive history and topography of the area. He died before he could bring this project to completion, and it had to wait until 1963 for a published version, but his manuscripts in Carlisle Record Office contain the unexpected delight of thumbnail sketches and ground plans of buildings including the now lost chapel at Firbank Fell. For more on these writers and others, and links to their works, go to the page on Travellers.

More information can be found in official documents, minutes of local government (including parishes) which was tasked with keeping the road system passable, in both senses, and in the documentation, including Acts of Parliament, around the later Turnpike Acts. Many of these are collected or summarised by the historian John F. Curwen in his Records Relating to the Barony of Kendale: Volume 3 and The Later Records Relating to North Westmorland or the Barony of Appleby.¹¹.

An invaluable resource for the area is the magisterial Old Cumbria Gazetteer by Martin and Jean Norgate.

1.     Margaret Fell The Testimony of Margaret Fox concerning her Late Husband George Fox prefaced to the 1694 edition of the Journal.    Return

2.     There is a very good chapter on this and its reciprocal nature in Ben Jonson's Walk to Scotland edited James Loxley, Anna Groundwater, and Julie Sanders (Cambridge University Press, 2015, paperback 2017) pages 171-198, Appendix 3, ‘Scenes of Hospitality’.     Return

3.     Margaret Fell The Testimony of Margaret Fox concerning her Late Husband George Fox. Fox does not mention who this was.    Return

4.     William Segar Honor military, and ciuill contained in foure bookes (London: Robert Barker, 1602) 230.    Return

5.     Richard Eaton A sermon preached at the funeralls of that worthie and worshipfull gentleman, Master Thomas Dutton of Dutton, Esquire who yeelded to nature the 28. of December. By Richard Eaton Bachelour of Diuinitie, and pastor of Great Budworth in Cheshire (London: John Legatt for Samuel Mann, 1616) 21-22.    Return

6.     Margaret Fell The Testimony of Margaret Fox concerning her Late Husband George Fox.    Return

7.     Being a Relation of a Short Survey of 26 Counties, briefly describing the Citties and their Scytuations, and the Corporate Towns and Castles Herein. Observed in a Seven Weeks Journey begun at the City of Norwich, By a Captaine, a Lieutennt. and an Ancient, All three of the Military Company at Norwich British Library Additional MSS. 34754, pages 19–20, quoted by Curwen 'Records of Kendale: The main roads', in Records Relating to the Barony of Kendale: Volume 3 edited John F. Curwen (Kendal: Titus Wilson 1926) 1-20. Online at http://www.british-history.ac.uk/kendale-barony/vol3/pp1-20.     Return

8.     The Journeys of Celia Fiennes edited Christopher Morris (London: The Cresset Press, 1949) 190, 192. She is worried about her horses, ‘for these stony hills and wayes pulls off a shooe presently [almost at once] and wears them as thinn that it was a constant charge to shooe my horses every 2 or 3 days’, though fortunately somewhere near Ambleside she manages to find a very good smith, who ‘did shooe them so well and so good shooes that they held some of the shooes 6 weeks; the stonyness of the wayes all here about teaches them the art off makeing good shooes and setting them on fast’ [197].     Return

9.     The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford edited D.J.H. Clifford (Stroud: Sutton, 1990; pb Cheltenham: History Press, 2009 and reprints) 189 etc; 261-2.     Return

10.     David Harrison The Bridges of Medieval England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004) 222-230.     Return

11.    'Records of Kendale: The main roads' in Records Relating to the Barony of Kendale: Volume 3 edited John F. Curwen (Kendal: Titus Wilson, 1926) 1-20, online at British History Online; The Later Records Relating to North Westmorland or the Barony of Appleby edited John F. Curwen (Kendal: Titus Wilson, 1926) 3-8, online at British History Online.     Return