Great British Railway Journeys (2010–…): Season 3, Episode 20 - Heysham to Sneafell - full transcript
In 1840, one man transformed
travel in Britain.
His name was George Bradshaw,
and his railway guides inspired
the Victorians to take to the tracks.
Stop by Stop
he told them where to travel,
what to see and where to stay.
Now, 170 years later,
I'm making a series of journeys across
the length and breadth of the country
to see what of Bradshaw's Britain
remains.
My Bradshaw's Guide has now steered me
towards the stunning natural beauty
of the Cumbrian coast.
In these pans,
the proximity of the sea,
the rich mineral deposits
and a network of railways
has led to industrial development
centred around the mines.
On today's part of my journey,
I'll be exploding the myths
behind Cumbrian slate...
(air horn blows)
That was a much bigger bang
than I'd expected.
Submerging myself
in a top-secret world...
Not much room here.
And discovering why Victorians
loved the Hanging Town.
This is a short drop rope.
(Carmichael) Short drop meaning
that they would be strangled.
They danced on the end of the rope.
I began my trip in Berwick-upon-Tweed
and I'm travelling through
the spectacular counties of Cumbria,
Northumberland and Lancashire,
finishing by sailing
the Irish Sea to the isle of Man.
Today's leg of the journey
starts in Kirby-in-Furness
and then hugs the west coast,
circumscribing Morecambe Bay,
culminating in the City of Lancaster.
My Bradshaw's says that people here
are engaged in the slate,
iron and copper mines.
But I'm intrigued by this entry
under Kirby-in-Furness.
It says, "This place
has a population of 1,666
employed in the blue slate quarries."
That sounds like quite a lot of people
in Victorian times.
I'm not sure I even know
what blue slate is.
We arrived at Kirby-in-Furness,
perched on the West Cumbrian coast.
This area is renowned
for its famous blue slate,
which has been coveted
since Roman times.
But it was during the 19th century
that production ballooned.
We come to the Burlington quarry
to find out more from Ian Kelly.
You've brought us
to a fantastic vantage-point
and I see slates all around us
but I'm in search of blue slate.
- Do you have blue slate?
- Lots of blue slate here.
There's a few pieces there.
This entire mountain
that we're looking at here
- where the quarry is is full of it.
- (Carmichael) What's blue slate used for?
The product is still used
for roofing slate. We make quite a lot.
We also make architectural products.
Wall cladding, flooring, kitchen tops.
Anything you can basically think of that
in a building we can make from slate.
As towns and industries grew in Britain
in the Victorian era,
so the clamour for good quality building
materials increased dramatically.
The question was how to transport
the vast volumes of slate
out of the quarry directly to customers
throughout Britain.
Historically, the Furness area
had always been isolated,
with the only road across the
treacherous sands of Morecambe Bay.
So the local landowners built a railway,
including the spectacular
and still functioning Arnside Viaduct,
to allow for shipping
either by rail or sea.
After two years of construction,
the railway opened in 1846.
There were quarrying slate by hand.
They would make it
into what we call clogs of slate,
which is a piece of slate they can
manage by hand and with pulleys.
They would load it
onto a railway bogie,
which they would then push by hand
or pull with a pony
through tunnels
and out to the production area.
When it's been made
into roofing slates
they'd use another rail mechanism,
which was an incline,
which was a slope where loaded bogies
would go down
and empty bogies would come up.
This would take the slate approximately
a mile down into Kirby village
where the railway station is.
Gravity-powered railways were amongst
the earliest tracks in Britain,
relying on the weight
of the full wagons going downhill
to pull the empty wagons up.
These open-sided trucks,
or “bogies” as they were known,
delivered the slate
straight to the railway station.
I'm keen to see more
of this historic quarry,
which remains fully operational.
That is an impressive sight, I must say.
This is huge.
You can see by the volume of rock
that been extracted over the years
there's a lot gone out.
Rumour has it that it is one of the
deepest man-made holes in Europe.
It looks like they've worked it down
by layers over the years.
What's happened is they've worked
one level of the quarry floor
and when that's been finished,
they go down
and put a sink in,
which is sinking into the floor
if you like, dropping down,
take another level out.
If you look to the east end,
you can see the different levels
of where they've gone down
over the years
into the bottom of the quarry.
In Bradshaws day the slate was
wrested from the rock face
using only hand tools and explosives.
The Victorian miners worked hard
to ensure
that the blocks remained
as intact as possible
in order to provide
the best-quality raw material.
Today, just 150 people
work a total of seven quarries
with a high degree of mechanisation.
But Victorian quarrying techniques
are still practised today
and recognised to be highly effective.
We try to be as gentle
with rock as we possibly can.
We're using a technique there
called diamond wire sawing.
They did use wire saws in here
a long time ago,
but this is a more modern technique
used in the Italian marble quarries.
It involves drilling holes into the rock
to meet up,
threading a diamond-encrusted
wire around them,
then spinning it and drawing it back
like a cheese wire.
Ian's taking me to the very heart
of the quarry to show me
a rather more spectacular
Victorian extraction technique
that's still practised today.
(air horn sounds)
That was a much bigger bang
than I'd expected.
That little bit of gunpowder.
Quite a blast.
- It is quite loud.
- That's been a success?
- That's done what you wanted.
- Yes. Yes.
In the 19th century,
roof slates were made
by dressing or hand working
large blocks of rock.
Unusually, this quarry's slates
have traditionally had a curved end,
earning Kirby residents
the nickname “Roundheads”.
The current hand dresser, John Earl,
is going to let me have a stab
at dressing a roof tile
in the old-fashioned way.
A few pointers
might be useful here, John.
OK.
(John) Grip it like that with your hand
and your thumb on there.
- OK.
- If you just start in there.
- (Carmichael) Just take that edge off?
- Yes.
(Carmichael) Whoops.
Keep your finger out of the way.
- Oh!
- You're alright.
I'm alright, am I? Just keep going.
That's not quite as beautiful
as yours, is it?
The hardest bit
is getting a straight line.
Once you get that, you're away.
I'm getting the hang of it now.
I'm getting the hang of that now.
(both laugh)
Right, here goes.
- There we go.
- There we... (laughs)
It's not quite like yours, is it?
Oh, dear. Oh, dear.
Thank you very much indeed.
Having got the chop
from my tile dressing job,
I'm how following the route
that the slate would have taken,
south down the rails
to the port of Barrow-in-Furness.
I'm told that this line provides
one of the most delightful
railway journeys in England,
sandwiched between the Irish Sea
to the west
and glimpses of the Lake District
to the east.
These mountains produce
more than just blue slate.
As my Bradshaw's puts it poetically,
"Iron is now forged in this vicinity
where the stag, wolf and wild boar
were formerly hunted."
Local landowners and entrepreneurs put
in a railway line to Barrow-in-Furness
and there they constructed a dock
and a steelworks
and they used that steel to build ships.
During Queen Victoria's reign,
Britain became the most powerful
trading nation in the world.
At the heart of this was the successful
development of steam technology.
It powered not only the railway network,
but also the ships that operated
on the major trade routes
to India, South Africa,
the Orient and Australia.
British shipyards
came to dominate the world,
as they pioneered the use of iron
and steel in shipbuilding.
With iron ore in the Cumbrian hills,
Barrow-in-Furness grew from a tiny
hamlet to a major shipbuilding town,
home to the largest steelworks
in the world by 1876,
earning itself the moniker
“the Chicago of the North“.
The dockyard is still going strong,
famous for building
a very special type of boat,
first constructed here
in the Victorian period.
Submarines.
We been granted very special access
to the top-secret Devonshire dock.
My guide is Brian Hurley.
It is enormous, isn't it?
It's like the last scene
of a James Bond movie, isn't it?
It is. It's a phenomenal building.
It's 17 storeys tall.
It's probably the biggest open space
that we have in the country.
At the moment from what I can see
you've got two boats, as you call them,
two submarines, under construction.
How are they getting on?
Behind you you can see Audacious.
This is boat four.
She's in what we call open outfit.
On the south build line we have Artful,
which is now into closed outfit
where we're now finishing systems
and getting ready to hand them across
to the commissioning team.
Astonishingly, submarines
have been built at Barrow since 1886,
when the shipyard build
its first submersibles for the Danish.
Earning a growing reputation
for quality built boats,
the shipyard claimed
at the tum of the century
to be the only one capable
of designing, building,
engining and arming its own vessels.
What is the challenge
of making a submarine?
The challenge of making a submarine
is putting all the things
that you wouldn't want to put together
into one tin can.
You've got a nuclear reactor,
you've got a power station, a hotel.
High-voltage systems, high pressure
systems, all inside a confined space.
It's one thing you wouldn't want to do.
You'd want as much space as possible.
Barrow won the contract for
the Royal Navy's first five submarines.
Built and launched in utmost secrecy
in 1901,
the HMS Holland 1 could dive
to a depth of only 100 feet
and had to surface every day.
But the Admiralty
was sufficiently convinced
to continue
with submarine development.
Six decades later the shipyard
constructed Dreadnought,
Britain's first
nuclear-powered submarine,
launched in 1960 by the Queen.
I name this ship Dreadnought.
May God bless her
and all who sail in her.
(cheering)
- (man) Hip, hip!
- (crowd) Hooray!
Do you have a sense working here
of the heritage of submarine building?
Is it something you're aware of?
Certainly from my perspective,
I'm the fourth generation
in shipbuilding.
My father actually worked for me
on Ambush as a paint supervisor.
Before that, his father was a rigging
supervisor on one of the boats.
Before that, his father
was a machinist in the shipyards.
So, yes.
The heritage and the legacy
rest quite heavy with me
and I'm quite emotive about
the whole build of submarines in Barrow.
As I walk beside the leviathan
that is HMS Audacious,
it's riveting to recall that all this
began with Victorian entrepreneurs.
Their construction
of the Furness Railway in the 1840s
to carry iron ore, slate and limestone,
allowed for the immense expansion
of the deep water port at Barrow.
Being underneath the submarine
you get another idea of how big it is.
Things have really come on
over the years.
Yes, certainly.
The Holland class submarine that we
first built was just over 20ft long.
The Astute class submarine
is just over 300ft long.
I've been given the rare privilege
of going on board
the nuclear-powered submarine HMS Ambush
as she lies in the water undergoing
final tests before her sea finals.
Not much room here.
Fantastic, isn't it?
You enter a different world.
They should warn me.
Not much headroom here.
No, it's quite confined inside.
Where are we now?
We are in the control room
of HMS Ambush.
All the information
would be displayed here.
The control room isn't
the traditional control room
that you expect to see
with the periscope.
We have externally mounted masts
and digital input.
What you see, the screens,
are the digital outputs from the masts.
I'm rather amazed to discover
that fist-century submarines
don't necessarily
have traditional periscopes.
The Astute class are
the first British submarines
to use high-spec
video technology instead.
- The commanding officer sits here.
- The commanding officer's chair.
Has a perfect view of the whole scene
in the control room.
Fantastic. Beautifully air-conditioned.
Wires everywhere.
So, this is the Senior Rates Mess?
That's the senior
non-commissioned officers on the boat.
How many are they?
There is approximately 30 on board.
Thirty. Not so big for 30, is it?
What would they do in here?
(Brian) They'd spend
some of their recreational time,
eating and drinking
within this facility.
- Obviously in shifts.
- In shifts.
The guys work four-on-four-off,
so they rotate through this facility.
How many months is the same crew at sea?
A patrol could last three months
and that's based on the amount of food
that the submarine can carry.
Before I leave, I want to meet someone
who's spent his whole working We
as a welder on the submarines.
Joe Murphy.
They told me to look you up.
They told me you're a bit of a welder.
I've been welding 40 years.
I've been teaching for another six.
Teaching others to weld.
It's nice to pass on your skill
to somebody else.
How do you feel about this work
you've done here?
The boats that we build
are the highest specification.
Built to the highest specification
in the world.
Nobody else builds them
like we build them.
Oh, it's great.
I get a lot of satisfaction
from what I do now.
What we're trying to instil in the lads
is pride. Pride in the work.
That's everything. Neatness.
When I look at welding
and see the neatness,
I see the concentration
that these lads have put into that.
Neatness equals pride.
And that's what it's all about.
Pride in your work.
Pride keeps our crews safe.
That's what keeps the water out.
This town depends on this shipyard.
Without the shipyard, there's no...
That town would fold behind it.
Let's hope that never happens.
A real privilege to meet you.
- Thank you very much.
- Bye.
Thank you. Bye now.
I was once the political boss
of the armed forces.
We always found it humbling
to meet the people
whose energy and skill
provide the nation with its submarines.
For my overnight stop,
I'm taking the West Coast Main Line
and crossing the border into Lancashire,
headed for Lancaster.
The city's port was one of the busiest
in Britain during the 19th century.
The railway station is inspired
by the towering 13th-century fortress
beneath which it nestles.
My Bradshaw's refers to Lancaster Castle
Station as being the northern terminus
of the Lancaster and Preston railway.
"The station is a very neat building
erected of fine, white freestone."
I love the fact that it's been made
to look like a castle.
I'm staying overnight at a Bradshaw
recommendation, the King's Arms.
But he's not the only great Victorian
who took a shine to the place.
Bradshaw says that Charles Dickens
stayed herein 1857
and remarked that his orders were,
“Promptly executed as all orders are
in this excellent hotel.“
- Which floor is that?
- Fourth. Enjoy your stay.
- Thank you very much. Good night.
- Good night, sir.
Sleeping where Dickens once did
was certainly novel.
With the arrival of morning,
I'm up early to head into town.
My breakfast order was promptly executed
and that's put me in a good mood
for a new day.
The late-19th century saw an increase
in leisure time for all,
with the five-and-a-half day week
becoming standard.
Lancashire, as the gateway
to the Lake District,
experienced an upsurge
in Victorian tourists,
as train companies such as
the Furness Railway widened their remit
from ferrying industrial traffic
to embrace the carrying
of fare-paying passengers.
My next destination was a favourite
location for Victorian visitors.
Although perhaps,
as /am led to believe,
not for the most savoury of reasons.
Lancaster Castle, my Bradshaw's says,
"Standing on a hill west of the town,
it includes the Shire court,
County jail, four or five old towers,
of which the dungeon, 90ft high,
is the oldest."
And to my amazement,
I see that even today
it has a notice describing it as
"Her Majesty's Prison Lancaster Castle".
We come to Hadrian's Tower,
one of a number of towers
that defended the castle,
to meet Steve Alien,
my guide to this ancient bastion.
- Hello, welcome to Lancaster Castle.
- It's a magnificent building.
How old is Lancaster Castle?
Well, there's been a fortification here
since Roman times.
But it was the Normans who rebuilt it
and turned it into a stone fortress.
They controlled Lancashire and what is
now South Lakeland area from here.
How long has it been a prison?
It's been a prison
really since Norman times.
It has a history stretching back
nearly 900 years.
The prison here is the oldest
working prison in the country,
or rather it was up until March 2011
when it closed.
It still receives and dispatches
prisoners to criminal court here.
The court housed within the castle
began dispensing justice in 1800
and is the oldest continuously working
criminal court in the country.
Visitors could be forgiven for thinking
this more like a torture chamber
looking at the shackles
hanging from the walls.
These chains were often used
for prisoners
who were sentenced
to transportation to Australia.
Shockingly, Lancaster Crown Court
sent many hundreds of men, women
and even children Down Under.
Steven wants to show me another room
in this labyrinthine fortification
that has a macabre history.
What took place there, he believes,
is the real reason that Victorians
flocked to the castle.
- So, here we are now in the Drop Room.
- Drop Room.
Yes, a kind of en-suite
execution facility.
It was part of the rebuild
and extension of the castle here.
This is a short drop rope. A noose.
Short drop, of course,
meaning that they would be strangled.
That's right.
They danced on the end of the rope.
Indeed. Three, four, five, six minutes.
This would be in full view
of thousands of people
who would come to the town
to see the execution.
In Victorian times,
public hangings were very popular.
People would come from miles around
to watch.
Special trains were laid on,
as the poet AE Houseman recalled
about his native Shropshire.
"They hang us how in Shrewsbury jail.
The whistles blow forlorn."
"And trains all night groan on the rail.
To men who die at dawn."
This window is also a door.
It's a wooden door disguised
on the outside as a stone window.
The door opens inward...
and the party step out
onto a temporary wooden platform
that's been erected the night before.
Son of keep in an easy-to-assemble
kit version for these special occasions.
Outside, this vast crowd of people
have all packed into
every available bit of space.
In fact, the vicar was able to charge
people to stand or perch up on the roof
so that they could get a good
gallery view seat of the operation.
And even today you can see the holes
in the wall of the castle
where the super-structure was attached.
The noose would be put around
the condemned man's neck.
Then a hood put over the head.
The sheriff or his deputy
would read a proclamation.
The priest would say a prayer.
And then the officials would withdraw.
The executioner stepped down,
pulled the lever, released the bolts
and we're in business.
Lancaster Court is said
to have sentenced
more people to swing from the rope
than any place outside London,
earning it the epithet
“the Hanging Town“.
But as the century progressed,
the authorities realised that the crowds
were more entertained
than deterred
from committing hideous offences.
So a Parliamentary Act of 1868
finally removed executions
to within the prison walls.
With all the dramatic landscapes
that I'm travelling through,
it's hardly surprising that I'm passing
over some spectacular bridges.
Bradshaw's attention
was caught particularly
by the one I'm approaching now,
just east of Lancaster
on my last leg of today's journey.
My Bradshaw's says, "Further up
the River Lune is the aqueduct bridge,
with five semi-circular arches
each with a 70ft span."
"This magnificent undertaking conveys
the Lancaster Canal over the Lune
and under one of the arches
the North Western Railway line
passes up to Yorkshire."
With a wonderful description like that,
of railway and aqueduct,
I just have to see it.
Before he turned his attention
to the railways,
Bradshaw had made his mark in 1830
by publishing a guide to the canals
of Lancashire and Yorkshire.
Throughout the 18th and 19th century,
the canals were the lifeblood
of the Industrial Revolution.
At a time when the roads
were poor and haphazard,
a single barge could transport
ten times the cargo of a horse and can.
Britain was the first country to acquire
a nationwide canal network.
Over 4,000 miles of waterway
at its height.
This led to some stunning engineering
and architectural breakthroughs.
The Lune Aqueduct is just such
an achievement.
I'm taking a barge on the
Lancaster Canal over the River Lune
to meet canal expert Andrew Tegg.
Setting foot on this aqueduct towering
above the river, I'm very impressed.
This is a fantastic achievement quite
early in the industrial Revolution.
Very much so.
This was conceived and constructed
in the late 18th century.
It's a great example
of the engineer's art and ability,
at that stage mainly constructed
using rudimentary machinery
and manpower.
(Carmichael) What was the purpose
of the canal?
(Andrew) The canal was constructed to
link the coal fields in the Wigan area
with the South Lakeland area
for limestone.
So it was known as
the black and white canal.
(Carmichael) Because I always
bang on about railways,
I'm in danger of forgetting
that before the railway revolution
there was a canal revolution,
there was a canal mania.
There was. In the late 18th century,
you know,
canal technology was the future.
It was the High Speed Two
of its generation.
It really revolutionised transport.
Canals like this
were very much an example of that.
They made the movement of goods
very, very profitable.
Therefore, investors were very keen
to invest in such schemes.
On its completion in 1797, the aqueduct
was inscribed with a Latin motto,
which translates, “Old needs are served,
far distant sites combined.“
"Rivers by art to bring new wealth
are joined."
But the golden age of water transport
came to an end in the mid-19th century
and it was none other than
the more competitive railway network
that drove it into disuse.
But thanks to conservation
and tourism over the last few decades,
the British canal network is starting
again to display scope and beauty.
That is glorious.
That is so elegant, isn't it?
That is a thing of beauty.
It absolutely excels my expectation
when we were walking up there.
It's... Well, it is so 18th century,
isn't it?
It's just... Just magnificent.
On this leg of the journey
I feel I've seen the span
of the Industrial Revolution.
From an 18th-century aqueduct
to a 21st-century
nuclear-powered submarine.
The common thread is the vision
of brilliant engineers,
the son of people
that George Bradshaw admired,
the son that I revere.
On the next step of my rail trip,
I'll be visiting an island
steeped in smuggling history. ..
He stepped onto his ship
and his trousers split
discharging the tea
into the harbour water below him.
Discovering Britain's fear of enemy
spies in the Second World War...
The British Government
told the Manx Government
to tell all the boarding-house keepers
and hoteliers
to move out with ten days' notice.
And scaling the heights
to view seven kingdoms...
We're in the Guinness Book of Records
for having
the oldest working tram in history.
travel in Britain.
His name was George Bradshaw,
and his railway guides inspired
the Victorians to take to the tracks.
Stop by Stop
he told them where to travel,
what to see and where to stay.
Now, 170 years later,
I'm making a series of journeys across
the length and breadth of the country
to see what of Bradshaw's Britain
remains.
My Bradshaw's Guide has now steered me
towards the stunning natural beauty
of the Cumbrian coast.
In these pans,
the proximity of the sea,
the rich mineral deposits
and a network of railways
has led to industrial development
centred around the mines.
On today's part of my journey,
I'll be exploding the myths
behind Cumbrian slate...
(air horn blows)
That was a much bigger bang
than I'd expected.
Submerging myself
in a top-secret world...
Not much room here.
And discovering why Victorians
loved the Hanging Town.
This is a short drop rope.
(Carmichael) Short drop meaning
that they would be strangled.
They danced on the end of the rope.
I began my trip in Berwick-upon-Tweed
and I'm travelling through
the spectacular counties of Cumbria,
Northumberland and Lancashire,
finishing by sailing
the Irish Sea to the isle of Man.
Today's leg of the journey
starts in Kirby-in-Furness
and then hugs the west coast,
circumscribing Morecambe Bay,
culminating in the City of Lancaster.
My Bradshaw's says that people here
are engaged in the slate,
iron and copper mines.
But I'm intrigued by this entry
under Kirby-in-Furness.
It says, "This place
has a population of 1,666
employed in the blue slate quarries."
That sounds like quite a lot of people
in Victorian times.
I'm not sure I even know
what blue slate is.
We arrived at Kirby-in-Furness,
perched on the West Cumbrian coast.
This area is renowned
for its famous blue slate,
which has been coveted
since Roman times.
But it was during the 19th century
that production ballooned.
We come to the Burlington quarry
to find out more from Ian Kelly.
You've brought us
to a fantastic vantage-point
and I see slates all around us
but I'm in search of blue slate.
- Do you have blue slate?
- Lots of blue slate here.
There's a few pieces there.
This entire mountain
that we're looking at here
- where the quarry is is full of it.
- (Carmichael) What's blue slate used for?
The product is still used
for roofing slate. We make quite a lot.
We also make architectural products.
Wall cladding, flooring, kitchen tops.
Anything you can basically think of that
in a building we can make from slate.
As towns and industries grew in Britain
in the Victorian era,
so the clamour for good quality building
materials increased dramatically.
The question was how to transport
the vast volumes of slate
out of the quarry directly to customers
throughout Britain.
Historically, the Furness area
had always been isolated,
with the only road across the
treacherous sands of Morecambe Bay.
So the local landowners built a railway,
including the spectacular
and still functioning Arnside Viaduct,
to allow for shipping
either by rail or sea.
After two years of construction,
the railway opened in 1846.
There were quarrying slate by hand.
They would make it
into what we call clogs of slate,
which is a piece of slate they can
manage by hand and with pulleys.
They would load it
onto a railway bogie,
which they would then push by hand
or pull with a pony
through tunnels
and out to the production area.
When it's been made
into roofing slates
they'd use another rail mechanism,
which was an incline,
which was a slope where loaded bogies
would go down
and empty bogies would come up.
This would take the slate approximately
a mile down into Kirby village
where the railway station is.
Gravity-powered railways were amongst
the earliest tracks in Britain,
relying on the weight
of the full wagons going downhill
to pull the empty wagons up.
These open-sided trucks,
or “bogies” as they were known,
delivered the slate
straight to the railway station.
I'm keen to see more
of this historic quarry,
which remains fully operational.
That is an impressive sight, I must say.
This is huge.
You can see by the volume of rock
that been extracted over the years
there's a lot gone out.
Rumour has it that it is one of the
deepest man-made holes in Europe.
It looks like they've worked it down
by layers over the years.
What's happened is they've worked
one level of the quarry floor
and when that's been finished,
they go down
and put a sink in,
which is sinking into the floor
if you like, dropping down,
take another level out.
If you look to the east end,
you can see the different levels
of where they've gone down
over the years
into the bottom of the quarry.
In Bradshaws day the slate was
wrested from the rock face
using only hand tools and explosives.
The Victorian miners worked hard
to ensure
that the blocks remained
as intact as possible
in order to provide
the best-quality raw material.
Today, just 150 people
work a total of seven quarries
with a high degree of mechanisation.
But Victorian quarrying techniques
are still practised today
and recognised to be highly effective.
We try to be as gentle
with rock as we possibly can.
We're using a technique there
called diamond wire sawing.
They did use wire saws in here
a long time ago,
but this is a more modern technique
used in the Italian marble quarries.
It involves drilling holes into the rock
to meet up,
threading a diamond-encrusted
wire around them,
then spinning it and drawing it back
like a cheese wire.
Ian's taking me to the very heart
of the quarry to show me
a rather more spectacular
Victorian extraction technique
that's still practised today.
(air horn sounds)
That was a much bigger bang
than I'd expected.
That little bit of gunpowder.
Quite a blast.
- It is quite loud.
- That's been a success?
- That's done what you wanted.
- Yes. Yes.
In the 19th century,
roof slates were made
by dressing or hand working
large blocks of rock.
Unusually, this quarry's slates
have traditionally had a curved end,
earning Kirby residents
the nickname “Roundheads”.
The current hand dresser, John Earl,
is going to let me have a stab
at dressing a roof tile
in the old-fashioned way.
A few pointers
might be useful here, John.
OK.
(John) Grip it like that with your hand
and your thumb on there.
- OK.
- If you just start in there.
- (Carmichael) Just take that edge off?
- Yes.
(Carmichael) Whoops.
Keep your finger out of the way.
- Oh!
- You're alright.
I'm alright, am I? Just keep going.
That's not quite as beautiful
as yours, is it?
The hardest bit
is getting a straight line.
Once you get that, you're away.
I'm getting the hang of it now.
I'm getting the hang of that now.
(both laugh)
Right, here goes.
- There we go.
- There we... (laughs)
It's not quite like yours, is it?
Oh, dear. Oh, dear.
Thank you very much indeed.
Having got the chop
from my tile dressing job,
I'm how following the route
that the slate would have taken,
south down the rails
to the port of Barrow-in-Furness.
I'm told that this line provides
one of the most delightful
railway journeys in England,
sandwiched between the Irish Sea
to the west
and glimpses of the Lake District
to the east.
These mountains produce
more than just blue slate.
As my Bradshaw's puts it poetically,
"Iron is now forged in this vicinity
where the stag, wolf and wild boar
were formerly hunted."
Local landowners and entrepreneurs put
in a railway line to Barrow-in-Furness
and there they constructed a dock
and a steelworks
and they used that steel to build ships.
During Queen Victoria's reign,
Britain became the most powerful
trading nation in the world.
At the heart of this was the successful
development of steam technology.
It powered not only the railway network,
but also the ships that operated
on the major trade routes
to India, South Africa,
the Orient and Australia.
British shipyards
came to dominate the world,
as they pioneered the use of iron
and steel in shipbuilding.
With iron ore in the Cumbrian hills,
Barrow-in-Furness grew from a tiny
hamlet to a major shipbuilding town,
home to the largest steelworks
in the world by 1876,
earning itself the moniker
“the Chicago of the North“.
The dockyard is still going strong,
famous for building
a very special type of boat,
first constructed here
in the Victorian period.
Submarines.
We been granted very special access
to the top-secret Devonshire dock.
My guide is Brian Hurley.
It is enormous, isn't it?
It's like the last scene
of a James Bond movie, isn't it?
It is. It's a phenomenal building.
It's 17 storeys tall.
It's probably the biggest open space
that we have in the country.
At the moment from what I can see
you've got two boats, as you call them,
two submarines, under construction.
How are they getting on?
Behind you you can see Audacious.
This is boat four.
She's in what we call open outfit.
On the south build line we have Artful,
which is now into closed outfit
where we're now finishing systems
and getting ready to hand them across
to the commissioning team.
Astonishingly, submarines
have been built at Barrow since 1886,
when the shipyard build
its first submersibles for the Danish.
Earning a growing reputation
for quality built boats,
the shipyard claimed
at the tum of the century
to be the only one capable
of designing, building,
engining and arming its own vessels.
What is the challenge
of making a submarine?
The challenge of making a submarine
is putting all the things
that you wouldn't want to put together
into one tin can.
You've got a nuclear reactor,
you've got a power station, a hotel.
High-voltage systems, high pressure
systems, all inside a confined space.
It's one thing you wouldn't want to do.
You'd want as much space as possible.
Barrow won the contract for
the Royal Navy's first five submarines.
Built and launched in utmost secrecy
in 1901,
the HMS Holland 1 could dive
to a depth of only 100 feet
and had to surface every day.
But the Admiralty
was sufficiently convinced
to continue
with submarine development.
Six decades later the shipyard
constructed Dreadnought,
Britain's first
nuclear-powered submarine,
launched in 1960 by the Queen.
I name this ship Dreadnought.
May God bless her
and all who sail in her.
(cheering)
- (man) Hip, hip!
- (crowd) Hooray!
Do you have a sense working here
of the heritage of submarine building?
Is it something you're aware of?
Certainly from my perspective,
I'm the fourth generation
in shipbuilding.
My father actually worked for me
on Ambush as a paint supervisor.
Before that, his father was a rigging
supervisor on one of the boats.
Before that, his father
was a machinist in the shipyards.
So, yes.
The heritage and the legacy
rest quite heavy with me
and I'm quite emotive about
the whole build of submarines in Barrow.
As I walk beside the leviathan
that is HMS Audacious,
it's riveting to recall that all this
began with Victorian entrepreneurs.
Their construction
of the Furness Railway in the 1840s
to carry iron ore, slate and limestone,
allowed for the immense expansion
of the deep water port at Barrow.
Being underneath the submarine
you get another idea of how big it is.
Things have really come on
over the years.
Yes, certainly.
The Holland class submarine that we
first built was just over 20ft long.
The Astute class submarine
is just over 300ft long.
I've been given the rare privilege
of going on board
the nuclear-powered submarine HMS Ambush
as she lies in the water undergoing
final tests before her sea finals.
Not much room here.
Fantastic, isn't it?
You enter a different world.
They should warn me.
Not much headroom here.
No, it's quite confined inside.
Where are we now?
We are in the control room
of HMS Ambush.
All the information
would be displayed here.
The control room isn't
the traditional control room
that you expect to see
with the periscope.
We have externally mounted masts
and digital input.
What you see, the screens,
are the digital outputs from the masts.
I'm rather amazed to discover
that fist-century submarines
don't necessarily
have traditional periscopes.
The Astute class are
the first British submarines
to use high-spec
video technology instead.
- The commanding officer sits here.
- The commanding officer's chair.
Has a perfect view of the whole scene
in the control room.
Fantastic. Beautifully air-conditioned.
Wires everywhere.
So, this is the Senior Rates Mess?
That's the senior
non-commissioned officers on the boat.
How many are they?
There is approximately 30 on board.
Thirty. Not so big for 30, is it?
What would they do in here?
(Brian) They'd spend
some of their recreational time,
eating and drinking
within this facility.
- Obviously in shifts.
- In shifts.
The guys work four-on-four-off,
so they rotate through this facility.
How many months is the same crew at sea?
A patrol could last three months
and that's based on the amount of food
that the submarine can carry.
Before I leave, I want to meet someone
who's spent his whole working We
as a welder on the submarines.
Joe Murphy.
They told me to look you up.
They told me you're a bit of a welder.
I've been welding 40 years.
I've been teaching for another six.
Teaching others to weld.
It's nice to pass on your skill
to somebody else.
How do you feel about this work
you've done here?
The boats that we build
are the highest specification.
Built to the highest specification
in the world.
Nobody else builds them
like we build them.
Oh, it's great.
I get a lot of satisfaction
from what I do now.
What we're trying to instil in the lads
is pride. Pride in the work.
That's everything. Neatness.
When I look at welding
and see the neatness,
I see the concentration
that these lads have put into that.
Neatness equals pride.
And that's what it's all about.
Pride in your work.
Pride keeps our crews safe.
That's what keeps the water out.
This town depends on this shipyard.
Without the shipyard, there's no...
That town would fold behind it.
Let's hope that never happens.
A real privilege to meet you.
- Thank you very much.
- Bye.
Thank you. Bye now.
I was once the political boss
of the armed forces.
We always found it humbling
to meet the people
whose energy and skill
provide the nation with its submarines.
For my overnight stop,
I'm taking the West Coast Main Line
and crossing the border into Lancashire,
headed for Lancaster.
The city's port was one of the busiest
in Britain during the 19th century.
The railway station is inspired
by the towering 13th-century fortress
beneath which it nestles.
My Bradshaw's refers to Lancaster Castle
Station as being the northern terminus
of the Lancaster and Preston railway.
"The station is a very neat building
erected of fine, white freestone."
I love the fact that it's been made
to look like a castle.
I'm staying overnight at a Bradshaw
recommendation, the King's Arms.
But he's not the only great Victorian
who took a shine to the place.
Bradshaw says that Charles Dickens
stayed herein 1857
and remarked that his orders were,
“Promptly executed as all orders are
in this excellent hotel.“
- Which floor is that?
- Fourth. Enjoy your stay.
- Thank you very much. Good night.
- Good night, sir.
Sleeping where Dickens once did
was certainly novel.
With the arrival of morning,
I'm up early to head into town.
My breakfast order was promptly executed
and that's put me in a good mood
for a new day.
The late-19th century saw an increase
in leisure time for all,
with the five-and-a-half day week
becoming standard.
Lancashire, as the gateway
to the Lake District,
experienced an upsurge
in Victorian tourists,
as train companies such as
the Furness Railway widened their remit
from ferrying industrial traffic
to embrace the carrying
of fare-paying passengers.
My next destination was a favourite
location for Victorian visitors.
Although perhaps,
as /am led to believe,
not for the most savoury of reasons.
Lancaster Castle, my Bradshaw's says,
"Standing on a hill west of the town,
it includes the Shire court,
County jail, four or five old towers,
of which the dungeon, 90ft high,
is the oldest."
And to my amazement,
I see that even today
it has a notice describing it as
"Her Majesty's Prison Lancaster Castle".
We come to Hadrian's Tower,
one of a number of towers
that defended the castle,
to meet Steve Alien,
my guide to this ancient bastion.
- Hello, welcome to Lancaster Castle.
- It's a magnificent building.
How old is Lancaster Castle?
Well, there's been a fortification here
since Roman times.
But it was the Normans who rebuilt it
and turned it into a stone fortress.
They controlled Lancashire and what is
now South Lakeland area from here.
How long has it been a prison?
It's been a prison
really since Norman times.
It has a history stretching back
nearly 900 years.
The prison here is the oldest
working prison in the country,
or rather it was up until March 2011
when it closed.
It still receives and dispatches
prisoners to criminal court here.
The court housed within the castle
began dispensing justice in 1800
and is the oldest continuously working
criminal court in the country.
Visitors could be forgiven for thinking
this more like a torture chamber
looking at the shackles
hanging from the walls.
These chains were often used
for prisoners
who were sentenced
to transportation to Australia.
Shockingly, Lancaster Crown Court
sent many hundreds of men, women
and even children Down Under.
Steven wants to show me another room
in this labyrinthine fortification
that has a macabre history.
What took place there, he believes,
is the real reason that Victorians
flocked to the castle.
- So, here we are now in the Drop Room.
- Drop Room.
Yes, a kind of en-suite
execution facility.
It was part of the rebuild
and extension of the castle here.
This is a short drop rope. A noose.
Short drop, of course,
meaning that they would be strangled.
That's right.
They danced on the end of the rope.
Indeed. Three, four, five, six minutes.
This would be in full view
of thousands of people
who would come to the town
to see the execution.
In Victorian times,
public hangings were very popular.
People would come from miles around
to watch.
Special trains were laid on,
as the poet AE Houseman recalled
about his native Shropshire.
"They hang us how in Shrewsbury jail.
The whistles blow forlorn."
"And trains all night groan on the rail.
To men who die at dawn."
This window is also a door.
It's a wooden door disguised
on the outside as a stone window.
The door opens inward...
and the party step out
onto a temporary wooden platform
that's been erected the night before.
Son of keep in an easy-to-assemble
kit version for these special occasions.
Outside, this vast crowd of people
have all packed into
every available bit of space.
In fact, the vicar was able to charge
people to stand or perch up on the roof
so that they could get a good
gallery view seat of the operation.
And even today you can see the holes
in the wall of the castle
where the super-structure was attached.
The noose would be put around
the condemned man's neck.
Then a hood put over the head.
The sheriff or his deputy
would read a proclamation.
The priest would say a prayer.
And then the officials would withdraw.
The executioner stepped down,
pulled the lever, released the bolts
and we're in business.
Lancaster Court is said
to have sentenced
more people to swing from the rope
than any place outside London,
earning it the epithet
“the Hanging Town“.
But as the century progressed,
the authorities realised that the crowds
were more entertained
than deterred
from committing hideous offences.
So a Parliamentary Act of 1868
finally removed executions
to within the prison walls.
With all the dramatic landscapes
that I'm travelling through,
it's hardly surprising that I'm passing
over some spectacular bridges.
Bradshaw's attention
was caught particularly
by the one I'm approaching now,
just east of Lancaster
on my last leg of today's journey.
My Bradshaw's says, "Further up
the River Lune is the aqueduct bridge,
with five semi-circular arches
each with a 70ft span."
"This magnificent undertaking conveys
the Lancaster Canal over the Lune
and under one of the arches
the North Western Railway line
passes up to Yorkshire."
With a wonderful description like that,
of railway and aqueduct,
I just have to see it.
Before he turned his attention
to the railways,
Bradshaw had made his mark in 1830
by publishing a guide to the canals
of Lancashire and Yorkshire.
Throughout the 18th and 19th century,
the canals were the lifeblood
of the Industrial Revolution.
At a time when the roads
were poor and haphazard,
a single barge could transport
ten times the cargo of a horse and can.
Britain was the first country to acquire
a nationwide canal network.
Over 4,000 miles of waterway
at its height.
This led to some stunning engineering
and architectural breakthroughs.
The Lune Aqueduct is just such
an achievement.
I'm taking a barge on the
Lancaster Canal over the River Lune
to meet canal expert Andrew Tegg.
Setting foot on this aqueduct towering
above the river, I'm very impressed.
This is a fantastic achievement quite
early in the industrial Revolution.
Very much so.
This was conceived and constructed
in the late 18th century.
It's a great example
of the engineer's art and ability,
at that stage mainly constructed
using rudimentary machinery
and manpower.
(Carmichael) What was the purpose
of the canal?
(Andrew) The canal was constructed to
link the coal fields in the Wigan area
with the South Lakeland area
for limestone.
So it was known as
the black and white canal.
(Carmichael) Because I always
bang on about railways,
I'm in danger of forgetting
that before the railway revolution
there was a canal revolution,
there was a canal mania.
There was. In the late 18th century,
you know,
canal technology was the future.
It was the High Speed Two
of its generation.
It really revolutionised transport.
Canals like this
were very much an example of that.
They made the movement of goods
very, very profitable.
Therefore, investors were very keen
to invest in such schemes.
On its completion in 1797, the aqueduct
was inscribed with a Latin motto,
which translates, “Old needs are served,
far distant sites combined.“
"Rivers by art to bring new wealth
are joined."
But the golden age of water transport
came to an end in the mid-19th century
and it was none other than
the more competitive railway network
that drove it into disuse.
But thanks to conservation
and tourism over the last few decades,
the British canal network is starting
again to display scope and beauty.
That is glorious.
That is so elegant, isn't it?
That is a thing of beauty.
It absolutely excels my expectation
when we were walking up there.
It's... Well, it is so 18th century,
isn't it?
It's just... Just magnificent.
On this leg of the journey
I feel I've seen the span
of the Industrial Revolution.
From an 18th-century aqueduct
to a 21st-century
nuclear-powered submarine.
The common thread is the vision
of brilliant engineers,
the son of people
that George Bradshaw admired,
the son that I revere.
On the next step of my rail trip,
I'll be visiting an island
steeped in smuggling history. ..
He stepped onto his ship
and his trousers split
discharging the tea
into the harbour water below him.
Discovering Britain's fear of enemy
spies in the Second World War...
The British Government
told the Manx Government
to tell all the boarding-house keepers
and hoteliers
to move out with ten days' notice.
And scaling the heights
to view seven kingdoms...
We're in the Guinness Book of Records
for having
the oldest working tram in history.