eric robson's borrowdale...

THE
REGATTA
AND
GREAT ENGAGEMENT
ON THE
CELEBRATED LAKE OF DERWENT

Fort Joseph, near the Block House on Pocklington's Island, will be attacked immediately on the finishing of the boat race, and signals, during the attack, will be made from the battery upon Europa Point, with heavy metal, which will be repeated by the mountains.

Sounds like a grand day out. But unfortunately you've missed it. It took place on Friday the twenty-eighth of August, 1789 and was orchestrated by one of Borrowdale's more colourful characters.

Joseph Pocklington was a banker from Newark with vast reserves of money and very little taste. The good citizens of Borrowdale looked on with a mixture of wonderment and horror as ‘King Pocky' as he was known set about spending his fortune on unfortunate projects.

He bought Derwent Island and built a monstrous house in the middle of it. Also a pretend church, a copy of the Castlerigg stone circle, a fake druidic stone and a gun battery complete with live cannon which he loved to have fired so that he could hear them echoing from the surrounding mountains. When Pocky was holding court, peaceful Borrowdale was not.

Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge all berated him for his ‘puerilities' and ‘gingerbread erections'. But the final straw was when he created a ghost tree by stripping most of the branches from a venerable oak and painting what was left with whitewash. ‘Art beats nature' was Coleridge's verdict spoken with his tongue so firmly in his cheek that he must have resembled a hamster.

Not that any of this criticism bothered the good banker. He responded by buying the Bowder stone and having a hole cut through its base so that visitors could lie down underneath the massive chunk of rock and shake hands with the ancient crone he employed as the stone's guardian. For a few pence a time, of course.

Business is business.