Whitehaven" Cumbria (With St Bee's Head) W.H. Bartlett

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An Antique Line Engraving of "Whitehaven" (With St Bee's Head) Engraved by J. C.Redway from an original drawing by W. H. Bartlett Produced in London. Circa 1840 This item comprises the engraving as described above in good condition. This is a genuine antique being over 150 years old - NOT a modern reproduction. NB: This item is being offered, suitably mounted, ready for framing FORMAT Overall Size:- 8 " x 11" including the margin. Image Size:- 5" x 7" approx About the Subject... Whitehaven is a small town and port on the coast of Cumbria, England, which lies equidistant between the county's two largest settlements, Carlisle and Barrow-in-Furness. Located on the west coast of the county, outside the Lake District National Park, Whitehaven includes a number of former villages, estates and suburbs, such as Woodhouse, Kells, Mirehouse and Hensingham. Although there was a Roman fort at Parton, around 1.2 miles to the north, there is no evidence of a Roman settlement on the site of the present town of Whitehaven. The area was settled by Irish-Norse Vikings in the tenth century. The area name of Copeland, which includes Whitehaven, indicates that the land was purchased from the Kingdom of Strathclyde, possibly with loot from Ireland. The Priory of St Bees owned the village of Whitehaven until Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries in 1539. Before 1715 the parish of St. Bees included Whitehaven. The town was largely the creation of the Lowther family in the 17th century. In 1630 Sir Christopher Lowther purchased the estate and used Whitehaven as a port for exporting coal from the Cumberland Coalfield, particularly to Ireland. In 1634 he built a stone pier where ships could load and unload cargoes. Whitehaven grew into a major coal mining town during the 18th and 19th centuries and also became a substantial commercial port on the back of this trade. Daniel Defoe visited Whitehaven in the 1720s and wrote: "... grown up from a small place to be very considerable by the coal trade, that it is now the most eminent port in England for shipping off of coals, except Newcastle and Sunderland and even beyond the last. They have of late fallen into some merchandising also, occasioned by the strange great number of their shipping, and there are now some considerable merchants; but the town is yet but young in trade." John Paul Jones led a naval raid upon the town in 1778 during the American War of Independence; it was the last invasion of England by some definitions. The town has links to many notable people: Jonathan Swift, who claimed that an over-fond nurse kidnapped him and brought him to Whitehaven for three years in his infancy; Mildred Gale, grandmother of George Washington; and William Wordsworth, who often came into town to visit his family. The town's fortunes as a port waned rapidly when ports with much larger shipping capacity, such as Bristol and Liverpool, began to take over its main trade. Its peak of prosperity was in the 19th century when West Cumberland experienced a brief boom because haematite found locally was one of the few iron ores that could be used to produce steel by the original Bessemer process. Improvements to the Bessemer process and the development of the open hearth process removed this advantage. As with most mining communities the inter-war depression was severe; this was exacerbated for West Cumbria by Irish independence which suddenly placed tariff barriers on the principal export market. The Harbour lost its last commercial cargo handling operation in 1992 when Marchon ceased their phosphate rock import operations. A new masterplan for the harbour was prepared by Drivers Jonas and marine consulting engineers Beckett Rankine with the objective of refocussing the town on a renovated harbour. The key to the masterplan was the impounding of the i... read more

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