People of the Sacred Valley

A former haunt of Druids, Viking invaders and magical sword-wielding Celtic warriors, the historic and mysterious Derwent Valley is a beautiful fragment of England’s ravishing Lake District.

But besides forming part of a glorious Unesco World Heritage Site, the towns and villages along the sixty-mile course of its remarkable river have experienced traumatic events, nurtured great heroes and endured despicable villainy.

People of the Sacred Valley tells of the heavy human price paid for creating of some of the world’s greatest art and literature, nurturing its most dangerous political ideas, guarding the world’s greatest empire, the birth of one of the most significant religions and the battle to build Europe’s biggest conservation organisation, all of which happened in this tiny corner of Britain.

Also among the twenty-one real-life stories in this book:

• A corrupt moneybags accidentally made a town beautiful as he sneakily bought up an election.
• The pioneering doctor gave everything she had to establish a hospital for the poor, only to find her own Government was killing the people she aimed to save.
• An innocent German miner was bludgeoned to death by a jealous Cumbrian mob after he and his Continental colleagues left the local girls swooning.
• A cautious General narrowly escaped a firing squad after he volunteered to carry out a King’s impossible military fantasy.
• A brilliant girl who was savagely beaten by her tyrant father grew up to start the tabloid tradition of woman-hating columnists.
• A lecherous slaveowner’s pretensions to gentility collapsed when two girls he imported for his own pleasure escaped into the night…
People of the Sacred Valley features famous names such as John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Sara Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Hardwicke Rawnsley, Emperor Hadrian, Sheila Fell and Hugh Walpole.
Queen Elizabeth I, William Pitt the Elder, Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, William Hazlitt, John Maynard Keynes and L.S.Lowry play major roles.
It also shines new light on others whose stories have become obscured by time such as William Senhouse, Dame Edith Brown, Eliza Lynn Linton, Richard Graham, Viscount Preston, Sir John Mordaunt, Arthur Pigou, Celia Fiennes, Cumbria’s Viking invaders and …the barmaid of the Royal Oak Hotel, Keswick.