Workington
Starting at Siddick on the "Way of the Ironmasters", the land was all reclaimed from the sea. The lake on your left was original sea marsh. Beyond the lake above the sea cliff runs the railway path to Seaton and Cockermouth, part of the C2C route, covering the site of the Burgh Walls coastal fort now buried by the railway embankment. In the early stages of planning this cycle route Sustrans proposed the construction of a replica catapult to fire Hillman Imps over the lake to crash in a heap of ruined cars on the lower railway! The hills on the right, the seaward side, are in fact slag heaps and if you come across Jem Southam's recent photographic exhibition you will see how extraordinary this artificial coastline is. Just south of the junction between the two railway paths the route curls backward and forwards in a landscape sculpture designed by Mark Merror to create a point of interest in this derelict cutting. As you cross the River Derwent you will see a branch running along the river. This was opened to Cockermouth (1847), and if you follow this you will come to the lighthouse which forms the start of this branch of the C2C, with its panoramic view of the Lakes.
A potted history
Once the centre of the steelmaking industry, Henry Bessemer developed his revolutionary blast furnace here in 1857; at one stage its rolling mills produced rails for railways in almost every country in the world. By 1909 all the local works - Maryport, Oldside, Derwent, Moss Bay and Harrington - had merged into the Workington Iron and Steel Co. and after a final hectic period through the Great War the industry was worked out. From 1930 a single integrated "Combine" survived at Workington, but the last Bessemer "blow" was in 1975, the blast furnace shut down in 1982, and the rolling mills in 2007, when the work was transferred to Scunthorpe. If you have time to wander down to the coast you will walk below a wholly man-made cliffscape, where the sea beats against slag and the detritus from making rails sent all over the world from Bolivia to India, and from Scotland to Capetown. Echoes from the steel heart of Britain's industrial zenith. www.armidalecottages.co.uk / armidalecotts@hotmail.com
Accommodation
| Morven House Hotel, Siddick Rd, Workington, Cumbria CA14 1LE | |
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01900 602118, www.morvenguesthouse.com / cnelsonmorven@aol.com |
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Have you stayed here? Let us know! |
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| Armidale Cottages, 29 High Seaton, CA14 1PD 01900 63704, | |
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Have you stayed here? Let us know! |
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Route information
In Workington itself the route runs through a car park on the old station site, which makes a convenient stopping point for shopping, before continuing to Distington. Here the once tranquil railway path has been blighted by the new A595 trunk road and the route that you follow is the result of long and not wholly satisfactory battles with the Highways Agency. You pass briefly through Lowca where coal was mined for centuries, locomotives were manufactured and a chemical works set up to develop coal by-products in 1911. This was famous for being shelled by German submarines in 1915. You rejoin the coast at Parton, below yet another Roman fortlet. It is worth stopping here to reflect that this minute cluster of buildings started life as an anchorage used by the Romans. By Elizabethan times small merchant vessels were trading from here carrying Moresby's coal to Chester. A cluster of industries developed in this little valley including saltpans, glassworks, the Lowca Engineering Company, which made the first locomotive for the Maryport and Carlisle Railway, which had to be shipped north by barge. There was also a large tannery squeezed in, but soon the whole area was taken over by a colliery which mined through the Parton Drift Tunnel, carrying the coal away by horse drawn waggonway to Whitehaven Port. We follow this tramway for a quite magnificent section of the ride with views north on a clear day to the Galloway Coast, above the mainline railway cut into the cliff below, right above the sea. 
