Tallk: North Lakeland and Our Dialect

Contact

Name: Threlkeld Village Hall

Phone: 07931679654

Email: [email protected]

Website: https://www.threlkeldvillagehall.org

Address

Main Street
Threlkeld, Keswick, Cumbria,
Keswick
CA12 4RX

Price Notes

£3, pay on the door

Direction

Threlkeld is located off the A66 in Cumbria, 4 miles west of Keswick and 13 miles east of Penrith. From Penrith, junction 40 on the M6, follow signs to Keswick and after 13 miles turn right into Threlkeld Village. Do not follow your Sat Nav after this point - the Village Hall is located 0.5 mile along on the left hand side. From Keswick follow signs to Penrith and after 4 miles take the first left signposted Threlkeld. The Village Hall is 0.5 mile along on the right hand side.

Details

Local Cumbrian Eddie Wren gives a talk mixing dialect with local history and anecdotes, focusing on the village, the quarries over the valley, and the surrounding North Lakeland area. Apart from aiming to be informative about snippets of history, Eddie intends to add a lot of humour with anecdotes, explaining – for just one example – how a part-time butcher at the Quarry had his homemade sausages re-named ‘Pork’s High Explosives!’. Entry £3, pay on the door

After the very successful but rather experimental ‘dialect coffee morning,’ held here in the Public Room at Threlkeld last May, it became clear that there is still a lot of interest in our dialect in this area.  Eddie Wren has now been invited by Threlkeld Events to give a very different presentation, mixing dialect with local history and anecdotes, focusing on the village, the quarries over the valley, and the surrounding North Lakeland area.

Eddie, who in his police years gained the Cumberland dialect nickname of ‘Chitty’ – the local name for a wren – has a surname line which extends back at least as far as the 1520s to the Wrens of Briggus (Bridge House) in St Johns’-in-the-Vale, and several other ancestral lines in old Cumberland, dating back as far as 1180 AD/CE, although he will admit to having one other line that spent several generations in the wilds of Westmorland.  (Don’t tell anyone from Langdale that he wrote that!)

He was raised over the valley at the Threlkeld Quarry houses and the photograph used for the poster for this talk shows him more recently, outside his childhood home on Blencathra View, or – to give it the local name – t’ Top Row’, a name now defunct due to the newer houses in what was then the ‘back field’.

Having recently retired, he is planning to use every available opportunity to talk about dialect all round Cumbria and during this May he will be doing four other presentations about our unique heritage, in the west, north, and hopefully east of the county. Entry £3, pay on the door.

Event Details