Bretherdale is today as it was in MacGregor’s time, a remote valley in the county of Westmoreland. It is served by a single road which enters at the east and peters out into a rough track passing over the fells to the neighbouring Borrowdale and is watered by Bretherdale Beck. The name means valley of the brother, but it is not known who the brother was or whether it was originally a family name. The lower parts of the valley are divided into walled fields while the upper slopes are moorland.
Though remote, in MacGregor’s time the valley was surprisingly populous with a number of farming families and their servants living in large stone houses built along the single road. Most of these are now derelict or converted into expensive country houses owned by businessmen and professionals working in industrial Yorkshire.
MacGregor visited Bretherdale while staying with Samuel Blessed in Kendal. Blessed had once been a leading light among the so-called Lakeland Poets and was now their sole-surviving member. His early poetry now unfashionable—as was MacGregor’s—he had taken to opposing the spread of railroads and textile mills and “all other manifestations of corruption and un-naturalness” as he wrote in a letter to The Manchester Echo in 1847.
Given their similarities it might be thought MacGregor and Blessed had a natural affinity, but MacGregor’s journals reveal he could barely stand the older gentleman, calling him:
…a glum portrayer of human misery who values the shepherd for his picturesque quality and regards the suffering of the poor as necessary for the excitement of charity among their betters.
Journal entry June 17th 1850
It is not clear whether this was MacGregor’s opinion before he visited Blessed or not. He knew Blessed by reputation, and they had met socially but had not spent time in his company. It is possible MacGregor sought out Blessed having become increasingly at odds with the rapid industrialisation of Glasgow and parts of Edenborough; but while there was similarity of concern there was no understanding between them on what might be done. Blessed had retreated to the Lakes while MacGregor wished to do battle and bring, if not change, recognition of what was being lost. This sentiment would ultimately find expression in This Iron Race.
The character of George Huck owes his existence to this antipathy, for while at Kendal, MacGregor, unable for politeness to break company with Blessed but wishing a respite from it, embarked on a number of lengthy rides about the district which he described thus:
It is picturesque and wild in relation to much of Anglia; yet it is also so much more proportioned to man than the highlands of Scotland, which dwarf us by comparison. This is a wildness a man might countenance without trepidation, whether born to it or not.
MacGregor Archive box ix 1850-51 King James University, Edenborough.
One such ride took him through the valley of Borrowdale and then by an upland track into Bretherdale where:
My guide, a well-made farmer’s son named George Hugh, shewed me a curious stone which he said marked the boundary between this parish and the next. It was much broken, as though split by lightning, and he described it as a Cloven Stone and said that as no parish had the whole it belonged to none and so the devil had taken it and would sit there at night. He then remarked that in older times any person not thought fit for Christian burial was brought here and the sodden ground preserved their bodies. He seemed pleased to show me their mortal remains but in haste I begged we continue on our way.
Having given the matter study, I believe the association with the devil arises from the stone resembling a cloven hoof.
Plainly the description by George Hugh struck a chord with MacGregor and a decade later would give rise to the character of George Huck and his affair with the tragic Elisabet.