Where tourists seldom tread, part 17: three port towns freighted with history | England holidays

Ipswich

The place names are tiny poems: Silent Street, where sound was deadened with straw out of respect for convalescing soldiers during the Anglo-Dutch wars of the late 17th century; Smart Street, named after a benevolent merchant and library builder, William Smarte; Star Lane for Stella Maris, Our Lady of the Sea; Franciscan Way, leading to Grey Friars Road, evokes monkish times. Thirteen medieval churches rise above the old town, some in disrepair. Others are renascent: St Mary-le-Tower was recently redesignated as a minster in recognition of its value to the community and its 1,000 years of existence. That’s not so long ago in a town settled very early – perhaps as early as the fifth century, and established by the seventh – by the Anglo-Saxons.

You have to rummage to find historical treasures, which lie scattered, disguised, buried, bullied. The town has one of the best-preserved medieval cores in the country, but local planners wrapped it in roads, houses and, latterly, retail and leisure centres. Things are revealed by walking: the Tooley’s Court almshouses; lemon-hued, half-timbered Curson Lodge; gloriously pargeted Ancient House; an opulent town hall; and an ostentatious former post office on Cornhill, the main square. Seen from between the columns and arches of Lloyds Avenue, it could be Trieste or Venice, minus the overtourism and rip-off cappuccinos.

Erica, from The Friends of the Ipswich Museums, shows me around the mansion in Christchurch Park. Only four families ever lived here – the Withypolls, Devereux, Fonnereaus and Cobbolds – each associated with their times’ trades and trends: Atlantic merchant-adventurers, titled nobles, Huguenot linen traders, brewers and bankers. A standout exhibit is a patinaed oak overmantel rescued from a house on Fore Street that belonged to Thomas Eldred, who sailed round the world with Thomas Cavendish on his 1586-8 circumnavigation. The flagship Desire gave its name to a port on the Patagonian coast. In a corner hangs a portrait of Admiral Edward Vernon, who participated in the War of Jenkins’ Ear between Britain and Spain in the mid-18th century and the capture of Portobelo in Panama; he wore grogram cloth and is thought to have introduced toasts of rum-and-water – or “grog” – to the navy.

Ipswich traded with northern Europe from Saxon times, growing to become a Hanseatic League port, exporting wool and woollen cloth, and importing wine from Bordeaux.

On the harbour front is Isaacs on the Quay, a pub carved out of an old maltings. Behind it, at 80 Fore Street, is – according to Historic England – “the last surviving example of a 15th- to 17th-century Ipswich merchant’s house with warehouses at the rear opening directly on the dock front, where merchandise was unshipped, stored and distributed wholesale or sold retail in the shop on the street front”. The local council considered filling the harbour in to build houses, but a festival in 1971 showed the area could be a place of recreation as well as cultural preservation; the Ipswich Maritime Trust, still very active, grew out of this showdown.
Things to see and do: Willis Building; river cruise on the sailing barge Victor; free A Peep into the Past tour at Christchurch Mansion; Blackfriars monastery ruins

Ramsey, Isle of Man

Travelling overland to Ramsey from Douglas, you have a premonition of how important the sea must once have been. The meandering road and heritage electric railway both scale a mountain on the journey. Doing the trip on foot or horseback must have been hell. The Isle of Man’s longest river, the Sulby, plummets and meanders down from the uplands to meet the sea at Ramsey. Vikings, as well as Scots, entered the Isle of Man here. Its name derives from the Old Norse for “wild garlic river”.

The small working port breaks up a shoreline of sand and pebble beaches backed by apartment buildings and grand-seeming hotels. Timber and aggregate are massed up on the wharves. A bulk carrier called Snaefell River is moored beneath a single tall crane. To the south is the long Queen’s Pier, once a landing stage. Victoria never disembarked, but the pier recalls her visit. Above town is the Albert Tower. The consort made landfall.

Once Ramsey was a popular seaside resort, with Steam Packet ships to Kirkcudbright and Garlieston in Dumfries and Galloway; Liverpool and Whitehaven (I can see the Cumbrian fells). A swing bridge – closed to motorised traffic – connects the northern beach to Ramsey town centre, a likeable mishmash of Victorian buildings housing pubs, food and drink outlets, antique and bric-a-brac shops – and a very 80s strip mall with a Tesco, a drycleaner, a model shop and tattooists.

On the edge of town, I find myself at Grove House, now a museum. It was the holiday home of the island’s second most famous Gibb family. Duncan Gibb was a shipping agent from Greenock. The house reaches out to foreign climes. A tiger skin on the floor of the drawing room. A leopard skin in the bedroom. Mahogany furniture from a primeval forest. Curtains from India. A japanned backgammon set. When the men sailed away or died out, a matriarchy took over.

The Trafalgar pub, on West Quay, must have seen so many deals and binges, squabbles and scuffles. I drink an Odin’s mild in the corner. Locals look bristlingly familiar with one another, conspiratorial, as if they know something I never will.
Things to see and do: Manx Electric Railway to Laxey and Snaefell summit; Ramsey Nature Reserve beach walk; walk up to Albert Tower; the TT

Lancaster

It’s easy not to notice the River Lune or the Lancaster Canal. The former snakes north of the town centre, often behind buildings – supermarkets, an enterprise zone – and is cut off by the city’s notorious roads. The canal sneaks up from the south-west, hopping across the river near a McDonald’s. Anyway, the natural movement here for pedestrians is upward and inland.

The Romans took the high road. Marching through north Lancashire, operating in conjunction with naval transports, they could look out for landing troop detachments. A Roman fort was built on the hill now occupied by Lancaster Castle. It dates from the 12th century, as does the name of Lancashire, and is infamous as the place the Pendle Witches were imprisoned prior to their trial, sentencing and hanging. A small exhibition in a dungeon of the Well Tower recounts the key points of the story, reminding us Jack Straw refused to pardon them in 1998. The castle housed a prison till 2011; its Shire Hall is still used as a courtroom.

Lancaster was once England’s fourth largest slave port, with at least 122 ships sailing to Africa between 1700 and 1800. Local merchants were involved in the capture and sale of around 30,000 enslaved people. Slave-produced goods from the West Indies included sugar, dyes, rice, spices, coffee, rum and, later, cotton for Lancashire’s mills. Fine furniture, gunpowder, clothing and other goods were produced in and around Lancaster and traded in Africa for enslaved people, or sent to the colonies.

The slave trade and abolition trail, revised by Lancaster University professor Alan Rice, takes in churches, with their memorials to merchants who made money from slavery; the Sugarhouse, a nightclub on the site of a former refinery; Gillow’s Warehouse, which imported slave-harvested mahogany to make furniture; and 20 Castle Park, home of the slave-owning Satterthwaite family. On the abolition side are a Friends Meeting House (Quakers were among the earliest opponents of slavery) and, most poignantly, three benches in and near Williamson Park provided by philanthropists for the vagrant poor – including cotton workers laid off during the cotton famine caused by anti-slavery measures taken by Lancashire firms.

The small city of Lancaster, with its university campus and would-be genteel airs, looks and feels innocuous, and altogether unconnected to stormy seas. But it’s the nexus of a significant dark maritime history.
Things to see and do: Ashton Memorial; Maritime Museum; Gallows Hill; Judges’ Lodgings.

Chris Moss’s visits were assisted by Ipswich Central, Visit England, and the Isle of Man government