THE buildings, people and landscape of the Duddon Valley featured in the first of the autumn season of talks for the Ulverston-based North Lonsdale History Society.

It also marked the final major public lecture for Walter Johnston after a career stretching back almost 50 years.

Following the talk and table-top display on the Duddon Valley, Mr Johnston, of Yarlside Road, Barrow, was made a life member of the North Lonsdale History Society.

Mr Johnston said the: “It is one of my favourite valleys.”

Its name had Norse origins but the spelling of Duddon did not become fixed until the end of the 18th century.

The river estuary had been noted for its cockles and salmon but transport for iron and the charcoal fuel needed to produce it gradually grew in importance.

A wharf near Duddon Bridge was used by boats bringing in charcoal from Sowerby Woods, Barrow and from Greenscoe, near Dalton, for Duddon Furnace.

This had been built near Duddon Bridge in the early 18th century and was closed in the 1860s.

He said: “It is now recognised as one of the finest industrial buildings in the North of England.”

Duddon Hall had started life as a tower in the 1500s and became a country mansion.

By 1843 it had its own elaborate folly in the grounds.

It was restored in the 1990s and is now apartments.

The valley’s stone bridges, used by packhorses for legitimate trade - and by smugglers going from Ravenglass to Eskdale – were featured and several former mills using the water power provided by the Duddon.

Among the valley’s interesting ruins are Old Ulpha Hall and Frith Hall, a hunting lodge for the Huddleston family of Millom Castle.

Frith Hall was later a hostelry with a wild reputation – including a murder, a ghost and a mass wedding of 12 couples.

Ulpha Bridge, the closure of Ulpha’s former Church of England school and St John’s Church with its wall paintings of the 1790s were all described in a set of slides which followed a route from Duddon Bridge to the Three Shires Stone.

Mr Johnston recalled given 15 talks at the Brow Foot Meeting Room which had started life in London with the Mayfair Trust.

During the First World War the tin sheet building was taken apart and brought to the Duddon Valley by boat to Ulverston and then by horse and cart.

Also featured was the Newfield Inn at Seathwaite and the role of its landlord in the July 1904 riot by navies working nearby to create a reservoir.

As stones were being thrown at windows, the landlord sent for the police and defended his property with a gun, shooting at rioters – one later died.

The next meeting of the North Lonsdale Society is on October 11 from 7.30pm at Ulverston Methodist Church, in Neville Street, when Andy Lowe will talk on Woodland crafts and industries.