I like walking up the hill opposite Park House Farm, near Furness Abbey, because it gives a bird’s eye view of Barrow, Walney, the South Lakes and the Isle of Man.

Even though the town is dominated by Devonshire Dock Hall and the new Mini-DDH, my eyes are always drawn to the spires of Barrow. Though nuclear reactors are fired up and burn in the yard, I feel a greater power burns in the worshipping communities that gather beneath these spires that join earth to heaven. The worshipping communities of Barrow and the Furness peninsula form a constellation of faith that blazes and warms the hearts, and inspires the minds, of so many folk and families in Furness and beyond. I can see all this in my mind’s eye as I stand on the hill opposite Park House Farm.

I love landscapes, and always have as long as I can remember. I’ve loved the landscape of Furness since I was a child. It’s a love that has grown stronger as I’ve got older. One of the best things in the world for me is going on a walk with my wife up to Newton and over the fields to Dendron, Gleaston, Stainton, Urswick and Aldingham. As I climb the stiles and walk the footpaths, I see a Christian landscape all around me.

In my imagination I see the Anglo-Saxons settling in their timber homesteads and mead halls at Dalton, Ulverston, Urswick and Aldingham and the monks from Lindisfarne bringing the hallowed body of St. Cuthbert to Furness in their flight from the Vikings.

I see the monks from Savigny, Normandy, build their red sandstone Norman monastery in the Vale of the Deadly Nightshade, and the crisscross of paths across the fields and commons of Furness and Walney to their Granges - the farms that supplied the abbey and fed the people. During my walks tramping the lanes of Furness, my mind turns to the father of the Quakers, George Fox, who set out on his adventurous missionary journeys from Swarthmoor Hall and preached at Dendron and North Scale, where he was beaten with “staves, clubs and fishing poles”. He didn’t fare better at Cocken, on the Channel, where a man attempted to shoot him with a pistol that thankfully failed to go off. Even if we don’t know it, this Christian landscape and history is in our blood and the faith that burns in our hearts. Christianity is an incarnate religion, for God took on the flesh of humanity in Mary’s virginal body in Palestine and still shapes the fields, and lanes and streets of Furness.