Cumbria

And will farming be a priority for new regional mayors in rural areas?

Cumbria is going to change.

It's going to have these mayors.

They're going to have all this authority and power and money.

Because we do have slightly milder summers than the sea down south, it gives the crops more time to generate that energy and turn it into sweetness.

Dr Susan McCallum.

Six months today, voters in Cumbria will go to the polls to vote for the county's first elected mayor.

Mayoral strategic authorities are central to the government's policy of devolving more power and funding out of Westminster and into the hands of people who live and work in the English regions.

Speaking of hiring, that takes us on to our next listener question.

Nell from Cumbria in the United Kingdom.

Beautiful part of the world.

You're speaking of the fact that you love the UK.

don't get why.

Yorkshire Lancashire well I do because we've got a schedule to allow it and people keep saying well if you do Yorkshire Lancashire what would a Morgan Knowles from Cumbria do or a Mike McMeek from London do well I would say my argument would be and it wouldn't cover everyone but pretty much everyone Mike McMeek can play for a Yorkshire club so he's eligible for Yorkshire in War of the Roses or is it not

just like state of origin where if you're not eligible you're not eligible or

that yeah and alright you do hurt a few But you vastly help everyone.

Jane, for our audience, would you be so kind as just to introduce yourself and what you're up to?

So I'm Jane and I'm part of the Westland Family Limited up in Cumbria.

We have an upland hill farm that my parents farmed and my grandparents bought.

And when the motorway, the M6, came north in the late 60s, early 70s, they diversified by creating a motorway service area, a small 30-seater.

So we have strong links with the Gloucester Gateway Trust.

Well, that's who we went into partnership with to do the Gloucester services.

And we work with Community Fund in Cumbria.

So what we're doing is we're feeding money back into those communities and working with people who put that money where it's needed.

I just love that cup of tea.

and it's just the real simple things like the Cumbria way last week with the girls was up there with like one of the top 10 probably adventures I've done and you know I have been fortunate I have done you know I've done my fair share of stuff so far and it was just fantastic and the walking was great loved the walking however it was it was the like the last night we stayed in this pub which was unexpected stay and we just sat with a bottle of wine some bread i i love bread um and some bread and played like a game of cards and it was just so fun and that's the kind of that's the bit that i like about it all um is the kind of social side and being together as, like, humans more, because a lot of the time we don't do that as much these days.

There's one place, and I was a bit thick, and I never actually realised that Andorra was a country on its own.

And some friends a couple of years ago had said, there's a group of us, about five, that usually go off and do trips together and stuff.

I haven't actually stayed in one yet.

I've been in them for drinks, but yeah, I was meant to stay in one in Slovenia, but sadly the weather didn't play ball for what we were doing.

So yeah, yeah but I just because I love Bothy camping it's again that's one of my favorite things the Cumbria way we didn't camp in one but we did go in to make a hot drink and I messaged like two of my friends and was like I'm in the most happiest place ever and I was sat in this Bothy in the pouring rain making hot chocolate and I was I was so content with my life I was so happy um I just I just love it like I say it's I don't know it's just a little stuff and you can live without a lot of the stuff you've got as well I think that's the you start just bringing your life back to basics i think a bit more as well um we live in a very commercial world don't we and we don't realize but you're getting stuff like shoved in your face all the time with with adverts and just yeah just stuff all the time i just don't think people fully realize until you're out of that like on a trail or you're doing hut to hut abroad when you don't really have access to stuff and it does change your mind on how you think

Yeah, totally, because you want it to strip your bag down to the basics, to all those little extras that you think you need when you see the little camping ads you don't want to take.

They were the same family who ran Dublin.

And the Vikings of that wave, it was actually the second wave who took Dublin and then took York, they had actually been settled in what we would now call Cumbria or southern Scotland for a long time.

And they were almost certainly bilingual in Norse and Gaelic.

So the people from whom Athelstan grabbed Northumbria were actually half Irish.

It seems to be that an area more or less from Lincoln to the Isle of Wight was settled pretty clearly within a generation or two and is very strongly English, Anglo-Saxon.

Then there's another band, which takes another hundred years to become even dominated by the English, where you have a very mixed culture.

And the third band that takes another 200 years, Modern Cumbria and the Modern Shropshire Marches and Devon.

And of course, then the other bits, Coleman and Wales, that hold out to this day.

I went away to university when I finished school in Edinburgh.

I'm trained as a primary school teacher and have a degree as a primary school teacher in Cumbria, the University of Lancaster.

But I didn't go into teaching when I finished.

There weren't sort of vacancies.

Your opinion on the replays being scrapped a couple of years ago, because it has impacted how a lot of away teams will come and face games like this.

Barrow will no longer have a chance to take us back to Cumbria on a Tuesday night and try and beat us there.

So they have to try and beat us on the day, whether it's in regulation time or whether it's afterwards and on penalties and so on and so forth.

If you're a side like Barrow coming into a league two side, how do you approach it? Do you wait you out or do you go for the juggler and try and win it in 90 minutes?