Last updated 09:16, Saturday, 05 April 2008

The power of the written word: recognised in 1525 by the Archbishop of Glasgow when he cursed the Reivers; again by Carlisle City Council in 2001 when it turned his words into a cursing stone; and once more by those who linked the stone to Cumbria’s ills and called for its destruction. Episode one begins in the north east with Catherine Cookson and the mining industry before venturing west across Hadrian’s Wall and into Cumbria.

What are words worth? Melvyn Bragg makes four journeys through parts of Britain, looking at how writers have reflected the natural and man-made landscape

“I curse their head and all the hairs of their head; I curse their face, their brain, their mouth, their nose, their tongue, their teeth, their forehead... and every part of their body, from the top of their head to the soles of their feet, before and behind, within and without.”

Writing has power: bringing thoughts to life, planting images in the reader’s head, sharing experiences and ideas, uniting people.

The landscape of Britain – pretty and gritty – has inspired some of our greatest writers, whether they lived amid green pastures or industrial skylines.

But what influence does a writer’s environment have on their words? Can the atmosphere as well as the specific details of a place edge its way onto the page?

The history of writing on these islands is the subject of a new ITV1 series, written and presented by Melvyn Bragg.

Wigton’s most famous son will be seen tomorrow night fronting Melvyn Bragg’s Travels in Written Britain. The four-part series looks at writing in the north, the midlands, London and Scotland, with a good chunk of the opening episode devoted to Cumbria.

The rest of the series will include the work of writers such as Monica Ali and Peter Ackroyd of London, Tolkien and Larkin of the Midlands and Walter Scott and Irvine Welsh of Scotland.

The programme combines historical and modern works. Ordinary people’s voices are heard alongside those of famous writers, through diaries and letters. Bragg told the News & Star: “I wanted it to be the great writers and how they came to write in both the city and the country, and to mix that with ordinary people’s writing from things like fragments of diaries so that it was more representative of the whole country rather than a small elite.

“A lot of stuff has been unearthed and there’s been a drive to get ordinary people in the records. The earliest surviving writings in Britain were found at Vindolanda on Hadrian’s Wall. Thousands of stone and wooden tablets made by Roman soldiers were unearthed, giving an insight into their everyday life dating back to the first century AD. The British Museum has declared them the most important single domestic find ever.

“These are thousands of letters left up to 2,000 years ago, preserved in the soil. It’s people chatting to each other, saying ‘Come to my party’. They’re in Latin but they’re part of written Britain.”

The journey along the wall is accompanied by the words of Millom poet Norman Nicholson from his poem, Wall. “The wall walks the fell, grey millipede on slow stone hooves.”

We then hear the words of an “ordinary person”; from Lake District lead miner Thomas Dixon’s 19th-century account of a 21-hour shift.

In Carlisle the Archbishop of Glasgow’s damning words echo around the Millennium Gallery.

Melvyn Bragg, in broad Cumberland dialect, then reads from a 200-year-old poem called Lady Fair in Wigton, which concerns “a show of fine lasses” in his hometown.

Chris Bonington reads poet Samuel Coleridge’s 1802 description of a day he was stuck on Scafell in bad weather; this is probably the first recorded fell walk.

By the 1800s the Romantic poets such as Coleridge and Wordsworth had helped shape the lens through which we view the Lake District today.

Previously most opinions of the area had been coloured by writers who regarded it as an intimidating wilderness. Robinson Crusoe author Daniel Defoe toured Britain in the 1720s and wrote of the Lake District: “Here we entered a country eminent only for being the wildest, most barren and frightful of any that I have passed over in England.”

Bragg redresses the balance by visiting Dove Cottage, the Grasmere home of William Wordsworth, whose work was influenced so much by his native landscape.

The same can be said of Bragg himself, whose own writing has often been autobiographical and drawn heavily on his early life in Wigton.

Bragg’s 20 novels include the critically-acclaimed and commercially-successful trilogy set largely in Wigton: The Soldier’s Return, A Son of War and Crossing the Lines.

“I have written an awful lot about Wigton,” he says. “It must still mean an awful lot to me. It doesn’t have to be straight away. It can be years later. The place nourishes you and then it comes out in the writing.”

He says the influence of location is not so transparent as being able to tell a northern writer’s style from a southern writer’s, but that “Charles Dickens wouldn’t have written as he did if he’d lived in Cumbria.”

Two-thousand years after the Romans carved their words in wood and stone at Hadrian’s Wall, as technology brings new ways of communicating, the future of writing has been called into question.

The fact that these obituaries are still being written rather than spoken suggests reports of writing’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

Says Melvyn Bragg: “We have books on Cumbrian history, diaries, dialects, geology, mines, rock climbing, gardening. Britain is being written ever more intensely. We are a writing island.”

Melvyn Bragg’s Travels in Written Britain starts tomorrow on ITV1 at 10.45pm.