In the summer of 2024 I travelled from Devon to Cumbria with a friend of mine. Annie Chave joined us a couple of days later. This was partly as a result of seeing the picture on the cover of Paul Edwards’ book Summer Days Promise, and also that at Southport the previous summer he’d told us how much it was worth visiting.

I liked it there so much that I returned just four months later, partly to watch rugby, but also to take in the ambience of a very lovely small northern town.

It is autumn in the north of England.  Or perhaps it is early winter.  These strange days, nobody is sure.  One thing is certain, though.  It is not summer.

It is early morning.  Not the early morning of the shepherds who tend their flocks around here, but a mere couple of hours after darkness lifted and I woke to see the fells to the east of Sedbergh for the first time in more than a day.  Yesterday’s cloud and drizzle are clearing and I am about to travel south, back to careworn reality.  I walk slowly down to the Sedbergh School cricket ground.  As the cliché goes, it is a field of dreams.  

I have been here before.  Less than four months have passed since I was here watching county cricket.  It is the same and it is different.  Those four months ago the ground, borrowed from the school and made ready for county cricket, throbbed with activity, but now it is silent apart from the noise of birds, the chatter of the pupils on their way to classes, and the tractor which is mowing it with a kind of rhythmic intonation.  You sense that this is a Monday morning ritual. 

Cricket grounds in the dark months have a kind of stillness.  The marquees and the food and drink vans have gone.  There is a rugby pitch where the cars were parked.  Cricket exists only in the memory.  

We all have cricket in the memory.  Cricket in the memory always has the sun beating down from an azure sky and players in whites.  In the summer of 2024 the players of Lancashire, and Cumbria, and Durham, did not wear whites.  The sun shone, but a lot of the time the sky was slate grey.  High in the Howgill Fells this is standard, summer or winter.  

But it was good.  Again we head into the realms of cliché, but there is something about the Sedbergh School ground that exemplifies the memories of cricket which many of us have.  This is not the Home Counties, or the rural south west; it is sheep farming country, with the benefits of tourism added on.  Sedbergh characterises itself as ‘England’s Book Town’, and it has a couple of secondhand bookshops which are as good as you will find anywhere.  It is dominated by an independent school which has produced numerous professional rugby players as well as Mahika Gaur and Harry Brook.

How did I end up here?  How did I end up here for the second time in four months when I hadn’t been anywhere near this part of England since 1986?

In the summer of 2023 I went to see Lancashire play Hampshire at Southport.  Paul Edwards was there.  Nobody loves county cricket more or writes better about it than Paul Edwards. 

On the cover of Paul’s book Summer Days Promise is a picture of the Sedbergh School ground taken during the first game Lancashire ever played there, in the summer of 2019.  It is a County Championship match, so the players are wearing whites.  The sun is shining; it is the game’s third day and Durham are batting.  Liam Trevaskis is facing Saqib Mahmood.  But these are details.  The magic of the picture is that it captures Winder – the fell that towers over the town – and the church, and the rapt spectators, many of whom may barely be able to believe that they are watching professional cricket in such surroundings.

This sticks in my mind, and that of my friend Martin.  At times we talk about going to Sedbergh.  Then, at Southport, we meet Paul Edwards.

Hot day, press tent.  We talk about this and that but at the end Paul simply says: ‘Go to Sedbergh’.  So, in the summer of 2024, we do.  Annie Chave joins us.

We see Lancashire play Cumbria.  It is a warm-up game for the Metro Bank Cup.  The weather is dull, the crowd is small, but no matter.  The way in which you take in the sights and sounds of a ground is different on days like these, and it is fine.  Just as it is when there are more people there, and just as it is when there is nobody there at all.

A few days later, after we have walked the fells and looked down on the town from above, we are back.  The sun is shining and hundreds of people are queueing.  In time we take our seats.  There is a choice of views but we decide to face the church.  You can face the school, or you can face the pavilion or, if you are a player, or a coach or a media person, you can face Loftus Hill.  But the view of the church, with Winder behind, is what has brought us here.

Durham win the toss and bat.  Alex Lees makes an untroubled century; down the order de Leede, Ackermann and Jones bombard the boundaries.  345 looks a stiff target.  The Lancashire side is callow, and although Josh Bohannon plays a brilliant lone hand of 147, his side falls well short.

But a time like this, at a game like this, is about far more than the cricket.

People who aren’t interested in cricket, non-believers, sometimes say things like ‘cricket is ‘boring’.  Or they think of it as a ‘posh’ sport.  These days I rarely try to argue.  I know these people are wrong about cricket and a day at Sedbergh (whatever one’s views about the immense privilege that independent schools embody) shows how wrong they are.

I take a walk around the ground.  What I see and hear shows, even as we press on towards twenty years without terrestrial television coverage of cricket (The Hundred doesn’t count), that there is still a hardcore of cricket people.

People talk about many things: holidays in the sun, the composition of county age group squads, travelling around Europe in the 1980s, the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.  People wear many things: Lancashire and Durham colours, and, of course, replica football shirts:  Aston Villa, Celtic.  A T-shirt bearing the name of the half-remembered post-punk band Killing Joke.  Dads with sons, dads with daughters.  A small tabby cat wanders around the scoreboard.  A local lad who is clearly one of the town’s ‘characters’ makes himself helpful where he can, making sure that nobody gets in without paying or walks where they shouldn’t.  When I return in November he’s still around, down the hill at the Sedbergh School rugby ground.  Everyone seems to know him, and even the public schoolboys with their studied aloofness and air of mild disregard take time out to chat.

On top of the church the flag of Ukraine flies.  Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 the yellow and blue flag has become a familiar sight around Britain.  It represents support for a small country that has suffered at the hands of a foreign aggressor, but here it means more than that.  It is a reminder that we, as citizens of a free democratic nation, are able to enjoy a day like this without fear or hindrance. 

I have said things like this before – notably when I wrote a piece for CCM about the trip to Southport I mentioned earlier – but there’s no harm in saying them again.  In a country which has been in the economic doldrums for a long time, and where society’s old norms and dialogues frequently feel fractured, there are few experiences better for the soul than watching cricket in beautiful surroundings.  I know I am preaching to the converted here, but if you love the game you will find ways to do this until you can’t do anything else.

A few weeks ago I went for a haircut.  Usual hairdresser, usual December conversation about preparations for Christmas.  My attention wanders to the chair behind, where a lad of about ten is talking animatedly about cricket.  I love to hear this; partly because I recognise an echo of myself at the same age, but also because it’s easy to feel that these days – with terrestrial TV coverage gone and school cricket rare – that children aren’t interested in cricket.  He may be the exception that proves the rule, but as I leave I tell his mum that he was once me and that I’m still like that.  I am unsure whether she is reassured or concerned by this, but I leave with a smile on my face and a jumble of thoughts in my head.  

One of these is that, at some point in life’s uncertain future, he may want to visit a ground like Sedbergh.   I hope, when he is my age, that he still can.

County Cricket Matters, Volume 22, March 2025