ABSTRACT
Economic development, including easier carriage of agricultural produce, was aided by better communications, although for many years this repres ented only moderate advance. Most early industrial development, including mining, remained dependent on access to the sea because of the cost of over land carriage. As Sir John Lowther observed in the late seventeenth century, ‘where there are ships the whole world is the market’, but poor communica tions hindered inland developments. (Beckett 1981, 103) The earl of Carlisle found it difficult to exploit coal on his estate in north-east Cumberland before construction of waggonways. In the 1790s ‘peats’ were still a common domestic fuel in Carlisle, barely 15 miles from this coal but over routes which incurred heavy carriage costs. (Hughes 1965, 3) In the seventeenth century, it took about five weeks for a book ordered from London to reach Kendal, which had better links with the outside world than most of the North West. Kendal had to await the opening of the Lancaster-Kendal canal in 1819 to obtain cheap coal.
