Where Tourists Rarely Walk Part 4: Five British Towns with Hidden Stories

Part One / Part Two / Part Three

There are no compelling reasons underlying the selection of Bury, Burton upon Trent, Wigan, Workington and Whitehaven. These are not places with just one major attraction. None quite fit the adjectives we use to sell and promote a sense of place - quaint, fashionable, cool, eventful, filmic. One of the reasons for vacationing somewhere is that no one else does. But for this edition, food and drink is a tangential focus. A few decades ago, catering was an accessory, a plus, for travellers; today there are festivals everywhere and every week, for seafood, rhubarb, curry, real ale, eels, seaweed and even tripe.

Food is about memory and industry, architecture and myth, and flavors and feasts. It can be a way to look at a place, to walk through it, to understand it and to make sense of its absences and sorrows.

Bury — pronounced “berry,” or “burry,” like slurry — is a funny old town. For locals from the north of Greater Manchester and Lancashire it's a classy place - that market they say trams and Ramsbottom all lovely Yet when pronounced with a southern or even Cheshire accent it is another textile town with a harsh, flat, short name Watling Street (not to be confused with Dover-Wroxeter) ran from Mancunium (Manchester) to Ribchester An old cross at Effectside village green is probably medieval, although speculative historians have wondered if it was in fact a Roman column.Another village, Ainsworth, is known locally as 'Cockey' and it is pre tends that it alludes to the Roman fortress of Coccium - more generally located near Wigan.

The ancient manor of Bury passed from Adam de Bury to the Pilkingtons ( a family that once had feudal tentacles throughout Lancashire) and then to the Stanleys (which still do). The Bury area, protected by the West Pennine moors and with almost half the rainfall of Burnley, had fine arable farms. When the Black Death decimated the working population, plowed land became pasture. Grazing sheep were the basis of a wool industry. Bury later...