A county palatine fit for a Queen

I am from Lancashire and have been enjoying a racy paperback on the place written by Charles Nevin (Lancashire: Where Women Die of Love). Some people are surprised to learn I was born in Manchester. It's true I have a posh southern accent, but I can go demotic when necessary. Many years ago I used to do a weekly TV programme called What the Papers Say, which involved travelling up to Granada studios and staying the night at the Midland Hotel. You had to itemise your expenses and claim them from a lugubrious cashier who hated parting with money. ''Ere, wot's this?' he would say. 'Firstclass rail travel? Tea on t'train? Cooked breakfast? Tha likes to go it, dost tha not?

Some of you people from t'south think munny grows on trees - well, I'll tell thee, not oop 'ere it doesna.' To which I replied, squaring my jaw, Withenshaw-fashion, ''Old up, sonny boy, I was born 'ere, same as thou.

So shut thy gob and pay oop!'

To me, Lancashire begins when you trundle across the old rail-bridge at Warrington, which strictly speaking is a Cheshire town, though the northern bit is pure Lancs. Turn left and you're in Liverpool and scouse-land, half-Irish and incomprehensible. Turn right and it's Manchester, which used to be a grand town around 1900, in my mother's heyday.

She said, 'Some called it the Athens of the North, and it's true all the greatest actors and musicians came there. The Halle was the best orchestra in Europe. I once shook hands with Sir Hamilton Harty, and didn't like to wash it afterwards. Miss Horriman presented new plays regularly, first at the Midland, then at the Gaiety, and people came from all over the world to see them. Her first name was Annie, like mine. What a proud girl I was when I first enrolled at Sedgley College and joined the John Rylands Library.' My mother always believed that civilisation ended at the west side of the Pennines, and she would gladly have fought the Wars of the Roses all over again. Does Lancashire breed women of her spirit today? I doubt it.

Due north, the line led through Wigan. I have seen its old massed back-to-back terrace houses (now gone) hundreds of times from the train and never set foot in the place. As they said, ''Oo'd go ter Wigan for fun?' Next came Preston, and that was (and is) a town and a half, with a history and fine buildings and the tallest spire in the north, right next to the line of rail so you can't miss it. They said:

Proud Preston, poor people.

Low church, high steeple.

I first studied art history in the library of the Harris Institute there, which also houses Sir James Gunn's masterpiece, 'Pauline in the Yellow Dress'.

At Preston the line of rail bifurcates. To the west it goes to the Fylde, to Lytham and Blackpool. My mother spent her widowhood in Lytham, in a little cottage in Westby Street, and each day I would walk on the front, often meeting George Formby, the great, sad comedian who played the ukulele plaintively.

His fierce wife Beryl took all his wages and would then turn him out of the house for the day ('Don't get under my feet, thou!') with only sixpence in his pocket. So he'd talk to me, and sometimes sing, 'If you can see what I can see, When I'm cleaning winders!'

Further up the line was Blackpool where, as a teenager, I used to go and dance, at the Winter Gardens or the Tower Ballroom, with beautiful, chaste, scented local girls. The music was supplied by Roxy Fox or Harry Roy, or Edmundo Ros and his LatinAmerican music, or the American All-Girls Band, later celebrated in Some Like It Hot. A few of your partners would allow you a simple kiss (not 'French') or say, 'Thou can squeeze my bum if tha' likes.'

By turning right at Preston, the railway took you into the Ribble Valley and its tributary the Hodder, on whose banks lay my beautiful boarding school, Stonyhurst. This ancient Jacobean mansion had been slept in by Cromwell the night before he fought and won the battle of Preston, and many decades of incense-swinging from the Jesuits has not entirely exorcised his dour Protestant ghost.

Across the Ribble Valley lay Pendle Hill, haunt of witches and wizards even to this day.

I have tramped up to its mysterious summit many times and painted its elusive shape on hundreds of occasions. If you follow the Hodder into the hills, you come to the Forest of Bowland, where lie my family origins. It is a forest only in the legal sense, for there are few trees on its noble, harsh slopes, but it once came under royal forest law. It is still part of the old Duchy of Lancaster, and the Queen has a farmhouse converted for her use. She is believed to have said it is the most delightful spot in all her three kingdoms, and to wish to end her days there. I agree with her, and it shows she has excellent taste.

Further north still you come to Morecambe Bay and its dangerous and sinister sands. I once walked across there at low tide, fearfully, having been warned, 'Tide comes in faster than thou can run, lad.' It is true. Morecambe is also celebrated for having the lowest cost of living in England. 'Ee, lad, thou can get a mixed grill there as good as in London Ritz and one 'undreth of t'price, dost thou know.' Stan Laurel came from nearby Ulverston, 'where ee learned t'make lads laff', before he trained under Chaplin and went to Hollywood to join Oliver Hardy. I would rather watch a Laurel and Hardy silent ten-minute movie than any other form of entertainment - so simple, so innocent, so funny and ingenious, so professional. The dance the two comics perform on the steps of the saloon in Way Out West is the best five minutes in the whole history of motion pictures. And since Laurel was the brains and energiser of the partnership, Lancashire can claim credit.

Further north still, Lancashire owns the southern bit of the Lake District, a little chunk of Windermere and a more generous one of Coniston. I used to walk and climb there a lot, and often visited John Ruskin's house overlooking the finest part of Coniston Lake. His study was below a kind of balconyparapet, and every evening his butler would interrupt his work to announce, 'Mr Ruskin, sir, the sunset!' Then the old man would clamber up the stairs to look and ponder and compose in his noble head phrases about the grandeur of nature and the mysteries and secrets of the universe. One way or another, Lancashire has everything that I would ever wish to have from the natural world - splendour and intimacy, the sublime and the ridiculous, the sternly simple and the surprisingly exotic. I have read Mr Nevin's book with pleasure and commend it to all, the Queen included.