By the side of one of Scotland’s most beautiful sea lochs lies a pile of stones. It marks the place where the Young Pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie, landed in July 1745 with a tiny and already somewhat battered and disunited group of seven supporters. The inscription on the memorial records that one of the prince’s party was: “Francis Strickland an English gentleman from Westmorland”.

Together, these seven launched the Jacobite Rebellion, the most formidable and daring attempt by the exiled Stuart dynasty to regain the British throne.

Although he came ashore with only this absurdly small band of followers, Charles Edward Stewart’s timing was good because the bulk of the British army was away fighting in mainland Europe. He gained slightly equivocal support from thousands of Highland warriors and within weeks was the master of Scotland and victor of the battle of Prestonpans near Edinburgh. In that fight he annihilated the only semblance of an army the English had at a time when the London government could hardly muster enough troops on hand to guard the royal palaces, let alone fight an invasion.

He was disappointed when his English supporters failed to rise and even more downcast when the French delayed launching their promised invasion until it was too late. Even so, the speed and tactical nous of Charles’s forces wrong-footed the defenders of a succession of English cities. The Jacobites captured Carlisle and penetrated as far south as Derby. This unprecedented success by an invading army threatened to destabilise the British state. Yet the intense squabbling and internal distrust that had grown among his commanders led to the conviction they would not win and they retreated against Charles’s wishes. This allowed the English to regroup and led to the Jacobite army being crushed at the Battle of Culloden with 1,250 rebel deaths.

One possible explanation for why this heroic failure took place is that Charles, a bold, charming adventurer, recklessly flung himself into the rebellion even though he knew the chances of retrieving the crown were slender. Another explanation lies in the variable quality of Charles’s seven companions whose names are engraved in English and Gaelic on a plaque attached to the pile of stones mentioned earlier. They have passed into history as The Seven Men of Moidart.

Francis Strickland was equerry to the prince which means he was the one member of the royal household who was with young Charles constantly. His job was to perform the most sensitive, sometimes mundane and often secret tasks needed to help Charles carry out his leadership role. But whatever comfort Strickland brought the prince as a friend, servant and counsellor, he had a paranoid and suspicious personality.

The worst examples of the Cumbrian’s influence came at the most awkward moments. During the Siege of Carlisle when Jacobite forces loyal to the prince first captured the strategically vital town and its castle on 14–15 November 1745, he urged the Charles to dismiss his most able general, George Murray, as a supposedly “dangerous man”. In fact Murray was the Jacobite Rebellion’s best military advisor, having masterminded the Prestonpans triumph only weeks before.

Francis and the prince had been extremely close colleagues since childhood, friends and hard-drinking buddies. Francis was a member of an ancient Catholic family known as the Stricklands, longstanding Stuart loyalists, who have lived at Sizergh Castle near Kendal in Westmorland for 700 years. A portrait of Francis has been on display for decades at the house, celebrating the family connection to one of the key organisers of both Jacobite rebellions. Francis Strickland’s intimacy with the exiled royal family was beyond question since the Old Pretender, James Francis Edward Stuart, Bonnie Prince Charlie’s father, was his godfather. When he was born, Francis was even given one of James’s names. Francis was unusual in that, at a time when Catholics were public enemy number one and most chose to keep their heads down to avoid severe fines and imprisonment under harsh penal laws, he risked his life by getting involved with James’s shambolic 1715 Jacobite rising.

After that disaster, Francis became an enduring embarrassment to the Cumbrian Catholic recusants (people who broke the law by refusing to attend Church of England services). They included other members of the Strickland family, who wished to distance themselves from what they saw as the hopeless Jacobite cause and guard their safety by asserting loyalty to Britain. But with Francis so prominently continuing to agitate for the Stuarts, the Catholic community’s allegiance to the crown was doubted anyway and this sabotaged the efforts of Papist Cumbrians to live a normal life.

Francis was a fanatic, one of those people who indulge in a heady and toxic concoction of self-affirming, know-it-all confidence. He arrogantly assumed he had unique access to absolute truths that were perfect and therefore should be imposed on everyone. In many ways, he thought he was more Jacobite than James Stuart himself, as we shall see.

After the collapse of the 1715 rising, Francis went off to get some proper military experience fighting in Spain. When he returned he held many different posts at the Stuart court as it moved first to Avignon, then Pesaro and Urbino. Strickland finally took up residence at the court-in-exile that James and his son set up in Rome in 1719. The would-be-royals lived there in melancholy splendour, a lifestyle paid for by James’s friend and close adviser Cardinal Filippo Antonio Gualterio, who had been appointed by the Pope as the church’s protector of Scotland.

But despite Francis’s impeccable Catholic credentials, his willingness to face bullets for the Pretenders, his readiness to perform humble tasks and his long years of service in many places, Strickland was a shadowy and controversial figure even within the ranks of his own affinity. He sowed division as he flitted in and out of the lives of the Stuart family over a span of fifty-five years.

The hundred or more biographies of Bonnie Prince Charlie and histories of the 1745 rebellion are awash with contradictory, confusing and suppositious information about Francis. This makes it difficult to construct a reliable account of Strickland’s identity or to explain his motives. In a period of Scottish history that was rife with rumour, double cross and treachery when a stray word could mean death, this elusiveness may well be what he set out to achieve. He preserved his anonymity so that he could move around unnoticed and influence events without appearing to do so. But there came a time when James Stuart began to realise Francis was using his position to pursue his own political agenda.

To say Francis was on the extreme left of Stuart politics would be wrong since the concept of ideology would only be invented eighty years later in the French Revolution. But Francis certainly represented an ultra-pragmatist worldview that Lenin would have endorsed. He seemed prepared to dump any political principle and even the religion he was ostensibly fighting to reinstate in order to achieve power.

The final breach appears to have occurred at the height of the 1745 rebellion when Francis suggested to Charles that he convert to Protestantism to secure political backing from the English middle classes and that he should depose his father as Pretender.

When James learned that Francis was scheming to turn his son against him, he sought to have Strickland dismissed as a malign influence, referring to Francis as the biblical Obadiah, one who sowed discord. It may well be, therefore, that the Cumbrian at the court of would-be King Charles was one of the people most responsible for the internal divisions that led to the sorry shambles of 1745, from its confused beginning, its faction-ridden conduct to its scattered, disorganised and bloody end at Culloden.

The mystery of this man begins with his very name. To Jacobites, he was known variously as Francis, Francois, Frank and by a range of other aliases. He has been described as English, Irish, Scotch and in most accounts of his eventual capture at Carlisle, as French. Within England he has been associated with the Counties of Cumberland, Westmorland, Yorkshire and Lancashire.

He has been confused with Sir Roger Strickland, an English admiral and Member of Parliament (who was a secret Catholic), and wrongly named as John Strickland. He has appeared under the titles Mr, Captain, General, Chevalier, most often Colonel and given the elevated title of Sir by the novelist Alexandre Dumas in his book “Louis XV”.

A 1947 British Lion film, Bonnie Prince Charlie, featured actor Bill Allison as “Sir” Francis Strickland. Strickland has been described as a Jacobite, a gentleman, a Catholic, a squire and a drunkard. So, what is the true story of this man? Brilliant research by Ian Hopkinson of Liverpool John Moores University has helped to clear up some of the most teasing confusions. Francis Strickland was born in France at the exiled court of the deposed English King James II.

His baptism is recorded at taking place on 19 March 1691 and the register names him as Francois Edouard Joseph Strickland. The young boy lived at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in the western suburbs of Paris. Saint-Germain is the grand palace that Louis XIV loaned to the Catholic King James after he was toppled and replaced by the Protestant William of Orange in 1688.

Francis’s parents were Robert Strickland, vice chamberlain to James II, and Dame Brigitte Strickland, a lady of the bedchamber to his Queen, Mary of Modena. Francis’s godfather was listed as James Stuart. So, Francis could not have been more snugly embedded in the exiled Stuart household. He was the ninth child born to Robert and Bridget who came from the Catterick branch of the Strickland family. His parents had followed James II into exile with forty other recusant families.

These exiled Jacobites were not a very homogenous group, however. They were riven by a variety of beliefs, motivations, allegiances and degrees of pragmatism. For example, the Sizergh Stricklands were all for compromising with the authorities and they soon abandoned the royal exiles in Paris and returned to Westmorland.

Younger offspring such as Francis and his second cousin Sir Thomas Strickland had a more independent outlook and were willing to take risks for the cause. Thomas joined James II in exile in 1689 and, to prevent Sizergh being confiscated, he made the estate over to his (Protestant) servants Thomas Shepherd and Robert Carne. But when he died in 1694, Margaret Alford Lady Strickland headed straight back to Sizergh, followed by her son Walter in 1699.

Older members of the Cumbrian Catholic gentry, who were by far the majority, were the most cautious and worried about preserving their estates, avoiding debt and bankruptcy. Although they privately continued to cherish Jacobite sympathies, they were not prepared to act on them. Keeping a low profile during the 1715 and 1745 rebellions did not do them much good, however.

The Government acted as if they were enemies, forced them to register with the local sheriff and treated them as potential subversives anyway. On the other hand, allying yourself with the “king” in exile was not very profitable, either. The Stricklands were always hard up. When James II died he owed the couple 20,000 livres. One livre was worth a pound of silver, so this was a big debt.

The Old Pretender’s accounts for 1718 show he had given Francis a lump sum of 1,000 livres plus a living allowance of 150 livres per month, paid on the basis that Francis ate regularly with him. No king wants to be seen dining alone. Bridget’s letters to James Stuart over thirteen years reveal she was deeply anxious about her family finances: “Having now noe protection under Heaven but your Majesty I throw myself at your feet humbly beging that you will out of Pity recommend my case to the French Court”, she wrote.

Money was available for education, however. Francis received instruction at Douai College near Reims in the champagne country north of Paris, an elite institution that trained young Catholic aristocrats in the etiquette of court life. The vice-chamberlain was not impressed with the progress Francis made there, however, complaining he was “not going on well with his books”.

After school, Francis became a page to James Stuart and later tutor to James’s younger brother. Then Francis served as a courier taking secret messages between James while residing briefly in Lorraine and his Queen who was seriously ill. The relationship between Francis and James was not servile. He was seen as a close relative. James wrote at one point that he had granted Frank’s request to spend several weeks leave in Paris with his brother “which I could not refuse.”

His role and movements in the 1715 rising are, as usual, confusing. But what he did seems to have been very important. On 10 October 1715, the Old Pretender wrote of his plans to go with others to England or Scotland and that “Frank will go to represent me at Dunquerque” where a French invasion fleet in support of the Jacobite cause had been massing. This was one month after the Duke of Mar, the Scottish noble who led the rebellion, had raised the flag of revolt in Braemar, a village in Aberdeenshire. James sailed from Dunkirk on December 22 and landed at Peterhead in Scotland. Shortly afterwards, in February, James realised the insurrection was likely to fail and, suffering from a fever, he sailed back to France.

He wrote letters shortly afterwards revealing that Strickland had been with him there. What Francis did for James in this period is unclear. But the Duke of Mar wrote on 17 April 1716 that “anchovies and apples (Stuart code for arms and ammunition) had been sent at that time to Skye by ship that were “bound for Strickland (a spy)…”. After the failed 1715 rebellion Francis was intimately involved in setting up James’s overseas residence. He was described as a “captain de cavalry, gentilhomme servant de la chambre”, one of thirty-eight English gentlemen in James’s court. Francis negotiated with Papal representatives, paid out money on James’s behalf (such as for the Duke of Mar’s lodgings) ensured James had his “highland clothes” when necessary and carried out secret missions to the Court of Sicily, Lanslebourg in the French Alps, Turin and Loretto.

Along the way, he seemed to enjoy the European fleshpots. A Jacobite lawyer, John Carnegy, arriving in Urbino, wrote in a letter of July 21 about Strickland’s fondness for drink: “Tell Strickland, if he were here, I would carry him to drink cool liquors about one or two in the morning, for they be very good here.” Francis soon arrived in the town and compared it favourably with Pesaro on the Adriatic coast that the court had just quit.

“The city (Pesaro) and surroundings are beautiful. However, the inhabitants are savage and barbarian, the wine is worth nothing, neither is the bread, and there are just two bad coaches in the city.” Urbino suited him better, he said, adding: “I do not believe that one can spend a long time here without losing one’s illness.” That remark about illness hinted that drink was exacerbating his medical problems.

Strickland shared a love of wine with Charles Stuart. The Prince saw himself as a jovial drinking companion but reading between the lines he appears to have been a passionate but rather moody and brittle personality already on the way to the alcoholism that would plague him for years after the disaster of Culloden.

As he wandered the Highlands for months after Culloden seeking return to the Continent, Charles was reported to be drinking a bottle of brandy a day. It appears that his son’s drinking partnership with the intense and secretive Francis was already driving James Stuart to despair. He wrote to Colonel Daniel O'Brien, the former Master of James II’s Household, complaining of Charles’s “penchant for all sorts of entertainments, and a little too much taste that he seems to have for wine.”

In Urbino the conspiracy-obsessed Francis caused consternation by passing on “intelligence” from Mary of Modena. This said that the English military leader, the Earl of Peterborough, who was visiting St Germain, was on his way to assassinate James Stuart. This was an exaggeration.

The Queen had merely expressed a fear of an attack and urged precautions to “prevent accidents”. Lewis Innes, the queen’s almoner, wrote to the Duke of Mar on August 22, 1717 that Strickland had left Urbino after causing the panic. He complained that the alarm Francis had promoted “is now very publicly talked about here.” Strickland’s paranoid habit of spreading of false rumours, however, was not without consequences for Peterborough. He was arrested by the French and imprisoned at Fort Urbana. He was not freed again until November after the British threatened a naval bombardment of the Papal States if he was not released.

The next time “Captain” Strickland appeared as a participant in Stuart rebellion was seventeen years later, in November 1734. Francis had just been released from service with Fitzjames’ Regiment based at Berwick. He had been called on to take up duties as equerry to the fourteen-year-old Charles Stuart, at a monthly salary of £60 (worth a handsome £7,000 in 2022) a post he was to hold until 1741.

Three years later, at seventeen, Charlie cut a dashing, well- educated figure – fluent in Italian, French, English and German. The prince was musical, handsome and athletic, if temperamental. James Stuart sent him on a grand tour of the major cities of Italy, including Bologna, Parma, Florence, Genoa, Milan, Venice Lucca, Pisa and Livorno. The aim was to polish up his son’s cultural credentials and to raise the profile of the Stuart monarchy among the Italian aristocracy.

Charles travelled under the guise of the Count of Albany in a party of twelve to fourteen people. The group included Francis Strickland, whose key role was to supervise Charles’s writing. Spelling was not the would-be king’s strong point.

Initially the party was feted enthusiastically by the Continental aristocracy. So successful did Charles’s tour appear to be that the intolerant, stupid and irritable George II did his best to discourage fellow monarchs from welcoming him. Gradually, however, the tour turned into a debauch as Strickland and the young Prince indulged themselves at lavish receptions, grand balls and extravagant dinners where the booze flowed freely. Francis contrived things so that Charles wrote only infrequently to his father, but James caught up with their hard-drinking activities from other sources. It was about this time that James began thinking Strickland was an undesirable companion and role model for the young and impressionable prince. These worries were to worsen.

It is strange, therefore, that James appointed Francis Strickland as “maggiordomo”, Head of the Royal Household, in 1741 at a monthly salary of £100, a post he held until he departed for Paris with Charles in the summer of 1744. It may be that giving him the job was a ploy to divert him and thereby reduce the direct influence Francis wielded over the princes. Francis’s new role covered a much wider brief, including acting as the main conduit through which people sought favours and jobs from James.

In January 1744, Francis was again at the centre of things, helping to deceive the British and Charles’s fanatically Catholic brother Henry into thinking Charles had gone off on his usual annual hunting trip - whereas in fact it was the prelude to another Jacobite rising. It was at this time that James learned that Francis was trying to persuade Charles to convert to the Church of England which he argued would increase his acceptability as king in England.

James immediately ordered Francis to be dismissed for sowing discord between the two brothers. Strickland reacted by making his way to the baths in Lucca, one of Europe’s oldest health resorts, famous for treating respiratory ailments. It appears Francis was suffering from shortness of breath, a symptom of heart failure. As Frances soaked in the reviving waters, Charles rejected his father’s advice, blaming vicious court gossips.

“I am very sorry to see…that Strickland has given you again occasion of mentioning his name.” But he added: “hitherto he has given me all reason to be pleased wit him in every way”, adding: “sume people have don him injustice towards you.” James wrote furiously to Daniel O’Brien, the Stuart ambassador to France on August 30, 1745, that the “homme dangereux” was hypocritically manipulating Charles. “It has taken me a long time to recognise what is happening”, he wrote, adding that he couldn’t believe his 24-year-old son had taken Strickland with him to Scotland.

The famous 1745 rising did not get off to a promising start. Prince Charles and Frances boarded the French privateer Doutelle that boasted sixteen cannons at Nantes on 2 July. Their ship was accompanied by another, the old French man of war, Elizabeth, armed with sixty-four guns. Its hold was loaded with a massive cache of arms and ammunition, enough for 10,000 Jacobite soldiers.

But on the 9th this small convoy, crucial to the success of the rebellion, was intercepted by a British warship, The Lion, with fifty-eight guns and a crew of 140. A desperate, bloody five-hour battle ensued with the crews often bobbing within pistol shot reach of each other. The Elizabeth, carrying £40,000 in cash (equal to £5 million in 2021) intended for Charles to fund the uprising day-to-day, was badly damaged. The ship limped into Brest harbour and was lost to the rebels.

The Doutelle escaped undamaged with the prince and his aide still safe aboard. Aghast at the total loss of the Jacobite supply of weapons and money, Strickland urged Charles to abandon the uprising, arguing that the misfortune was a fatal blow to his chances and that he should return to France.

But the Prince rejected the advice and the ship proceeded to the Western Isles where the seven men landed at Moidart on the beautiful Loch Shiel. Downcast at the seaborne disaster, the compatriots repaired to the nearby 15th Century Kinlochmoidart House. There, the prince slapped down the many waverers by demanding they sign an oath of allegiance.

When the party moved on to nearby Glenfinnan on 19 August where the prince raised the standard of rebellion, an onlooker said the group of revolutionaries did not look happy. They were as “old allagrugous [grim or ghastly] like fellows as ever I saw”, he said. Highland clan leaders streamed down from the mountains to debate with the prince about whether to proceed with the risky enterprise. Noting the preponderance of non-Scots advisers in Charles’s cabinet, the highlanders voiced extreme suspicions, particularly about Strickland whom they accused of lacking military experience.

They insisted on his being excluded from the formal council of war at Loch Garry Castle seventy miles away. There, Charles’s charismatic aura and sentimental nationalism overcame the doubts of cooler heads, and the Jacobite army began its march south. Almost immediately, the highlanders expressed fury at Strickland’s attempts to stop them plundering the local homes. Reeling from the stress of this confrontation, it appears, Francis became so ill he was forced to remain behind near Stirling. One of Charles’s courtiers, Sir Thomas Sheridan wrote later “we really believed we shou’d never see him more.”

But the tenacious Strickland recovered in time to overtake them and play his part in the battle of Prestonpans where, through brilliant generalship, the Jacobites caught the English literally napping. Despite his sickliness, Strickland insisted on staging a court martial at Holyrood House, the Scottish Buckingham Palace, in order to sentence six deserters to death by firing squad the following day. If Strickland imagined this punishment would strengthen Jacobite discipline and unity, he could not have been more wrong. Charles was forced to overrule his friend’s decision to prevent an internal revolt. Using the condemned men’s brave conduct at Prestonpans as an excuse he reprieved the absconders. This incident lost Strickland the last shreds of trust among the clansmen.

Yet Strickland persisted with his heavy-handed approach, threatening Lady Jane Nimmo, sister of the fiercely anti-Jacobite Earl of Marchmont, with dire consequences if she failed to deliver weapons he suspected she had hidden about her house. She defied him. Strickland obtained table linen and sheets for Charles’s bed at Holyrood.

He engaged a barber, wigmaker and valet to accompany the young prince on his march into England. Then he tried to bully Edinburgh vintner John Hickson into taking on the management of Charles’s table and household affairs. The wine merchant promptly fled to England to escape any further solicitations from Strickland. Sheridan wrote later that the relationship between Strickland and Charles was by now “no place of intimacy” as the prince was beginning to heed his father’s warnings that Strickland was a disruptive influence.

As the rebel army left Edinburgh there were reports that Strickland had injured himself falling from his horse and that he was left behind in the house of Lady Ormiston, near Dalkeith. British soldiers galloped to arrest him there, but he had slipped away to re-join the Jacobite march. After crossing the border with England on November 8, the Jacobite army camped at Brampton east of Carlisle.

On a whim, Strickland decided that a volunteer, Peter Pattinson, was reliable and sent him with an extremely sensitive letter from Charles through enemy English lines to the prominent English Jacobite, Lord Barrymore. This was a catastrophic error. The compromising document detailed the rebels’ plan to march on London and it was intercepted by Barrymore’s son who leaked its contents to the British.

During the siege of Carlisle, Strikland’s paranoia grew, and he began intriguing against fellow rebels in the leadership including Charles’s military commander, George Murray who sent the prince a strongly worded letter of protest. Strickland told another of the Men of Moidart, Sir John MacDonald (a former French cavalry officer), that Murray’s letter was “very impertinent”. Sir John subsequently wrote that “Strickland and I thought this was a good occasion to get rid of this dangerous man [Murray], suspected by all the army except Thomas Sheridan and 3 or 4 others whom he had persuaded of his ability and honesty”.

The bizarre insults that the militarily inexperienced Francis directed at the commander were extraordinary. Murray repeatedly proved himself one of the ablest generals who fought for Charles during the rebellion. He was largely responsible for the overwhelming Jacobite victory at Prestonpans, East Lothian, on September 21, during which he caught the only English army available to the king while it was sleeping and destroyed it. Murray would later skilfully direct the Jacobite retreat from Derby. Not surprisingly, Murray resigned his commission in outrage at Strickland’s intrigue and was rapidly reinstated after one of his junior commanders, the Duke of Atholl, pleaded with the prince to reconsider.

Perhaps the explanation for Strickland’s vicious behaviour is that he was clearly very sick, suffering badly from an ailment that was then termed dropsy, but we now call congestive heart failure. Common causes of this illness include drinking alcohol heavily over a prolonged period, liver damage and the high blood pressure this produces. Sheridan later wrote that “by the time we got possession of Carlisle, he (Strickland) was again fallen so ill, that it was impossible for him to advance further.

So, he remain’d there till our return, where we found him reduced to a perfect Skeleton.” There is no evidence that during this period Francis called on his impoverished relatives at Sizergh. They remained aloof from the conflict as the Jacobite Army passed its door on the way to London – and again on the way back. Francis Strickland was dying. He was looked after by several servants at Carlisle, as well as Dr James Stratton from Newcastle upon Tyne, a surgeon who attended the sick and wounded in the rebel garrison. For his pains, he was put on trial for treason after the rebellion but acquitted.

Strickland also received help from Henry Salkeld who when younger had acted as a physician. Salkeld lodged at the Grapes Inn and carefully avoided communication with the rebels, prudently seeking consent from two justices of the peace before visiting Strickland. One of the captured prisoners rounded up and sent to York was one “Piere Nestiel, servant to the late Colonel Strickland”. Strickland almost certainly died in Carlisle. The date of his death is often given as 1 January 1746 “three days after he was taken.” But no official record of this has been found, although the registers of St Mary’s Cathedral and the nearby St Cuthbert’s are unreadable because of damp.

Most accounts of the surrender of Carlisle to the British commander the Duke of Cumberland on 30 December 1745 say the Jacobite prisoners were held at Carlisle Cathedral and listed among them was “Col. Strickland of no regiment.” A handwritten list of prisoners taken by the Duke of Cumberland on the same day lists Strickland as among “those who style themselves French,” suggesting he was still alive and defiant. Sheridan later wrote that “he lived long enough to fall alive into the enemies’ hands, and perhaps the ill-usage he met with from them, might hasten his death by two or three days.” A statement from Captain Francis Geoghegan, the commander of the French artillery, dated 10 January 1746, listed Strickland among those who refused to sign the surrender document.

This is merely an extract. You can read the rest of this piece in a new book called Secrets of the Lost Kingdom. You can buy the book at The New Bookshop, Main Street, Cockermouth, at the Moon & Sixpence cafe at Lakeside, Keswick, Bookends in Keswick and Carlisle, and Sam Read in Grasmere.

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An English Heritage team launched a drone over Bassenthwaite Lake - and spotted an unsettling clue about Cumbria’s Stone Age.

They saw a strange elongated oval shape enclosing an acre of land. It was surrounded by a tell-tale bank and a ditch. It dawned on them the embankment must originally have been topped by a massive palisade wall made of tree trunks.

This was the first Neolithic causewayed enclosure ever discovered in Cumbria. Such structures do not automatically imply conflict. But many of those found elsewhere in Britain do show clear evidence of violent attack. Hundreds of flint arrowheads have been discovered concentrated at entrance gateways, burned timber palisades, and unburied individuals in the ditches bearing fatal skeletal trauma. So the discovery in Cumbria has changed the minds of senior experts who previously imagined a more placid lifestyle prevailed.

The ring lies on top of Green How, a prominent hill on Aughertree Fell near Uldale. At the time the enclosure was built five thousand years ago, it represented a very rare clearing on the heavily-wooded fellside. The discovery was revealed in a paper called “A probable Neolithic causewayed enclosure in northern England” produced by archaeologist Peter D. Horne and his team.

So, what is so special about this discovery? Well, traditionally, academics have explained this kind of feature away. They were cattle enclosures, trading centres or religious sites visited only occasionally by Stone Age farming families, the experts thought. In other words, they were used for peaceful, social purposes. They wouldn’t be much good for defence, the experts said.

But, more recently, as archaeological digs have unearthed more evidence of weaponry, the nature of these sites is being reassessed. As Professor Rick Shulting of Oxford University put it, experts have been guilty of “pacifying” the Neolithic period by deliberately choosing to interpret evidence as benign in a misguided attempt to remain objective.

“The role of violence in the Neolithic period in Britain, indeed in European history in general, remains poorly understood. With some notable exceptions…the tendency has been to downplay or ignore the role of interpersonal violence in structuring both society and individual experience…archaeologists, largely through omission, have pacified the past,” he wrote in his paper analysing fatal fractures in Neolithic skulls.

He said a major stumbling block has been an alleged of evidence but this absence was “more perceived than real.” Gradually, specialists are looking again at Neolithic sites. “The last 15 years or so has seen something of a resurgence of interest in the documentation and interpretation of evidence for warfare in the British Neolithic,” Shulting said.

Green How is a fascinating example because it sits on the highest point of a 1,000 foot fell. The oval dips away from the summit, so the interior of the structure would be invisible to an advancing enemy, yet the enclosure commanded panoramic views, especially towards the Solway Plain and Solway Firth.

Green How’s geographical position and regional context point to a notable potential for Neolithic conflict. Because large-scale excavation has not yet happened on this newly discovered site archaeologists have yet to recover the human skeletal remains or arrowhead clusters needed to confirm whether physical combat occurred. But these discoveries are becoming increasingly common in the south of England.

Sitting at 321 meters elevation, this enclosure in Cumbria is tilted across a prominent ridge commanding panoramic views over the Solway Plain and Solway Firth.

Archaeologists are convinced the territory was periodically a war zone because the region hosted one of Stone Age Britain's most important manufacturing sites, the Langdale axe industry, where the inhabitants quarried, polished and exported thousands of highly sought-after greenstone axes. Green How was positioned near key corridors for moving livestock and trading goods. In early farming societies, competition over cattle, grazing rights, and prestige goods like stone axes was a primary driver for raiding and inter-group skirmishes.

What is more, recent surveys across Early Neolithic North Western Europe have revealed that over 10% of skeletal remains show evidence of weapon injuries. These were predominantly injuries to the skull caused by blows from axes and clubs, as well as arrow penetration wounds.

While Green How is likely to have been founded as a seasonal ceremonial and trading site it existed in an increasingly volatile landscape where regional wealth mainly held in the form of cattle herds could make prominent gathering places prime targets for raiding.

The volcanic greenstone axes quarried at Great Langdale were for a long time regarded by archaeologists purely as timber-clearing tools, currency for peaceful trade or diplomatic deals. But more recent studies across Britain show that stone axes were actually the primary weapon for killing enemies during this era. Controlling the high-altitude quarries and transport corridors in Cumbria meant the local tribes were wealthy, powerful and influential. Therefore, they were sitting on critical military and economic assets that had to be defended.

The acidic, peaty soils of the Lake District rapidly dissolve human bones, leaving almost no local skeletal remains from the 4th millennium BC when axe making was at its peak. But archaeologists look at studies carried out elsewhere in Britain and North western Europe. These increasingly reveal early farming societies were far more violent than previously assumed.

As forest clearing expanded and livestock herds grew, pastoral societies were more and more plagued with inter tribal raiding. That forced communities to build their settlements in ever-higher locations to protect their animals. From this position of strength, they attempted to negotiate peace alliances during regional gatherings. Ironically, handing out polished axes was one of the most useful ways of buying off aggressors.

So, experts do not imagine the Lake District was the scene of continuous, formal warfare, but rather a landscape where the constant threat of violent raiding actively shaped where people lived, traded, and built monuments.

Further evidence that Neolithic people fought each other has been found on the Cumbrian West Coast. Widespread scatters of leaf-shaped flint arrowheads, the type which experts say were designed for interpersonal warfare rather than hunting, turned up in 2002. One example in particular was found in a coastal inlet of Walney Channel near the Duddon Estuary. Leaf-shaped arrows were designed to maximise blood loss in humans when fighting close up.

The Green How enclosure is not unique. Sixty-nine other causewayed enclosures have been identified in Britain, but the vast majority are in the south of England. Until now none was known to exist in the north. The discovery of Green How has raised expectations that more Cumbrian enclosures will be spotted.

The idea that causewayed enclosures were always peaceful changed after evidence emerged that one at Crickley Hill, Gloucestershire, had faced a deadly attack in the Stone Age. Crickley had at least three gateways and it was surrounded by a huge palisade of tree trunks.

But it was attacked. Hundreds of leaf shaped arrowheads were found in the area of two entrances and the palisade had been burned down somewhere between 3490-3450 BC.

Another Stone Age enclosure may have existed on the good farmland of the Solway Plain near Aspatria. An excavation at Plasketlands has unearthed a palisaded Neolithic enclosure or monumental structure, which raises the prospect that conflict took place between Stone Age farmers.

Although evidence for Neolithic violence has rarely been found in the region, it is not unknown. A pair of very hefty clubs was found after a farmer drained Ehenside Tarn near Whitehaven. A range of wooden items that would normally have decayed was preserved by being submerged in the oxygen-free moisture for 6,000 years.

One club was covered in a carefully carved lattice pattern and the other was a bowling-pin shaped cudgel. Neolithic Cumbrians did not keep these bludgeons for amusement. They were necessary and deadly serious weapons.

-

Read the full story of how farming brought violence to Neolithic Cumbria in a new book called Secrets of the Lost Kingdom.

You can pick up a copy from the New Bookshop on Main Street, Cockermouth. They are also available at the Moon and Sixpence, Lakeside, Keswick. You can get them at Bookends in Keswick and Carlisle, or Sam Read in Grasmere.

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Modern Cumbrians are mostly descended from ancient hunter-gatherers who migrated north from Spain after the last ice age, the latest scientific evidence suggests.

Medics at the University of Complutense in Madrid took DNA samples from more than 5,600 people in 19 countries. The results strongly suggest that the inhabitants of the north-west corner of England are the descendants of prehistoric people who sailed up from Iberia.

But the proposition that thousands of families waited out the big freeze and then began paddling north in boats 10,000- 15,000 years ago to settle in the mountainous Cumbrian region might seem to be a rather amazing statement. It certainly does not fit with what has been taught in school history lessons for generations.

It would mean that the official story about the origins of Cumbrian people needs to be completely rewritten. Before explaining in full what the Iberian medics found in their huge investigation, let’s recap a little.

The traditional version of British history portrays the people of the so-called Celtic Fringe as a group that came, not from the south tens of thousands of years ago, but from Central Europe in around 400-500 BC. The conventional story goes that these people were rather poor, failed to unify militarily and were essentially massacred by allegedly stronger and better organised invaders from Northern Europe about 1,000 years later in 449 AD, in the famous Anglo-Saxon invasion.

Victorian historians were convinced the British were overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon in origin. They assumed that virtually all the indigenous Celts must have been killed by the incomers. They decided a tiny minority of Celtic survivors, who were not killed, enslaved or expelled from Britain, were driven into infertile mountainous western areas like the Lake District and Wales. This allegedly tiny group of hapless refugees were allowed to scratch a living on unpromising land the Anglo-Saxons did not want.

For 200 years at least, the inhabitants of the western side of Britain were written off as essentially weak, marginal and unimportant. The term Celtic Fringe was invented to describe them in 1890 by the Tory Prime Minister Lord Salisbury as he called for a reduction in the number of MPs representing those areas.

Salisbury wrote: “The great defect of our present representation is that the Celtic edges of the country on both islands are represented enormously out of proportion to the rest of the Anglo-Saxon population.” The Anglo-Saxon invasion hypothesis was enthusiastically embraced by the British establishment because it confirmed some deep prejudices among the ruling class.

Firstly, it suggested that because the Celts were practically all exterminated, British veins now run with the undiluted blood of tough, no-nonsense Germanic tribes. This is supposed to explain why we had what it takes to build an Empire.

Possibly the most influential Victorian historian was Oxford University professor Edward Augustus Freeman. He rejoiced in the assumption that the British were really resilient Germans. He said people should “reverence” the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which purported to describe the Germanic invasion as the beginning of English history, “next after your Bibles and Homer (because it) tells us that the first Teutonic Kingdoms in Britain began in the year 449.”

The second reason the elite liked the invasion story was that it seemed to confirm Salisbury’s view that the people of the Celtic Fringe are inferior and less deserving of political power.

This tale envisages a heavily armed force of 200,000 Anglo-Saxon warriors wiping the landscape clean of Celts. It is still very influential among traditionalists, such as Dr David Starkey, presenter of Channel 4’s Monarchy programme. He described the alleged invasion as “ethnic cleansing at its most effective.”

But the entire invasion hypothesis has come under attack from a new generation of academics. They are led by Oxford Archaeology Professor Barry Cunliffe. This younger group points out that there is no archaeological evidence whatsoever for a single, major Anglo-Saxon invasion in 449AD, no battle sites, no mass graves and no sign of disruption to agriculture which is invariably seen when such events occur. They say the actual evidence that does exist suggests a slow migration of Germanic people into Britain over a period of three centuries, not an instantaneous invasion.

Cunliffe produced DNA research suggesting 68 per cent of Cumbrians are descendants of  the original Celtic hunter-gatherers who arrived in Britain by sailing up the so-called Atlantic Facade after the ice age. This has been backed up by a separate 2015 survey conducted by the Wellcome Trust and Oxford University which found a distinctive Cumbrian genetic cluster overlaying the boundaries of the Dark Age Kingdom of Rheged as they believe they existed in 600 AD.

Cunliffe argues that, far from being driven west after some mythical slaughter, there is no archaeological or documentary evidence of a mass invasion by Anglo-Saxons and certainly no massacre.

The Cunliffe camp argues that, instead, the Cumbrian Celts migrated north from Spain, Portugal and Southern France after the ice age. They followed the relatively shallow waters of the continental shelf. They shared a culture and language with the people spread all along what he called the Atlantic Facade: the  Irish, Welsh, Orkney Islanders, Bretons, Galicians, Basques, Portuguese, Cumbrians and the Cornish.

Cunliffe argues that these migrating Iberians used Celtic as a “lingua franca” rather as English is used as a medium of commerce today.

If true, this alternative thesis, which Cunliffe calls “Celtic from the West” would increase the importance of Celts in Britain’s history.

 However, the traditionalists refuse to give up. One leading supporter of the invasion theory is the Professor of Archaeology at Leicester University, Simon James. He argues the most extreme case that the Celts “never existed” and that they were  “invented” by an 18th Century linguist called Edward Lhuyd. He was the man who first identified that the people of Brittany, Cornwall, Ireland, Isle of Man, Scotland, Wales, and, until the 13th Century, Cumbria, spoke mutually comprehensible dialects of the Celtic language, a tongue rather like contemporary Welsh.

 James strongly implied that the word Celt was a fiction invented for political reasons. It was a ploy to criticise the English suppression of regional identities, he said. We should simply stop using the term and the whole issue will vanish, he argued.

Even so, the latest DNA science has dealt a serious blow to the long-cherished Anglo-Saxon invasion idea.

A high-powered group of doctors based at the School of Medicine in the University of Complutense in Madrid, Spain, one of the oldest and most prestigious academic institutions in Europe, has produced one of the most comprehensive analyses of the genetic origins of Europeans ever conducted.

They decided to test whether the claims of Cunliffe and his allies stood up. It was an extremely large-scale investigation.

They took blood samples from 5,676 people in 19 countries. They came from a selection of Atlantic-facing countries as well as others such as from Japan, Switzerland, Austria in Central Europe and Finland to provide a clear comparison.

The analysis focused particularly on the frequency of the so-called R1b Y male chromosome.

 HLA genes are used to match bone marrow recipients with their donors. So, they offer a very precise way of establishing someone’s genetic identity.

The doctors reported their findings in a paper entitled: “HLA Genes in Atlantic Celtic Populations: Are Celts Iberians?” It revealed the HLA readings were low in the non-Facade countries. But they “reached the maximum frequency in North Spain, Brittany, Wales, England, Scotland and Ireland.”

They add: “This suggests an ancestry relationship between populations inhabiting the Atlantic Europe facade.”

The report concluded: “The origin of the Celts is the Iberian Peninsula and not Central Europe.”

Now, this is very interesting because Linguist John Koch claims to have found potential proof of an Iberian origin for the Celts. He found rune-like inscriptions on around a hundred ancient stone tablets or stelae, mainly gravestones, in south western Portugal.

He believes they were written in the world’s earliest Celtic language, Tartessian, using the Phoenician alphabet.

The stelae date back to 900 BC - 200 years before the Hallstatt culture reached its peak in Austria. Hallstatt, according to the traditional view, is supposed to be the cultural centre of Celtdom.

One telling discovery is that the opening line on one Tartessian stelae mentions “Lugos”. This is the same Celtic god that Carlisle (Luguvalium) was dedicated to.

If confirmed, this is a remarkable link between Carlisle and the Portuguese port city of Tartessos 2,000 miles to the south. It is also adds strength to the Atlantic Facade thesis. If Koch is right, his findings mean Celtic culture and language was born in Iberia, spread to places like Cumbria and then to Central Europe, not the other way around.

A growing number of archaeologists believe the Koch discoveries indicate that Celtic was spoken in Iberia before it reached Britain and other parts of the facade before it ended up in the rest of Europe.

The Tartessian hypothesis is still controversial to some academics. Tatanya Mikhailova of the Institute of Linguistics at Russian Academy of Science, Moscow, is particularly sceptical, dismissing his interpretation as “biased” and “far-fetched”. 

But Professor Alice Roberts, author of The Celts: Search for a Civilisation, is less sceptical. She believes the Tartessian evidence indicates the conventional story that the Celts invaded Britain from Central Europe: “isn’t just creaking; it’s broken.”

So, are the Cumbrians Spanish? It is beginning to look like they might be.

This is a piece is based on themes in a new book called Secrets of the Lost Kingdom. You can buy the book at The New Bookshop, Main Street, Cockermouth, at the Moon & Sixpence cafe in Cockermouth and Keswick, Bookends in Keswick and Carlisle, and Sam Read in Grasmere.

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Southerners are often a bit confused about which side of the Border Cumbria lies on. One of the people responsible for the uncertainty is a highly unusual 12^th century king of Scotland called David I.

In his youth David was a penniless and landless  princeling, the eighth son of Malcolm III. It seemed unlikely he would amount to anything. Yet David rose to become one of Scotland’s greatest kings – and a saint to boot.

This happened because he had a great stroke of luck.  The English King Henry I married his sister, Princess Matilda in 1100. At her prompting, Henry made her seventeen-year-old brother his greatest protege, training him as a knight and grooming him to rule. Of course, Henry had an ulterior motive for doing this. He wanted to use David as a tool to control the bothersome Caledonians.

The English king bullied the Scots into making  David the “Prince of the Cumbrians” with lands in southern Scotland extending from Glasgow to the north bank of the Solway. That created  a buffer zone which stopped Scottish raids on England. Henry’s success in effectively inserting the maverick David onto the Scottish line of succession is a unique event in British history.

When Henry died and civil war broke out in England, David turned the tables. He switched from being an ally of England blocking Scottish territorial ambitions in England to grabbing large parts of Cumberland and Northumberland for Scotland and ruling them for 18 years. David also commandeered England’s Carlisle Castle and massively reinforced it as Scotland’s southern military headquarters. The way the enormous fortress looks today is pretty much the result of David’s rebuilding programme.

So how did the runt of the Scottish royal litter end up making such a huge impact on the north’s history?

When he was born this sixth and youngest son of Malcolm III, no one thought David would ever be important. Young David was so low in the dynastic pecking order he had seemingly no hope of ever wearing the Scottish crown.

But his fortunes were transformed when King Malcolm was ambushed while invading Northumberland in 1093. He was controversially killed by Robert de Mowbray, Earl of Northumbria, probably in the tiny coastal village of Alnmouth. The death of a king outside a formal battle was against the rules of chivalry.

David’s aggressive uncle Donald made himself king, forcing David, then aged nine, and his brothers to flee for their lives into exile in England.

Then the English King William II, better known as Rufus the Red, died in a suspicious hunting accident in the New Forest. His brother Henry seized power. He married Matilda and took her brother David into the privileged crowd of noble youths being trained as knights in the royal household.

It seems Henry soon realised the potential advantages of having David around. The youth could be used as a lever to control the Scottish king. Boosting David’s status was all part of Henry’s policy of raising up “New Men”, or minor gentry, who he could use to dilute the influence of obstructive conservative nobles. The snobbish chronicler Orderic Vitalis sneered that they were nobodies “raised from the dust”.

At Henry’s court, David became saturated in Anglo-Norman culture and he received a crash course in worldliness. The unsmiling, bullock-like Henry was all business. He was one of the least sentimental men ever to rule England. He did not recruit David into his elite out of the goodness of his heart. The English king aimed to use the boy as a tool to get control of his Scottish rivals. David had become Henry’s greatest protege.

As William of Malmesbury put it, David was “a youth more courtly than (his brothers) who, polished since boyhood by intercourse and familiarity with us, had rubbed off all the rust of his Scottish barbarism.”

The next stage in David’s advancement came when then Scottish King Edgar, David’s oldest brother, died in 1107. The next brother in line, Alexander came to the throne. Alexander soon expressed extreme reluctance to hand over what Edgar had promised David: lands  including Roxburghshire, Selkirkshire, Berwickshire, Peeblesshire, Lanarkshire and Tweedale extending from Glasgow to the north bank of the Solway and the title princeps Cumbrensis, "Prince of the Cumbrians”.

Henry was furious. He was determined to install his protege David as prince of Southern Scotland, thus creating a vital buffer zone north of the border with England. The aim was to end centuries of damaging raids by aggressive Scottish kings and greedy Caledonian bandits. But Henry was far more militarily powerful than Alexander. He threatened to send an English army into Scotland and stop the coronation. Alexander backed down and David bloodlessly came into his inheritance.

David’s credit stood very high with Henry at this point and the status of the Scottish king Alexander very low. This is illustrated by the patronising language that appeared in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describing this episode. The chronicle suggests Alexander’s accession to the throne of Scotland depended on English approval: “…as king Henry granted him…” Alexander was so much under Henry’s thumb that he personally fought on the English side in a 1114 battle against Gruffudd ap Cynan, the King of Gwynedd (North Wales), a unique event in British history.

The lands David acquired as Prince of the Cumbrians represented the northern half of the ancient Kingdom of Strathclyde which had existed between the sixth century until 1030. At its fullest extent, Strathclyde (known as Cumbra-land and, in Latin, Cumbria) had included what became Cumberland and Westmorland. But the Scottish royal clerk who recorded David’s good fortune was careful to stress that he had only received the bit of Cumbria north of the border: “he was not in truth lord of the whole Cumbrian region (or kingdom).” This, of course, did nothing to dampen David’s ambition to build on this achievement.

This is an extract from a forthcoming book. You can read more like this in my latest book The Trophy at the End of the World. You can pick up a copy at The New Bookshop, Main Street, Cockermouth, at the Moon & Sixpence cafe at Lakeside, Keswick, Bookends in Keswick and Carlisle, and Sam Read in Grasmere.

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Eleven centuries ago, the men of Cumbra-land fought what contemporary observers called the “immense, lamentable and horrible” Battle of Brunanburgh.

They were forced to join what was arguably the greatest military clash of the early Middle Ages before Hastings to prevent their homeland being forced into King Athelstan’s expanding English kingdom. As we shall see in this piece, they succeeded, but at great cost.

The bloody fight became unavoidable after Athelstan, the grandson of Alfred the Great, launched a blitzkrieg-paced campaign in 927 AD that suddenly moved the effective northern border of English control to the Eamont River just south of Penrith.

Faced with the prospect of being turned into vassals of the ambitious Wessex-based upstart, Owain, the King of the Cumbrians, the Scots and Irish Vikings buried their differences and formed an alliance to fend off the English demand that they bow down and accept Athelstan as their overlord.

Marching south, they confronted their antagonist in the savagely fought conflict at Brunanburh which many scholars believe took place on marshy ground around Bromborough near the Wirral in 937 AD, though other locations have also been proposed.

The clash was a uniquely horrifying orgy of killing in which several kings, powerful earls and the King of Scotland’s son died in a day-long slaughter that left piles of bodies on all sides.

Brunanburh was to be remembered for generations afterward in English tradition as a great war. The sorrowful remnant of the Cumbrian army retreated in shame and grief after suffering harrowing losses. When the battle was over, Athelstan’s propagandists claimed their king had won a uniquely glorious, near‑mythical triumph.

But modern historians such as St Andrews University’s Alex Woolf, who have examined the evidence behind the gloss, describe Brunanburh as a “pyrrhic victory” that resulted in a strategic stalemate.

Athelstan was dead within two years of the battle and there is no evidence that he ever succeeded in imposing a formal, lasting subordination on Cumbria.

Athelstan had achieved the extension of his empire in a very short time. The problem he faced as a result was that his regime was already close to operating beyond its military and economic capacity, a situation that has been called imperial overstretch.

In fact, by merely surviving even in a weakened state, the Cumbrian kings gained something of historic importance whose legacy can be felt even today. The lands of the Cumbrians did not become fully integrated into Athelstan’s England.

It thereby escaped the intense, top‑down programme of shiring, burh‑building and ecclesiastical reorganisation that diluted the separate identities of other components of Wessex-England such as Mercia and much of the Danelaw.

Instead, after nursing his wounds, Cumbria’s king adopted a defiant posture and kept on ruling. The Cumbrian realm retained its autonomy and local institutions for much of the next 150 years. After Brunanburh, Cumbria gained in wealth and diplomatic power by collaborating with Irish Vikings in creating a lucrative trading corridor shuttling goods, armies and silver between Dublin and York.

Cumbria became a broker in the north, adopting alternating alliances. Its king offered military support or neutrality to Vikings, Scots, or English kings as seemed appropriate, effectively selling or withholding backing as circumstances required. So rather than Brunanburh undermining Cumbria’s standing, over the medium term it was enhanced.

Of course, ultimately, it was forced to surrender its sovereignty to a superior force. It was taken over for the English crown by the Norman state in 1092.

By then it did so as a mature, functionally independent kingdom. Cumbria at that time was a rugged frontier society with an underlying Celtic identity and a distinctive character that made it difficult for the Normans to impose feudalism on the place.

When the Normans invaded, they had to graft their own feudal and administrative structures onto Cumbria’s pre‑existing Cumbrian–Norse culture. They took over a Cumbria that had been dominated by a small set of deeply entrenched and powerful local lords, Anglo–Scandinavian thegns, regional ealdormen and Norse strongmen, who held real power on the ground.

The Normans could not simply reform this edgy, fragmented, militarised borderland system and gently install a new, stable, centrally-controlled one. Instead, they violently ripped out much of the old native elite and then tried with variable success to overlay it with a foreign feudal structure of castles and baronies, in which the barons themselves held their lands in an insecure, quarrelsome and often precarious manner at the mercy of William Rufus’s displeasure.

The result was imperfect control because Cumbria is a land of high mountains, steep valleys, and narrow coastal plains, where travel and communication are difficult and where large areas remained stubbornly independent of any lowland centre.

The Norman system was always too weak and brittle to fully replace the older, informal power. The Normans could control the Cumbrian valleys but not effectively police the uplands, remote dales, and the long Solway–Irish Sea fringe. Thus, Norse and Anglo‑Scandinavian communities with lingering non‑English legal features survived alongside the new feudal framework.

This helps explain why Cumbria is noticeably different to the rest of England even today and despite the experience of Norman oppression. Its culture retains a distinctive mix of Celtic, Scandinavian and English influences, although admittedly the evidence for some of these aspects has been exaggerated by nineteenth‑ and twentieth‑century enthusiasts who drew attention to deeper, more complex medieval layers.

It is why Cumbrian place names and dialect feature words derived from the ancient Cumbrian Celtic language, Cumbric. It is also why the legacy of Cumbria’s distinctive customary tenures law, which may have roots in earlier Celtic practice, persists.

This law gave many peasant farmers unusually strong security of tenure in the farms they rented, sometimes approaching practical freehold, and the principle of this custom is still reflected in Cumbria’s common land rights and manorial laws.

So, how did Cumbria manage to stay outside the Wessex-English embrace for so long and why?

Paul’s latest book is called Secrets of the Hidden People. You can buy it at Bookends in Carlisle or Keswick and the New Bookshop in Cockermouth or Sam Read in Grasmere.

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“We have found it!” shouted the archaeologists standing on the summit of Trusty’s Hill in May 2013.

Their cries of delight came as they read radiocarbon test results that had just returned from the lab. Scientists had examined soil from a 1,500-year-old blaze so fierce that it had turned the wooden ramparts of the Dark Age fortress into lumps of black glass.

The readout suggested the fortified summit of the small, craggy hillfort one mile west of the town of Gatehouse of Fleet in Galloway was occupied in the late sixth century. That was during the reign of the fierce warlord King Urien of Rheged when it was fire-bombed by raiders.

The lead archaeologists on the dig, Ronan Toolis and Christopher Bowles, formally announced their finding triumphantly four years later. In a book about the excavation, they declared: “The 2012 excavations show that Trusty’s Hill was likely the royal seat of Rheged.”

All the evidence they dug up, gold and silver jewellery workshops, the multiple rings of earthworks, the strategic location controlling key Dark Age transport routes and elaborate Pictish carvings convinced them they had found the headquarters of Urien, the Old North’s “most famous king.”

Their immensely important discovery received lavish praise from historians and archaeologists, especially for the dig’s superb professionalism. Most experts are convinced they did indeed find a major early medieval power centre.

The find massively increased the significance of the region’s role in post-Roman history. But although the two archaeologists made a compelling circumstantial case, naming the site definitely as “the heart of Urien’s Rheged” was an enormous leap of faith.

It is not the first time enthusiastic researchers have identified places within the elusive, mysterious, quasi-legendary kingdom of Rheged as the permanent palace, fortress or military base of the illustrious warrior-monarch. Urien was a real, historical figure believed to be one of the inspirations for the King Arthur stories.

The tragic king Urien has haunted the imaginations of medievalists for hundreds of years. He was treacherously murdered on the orders of a jealous rival in around 590 AD despite, or more likely because of, his heroic and highly successful defence of the Celts against the invading Anglo-Saxons.

Nennius, the ninth century author of the Historia Brittonum breathlessly declared the Rheged ruler displayed “so much superiority over all the kings in military science” he had no equal. The sixth century Welsh poet Taliesin went even further in a poem called “Urien of Yrechwydd” asserting that he was “Of the bravest stock, thou art the best that is, that has been and will be; thou hast no peer.” The gushing tone is no surprise since Taliesin was, after all, Urien’s employee.

But are the seekers after Urien’s HQ barking up the wrong tree? The reason for the question is that there is growing evidence that early medieval kings were not static, but peripatetic. They constantly travelled from place to place because after the departure of the Romans, power fragmented. Multiple ambitious warlords, tribal groups, and emerging kingdoms competed for survival and dominance. Building a permanent headquarters simply offered your enemies too easy a target.

In a society without formal legal systems or police forces, violence or the credible threat of it was the primary tool for maintaining the peace, exacting tribute and settling disputes. It was better for a king to keep moving and by circulating around the realm impose order personally on any troublemakers and constantly gather on-the-ground intelligence about any threats.

As Tom Lambert and Sam Leggett wrote, instead of remaining in one place, early kings and their military retinue travelled around the realm living off so-called food renders. This was a mandatory tax or tribute paid in ale, honey, cheese, butter, salmon, geese, cows, hens, eels, fodder and other necessities of life by local communities to support a travelling king and his royal warband. Historian Robyn Fleming has traced this system, known in Old English as feorm, back to the early sixth century.

But let’s not prejudge what happened in the north west. In this piece we are going to assess the practicality of each of the leading options that have been put forward as potential permanent bases for Urien’s government. In doing this, we are not going to look at the question in an abstract way. Our investigation will take account of real, harsh, military, political and logistical realities of sixth century Britain confronting Urien as he considered the safest and most strategically effective place to put his forces in the actual landscape of Rheged.

Rheged’s precise boundaries are in dispute because the direct, concrete evidence for the kingdom’s existence is thin. The biggest complaint is that almost everything we know about it comes from reading a few pieces of what was originally oral poetry composed by Taliesin. His verses were only written down by monks for the first time in the 14th century, leaving lots of time for the text to be interfered with. Beyond that, we have to rely on a scatter of archaeological remains that are suggestive rather than conclusive. Another obstacle is that many early medieval scholars, especially those classically trained at private schools, do not trust Old Welsh verse as history. Despite vehement denials of any prejudice, in practice, documents in ancient Welsh routinely lose out against those written in Latin. The classicists even prefer the wild, clearly mythological and at times hysterical jeremiad by the sixth century monk, Gildas, to anything in a vernacular language.

The most powerful argument in favour of Rheged existing is that experts have already found places on the map for the other northern Dark Age kingdoms. While the positive evidence for Rheged’s location is elusive, there is a definite “hole” on the map for Rheged to go into as we shall see later.

So, what are the options for Urien’s stronghold? One camp favours a promontory with lush farmland on the most southerly tip of Scotland known as the Rhins of Galloway while others plump for that remarkable fort at Trusty’s Hill, a superbly defensible site on its rocky knoll near the Galloway coast.

Another group is sure Urien must have been based at the highly defensible riverside site where Carlisle Castle now stands. This was also once the location of a complex former Roman fortress. Others take the hint from a Taliesin poem that suggests Urien feasted his followers at a palace at Llwyfenydd beside the River Lyvennet, a tributary of the River Eden located just south of Penrith in the agriculturally rich Eden Valley.

The final camp believes Urien acted as a powerful and highly mobile over-king ordering lesser monarchs about in a shifting, loosely-organised state with no permanent base.

When Urien came to power, Rheged was facing an existential threat from its aggressive Anglo-Saxon neighbour, Bernicia, but also intermittent attacks from frenemies - neighbouring Celtic kings.

Urien would have been highly conscious that choosing a permanent stronghold would be a powerful symbol of royal legitimacy. A well-fortified site such as Carlisle or Trusty’s Hill would be a secure refuge against sudden attacks and it would encourage useful artisans, merchants, and noble clients to settle nearby.

But in a highly competitive and war-torn landscape, a fixed centre presented an obvious target for enemies. It would restrict the king’s mobility, reducing his ability to maintain personal bonds and loyalty with sub-chiefs. Establishing a single “capital” could also draw the envy and hostility of neighbouring kingdoms and encourage civil strife.

All these factors will weigh heavily when we determine Urien’s final, perhaps surprising, choice.

The Rhins was an exceptionally rich agricultural breadbasket due to its Gulf Stream-warmed climate.

Some academics even go so far as to dismiss Rheged as mythical because we have not found any contemporary documents referring directly to it.

Archaeologists have unearthed no objects definitely from Rheged. There are no first-hand accounts of events there.

Thomas Williams, author of Lost Realms, 2022, writes that “the possibility must always be seriously entertained that the kingdom of Rheged never existed at all.” Bradford University’s Mike McCarthy wrote: “Little of the Rheged legend is grounded in solid evidence” although he admitted there may be “kernels of truth” about Urien.

This absence of evidence has left a wide-open space for interpretation. Much effort has gone into scrutinising medieval Welsh lists of kings and Taliesin’s eight praise-poems. The bard originally composed his poems in oral form to be memorised and delivered at feasts and formal occasions.

Anyway, poems are not usually seen as reliable historical source material by scholars. Poetry, many argue, is full of imprecise metaphors, irrelevant emotion and it prioritises the biased views of individuals over objective, verifiable facts.

But cultural historians and historical philologists take the opposite view. They argue it is wrong to reject the information contained in medieval Welsh poetry just because of the form it takes. They argue that medieval Welsh intellectuals, the professional poets known as bards, wrote serious history, preserving tribal memories, key events, dynasties, and battles in highly sophisticated verse forms.

While the content is stylised and shaped by ancient poetic conventions, they say, the poems often record authentic details about people, events, locations and power structures. These facts can often be corroborated using other sources such as the Welsh and Irish Annals which record major battles and mention notable individuals.

Taliesin’s poems celebrate the achievements of the two most famous kings of Rheged, Urien and his son Owain without, unfortunately, ever giving clear descriptions of where the kingdom was or how far Rheged’s boundaries spread.

So, we first have to face the grim possibility that we are chasing a phantom. Did Rheged exist at all?

In 1968, there appeared to be a breakthrough in the hunt for Rheged when Welsh language professor at Bangor University, Sir Ifor Williams, homed in on a key phrase in Taliesin’s poetry which reads: “tra merin reget”. He said this meant “beyond the sea of Rheged.” He claimed the words referred to the Solway Firth. That seemed to imply nearby Carlisle was Urien’s base. Sir Ifor also amended the word “don” in another poem to read “i-don” so it translated as: “the plentiful wine of Idon”…a seeming reference to the River Eden (which sounds similar to idon) in Cumbria, close to Urien’s supposed palace.

Manchester University’s influential historian Tim Campbell ridiculed all this, pointing out that chilly sixth century northern Britain was not exactly famous for its vineyards. He concluded it was impossible to locate Rheged using currently-available information.

Yet, despite his scepticism, Campbell did concede that the locations of the other northern Iron Age kingdoms such as Elmet, Strathclyde (Alt Clut), Gododdin, Bernicia, and Deira could be established. He remarked that, when one puts those places on a map, a “hole” appears over the space occupied by modern-day Cumbria. Based on Campbell’s reasoning, therefore, the existence of Rheged in the space now covered by Cumbria is a highly rational possibility.

There is literary evidence for the place. Taliesin’s verses repeatedly mention Rheged. In a poem called “The Affair of Argoed Llwyfain,” he describes a great “Battle of the Trees” (Cad Goddeau in Old Welsh) involving Rheged and other northern kingdoms with the line: “Godeu and Reged to overwhelm.”

Urien’s famed Eden Valley palace gets frequent name-checks. In the poem known as “Urien of Llwyfenydd” Taliesin writes: “I have been in the hall of Lleu and Gwydion, in the court of Urien of Llwyfenydd.”

The next stage in our quest is to work out where Rheged’s borders were.

There is a rough consensus among scholars that, at its height, Rheged covered a substantial area of northwest Britain, perhaps extending south from Loch Lomond in southern Scotland, through present day Cumbria, into Lancashire, and as far east as the Pennine mountains. At most, his kingdom extended 250 miles north to south and 50 miles east to west.

So, where would Urien have been wisest to set up his headquarters? After all, he faced military threats from several directions.

When selecting a HQ, Urien would have been forced to prioritise defensibility, distance from vulnerable borders and the availability of farmland for feeding troops. He could not ignore the accessibility of major roads, rivers, and passes vital for his armies, messengers, and supplies to move around on. He also needed to remain politically central and therefore could not choose a base too remote from his network of subordinate kings and regional allies.

The most pressing fact facing Urien when he inherited the kingdom sometime between the 560s and early 570s from his father, Cynfarch Oer, who was known as “The Dismal”, was the murderous threat from Bernicia. The aggressively land-hungry Bernician kings based to the east at their barbaric coastal fortress of Bamburgh were launching constant attacks. They were trying to capture Rheged’s key mountain passes and river valleys in preparation for achieving dominance over the whole of northern Britain.

Urien’s main task, therefore, was to defend and where possible roll back Bernician expansion asserting his own dominance over the western Old North. It seems Urien’s military skill and resolution exposed the Bernicians’ internal weaknesses. The Bamburgh court was destabilised by the plotting of exiled princes and rival claimants to the throne. It was during Urien’s reign, not his father’s, that Rheged began being described as the dominant northern power.

In a way, the Bernicians were not the trickiest problem. Urien Rheged faced continual threats from jealous Celtic rivals seeking to seize his lands and undermine his authority. When not united against external enemies like the Bernicians, the other Brittonic kings frequently engaged in violent power struggles with one another, motivated by fear, rivalry, and the desire to stop their rivals surpassing them in power.

Urien faced opposition and sporadic conflict from Dunod ap Pabo, leader in the “land of the Dunoting” near modern Dent, as well as from Gwallog ap Lleenog of Elmet in what is now West Yorkshire. The pair were driven by a combination of dynastic rivalry, the quest for regional dominance, and deeply ingrained traditions of kin-based conflict and vengeance.

But it seems Urien was supremely successful in overcoming all these challenges, at least in the short term, according to both the 9th Century Historia Brittonum and the Taliesin poems. He is said to have directed most of his energy towards containing Bernicia.

In doing so, Urien became one of the most significant British rulers in the sixth century. Taliesin wrote about how he brought many northern British rulers under his control. He calls Urien “lord of Catraeth” suggesting Urien conquered modern-day Catterick in North Yorkshire. Ultimately, his authority spread as far north as Manaw Gododdin around Clackmannanshire, to Cheshire in the south, the Irish Sea in the west, and as far north east as Yeavering in present-day Northumberland.

The peak of Urien’s career came at the Battle of Argoed Llwyfain, fought near Urien’s supposed palace at Lyvennet in the Eden Valley. There, he defeated the Anglo-Saxons and killed the Bernician king Theodric. Urien then took the fight deep into enemy territory, leading the three-day siege of the Bernician stronghold of Lindisfarne on the east coast. He came remarkably close to destroying the kingdom of Bernicia and forcing the Angles out of northern Britain.

Such an outcome would have transformed the history of England. If Bernicia had been destroyed, there would have been no later union with Deira to form what became Northumbria, one of the most powerful and influential Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in Britain. The destruction of Bernicia could have stopped the great Anglo-Saxon advance into the north and kingdoms such as Cumbria would have flourished, seriously curbing the subsequent rise of England. Historian Alex Woolf described Urien’s campaign against Bernicia as “one of the great near misses of history”.

Urien would have succeeded but for the treachery of Morcant Bulc. Known as Morcant “The Proud”, he was king of the southern Scottish kingdom of Bryneich. He joined Urien’s coalition against the Bernicians but during the crucial siege of Lindisfarne, Morcant arranged Urien’s assassination, likely out of fear that Urien’s power had eclipsed his own.

But, the thinking goes, Urien could not have got so far without a secure and well-provisioned headquarters within reach of his enemies. Scholars are deeply divided over where this was.

There are many rival theories.

The first candidate for Urien’s base is the Rhins peninsula, a beautiful and fertile tongue of land stretching down the west coast of Scotland from Stranraer to the Mull of Galloway. The promontory has the mildest climate in Scotland because it is warmed by the Gulf Stream. Its soil produces good harvests of grain, particularly oats, barley, and to a lesser extent wheat. This, some say, is perfect for supporting a royal military force.

The second candidate is the hill top fortress excavated at Trusty’s Hill. Archaeologists Dr. Christopher Bowles and Dr. Ronan Toolis used GPS satellite mapping. They were able to reconstruct the site as it appeared in the early Medieval period. As a result, they came to believe the rocky outcrop with a commanding view of the Fleet Valley and local roads, was Urien’s headquarters. The summit is enclosed by ramparts laboriously carved from the rock forming a roughly oval fortification around the hill’s highest point. Laser scanning confirmed the authenticity of Pictish rock carvings.

A footprint sculpted out of the stone and a basin suggests it was where kings were crowned. Inside the fortress are the signs of royal presence including remains of timber buildings, signs of high-status metalworking in gold, silver and iron and traces of luxury imported goods such as E Ware pottery from France.

The third proposition is a much looser and shifting realm. Under this model, backed by Scottish archaeologist Ronald M Morris, Urien would have acted as a powerful and highly mobile over-king without a fixed headquarters. He would shift his court and military resources as needed depending on the political, defensive, and strategic threats he faced. He would control a network of lesser kings, each with their own local territories, forts, or clans.

This type of set-up was common elsewhere in post-Roman Britain, Ireland and Wales. The petty kings under the sway of this over-king would be bound by strict obligations to offer tribute, hospitality, military service and loyalty to the leader.

The fourth model envisages a rigid, rigorous and hierarchical structure. Under this regime, favoured by Cambridge University academic Nora Chadwick, Urien’s court would include a personal military unit of highly trained and loyal warriors. This kind of warband was known in Welsh poetic tradition as a teulu or comitatus—a group of elite fighters who pledged direct allegiance to the king in return for generous gifts of gold.

Later legend suggests Urien had his permanent fortress at Carlisle. Using stratigraphic excavation, archaeologists have closely examined the layers of deposits and associated artefacts within the fort which seem to confirm it was inhabited by the Celts in Urien’s time. In addition, Urien is supposed to have had a palace in the Eden Valley, amongst Cumbria’s finest farmland. Taliesin’s poems repeatedly say the palace was at “Llwyfenydd,” which many scholars believe is the Lyvennet, a tributary running into the Eden Valley.

But are any of these locations practical military options in the brutal sixth century?

Paul’s latest book is Secrets of the Hidden People. You can buy it at The New Bookshop, Main Street, Cockermouth, at the Moon & Sixpence cafe at Lakeside, Keswick, Bookends in Keswick and Carlisle, and Sam Read in Grasmere.

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Every year teachers tell about four million primary school pupils that the Roman invasion of Britain in 43 AD gave the population a whole range of advantages.

They got proper houses, underfloor heating, sewage systems, literacy, new words, miles, feet and inches, coins and, er, rabbits. “Overall we owe a lot to the Romans,” a video accompanying the Key Stage Two history lesson declares.

But this is a travesty of the truth about British lives in the north of England two thousand years ago. The people who inhabited what is now Cumbria and part of Dumfriesshire, the Carvetii tribe, felt quite different emotions about the forcible occupation of the region. It was not awe, admiration or gratitude - but hatred.

In 78 AD, Cumbria was conquered by a ruthlessly efficient Roman general called Gnaeus Julius Agricola. He captured and sealed off villages on the edge of the uplands as his forces moved north, thus isolating the rebellious hill dwellers from the rich agricultural plain.

Within a few years of the takeover, it became clear that many of the Carvetii elite figured that they had something to gain from collaborating with their new overlords, and we will look at the evidence for that in a minute.

But the reaction of the broad mass of the Carvetii to the Roman occupation was starkly different to, for example, that of the tribes in the south of England. Early in the invasion the Romans drew a diagonal line on their military maps that extended roughly from Lincoln to Exeter. To the south and east lay the main lowland areas with the best farmland.

Several of the British tribes who lived there had invited the Romans into the country in the first place. Imperial commanders deemed these pro-Roman people capable of being “civilised”. Gradually during the 367 years of Roman occupation the upper class inhabitants of the prosperous southeast triangle began to look distinctly Mediterranean.

But the Carvetii people in Cumbria responded quite differently. One reason for this is that the Romans disrupted Carvetii traditions far more violently than any other part of England. Another is that the invaders made far less effort than they had in the south to share the wealth of the Empire with Cumbrian people.

If we could ask them today, Roman commanders might excuse these omissions by saying the north was a war zone under constant attack from Scottish tribes and internal insurrection, therefore defence had to take priority over diplomacy.

That is why the invaders had to build a vast amount of repressive infrastructure to keep the Cumbrian Celts down. They constructed upwards of twenty-seven massive forts in the county including along the Stanegate line and down the Solway Coast at Beckfoot, Maryport, Burrow Walls (near Workington), Moresby (near Whitehaven) and in the interior, for example at Derventio near Cockermouth, Hardnott in Eskdale, Ambleside and a formidable grid of military roads linking them together.

The failure of Romanisation in Cumbria is illustrated by one stark statistic. Conquered people in the south built 1,500 Roman-style villas in imitation of their oppressors’ culture, with mosaics, wall paintings and gardens during the occupation. None was built in Cumbria.

We also know the Romans treated the locals with contempt. A wooden tablet discovered at Vindolanda fort on Hadrian’s Wall, bore a derogatory message describing the tribesmen as Brittunculi or “wretched little Brits.”

Archaeology shows that the Carvetii were tough people living hard lives and they carved a modest living from scarce fertile farmland.

Before the Roman invasion, Carvetii society was highly structured with six basic classes but, despite that hierarchical structure, the land was held communally. The tribe lived in roundhouses surrounded by enclosures and fields. They were governed by a collective philosophy with farmers helping each other out, particularly at harvest time.

Close inspection the map of Cumbria reveals that the invaders almost invariably slapped their forts down on the lowest, flattest and most productive farmland, evicting farming families as they went.

Each fort occupied at least 185 acres and that was before the builders added the outlying “territoria” zones – areas cordoned off for requirements such as horse pasture, woodlots, water sources, stone quarries, mines, exercise fields and attached villages. In total the Carvetii lost 300,000 acres of precious agricultural land to fort building, not including the forts along the Cumbrian section of Hadrian’s Wall.

The irony is that Cumbria’s economy boomed for long periods under Roman occupation - but hardly any of the wealth generated trickled down to the native Carvetii. Apart from a few glass beads and other cheap trinkets, no Roman items of any value have been found in the homes of the Cumbrian Carvetii families.

Every Roman fort in Cumbria, such as the large one at Derventio in Papcastle, developed a vicus settlement where the (often unofficial) wives and children of the soldiers lived, military workshops operated and a civilian market traded. Independent dealers flocked to these markets to sell goods and services to the well-paid legionaries, ranging from metal horse tack to glass vessels, perfume to fine shoes, beer to brothels.

Craftspeople such as stone masons and jewellers set up shop in vici to serve local demand. It was a lucrative business - a regular garrison soldier earned twice as much as an ordinary unskilled Carvetii man. But, apart from a few Cumbrians doing unskilled labour, almost all the traders were immigrants. Fewer than one in six were locals.

The records show one rich Greek merchant called Flavius Antigonus Papias, based in Carlisle, dominated local vicus trade. Another civilian trader was Ateco based at the Old Carlisle fort between Caldbeck and Wigton. A further cause of tension was that many local women evidently viewed the well-washed soldiers as better marriage material than the local men. Many Roman soldiers retired close to the garrison where they served and married local women.

The Roman Empire was based on slavery. Carvetii warriors were taken as prisoners of during the northern invasion and, later, criminals and debtors ended up on chain gangs. The captives were set to work building major projects such as the new road system spanning the fells.

Given the evidence from elsewhere in the Empire, it is unlikely the Romans would have attempted to construct the vast Cumbrian highway network using exclusively paid labour. During their bondage, slaves had no rights and no independent identity. Upwards of one in ten of the indigenous Carvetii may have served time in slavery, although it was normal after a period for slaves to be declared freemen as a reward for good service.

The Carvetii were a people singularly unlikely to respond well to this kind of treatment. Here’s why…

—-

This is a short extract from a new book called Secrets of the Lost Kingdom. You can buy the book at The New Bookshop, Main Street, Cockermouth, Bookends in Keswick and Carlisle, and Sam Read in Grasmere.

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Keswick, Saturday night, 5th October, 1566. Twenty drunken young toughs, many waving hefty oak staves, paraded up the Market Square…

They were shouting like maniacs and kicking their way through the rubbish left on the cobblestones from that day’s trade.

A few of the well-lubricated men danced threateningly in front of any passers-by who looked remotely “Dutch” (they meant German). Bawling in their faces, they threatened to give the off-comers a good thrashing if they did not go back to where they came from.

Londoners in the middle of the seventeenth century regarded Keswick, if they had ever heard of it, as a fantastically remote outpost lost in a despised, even feared, wilderness.

It would be more than two hundred years before the Romantic poets started praising mountain landscapes as sublime or lauding Lakeland inhabitants as noble.

Elizabethan England was a much more youthful and violent society than ours. The average age of the people was twenty-two and few lived past forty. Death was an ever- present force in daily life. Shakespeare set his plays in exotic foreign locations to avoid accusations that he was criticising the Queen’s policies.

But the audience at the first performance of Romeo and Juliet a few years later knew that he was really writing about England. The squalid street murder of Mercutio could just as easily have taken place in an English provincial town as in Verona.

The murder rate in Elizabethan England was about one in ten thousand; by comparison today in Britain the toll is one in a hundred thousand. Elizabethan men looked like boys and often behaved like reckless juveniles. Hence, the atmosphere in Keswick was inherently threatening religiously charged, intemperate and riotous.

On that night in the Market Place the community reeked not just of the sulphurous fumes from the smelter, but also of xenophobia, religious bigotry, sexual rivalry, and envy.

Leonard Stoultz was one of a hundred and fifty foreigners drafted in to help save England from the Spanish threat. Smart, disciplined and well-paid, the Cumbrian girls began thinking he was better husband material than the local competition.

The tempers of the Keswick men had frayed not only because Germans like Stoulzt made an impression on the surrounding rock faces but also because the local women had increasingly come to admire the miners’ prodigious earning power, superior self-discipline and more regular bathing habits. These were qualities that made many Keswick girls see them as more marriageable than the indigenous males.

Suddenly, the rabble, led by a shoemaker called Fisher surrounded Stoultz, one of the German technicians hired to smelt the copper needed to forge bronze cannons to defeat the threat from the Spanish Armada. In behaviour, Stoultz was as unlike his assailants as it was possible to be. The German lived by Calvinism’s strict code of behaviour.

He didn’t gamble, dance, get drunk, wear colourful or rich clothes, swear or even sing non-religious songs. But he was not a pacifist. He fought back against his attackers with his own stick for what seemed like an age.

But at last another member of the mob, John á-Wood’s son, raised his staff and smashed the German’s arm so that he could no longer defend himself. The crowd of bellowing locals then fell upon the foreigner. Finally, Christopher Woodborne delivered the death blow. In the following days the Bishop of Carlisle demanded the attackers’ execution.

But no-one was ever punished for the murder. Without question this was thanks to the influence of Keswick’s immensely powerful and well-connected local landowner Lady Derwentwater, Catherine Radcliffe, who lived in a manor house on Lord’s Island in the nearby lake.

She was a Catholic and she had originally opposed the arrival of the Germans who were making a good living pulling copper ore from the nearby Cumberland hills.

However, once the foreigners were there she was happy enough to make their lives a misery. Firstly she enticed them into leasing, for a peppercorn rent, a plot a mile out of town at Brigham on the banks of the tumbling River Greta where they built their smelter and water-powered hammer to pound the ore into manageable chunks.

Then, once they were committed, she sold the Germans the wood they needed to make charcoal, without which they could do nothing, at extortionate prices. No other landowner dared risk her wrath by offering the Germans cheaper timber.

But what caused the murderous clash in the Market Place? It was unexpected because for two years relations between the townsfolk and the off-comers had been relatively peaceful. Everyone had benefited from the industrial project.

The rich seam of ore the Germans had discovered in Newlands Valley had brought prosperity to the locals, too. Dozens of residents had taken jobs carrying coal from Caldbeck, peat and slates from Skiddaw and timber from Borrowdale to feed the expanding smoky, belching, smelly new copper works.

Admittedly, the wages on offer to the unskilled were a fraction of those that the German mining specialists could command. Even so, Keswick had become a sort of English Klondike. It was not enough to staunch the raging jealousy of the local men.

This is an extract. You can read the rest of this piece in my book called People of the Sacred Valley. You can buy the book at The New Bookshop, Main Street, Cockermouth, at the Moon & Sixpence cafe at Lakeside, Keswick, Bookends in Keswick and Carlisle, and Sam Read in Grasmere.

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For a long time, historians and archaeologists thought it was impossible to say much about the first people who lived in Cumbria.

The stone age pioneers who ventured into the mountainous north west of England thirteen thousand years ago just as the glaciers of the last ice age were melting were a simple and primitive people, they said.

These early hunter-gatherers led a harsh, precarious, rootless lifestyle and their nomadic existence did not leave much trace, it was argued. They concentrated rather timidly on foraging along the seashore, beside lakes and along rivers, rarely venturing into the heavily forested interior.

They failed to innovate, remained ignorant of farming, didn’t plan and seemed incapable of manipulating their environment. According to the received wisdom, hunter-gatherers were peaceful.

They lived in small bands in a state of equality without chiefs or kings and the concept of private property did not exist for them.

They lived by opportunistically hunting wild animals and birds, gathering leaves, roots and fruit from plants, catching fish and shellfish. Even their homes were not permanent - they carried the skins they used to build their tent-like houses from site to site.

It almost seemed the academics looked down on these middle stone age, or Mesolithic, people. They were portrayed as the uninteresting filling in the sandwich between the heroic big-game hunters of the Palaeolithic Old Stone Age and the triumphant Neolithic farmers of the New who, allegedly, invaded Cumbria and, ahem, “replaced” them.

Now evidence is emerging that turns all these assumptions upside down.

Excavations, particularly on the Cumbrian coastal plain at places such as Morecambe Bay, Eskmeals near Ravenglass and the Solway shore suggest that the traditional downbeat view of Mesolithic people is wrong.

Far from being lethargic stick-in-the muds, the idea that they lacked the energy to invent anything new for five thousand years is not only misplaced, but the evidence of a highly inventive community of early Cumbrians being unearthed means the story of British prehistory needs to be radically rewritten.

All this matters if we are to understand precisely who Cumbrians really are.

The point is the people who moved into Cumbria after the last big freeze are not some remote irrelevance - they are our direct ancestors. As an Oxford University team under Bryan Sykes, Professor of Human Genetics, discovered through DNA analysis, most of the people who live in Cumbria today can trace their lineage back to one or other of those Mesolithic immigrants.

Sykes found that the the first Cumbrians travelled all the way from the coastal regions of Spain more than 13,000 years ago, following the retreating ice. Now, some important excavations along the shore just below Ravenglass are starting to tell the story of how they lived.

We need to be clear what we mean when we refer to the first people to inhabit Cumbria. The truth is that human-like creatures had been living in Britain off and on for at least a million years.

Evidence for this was discovered at Pakefield in Suffolk, where archaeologists found stone tools that were between 950,000 and 700,000 years old. 

But those people weren’t us. They belonged to Homo Antecessor, an extinct human species whose most obvious characteristic was a distinctly flat face. Homo Antecessor existed before the human species split into Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens. When Homo Antecessor lived here, Britain enjoyed a Mediterranean climate and food supplies were abundant. There have been five major ice ages in world history.

The last one took place between 115,000 – 11,700 years ago when glaciers up to 2,000 feet thick scraped and gouged the Lake District mountains.

If any humans did visit Cumbria before then, the ice has destroyed all the evidence. The signs are that homo sapiens waited out the ice age in a warm Iberian refuge, and then followed the herds north, most likely by boat, as the glaciers retreated, probably reoccupying places their ancestors knew.

At first, the Cumbrian hills were covered in a relatively sparse scrub known as park tundra made up of birch, juniper, willow and hazel trees. Temperatures could still get down to minus 20 or 30 degrees centigrade.

As things warmed up, the tundra was replaced by a more open landscape of grassland punctuated with small copses of trees and the occasional swamp filled with sphagnum moss. Over time, the big game animals that stone age people hunted such as mammoths, which were not well suited to the warmer weather, went extinct - forcing humans to adopt new tactics to feed themselves.

In the past, many commentators have been disparaging about Mesolithic people. Jacquetta and Christopher Hawkes, who were prominent archaeologists in the 1930s, sniffed: “Any modern visitor to Mesolithic Britain would hardly be able to guess that anything…momentous was astir.”

Archaeologist Dame Kathleen Kenyon who was active in the 1950s wrote that they were “in some ways rather a poor, struggling stage in man’s development”.

The popular Very Short Introduction to Prehistory published in 2003 by Oxford University contains entries for the Old Stone Age (Palaeolithic) and the New Stone Age (Neolithic), but nothing for the Middle Stone Age (Mesolithic).

In the early 2000s, historian Rodney Castleden declared hunter-gatherers barely “scratched a living”. But the latest evidence contradicts these gloomy assessments.

The first people to live in Cumbria inhabited caves in the limestone cliffs above the plentiful fishing grounds of Morecambe Bay. Archaeologists unearthed small flint blades and elk antlers dating back to 11,000 BC in Kirkhead Cave near Grange-over-Sands. Less than a mile away, a large angle-backed flint blade turned up sealed beneath a stalagmite in Lindale Low Cave at the mouth of the River Kent.

Eighty more tiny flint blades and reindeer bones were found across the estuary in another cave called Bart’s Shelter, near Aldingham.

This tells us that a community of hunter-gatherers had, under pressure from the disappearance of larger game, adopted new technology in order to survive. Instead of the relatively crude, heavy, hand-held flint axes and spear heads that the Old Stone Age people relied on to bring down bigger slower-moving prey, these Mesolithic people took up sophisticated new weapons to capture more fleet-footed creatures, while at the same time making the most of scarce resources.

For example, the Morecambe Bay finds show that they had learned to chip off smaller but sharper blades from their scarce supply of flints which are almost entirely absent from Cumbria. These longer, wafer thin shards are known as microliths.

The Mesolithic people were skilled at gluing these triangular, square, or trapezoidal flakes onto arrow shafts, harpoons and spears. When cemented with resin into a groove in a piece of wood the microliths kept a cutting edge longer and were deadlier than a single piece of brittle flint.

The evidence, then, suggests they were highly intelligent people who were hardly struggling to make their way. It is also not true to say that the middle stone age people had a scant or un-nourishing diet.

Now archaeologists have discovered that early Cumbrian people moved north from Morecambe Bay and settled at several sites in and around the Eskmeals foreland south of Ravenglass.

These pioneers set up not temporary, but permanent, villages on the seaward-facing slopes of the escarpment that rises above the River Esk. Eskmeals is now regarded as the best example of a Mesolithic site in the whole of Britain.

The coast was a combination of salt marsh, sand dune, rocky cliff and headlands. The drier ground was capped by wind-strafed scrubland grading into taller forest inland. The incomers chose the area well because it combines a river, an estuary and a seashore in one place and thus it offered a far greater variety and abundance of food along with sand and stone for building shelters than a purely coastal location.

Despite previous gloomy assessments, it turns out Cumbria’s wild food supply was bounteous for much of the Mesolithic period. The renowned geographer Jared Diamond wrote that they had a better balance of protein and nutrients than the Neolithic farmers that followed them. Farming drastically limited the range of food available to a family, and it was excessively focused on carbohydrates, Diamond said, although Neolithic societies were able to produce more food than hunter-foragers and support denser populations.

However, the relative abundance that the first Cumbrians enjoyed faced a severe challenge. Immediately after the glaciers retreated, Britain was still connected to the Continent by a land bridge about the size of Wales that we now call Doggerland.

A flat, fertile plain laced with rivers and wetlands, Doggerland was one of the richest areas in ancient Europe for hunting, fishing and bird catching. But then in 6,500 BC a catastrophic tsunami submerged the low-lying land permanently under the sea and broke Britain’s connection to Europe.

Thousands of early people drowned in the cataclysm and the survivors were forced to move to higher ground either on the Continental mainland or on the newly created island of Britain. Although the absolute numbers of Mesolithic people were never large, any influx would have put great pressure on the existing population.

This is because a hunter-gatherer band the size of an extended family required access to between 500 and 700 square miles of land to find the food they needed to survive. Based on this maths, the whole of Britain could have supported a total of no more than 10,000 hunter-gatherers, a few hundred of them in Cumbria. This was the stimulus for a another momentous revolution: the violent introduction of farming into Cumbria…

This is an extract from my book Secrets of the Lost Kingdom. You can pick up a copy from the New Bookshop, Main Street, Cockermouth or Bookends in Keswick and Carlisle. It is also available at the Moon & Sixpence coffee bar at Lakeside in Keswick and Sam Read’s in Grasmere.

You can also buy online at Fletcher Christian Books.

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A horrible obsession gripped the minds of Cumbrians after the shattering destruction of the Cromwellian Civil War.

They felt compelled to accuse, persecute, try and execute large numbers of people, primarily women, for witchcraft. Pinpointing why this macabre witch-hunting mania erupted in the north of England is a challenge.

One explanation is that Cumbria always did indeed have a lot of witches. For hundreds if not thousands of years before Christianity, Cumbrians in common with Celts across Britain believed certain people, often women, could communicate with the gods, influence natural forces and bring about healing. These women were called “wicce” in Old English, which means witch. The men were called “wicca”. They were seen as beneficial for society and Celts did not see them as malign.

But during and after the English Civil War, Puritan authorities, which wanted to concentrate all religious authority in their own hands, increasingly viewed traditional Celtic healers and women practicing folk medicine not as benign helpers, but as witches suspected of making pacts with the devil. This marked a dramatic shift from earlier attitudes, where healers and wise women were often respected in their communities.

This harsh trend was accentuated by the nine-year nightmare of brutal sieges, pillage, robbery and the constant threat of violence by soldiers that the Civil War brought, followed by the impoverishment and famine that inflicted deep trauma, anxiety and a lasting sense of loss on Cumberland and Westmorland.

When the struggle ended in 1651 people looked for scapegoats for their suffering. Families were grief-stricken, bewildered and impoverished after an estimated 3,200 out of the 80,000 inhabitants of Cumbria died in the conflict between Charles I and Parliament.

That is 5.3 per cent of the local population, a significantly larger proportion than the 4 per cent killed in the whole of Britain during the Civil War and much higher than the death toll in the Second World War in which 1 per cent of Britain’s population died.

Although ordinary Cumbrians were not as consistently or enthusiastically Royalist as their local lords, the beheading of King Charles I and the collapse in authority of the mainstream churches left many feeling spiritually and socially rudderless. Widespread anxiety and related religious fervour fuelled a dramatic rise in witchcraft accusations. Henry VIII and James I had both affirmed that witches really existed and had issued laws making occult practices illegal.

But it seemed to many the bloody destruction of the monarchy had turned the normal class hierarchy upside down, dismantled the prevailing religious and cosmological order and violated the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings. People felt this cosmic disturbance made supernatural events more likely. During the Civil War, reports of apparitions, omens, and ghost stories proliferated across Cumbria. For example, folklore tells that on the night before the battle of Marston Moor, people in Cumbria reportedly saw a ghostly army marching over Helvellyn which locals interpreted as an omen of the bloodshed to come. Ghostly soldiers who died or suffered during the conflict were reported walking on the battlements of Carlisle Castle.

Hundreds of ordinary Cumbrians started to nurture the utopian thoughts. Their ills, they imagined, could be solved by exploiting the crisis of authority to remake society on idealistic lines. They flocked to fringe sects that rose to fill the spiritual vacuum, particularly Quakerism which was deemed a particularly subversive organisation by the Government. It was led by the straggle-haired George Fox. He terrified the authorities by proposing a radical social and spiritual revolution, the reform of established religion and the abolition of all forms of hierarchy. And he singled out witches as part of the fundamental evil causing all society’s troubles.

Fox spoke to several large meetings in the region. Firstly at Firbank Fell (now known as Fox’s Pulpit) in Westmorland, located between Kendal and Sedbergh in 1652 and at least twice more at Pardshaw Crag, the historic Quaker site near Cockermouth, first in 1657, and again in 1663. Preachers inspired by Fox, such as John Audland and Edward Burrough, repeated his messages on other occasions.

Fox promised crowds of half-starved devotees universal equality and heaven on earth. He regularly blamed witches for causing the everyday misfortune and societal disorder that were preventing those good things from coming about.

Fox claimed to possess “a spirit of discernment” that enabled him to spot witches and expel them from Quaker meetings. He often publicly picked on individuals in the crowd and rebuked them for being “in the Spirit of witchcraft”.

His words came as images of witches, mostly as woodcuts or illustrations in pamphlets, circulated in Cumbria. They often featured sensational pictures of accused women, animal “familiars,” and demonic scenes, reinforcing emerging stereotypes of witches as crones, frequently with regional settings. The classic propaganda image of the witch with the black pointed cap was taken by cartoonists from the conical “ale-wife” hats typically worn by women brewers who were common in Cumbria in the Civil War period.

Fox was only one of many demagogues who stoked the witch craze among northerners who we would today say were suffering post-traumatic stress disorder after the prolonged and bloody sieges at Carlisle and Cockermouth, the fighting at Clifton Moor and incessant border skirmishes. The merciless plundering of homes by the 20,000-strong Scottish Royalist army as it marched south to Preston meant few parishes escaped without suffering deaths or injuries.

The victorious Puritan Government dissolved the Anglican Church in retribution for supporting the King. Cromwell made Catholic worship illegal. Quakers, Anglicans, or dissenters of any stripe faced banishment, whipping, mutilation, imprisonment or even execution. Cromwell’s government ordered villagers to report moral or social deviants or anyone practicing mystical rites and folk magic. Naturally, the result was rampant fear, secrecy, and the breakdown of trust between neighbours.

In many small, stressed Cumbrian communities old grudges, jealousy and property disputes were reformulated into accusations that individuals were causing harm by magical or occult means. Thus, a witch hunt swept across Cumbria, egged on by hard-liners in the Puritan movement who believed in the reality of witchcraft, sorcery, divination, and related practices condemned in scripture.

Amid rising hardship, wealthier residents often refused charity or kindness to poor neighbours. When something bad happened on their property, many accused the desperate poor of witchcraft as a form of revenge or to assuage their own guilt. The victims of these allegations were overwhelmingly destitute, widowed, elderly, outspoken, independent and isolated women. Oddballs, loners, those who outraged traditional gender roles, or displayed knowledge of ancient Celtic herbal medicine or practised midwifery were the most typical victims.

Among the alleged perpetrators of Cumbrian Black Magic was Margaret Teasdale of Gisland. Her cupboard was found to contain a “Hand of Glory”, cut from the corpse of a murderer on the gallows. Arrayed with lit candles, such ghastly hands were used, most famously, to induce magic sleep so burglars could rob The Old Spital Inn, North Stainmore in 1797. Another alleged harpy, Elizabeth Howe of Thursby was said to have bewitched a valuable cow and calf to death and paralysed a farmer by putting her hand in his corn. The sorceress was only stopped by ritual “blooding” when her victims cut her forehead with a knife, it was claimed.

A mysterious phantom clad in green inflicted retribution when wealthy Westmorland landowner Gabriel Harding returned from visiting a prostitute and killed his wife with one blow to her chest. The apparition entered Gilbert’s house and broke his neck, his neighbours claimed.

A wizard called Dr William Farrar, of Orton, an “anti-conjurer” specialised in de-witching farmhouses using his “Book of Black Art” - in reality a treatise on astronomy with diagrams of the heavenly spheres - for a fancy fee. The Dentdale witch lurked in the Dee valley near Dent drowning drunks returning from the pub, it was said.

The flurry of allegations and prosecutions reached a frightening peak in April 1659, when the village of Winton in Westmorland became the centre of a notable witch trial. Margaret Bousefield, supported by neighbours, accused several women of bewitching her. The proceedings were heavily weighted against the defendants. If the accused cried or seemed afraid during the trial, that was taken as a sign she was a witch. An examiner would look for a diabolical mark on her body, like a birthmark or mole, which was a sure sign they were a witch. If he couldn’t find one, he was perfectly entitled to claim the mark had been made invisible by magic, and therefore the accused was a witch. The defendants were hanged at the Appleby General Sessions after a jury found them guilty.

The obsessive hunt for sorcery was a strange event. Carlisle had become a wealthy administrative town run by well-educated officials. It was also one of Britain’s earliest Christian centres. But its officials accused dozens of Cumbrian women of bewitching neighbours, sickening or killing livestock, damaging crops, summoning up harsh weather, causing physical ailments or other misfortunes.

Why did the witch craze flare up with such vicious intensity in Cumbria? The answer is that ordinary people believed witches existed. Families had passed knowledge of Celtic folk medicine, charms, spells and supernatural beliefs down the generations.

Prehistoric people credited members of their community with the ability to heal, ensure fertility, protect crops and livestock. In Old English such people were known as “conning” or “cunning” folk, meaning “learned, skilful, possessing knowledge.” Celts believed this positive role was symbolised by the Celtic mother goddess, Modron, who was associated with fertility, abundance, healing, and ancestral wisdom.

Evidence that Cumbrians believed in the literal reality of witches can still be seen. Visitors to Winton Hall in the village of Winton near Brough, where the alleged witches were apprehended, can see witch marks intended to ward off evil carved in 1665 on the fireplace in the snug.

Worshippers engraved witch marks in the form of daisy wheel shaped hexafoils on the window frames at St Mary’s in Dalton-in-Furness. Carvers in Carlisle Cathedral fashioned a former roof boss, dated to the early-fifteenth century, to ward off evil spirits. It depicts an evil-looking Green Man. He has a pronounced squint, a symbol hinting at the malevolence of a witch.

In 1637, James I’s son, Charles I, granted Carlisle its governing charter, which, among other things, appointed two aldermen of the city to act as justices of the peace. It gave the officials wide ranging powers to investigate witches and wizards or, as the king put it: “All manner of poisonings, enchantments, magic art, trespasses, forestallings, regratings and exortations whatsoever.”

The nadir of the witch craze came when a man called Matthew Hopkins, a lawyer and son of a Puritan minister, in 1644 appointed himself “Witchfinder General.” He earned a fortune in fees from fearful town officials in return for ridding them of witches - extracting confessions by ruthless means. His most controversial technique for finding witches was the “swimming test.” He bound his suspects hand and foot and threw them into the river. If they floated, they were guilty. If they sank, they were innocent. Hopkins’ entirely bogus campaign led to the execution of up to 230 victims, overwhelmingly women.

Prosecuting witches became a formal duty of Cumbria’s governing classes. The Audit Book of Carlisle for 1649-50, the main record of the city’s policies and activities, has the following entry: “Item for ye witchfynder £6.10s.” This is the equivalent of £35,000 today, a hefty sum at a time when the average wage for a top-skilled craftsman was two shillings a day.

Town officials aggressively pursued witchcraft cases to gain favour with the Government and advance their careers. Frightened residents were also eager to administer rough justice. The parish register of Lamplugh covering the years between 1656 and 1663, records the deaths of seven people who were “bewitched,” as well as three women who residents accused of witchcraft and who they later drowned. The register records that the three victims were “frightened to death by fairies,” which seems to be code for how they were put to death by their neighbours, perhaps using the notorious swimming test.

This is an extract from a new book called Secrets of the Hidden People. You can buy it at Bookends in Carlisle or Keswick and the New Bookshop in Cockermouth or Sam Read in Grasmere.

Alternatively, you can order a copy online here:

https://www.fletcherchristianbooks.com/product/secrets-of-the-hidden-people

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Two thousand strange and often sinister-looking carved stone heads have been found all over Cumbria and the north. Many of them date back to before the Roman invasion. What on earth are they?

Some sceptical academics say the crudely-carved sculptures are merely decorative motifs with no profound meaning. But increasingly, Iron Age specialists say Cumbria and, in particular, Carlisle, was the centre of an intense and violent prehistoric “cult of the head”. This creed dates back as early as 800 BC and was part of an organised religion among pagan Celts that extended across Europe.

But why stone heads? The answer is that the ancient Celts sculpted, collected and venerated human heads because they saw the head as the seat of the soul and a symbol of divinity.

Greek and Roman writers tell us that, in battle, ancient Celtic warriors aimed to chop off the heads of their opponents to capture the centre of their enemies’ life, emotion, and spiritual power.

The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus wrote that when enemies fell in battle, Celtic warriors decapitated them and fastened their heads to the necks of their horses.

They also preserved the heads of their most distinguished enemies in a chest full of cedar oil to show off as war trophies, he wrote.

The act of severing and displaying heads was an ostentatiously violent act that was meant to inspire deep psychological trauma in an enemy and assert dominance in warfare. The act of taking an enemy’s head was celebrated by Celts as a public demonstration of personal bravery, martial skill and victory, fulfilling a warrior’s desire to achieve status and prestige. Diodorus and the Roman historian Livy reported that Roman soldiers were unsettled and intimidated by the tactic and the writers expressed shock and horror at the barbaric and fearsome practice.

But for the Celts decapitation was also interwoven with and spiritual healing because the enemy’s skull could be displayed beside one of Cumbria’s 70 Celtic sacred wells or springs to give the community spiritual protection. Severed heads kept as trophies or displayed at shrines and in homes were thought to channel the power and spirits of the deceased for the benefit of the living, acting as guardians against evil, misfortune, and supernatural threats.

No remains of actual human heads dating from the Iron Age have been discovered in Cumbria. But multiple historical and archaeological sources confirm that Celtic warriors across Britain—including those in Cumbria—were known for “headhunting,” meaning they would cut off the heads of their defeated enemies.

Archaeologists have repeatedly discovered carved Celtic heads in and around Carlisle. They often appear to have been displayed in both pubic religious contexts and in domestic shrines. Experts say this provides solid archaeological and folkloric proof that Carlisle was a major centre for the Celtic head cult in Britain.​

We do know the practice of decapitation happened in Britain. Headless Iron Age bodies have turned up regularly, for example on the banks of the River Sowy in Somerset in 2018, in a Yorkshire pit in 2009 and at Wintringham near York in 2023.

Celtic historian Dr Anne Ross has calculated that a total of 2,000 heads - made of stone, not human - have been found in the area once ruled by the Brigantes tribe: Cumbria, Yorkshire and part of Lancashire. They were found in “great density” near Hadrian’s Wall.

“In a region as turbulent and as open to attack from the north as this, we should expect the natives to indulge in head-hunting and the symbol of the human head to be prominent in this area. This is indeed what we find,” she wrote.

She believes the stone ones were carved as substitutes for the real thing. In her view, Cumbrian Celts undoubtedly used real human heads in ceremonies and rituals. But the problem was that real heads, even when embalmed, would rapidly decay. So, they also made stone heads to act as substitutes.

They were lasting symbols of the spiritual and protective qualities associated with the human head. Stone heads placed at shrines, wells, temples, and domestic sites, spread the benefits of the head’s protective and spiritual power throughout the community, not just to victorious warriors or elite individuals, she wrote.

The northern heads form an “interesting and impressive group”, Dr Ross added. “The majority are fashioned from stone, but we must not overlook the fact that many of them were probably made of wood and thus have perished without trace.” One of her most significant findings is that Carlisle was a centre of this head worship cult.

The name of the town offers the most obvious clue. In Roman times, Carlisle was called Luguvalium after the pagan Celtic god Lugus who was celebrated at a prehistoric festival known as Lughnasadh, in which worshippers ritually piled stone heads on mounds.

This practice is believed to have been a relic of a time in deep prehistory when the heads were real. Luguvalium, means “fortress of Lugus”. In the centuries after the Roman departure, the Celtic word “caer,” meaning “fort,” was added to the town’s name. This resulted in “Caer Luel” or “Caer Leol,” which ultimately evolved into “Carlisle”.

Folklorist Máire MacNeill has recorded evidence that customs linked to Lughnasadh, such as the cutting of the first corn, ritual meals, athletic contests, and gatherings on hilltops were celebrated across the North West, including on the Isle of Man and in the place we now know as Scotland.

Iron Age Britain (including Cumbria) did see considerable violence, warfare, and ritual sacrifice. Ceremonially-killed bodies were buried in bogs at Scaleby Moss, north of Carlisle, and at Seascale Moor (sometimes called Seascale Moss), between Whitehaven and Millom. But modern scholars caution against leaping to the conclusion that everyday life in Celtic Cumbria was unliveably violent for the inhabitants. The veneration of heads says as much about the head’s importance as a religious symbol, links to the afterlife, and ritual protection as it was about warfare.

However, the Brigantes and their allies the Carvetii, the Celtic tribe that occupied the territory we now know as Cumbria, are frequently described in Roman sources as a powerful and warlike group who were involved in multiple uprisings and prolonged conflict with the Roman Empire. Their internal politics were also marked by factionalism, fragile alliances and frequent rebellion.

But the Celtic head cult is not simply a relic of remote history. A strong folk-belief in a head’s power to ward off evil spirits has persisted all over Cumbria and into modern times. For example, the faces carved on corbels in Holy Trinity church, Kendal, are the relic of Celtic head worship. The leaf-covered Green Men carvings in Carlisle Cathedral and St Mary’s Church, Gosforth come from a related tradition.

The Victorian antiquarian, the Rev, Sabine Bearing-Gould, first identified another link connecting the head cult to Carlisle in his 1892 book “Strange Survivals”. He pointed out that the heads of executed traitors Thomas and Alexander de Bruce, were stuck on spikes over the gates of Carlisle Castle 1307.

The Celts believed hoisting severed heads onto poles outside buildings would ward off evil because they had a powerful link to the spiritual or otherworldly realm. One of the most remarkable artefacts in Tullie House Museum at Carlisle is a stone head found near the Roman road north of Appleby, dating probably from the years just before the Romans invaded Cumbria in 79AD.

Today, many visitors are disconcerted by its alarming appearance. It has an alien turned-up moustache, savage close-cropped hair, haunted eyes and howling mouth. No wonder, some say, the Roman legions crushed these nasty Cumbrian Celts and oppressed them for three hundred years.

Indeed, the Roman historian Tacitus, whose father-in-law Agricola was the general who led the conquest of Cumbria, called the northern Celts “savage, fierce and culturally inferior”. Yet in the famous biography he wrote of Agricola, Tacitus also expressed a sneaking admiration for the Cumbrian Celts.

He praised their bravery and endurance, love of freedom and the austere spiritual authority of the druids which he contrasted with the greed, corruption, luxury, and moral decline of Rome. In saying so, Tacitus stepped well out of line with mainstream Roman writers. For example, Strabo called the Celts “war mad.” Dio Cassius dismissed the Celts as “vastly inferior to us.”

Lucan deplored the “horrible altars” on which the Celts performed human sacrifices. But perhaps Tacitus’ writings give us a strong clue that the Cumbrian Celts were not quite the savage barbarians that Roman propaganda suggests.

This is an extract from a new book called Secrets of the Hidden People. You can buy it at Bookends in Carlisle or Keswick and the New Bookshop in Cockermouth or Sam Read in Grasmere.

Alternatively, you can order a copy online here:

https://www.fletcherchristianbooks.com/product/secrets-of-the-hidden-people

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Something stunning has happened in British history. The effort to establish whether King Arthur was a real person has suddenly revived.

Fifty years ago, the academic profession came to a consensus view that the legendary Dark Ages hero had never lived. Scholars began excluding him from serious history books, leaving the study of Arthurian legend to what they termed amateurs, pseudo-intellectuals and cranks.

But a new generation of academics has restarted the quest. Why? Well, they point out that Arthur appears in at least three pre-Norman manuscripts. You can’t just ignore that, they say.

They believe those texts link him to real battles whose locations lie in Rheged, the Dark Age kingdom that covered much of what is now Cumbria.

And they think that when you use modern forensic analysis it is possible to see underneath the layers of legend and mythology that a real person lies there – who is a northerner. Now, you will recall that there are many versions of the Arthur myth and they place him in various locations across Britain (and even beyond).

But Cumbria has been strongly associated with Arthur for a thousand years. Many scholars believe one of the key historical figures who inspired the Arthur stories is King Urien of Rheged, a real person, not a fictional character. He became a folk hero among Welsh peasants because of his tragic heroism in dying at the hands of a treacherous ally in 590 AD while fighting the Anglo-Saxons, exploits celebrated in the poetry of 6^th century bard, Taliesin.

Urien became a celebrated figure there because the Welsh were also fighting what seemed a similar life-or-death struggle against the expansionary English. There was an urgent need for stories of resistance and unity to rally the troops during a time of social upheaval and external threat.

Both Rheged and Wales were part of the broader Celtic-speaking world that once stretched across much of western Britain, sharing a language, customs, and a sense of kinship in opposition to the aggressive Anglo-Saxons who had colonised the east. This kinship exists in the Celtic name the Welsh used for themselves, Cymry, (comrades). This means the same as the Cumbrian Celtic word, Combrogi, from which we get the name Cumbria.

So, in the popular mind Arthur did the same thing as Urien: he fought the Anglo-Saxons, suffered betrayal and died tragically.

We can say for sure that Urien is not Arthur. But the trajectory of his life seems to have shaped the Arthur story. The most potent part of the Arthur legend is that it embodies hope.

Like the story of Jesus Christ, the tale promises that the ideal monarch, King Arthur, did not truly die but went to a mystical place—usually the island of Avalon—where he awaits the right moment to come back and save his people. At this point it is worth reminding ourselves that if scholars do find the “real” Arthur he is not going to be the illustrious figure of legend. He will lack many of the qualities that made his story one of the most influential tales in Western mythology.

It could even be said that searching for the original Arthur is pointless. This is because the most important thing about him is not that he actually existed. His real power is as a symbol of perfect leadership, moral virtue, and cultural identity, qualities that have made him far more significant in the long run than any single real-life war leader could have been.

Across more than 1,500 years, the Arthurian legend has repeatedly been recast and rewritten. It continues to resonate and appear in new variants all the time to meet the needs and concerns of different eras.

For example, a recent movie featuring the mythical king does exactly this. Guy Richie’s 2017 “King Arthur: The Legend of the Sword” features an Arthur who grows up in poverty as an orphan, not as a prince, and is portrayed as a streetwise, working-class figure. This Arthur embodies the anti-elite populist sentiments that run through contemporary world politics.

But let’s say scholars do track down the genuine, workaday real person who sparked all the myth-making. This Arthur will not enjoy the support of the Knights of the Round Table, Merlin, Uther Pendragon, Morgan le Fay, the Lady of the Lake, the magical sword Excalibur, (or Caliburn), Lancelot, Guinevere, or the Holy Grail. Why? Because all these characters and props are embellishments added by medieval poets who started writing 600 years after the “real” Arthur is supposed to have lived.

Yet, given all those reservations, important scholars such as Cambridge University Celtic specialist Rachel Bromwich believe they have found clues in manuscripts suggesting that there was an actual historical Arthur from the north, potentially in what is now southern Scotland, who fought and died in Cumbria.

The renewed attempt to track down the real Arthur centres on a Latin work entitled the Historia Brittonum. This is a peculiar and slightly weird book, even by the eccentric standards of the Middle Ages. It is a patchwork document compiled by a monk called Nennius in 829 AD from multiple sources, many of which contradict each other.

It mixes legendary stories, myth, and pseudo-history with a handful of verifiable facts. It claims, for example, that an entirely mythical refugee from the Trojan war called Brutus (a different person from Julius Caesar’s assassin) founded Britain, named it after himself, became king and then created “New Troy” (London).

Other fantastic material includes battles with giants, dragon prophecies, and miraculous events. But for all its quirky nature, the Historia Brittonum proved hugely influential. It introduced key motifs and stories—most notably the first definite reference to King Arthur—that became the foundation of the later Arthurian myth.

The Historia contains a list of a dozen battles that Arthur is supposed to have fought. Scholars give cautious attention though not uncritical credibility to this list for several nuanced reasons. For one thing, it provides the earliest known summary of Arthurian battles.

The section of the manuscript dealing with the battles adopts a form and tone that differs markedly from the rest of the text. It is much more specific and it attaches the battle locations to recognisable rivers and regions that in theory are placeable on a map. In addition, the Annales Cambriae (Welsh Annals), a separate Latin chronicle compiled in the mid-10th century, mentions real historical people and echoes some of the battles. This corroboration suggests that Nennius’ list has a degree of tradition behind it and was not just made up.

Academics say this list is the only detailed record that survives of any Dark Age events from the point of view of the indigenous British, that is, Celtic people.

If the new analysis of the locations of these battles is reliable, it overturns the traditional story that Arthur was a royal southerner with a magical sword who fought the Anglo-Saxons. In the new reading, he was a gritty northern military leader who earned a great reputation fighting in Rheged and the north-east of Britain.

The new analysis says the “real” Arthur’s opponents in the twelve battles were other North Britons, not Anglo-Saxons. Arthur’s objective was to secure cattle for his starving people in the wake of one of the most catastrophic events of the early medieval period.

Arthur’s followers had been hit by a famine caused by, most likely, the massive eruption of an Icelandic volcano in 536 AD, possibly Katla, Hekla, or Eldgjá. The explosion released immense quantities of microscopic sulphuric acid droplets into the atmosphere that remained suspended in the sky for years. This dimmed the sun and sent summer temperatures plunging by up to 2.5°C, causing extreme hardship.

Contemporary chroniclers described how snow fell in summer harvests failed for years. There were “winters without storms, springs without mildness, and summers without heat.” Annals written by northern monks record a “failure of bread” and widespread deaths through starvation. Plague and disease soon followed.

The key academic pioneering the new interpretation of the Historia is Professor Andrew Breeze of the University of Navarre in Pamplona in Spain. Professor Breeze points to extensive evidence that the volcanic eruption caused widespread social unrest across the north. The upheaval provoked the struggles that led to the eventual defeat of Arthur.

Breeze’s analysis suggests Arthur died in a real military clash recorded in the Annales Cambriae as the battle of “Camlann.” This, Breeze surmises, is a reference to the fort known to the Romans as Camboglanna on the Cumbrian section of Hadrian’s Wall. Today the place is called Castlesteads.

This whole subject is controversial because Nennius was not a historian in any conventional sense. He admitted that he rummaged through old chronicles and fragments of folklore “heaping together all I could find” to create a heroic narrative. His book became available at a time when ninth-century readers in Wales and the surrounding regions were facing attacks from Anglo-Saxon invaders trying to colonise
Wales. In his account, Nennius cast the semi-mythical Arthur as the hero of a fight to expel the Anglo-Saxons.

Critics question the reliability of Nennius’ work because he worked for Cynan Dindaethwy, the king of Gwynnedd, in north-east Wales. Nennius’ top priority was not so much objective truth as to amplify the power and prestige of the Celtic Britons. His mission was to create a powerful narrative capable of rivalling the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, a hugely influential book written by Bede, the 8^th century historian.

The Ecclesiastical History blamed the Celts for not sharing knowledge of Christianity with the Anglo-Saxons for 250 years and even approved of killing Celts in retribution for this, the “gravest crime.”

By glorifying Arthur as a military leader and listing his victories, Nennius was pushing back against Bede. His political message was that the Britons were the rightful and original inhabitants of Britain, and the Johnny-come-lately Saxons weren’t. But if the Historia was a propaganda tool concocted to please Gwynedd’s elite, can one regard any of it as literal history?

Well, there are problems with it. The names of the twelve battles came from poems that originally existed only in oral form at the time Arthur would have fought them. They did not appear in books until until two centuries later. Nennius exaggerates Arthur’s military prowess.

At one point, Nennius claims that Arthur single-handedly killed 960 men at Mount Badon. That sort of ridiculous boast naturally creates doubts about whether we are reading reliable reportage. Nennius described Arthur as a Dux Bellorum (a Latin term for a military leader), rather than a king. That helps make Arthur seem like a more believable, down-to-earth figure, but it still does not provide concrete evidence for his existence.

On top of this, the list of twelve battles includes mythologised elements. The use of the number twelve, a multiple of three, makes the story sound more like a Celtic folk tale than accurate history. Three in Celtic mythology is an important symbol for unity and balance. It reflects the Celtic belief that life is deeply rooted in the rhythms and cycles of nature.

By the time Nennius compiled his work, Arthur’s story had been deeply rooted in Welsh myth and folklore for two centuries, so it was natural for him to credit Arthur with miraculous deeds drawn from that tradition. Despite the obvious problems, some academics think the Historia preserves the cultural memory of the Britons from a crucial time when few other sources exist.

They are convinced the list of battles refers to real conflicts even if the details have become fictionalised. Some scholars believe that if the locations can be identified, “Arthur” and his world might rejoin the ranks of genuine, recorded history.

The 12 battles as listed in the Historia are:

· Battle at the mouth of the river Glein

· Second to fifth battles: Four battles on the river Dubglas (or Dubglas) in the region of Linnuis

· Battle on the river Bassas

· Battle in the wood of Celidon (Cat Coit Celidon / Celyddon Forest)

· Battle at Castle Guinnion (Guinnion Fort)

· Battle in the City of the Legion (Urbe Legionis/Cair Lion)

· Battle on the river Tribruit (also listed as Trat Treuroit or Tribuit)

· Battle on the mountain called Agned or Breguoin (Cat Bregion/Monte Agned)

· Battle at Mount (Hill/Rock) Badon (Badon Hill, Monte Badonis)

Past attempts to locate the places where these battles happened have relied on unsystematic guesswork. That tempted academics to propose that Arthur’s military campaign extended over an implausibly extensive territory, stretching from Dorset to Edinburgh.

Arthur’s story is so attractive that different regions of England have tried to claim his legacy and incorporate their own local legends into his story. This has made it difficult to separate history from myth.

Professor Breeze is a philologist, an expert in the branch of knowledge that deals with the structure and relationships of words and how the meanings of words have changed over time. Breeze believes that Arthur’s battles happened in much more closely spaced locations across Britain than previous accounts have maintained. All but one took place in a tight geographical area of Northumbria and Rheged, he believes.

This is an extract from a new book called Secrets of the Hidden People. You can buy it at Bookends in Carlisle or Keswick and the New Bookshop in Cockermouth or Sam Read in Grasmere.

Alternatively, you can order a copy online here:

https://www.fletcherchristianbooks.com/product/secrets-of-the-hidden-people

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People say there are loads of places with Norse names in Cumbria. That must mean there was an overwhelming invasion by violent Vikings a thousand years ago.

They argue that the number of Norwegian warriors who landed on the Cumbrian west coast in 902 AD was clearly huge. You can tell that because the marauders succeeded in erasing almost all the existing Celtic and Anglo-Saxon place names.

They claim the tide of Scandinavians was so great that they drove out virtually all the original Celtic and Anglo-Saxon inhabitants. There must have been an orgy of rape, pillage and bloody conquest.

The Nordic influx is why, they argue, Cumbrian culture is today strongly influenced by its Viking heritage. And, they insist, it is why the Cumbrian dialect is full of Norse words.

In fact, none of this is true. Let’s try to explain why.

The dramatic story of how thousands of Viking invaders arrived in Cumbria originated with a few Victorian antiquarians. These were amateur history buffs, a body of men driven more by enthusiasm than academic rigour.

They based their claims mainly on the discovery of 116 pieces of sculpture bearing Norse-themed carvings on 38 sites mainly in the southern part of Cumbria.

The antiquarians never produced any evidence of Vikings actually fighting anybody.

There are no mass graves, no massacre sites, no signs of depopulation, and no evidence of widespread destruction in Cumbria as there was with the 793 AD Viking raid on Lindisfarne.

Despite the absence of evidence, the overwhelming Viking invasion story still grips the public imagination.

Local culture and folk memory keeps the idea alive more than a century later. Go to Google and you find 3,040 references to “Vikings invade Cumbria” over the past five years and 2,520 similar mentions on social media.

The large-scale Norse settlement of Cumbria theory is persistently promoted by school curricula, community projects, museums, re-enactment troops and tourism firms looking to squeeze out that last pound from visitors.

But DNA surveys, archaeological digs and place-name research all indicate the Norse migration that took place in around 902 AD was small and peaceful.

Experts say that just because there are Norse names it does not mean Vikings lived in all those places. Remarkably little evidence, such as burials or artefacts, have been found to confirm Norse people were present anywhere in Cumbria. A large proportion of Norse place names only came into existence at the time of Domesday Book in 1098 or even the 12th Century, long after the Viking “invasion” is supposed to have happened.

The prevalence of Norse place names in Cumbria is not the result of mass invasion or large-scale Norse settlement, but rather the outcome of a complex interplay of trade, cultural contact, and sporadic settlement over centuries. Recent scholarship suggests that Norse names may indicate varied Norse influence—including naming through trade routes, temporary camps, and periods of seasonal control, rather than solely by permanent colonists in large numbers.

In fact, the academic world dismissed the mass invasion theory in the 1970s. But the general public is reluctant to let go of the thrilling narrative .

In reality, there is little hard evidence for a Viking invasion of Cumbria, archaeologists, geneticists and historians say.

The task of getting the Vikings into proportion gets even harder when prominent people endorse the invasion hypothesis while ignoring the scholarly evidence to the contrary.

One well-known figure who embraced the mass invasion theory is Rory Stewart, the former MP for Penrith. He claimed in a 2015 essay entitled “Our Viking Heritage,” that the region’s original Celtic and Anglo-Saxon place-names were almost completely replaced by Norse ones.

Rory Stewart wrote: “They (the Vikings) came to Cumbria in enough force to obliterate almost all the earlier place-names and replace them with their own Norse names. There must have been ‘original’ inhabitants of Cumbria, who had occupied these valleys before them, but only the smallest trace remains.”

Rory suggested the tide of Norse incomers was so large it swamped the original Celtic population. He implies the Vikings became the dominant cultural group in Cumbria. There are quite a few problems with this.

Taking Rory’s points in order, it is not factually correct to say the incoming Norse were able to “obliterate almost all the earlier place-names”. They didn’t remotely do that.

For example, Celtic place names that were not “obliterated” include: Carlisle, Penrith, Blencathra, Helvellyn, the rivers Kent, Eden, Ehen and Levens, Crummock Water, Blennerhasset, Drumlanrig, Penruddock, Lonsdale, and Coniston.

Among the Anglo-Saxon place names that were not obliterated are: Workington, Thirlmere, Keswick, Buttermere, Crosby, Clifton, Millom, Brighter, Bolton, Orton and Grasmere.

Today, there are twice as many Anglo-Saxon/English place-names in Cumbria as Norse ones. This does not indicate an overwhelming Viking takeover happened.

In total, 25-30 percent of Cumbrian place names have Norse elements; 55 per cent are Anglo-Saxon/English and 5-10 per cent are Norman French. (These figures were calculated with help from 17 different sources on Cumbrian place names).

Then Rory claims that “only the smallest trace remains” of the “original inhabitants” of Cumbria.

This is simply wrong too, according to Professor Clare Downham of Liverpool University, a leading medieval historian and expert on the Vikings.

She has carefully researched how many Norse incomers arrived in Cumbria in 902 AD by examining contemporary written sources, landscape surveys and population modelling.

Prof Downham concluded the invading Norwegian force numbered fewer than 1,000 people out of a total 10th Century Cumbrian population of 10,000. She found no evidence for mass expulsion or replacement of native Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, or earlier residents, either.

But, leaving aside the dispute over the facts, what stands out is the confident tone Rory adopted in his article. This raises the question: why would Eton and Balliol College educated Rory, a former Professor of Human Rights at Harvard and Senior Fellow at Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, ignore the readily-available academic evidence?

One reason may be the sheer power of the myth created by schools, and public schools in particular, by teaching children about the supposed Viking invasion as a violent intrusion by fierce, adventurous warriors for a very long time.

For example, one influential school reference book that was used in classrooms for more than 80 years was Paul Henri Mallet’s history, Northern Antiquities, published in an 1847 edition.

Written in the style of a blood-soaked Icelandic Saga, Henri Mallet’s book explicitly stated that the British were the descendants of daring Viking warriors. Mallet wrote that the “finest qualities of the British Empire had their origin in genetic traits passed down by ancient Scandinavian invaders.”

This was not an isolated case. Many Victorian authors and antiquarians actively promoted the idea of a major Viking invasion and settlement in Cumbria and that Norse genes were handed on to subsequent generations of English people.

The well-known and influential Victorian translator and scholar George Dasent wrote an 1875 popular novel called “The Vikings of the Baltic: A Tale of the North in the Tenth Century”. It presented Norse ancestry as decisive in the development of the English nation it declared: “Viking blood flowed in Victorian veins”.

Mallet’s book was used in schools until the 1930s. But the style of his history never died out. To a striking degree, Malett’s portrayal of the Vikings as fearsome raiders, adventurers, or even tragic antiheroes still influences how Norse history is taught in Britain today.

So, we are confronted with a big puzzle. The public is still transfixed by the myth of the Viking invasion of Cumbria even though there is no actual evidence for a massive inrush of Nordic killers. Where did this idea get started?

The vogue for Vikings invading Cumbria first got going in earnest during the 1820s and 1830s. That is when groups of increasingly prosperous amateurs found they had time on their hands, especially clergymen, doctors, well-heeled professionals and local historians. They became “antiquarians”, a fancy name for being interested in old things.

They started systematically identifying, excavating, and documenting carved crosses, hogback graves, and stone monuments down the Cumbrian coast and in churchyards inland.

As the century progressed, these gentleman dilettantes began interpreting the growing number of Norse artefacts as evidence of a major colonisation of Cumbria by Vikings. The discoveries caused great excitement.

The term “Viking Revival” began being used by amateurs and academics alike to describe the wave of romantic interest and reinterpretation of Viking history, art, and culture that galvanised Victorian society.

The trend did not simply attract slapdash and unscientific antiquarians - some high intellectuals of real substance took up the quest to identify how much truth there was behind the growing furore.

One heavyweight figure was fine arts professor W.G. Collingwood, who lived at Brantwood near Coniston. He organised the Viking Club, a scholarly society set up to foster interest in all things Norse especially focusing on connections between Britain and the Scandinavian north. Collingwood worked scrupulously to build up a body of credible evidence about Norse presence in Cumbria, rejecting the exaggerations of cranks and racial theorising of the nationalist bigots.

Unfortunately, despite his fastidious approach, the Viking Revival soon became entangled with racial theory.

Victorian intellectuals and social commentators, especially towards the end of the century, grew anxious about protecting “Englishness” from the interbreeding that was going on in the growing colonial empire. They feared that contact between the races was leading to the birth of children from mixed marriages which they argued would dilute the national character and undermine the Empire.

This is why the suggestion that a “Viking race “invaded Cumbria became such a potent touchstone for arguments about English identity and “racial stock.” Racial theorists such as the right-wing essayist Houston Stewart Chamberlain and his followers seized on the Viking finds in places like Cumbria as proof that the English, or at least northerners, had Nordic blood in their veins which they saw as the key to the survival of Britishness.

In his book, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, Chamberlain promoted the idea that Vikings and other “Nordic” peoples possessed “pure” blood, supposedly due to generations of isolation in the northern European landscape. Chamberlain argued that these peoples had not been “contaminated” by mixing with what he described as “inferior” southern races. He claimed that this purity gave them strength, moral fibre, and the character needed to build and lead great states and empires—including Britain.

It must be said at this point that modern scholars have thoroughly debunked Chamberlain’s polemical and pseudo-scientific writings which became fuel for later white supremacist ideologies. His degree in botany and geology did not equip him to deliver scientifically-reliable findings about fields such as heredity, inheritance and anthropology.

Modern scholars have investigated Chamberlain’s claims by examining 442 Viking skeletons in northern graves at more than 80 archaeological sites in northern Europe, Italy, and Greenland. They found the Vikings were a highly diverse, multiethnic group, and certainly not all the tall, blond blue-eyed hunks beloved of the Nordic stereotype. In fact, the median colour of hair among Vikings was brown.

Their findings, published in the scholarly journal Nature in 2020, overturn the old myth of Vikings as a “single, pure Nordic race” and show deep diversity. The skeletons came from the Baltic and Slavic regions, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Italy, Greenland and all over the Middle East. The myth of a “pure Nordic race” has no basis in genetic reality. This result should be obvious: the Vikings were such successful raiders and traders because they were highly flexible and were willing to hire recruits from anywhere.

However, in 1911, Chamberlain’s bogus declarations about purity were treated as pioneering racial science. The Cumbrian Viking invasion theory became an international phenomenon when, encouraged by Chamberlain’s book, the world-famous founder of the National Trust, Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley seized on its conclusions as proof that Cumbrians were Norse people. Without doing any primary research himself, Rawnsley declared that the people of Cumberland belonged to the “square-jawed Viking race”.

Paul’s latest book is called Secrets of the Hidden People. You can buy it at Bookends in Carlisle or Keswick and the New Bookshop in Cockermouth or Sam Read in Grasmere.

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It might seem incredible in today’s democratic world, but Victorian politicians deliberately diluted the votes of Cumbrians simply because they lived in the so-called “Celtic Fringe”.

They redrew the boundaries of Parliamentary constituencies to stop the growing number of working class Cumbrians with the vote from ending Tory domination of Cumbria’s rural heartlands.

In 1884 Parliament doubled the number of UK voters from 3 million to 5.7 million mainly by adding working‑class men in rural areas to the voting rolls. But Conservatives used a procedural manoeuvre to radically redraw constituency boundaries.

This shifted new Cumbrian voters, most of whose homes bordered industrial areas, out of Tory dominated Cumberland and Westmoreland and into urban seats such as Carlisle, West Cumberland and Kendal where their votes would make no difference to the result.

Salisbury’s gerrymandered boundaries stayed in place for the General Elections in 1885, 1886, 1892, 1895, 1900, 1906, January 1910 and December 1910.

This meant that, even though the Cumbrian electorate expanded significantly, the extra voters would make no difference to who won because those Liberal votes simply piled up in constituencies which were already Liberal.

As a result, Cumbria’s Tory MPs would remained undisturbed in their Parliamentary seats for 33 years.

This extraordinary incident took place as the Industrial Revolution sucked workers from the countryside into West Cumbria where steel, shipbuilding, iron, coal and weaving industries were expanding dramatically.

On the one hand, establishment figures feared that if they did not start giving working people in these burgeoning industrial areas the vote, the revolutions that had ravaged Europe in 1848 might break out here.

But, at the same time, Tory leader Lord Salisbury and his colleagues worried that expanding working class voting in country areas would threaten Tory hold on crucial rural seats such as Cumberland and Westmorland.

Salisbury’s problem was that the 1867 Reform Act had created a giant anomaly. It granted the vote for the first time to all male householders paying £10 in rent per year in industrial areas such as Carlisle, Workington and Barrow in Furness. But the reform left out workers in rural areas such as Cumberland and Westmorland where voting remained restricted to wealthy landowners, tenant farmers and gentry.

He knew his political opponents would not let this injustice continue for long. But Salisbury was convinced that giving working class people who lived in the countryside the vote would, within a generation, threaten the Tories’ chances of forming national Governments. He reckoned Conservative power depended crucially on the party’s main rural bastions remaining unchallenged.

Places such as Cumberland and Westmorland had remained safely conservative for decades because the pool of voters in those counties was a tiny group of well-off conservatives largely descended from Norman families. Less well-off voters in Cumbria generally had quite different origins. They are overwhelmingly descended from the indigenous Celts, the original inhabitants of the region who had been oppressed for centuries by the Norman-English and never allowed to build up wealth or political power.

As Celtic Cumbrians got jobs in industry they no longer depended for their livelihoods on a single aristocratic employer. Once they were working for capitalist firms they could, at least in theory, move between different firms. This meant it was less risky for them to back radical causes aimed at bettering their economic and social position. Therefore, when they got the chance, they voted Liberal, or Labour after the socialists started putting up candidates in 1906.

Another sign of the rising power of Cumbrian workers was the rapid rise of trade unionism. Several major strikes and wage disputes erupted in the 1860s and 70s. The most bitter was over a 20 per cent wage cut caused by a drop in the price of iron goods. These notably affected the 5,000-employee Whitehaven Hematite Iron & Steel Co., in Barrow, its subsidiary collieries in Whitehaven, ironworks in Cleator Moor and associated sites in nearby Whitehaven, Workington, and Egremont, which supported smelting, shipping, and secondary metal processing.

Salisbury could not stop the voting shake up happening because his party was not in office. Liberal supporters were keen to see the right to vote expand because that improved their party’s chances of winning and keeping power. But the Tories dominated the House of Lords, the legislative revising chamber, which could, and did, sabotage Prime Minister William Gladstone’s reform plans by dragging its feet for months.

In the 1870s, Queen Victoria acted as a deeply conservative force in British politics, favouring stability, hierarchy, and imperial expansion while resisting democratic reforms. She was horrified by the campaign for universal suffrage, secret ballots, and labour rights known as Chartism which was strong Carlisle and West Cumberland among industrial workers such as handloom weavers and miners. She regarded these demands as the prelude to republican revolution.

With Queen Victoria strengthening his hand, Salisbury was able to use the threat of infinite delay to force the Liberal leader to agree stringent concessions. These were enshrined in the Arlington Street Compact, an agreement named after Salisbury’s London house where it was negotiated.

At this showdown, Salisbury told Gladstone he would only let the bill through in return for a radical redrawing of Parliamentary constituency boundaries. Salisbury then tabled cleverly-drawn new electoral maps.

Salisbury’s crafty scheme shifted the electoral boundaries in Cumbria so that most of the new working class voters were absorbed into the existing urban constituencies . The people did not actually move, but the boundary did, shifting them out of the Tory areas. In practice, most of the newly enfranchised working class voters lived on the periphery of the urban areas, so a simple sweep of the map makers’ pen could scoop them into the industrial zone.

Thus, Cumbrian towns like Barrow‑in‑Furness and Carlisle thus saw the extra Liberal votes pile up uselessly, making no difference to the result of an election. Meanwhile rural divisions—Penrith, Egremont, Eskdale, Appleby—remained safe territory for the Conservative Party because most of the new working class voters had been swept out.

By clustering the new working class voters together in the urban areas, the Tory party establishment preserved its dominance in its heartlands and limited the rising influence of working people. This process of rejigging electoral boundaries is today called gerrymandering—a conscious strategy to weaken the political impact of industrial and working‑class voters.

All of this is not simply the product of dry technical management of politics - but a deep cultural prejudice.

Salisbury was a leading ideologist of ethnic politics. He promoted a fierce anti-Celtic mindset whose roots run back to the Roman invasion.

The Tory leader openly complained in a 1890 speech that Celtic regions were “represented enormously out of proportion to the rest of the Anglo-Saxon population,” implying Celtic voters were somehow getting in the way of forming a balanced government.

He claimed there was a “defect” in the nation’s system of Parliamentary representation because the “Celtic edges of the country,” were being given more votes than what he termed “Anglo-Saxon” areas. If the newly enfranchised voters swung toward the Liberals, Salisbury warned, it could spell the “absolute effacement of the Conservative Party”.

Yet his complaint had very shaky foundations. Constituencies have always contained different numbers of voters, depending on what kind of places they are. It has always been accepted that there can be fewer voters in remote constituencies with challenging physical geography, sparse settlement and long travel distances that make internal travel difficult. Many “Celtic Fringe” seats fall into this category.

But Salisbury did not just argue that the electoral mathematics were wrong. He claimed that the Celtic areas did not deserve their existing level of representation because the Celtic nations and regions were peripheral, backward, or inferior compared to “civilised” England.

Like this? Paul has written six books about Cumbria’s fascinating history. They are available at Bookends, Carlisle and Keswick, The New Bookshop, Main Street, Cockermouth and Sam Read in Grasmere.

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Standing proud on a hill above the ancient town of Ulverston is a hollow one-hundred-foot-high tower.

Built out of white Cumbrian limestone, it is modelled on the storm-lashed Eddystone Lighthouse in Cornwall that has saved countless travellers from dangerous rocks.

But the magnificent pillar that looms so impressively over the Cumbrian market town is a mile from the sea, has never carried a storm beacon and has not put its stony toe in the water.

Paid for by public subscription, the monument was erected in 1850 to commemorate the life of Sir John Barrow, who was born in Ulverston in 1764.

It would have irritated Sir John greatly that many locals refer to the memorial not by its official name but as the Hoad Monument after the modest hill on which it stands.

For as the powerful Second Secretary to the Admiralty for forty years, John Barrow did his utmost to put his personal mark on history by masterminding the world’s greatest programme of exploration to the Arctic, Antarctica and Africa.

Opinion is divided on how successful it all was. To today’s civic leaders of Ulverston he set an inspiring benchmark for future explorers. But for his worst critics his record amounted to a worthless waste of money and lives in pursuit of “a desperately pointless dream.”.

Over 150 men died in total on expeditions Barrow organised. The vast majority were lost in his final, catastrophic Arctic campaign to find the Northwest Passage.

The fatal statistics from his major ventures include Sir John Franklin’s notorious “Lost Expedition” of 1845 in which all 129 men aboard HMS Erebus and HMS Terror perished after becoming trapped in the ice.

It took 169 years to locate the first ship from the lost expedition and 171 years to find the second. HMS Erebus was discovered in September 2014, and HMS Terror was found in September 2016.

The hunt spanned nearly two centuries and involved multiple nations, non-profit organisations, private investors, and decades of government-funded expedition. When adjusted for inflation, these 19th-century searches easily cost several hundred million pounds, making it one of the most heavily funded search operations in maritime history.

The other disasters that occurred on his watch include Franklin’s Coppermine Expedition between1819 and 1822 in which 11 of the 20 men on this overland Arctic party died from starvation, exhaustion, and exposure.

At least another dozen men died on various expeditions to map the Niger River and explore the Sahara, including Major Dixon Denham and Captain Hugh Clapperton’s parties.

Between 1816 and 1845 Barrow personally selected teams of naval officers to take part in these ground-breaking explorations. The brave men repeatedly launched themselves into the void with the insouciance of Apollo astronauts.

Often at loggerheads with each other and working in nightmarish conditions – full dress uniforms in the Sahara, cocked hats in the Arctic - they propelled themselves into the blank spaces on the map in complete ignorance of the extreme climates and deadly diseases they would encounter.

Born in the son of a poor tanner in Dragley Beck, a suburb of Ulverston in Cumbria, John Barrow left school at 13. He worked as a Sunday school teacher, the manager of a Liverpool foundry, a whaler and tutor to an aristocratic child prodigy from whom he learned Chinese.

This led to his appointment as translator for the Earl George McCartney’s diplomatic mission to China. By this circuitous route he found himself parachuted into the second most powerful job at the Admiralty.

Barrow was proud of his rise from a Cumbrian cottage to to the baronetcy. He was a bureaucrat par excellence. Towards his higher-ups he presented a relentlessly serious, moderate, unobtrusive and respectful front; to his subordinates, considerably less so. Outwardly, he was the anonymous, deferential figure taking the minutes at top-level naval meetings.

But behind that inconspicuous facade he skilfully amassed great power without once falling out with his superiors. He scrupulously avoided the impression he was intervening in party politics. Exploration was the ideal topic for Barrow because it dealt with the unknown and it required no technical knowledge.

He could argue that any discoveries would boost national commerce. But he warned that to allow foreigners to find such-and-such a place first would be a terrible blow to national pride. So, largely, he could declaim about exploration as boldly as he liked without fear of reprimand from his political masters.

Unfortunately for all involved, Barrow was often wrong about his chosen subject. When a geographical notion did enter his head, it was regularly wide of the mark. He would form his wildest conjectures after listening to his idol, the gouty, wheelchair-bound, septuagenarian Joseph Banks, a naturalist who sailed with Captain Cook, the discoverer of Australia.

From Banks, Barrow developed the mix of wrong convictions and habit of vague speculation that made him an exploration fanatic.

Another drawback to John Barrow’s power was that he hated the modern world, particularly the notion that the navy should scrap its sailing ships and replace them with a new fleet powered by steam, a technology he told his superiors was “useless and pernicious.”

Yet he was very persuasive. Ministers found it hard to articulate what they did not like about exploration while he sensed, correctly, that the weight of public opinion was behind him.

So, despite Treasury mandarins questioning the point of it all at every stage, Admiralty lords gave Barrow his own way. He launched volleys of expeditions, sometimes four a year, towards every blank space on the map he fancied.

The missions were eagerly crewed by the many naval officers who were under employed and on half pay in the years after Britain’s victory at Trafalgar. Men were desperate for excitement and the chance of fame in the new era of peace. Given Barrow’s determination to pursue his own whims in defiance of all the evidence, however, this was as much an era of black comedy as heroic endeavour.

Among a series of explorations, he sent a ship up the Niger without even the most basic of medicines charged with finding semi-mythical Timbuktu and its alleged gold mines. The vessel got barely 200 miles up river before the crew was virtually wiped out with disease. Barrow wrote the deaths were “almost inexplicable”.

Then he sent Franklin on his first mission to chart the frozen northern coast of Canada. To save money Franklin was given the minimum of navy personnel, told to hire feckless local trackers (who threw the mission’s essential gear away rather than carry it) and rely for supplies on Canada’s two fur trading firms, the Hudson’s Bay Company and its larger rival the North West Company who were effectively at war with each other.

The mission staggered 5,500 miles, saw a cannibalism outbreak, an execution and eleven of the original party of 20 men died of starvation or exhaustion. At one point the team were so hungry they cooked their footwear for soup - which earned Franklin the nickname “the man who ate his boots”.

The most notorious of Barrow’s many failures was his last epically disastrous mission. He sent a crew of 133 men to the Arctic aboard two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, reinforced with iron plates, warmed by an innovative heating system and armed with his usual vague instructions.

The naval world was shocked that Barrow chose as captain the likeable but aged and infirm Sir John Franklin. The objective was to chart the final leg of the fabled North West Passage, a fabled sea route linking the Atlantic to the Pacific, despite Banks’s warnings the search was pointless as the passage was almost always frozen solid.

An excited Boy’s Own Paper atmosphere reigned on the ships as they approached the notoriously ice-bound and treacherous Arctic seaway. Then, after three years’ silence the Admiralty was forced by Franklin’s wife Jane and outraged newspapers to mount a search costing the equivalent of £86 million to find out what happened to the men.

It took a decade for the full story to emerge. The ships had got hopelessly trapped in the ice sixty miles short of the end of the North West Passage. Eventually the men tried to walk 250 miles to safety across the sea ice to the eskimo community at Back River on the Canadian mainland hauling lifeboats over the ice filled with supplies.

But all died slowly from hypothermia, starvation, scurvy, lead poisoning from defective canned food and a lack of suitable clothing to deal with prolonged exposure to the extreme Arctic environment. Cut marks on some of the bones recovered also indicated the horrible ordeal ended in cannibalism.

After he retired in 1845, John Barrow left a mixed legacy. He continued to write books highlighting his own part in history and abusing his enemies. He produced at least sixteen volumes of frequently self-flattering and often vindictive commentary on British discoveries and the biographies of the great figures of his lifetime.

This literary labour convinced a wide audience that the exploits had been heroic and patriotically worthwhile in helping Britain claim the territories before other countries could. So, despite the ghastly toll of deaths that occurred on his missions he is today regarded as one of Cumbria’s most distinguished men.

Liberals condemn him as one of the most effective agents of British Imperialism while his worst critics, such as author Fergus Fleming, picture him as an almost lunatic incompetent. So, what is the truth?

This is a short extract from a new book called Secrets of the Lost Kingdom. It is available at Bookends, Carlisle and Keswick, The New Bookshop, Main Street, Cockermouth and Sam Read in Grasmere.

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From the moment the alluring, intelligent and spirited Mary Queen of Scots rode into Carlisle Castle in a horse-drawn litter in May 1568, the north of England was almost bound to rise in rebellion.

As the deposed Catholic monarch entered a strange state of semi-captivity in the brutal red sandstone fortress, her very presence galvanised the Cumberland gentry. Within a year, they launched the greatest internal challenge Elizabeth I ever faced to her right to rule.

In the five years since the English queen had come to the throne, her northern enemies had not proved themselves brave or decisive as Elizabeth began dismissing Catholics from all jobs with power.

But the sudden appearance of the eloquent, charming and vengeful Scottish queen turned the heads of susceptible Cumbrian gentlemen. The northern Catholic establishment flocked to the castle to hear her impassioned recitation of all the wrongs she claimed to have suffered.

Mary had earned the contempt of her Scottish subjects. She had apparently colluded in the murder of her husband Darnley. But at Carlisle, she basked in the adulation of an English gentry desperate for leadership.

Elizabeth had no idea at first how to handle her embarrassing visitor. She set no restrictions initially on Mary’s letter-writing or on who could visit her. The notoriously mean monarch forked out £56 a week (worth about £130,000 in 2022) to lay on food and drink for Mary’s Carlisle court-in-exile. She did this to reassure her Scottish guest that her royal status was respected.

Convinced by this munificence that all was well, Mary deployed all her arts of fascination to rally support for retaking her Scottish crown. She deployed her considerable beauty along with the style and elegance she learned in Paris. She had been married to Francis II, who was the French king for a year before he died.

Unfortunately, Mary failed to see that stirring up the northern Catholic gentry was the worst way to secure the help she needed from the profoundly insecure Elizabeth, who was preternaturally suspicious about plots among those very people. To Elizabeth’s chief adviser, the cunning, ruthless and rather scary William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Mary’s arrival in England was an unlooked-for opportunity to finish off the woman he always regarded as the greatest danger to his mistress.

Historians have tended to portray the rebellion in the north as a purely aristocratic protest played out on the national stage. But the largely Catholic north was a political tinder box before Mary’s sudden arrival. The day-to-day grievances of ordinary Cumbrians played a much bigger role than has been acknowledged. This is a key reason why the rebel nobles struggled to stop the revolt going off in the wrong way and at the wrong time.

One crucial factor fuelling the unrest was the sense of feudal solidarity that persisted between the classes in the north long after it had decayed in the relatively peaceful south. It is difficult to understand now, but the Cumbrian gentry, tradesmen and even to some extent labouring poor looked to the nobility for leadership.

At the head of those nobles was the powerful but slightly dim local landowner Thomas Percy, the Earl of Northumberland. He kept a rent office on Main Street in Cockermouth, now known as Percy House Gallery. This class deference existed partly because collective action was habitual and instinctive in an area where people lived with the constant menace of Scottish attacks.

Another factor that unified the discontented was the worsening economy. Under Elizabeth, food prices in Cumberland leaped seventy-five per cent while farm wages fell. When the rebellion was over, Elizabeth’s officials published a list of miscreants that were punished. It gives a good insight into why the rising happened.

It shows that the troubles were supported by all classes - from independent statesmen farmers and tradesmen to barbers, glovers, wheelwrights, village constables, bailiffs and labourers. The protesters demanded the restoration of the Catholic religion of their ancestors, the removal of evil counsellors such as Burghley, and the release of the Scottish Queen from her unjust imprisonment.

Mary could not have been unaware that these explosive local discontents existed. In fact, she appears to have exploited them to build her own support. This is why Mary’s behaviour in stirring Elizabeth’s Catholic enemies up was so odd. She desperately needed the English queen’s help, yet she was seemingly happy to undermine her.

The difficult physical circumstances in which Mary was being kept in the castle also won the Scottish exile sympathy among Cumbrian Catholics. Even Sir Francis Knollys, the tough Puritan 55-year-old Vice-Chamberlain who Elizabeth sent north to be Mary’s jailer, fell somewhat in love with his charismatic captive.

He admitted the accommodation was far from luxurious. The Scottish queen had been pampered all her life. She had always been surrounded by ladies of the highest rank. But now she was forced to make do with only two, and these, Knollys admitted, “were not of the finest sort”. 

She was housed in the south-east corner of Carlisle castle, part of the inner ward known as Warden's Tower. This was an accommodation block built by Edward I in the 13th Century.

Edward’s second wife, Queen Margaret, had a bath installed there, an extraordinary luxury in the Middle Ages. So, Mary lived in much more sumptuous surroundings than most of Elizabeth’s subjects. In comparison to the prisons that awaited her, Carlisle was luxurious.

Mary had arrived at Carlisle with no horses and she complained that she missed the exercise of riding. But when the slightly besotted Knollys lent her a mount to go hare coursing Mary ranged so widely that the experiment was not repeated.

Only three or four of Mary’s gentlemen were allowed to sleep within the precincts of the castle. The rest of her total staff of forty, including her cooks and scullions, had to leave at sunset and bed down in the town.

Heavy iron grilles barred her windows and, if she went out, she was accompanied by a hundred armed guards. She was permitted to promenade with her retinue on the grass outside the castle walls along what came to be known as The Lady's Walk.

Some of her old staff from Scotland arrived to join her and she was allowed to cheer her male courtiers as they played football on a nearby green.

Mary Seton, a meek lady-in-waiting who came from one of the grandest Scottish families, was another welcome arrival. She was an expert hairdresser. Mary had cut off all her lustrous auburn hair as a precaution against detection when she fled from Scotland. The stubble never grew again so that she was dependent on wigs and false-pieces for the rest of her life.

Knollys marvelled at Seton’s skill in disguising Mary’s baldness: “yesterday and today she did set such a curled hair upon the Queen that it was like to be a periwig that showed very delicately,” he wrote. Mary’s clothes remained a problem. In her paranoia and jealousy, the queen sent her gifts of such mean quality - a few pieces of black velvet and old dresses - that Knollys had to pretend they were intended for Mary’s servants.

The ambitious Earl Moray, Mary’s treacherous half-brother who became Scottish regent after her abdication, was equally unhelpful. He sent a few cloaks and only one serviceable taffeta dress. He did not want to see Mary restored to the throne on any terms. After Mary’s performance in Carlisle, his wish was to be granted.

Mary’s most astonishing move was to encourage Northumberland in his antipathy to Elizabeth. The Scottish fugitive sent many rings and tokens of loyalty to the Earl’s deeply devout wife Ann. In turn, she pushed her sincere but doltish husband to perform increasingly illegal actions on Mary’s behalf.

When the Northern Rebellion finally erupted in the autumn of 1569, with the dithering Northumberland at its head, it was the first and most serious blow delivered by the English Catholics against Elizabeth’s still fragile reign.

But Mary’s intrigue backfired. The net result of the uprising was to strengthen, not weaken, Elizabeth. Mary made a fatal misjudgement when she launched her campaign in Carlisle because she could not be certain that the revolt that followed would succeed.

—-

This is a short extract from a new book called Secrets of the Lost Kingdom.

Find out more about Mary in Carlisle by buying the book at The New Bookshop, Main Street, Cockermouth, at the Moon & Sixpence cafe in Cockermouth and Keswick, Bookends in Keswick and Carlisle, and Sam Read in Grasmere.

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This is the text of a talk Paul Eastham gave to the Words By The Water Literary Festival at the Keswick Museum in Cumbria.

I have written a new book about the hidden people by which I mean the Cumbrians who, as I will argue, have very ancient Celtic roots.

But the Celtic roots of the Cumbrians are hidden, in fact have been buried, by the traditional histo…

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Carlisle was destroyed in 875 AD. All its inhabitants were killed.

The slaughter was so fearsome that nobody wanted to live there for two hundred years afterwards.

At least, that’s what is supposed to have happened according to one of the most authoritative medieval chroniclers.

The perpetrators of this horror were said to be the Great Heathen Army of Danish warriors that rampaged across Britain in the late ninth century. One thing is certainly true – a large number of Danish warriors did land in East Anglia in 865 AD. But whether they descended on Cumbria and wreaked havoc has always been a bit mysterious. So, this chapter is a sort of detective story.

It is aimed at finding out what really happened in the north-west in the wake of the Danish invasion during the era of Alfred the Great, and what, if any, legacy it left.

The invading Danes were led by a wrathful Viking commander, Halfdan Ragnarsson. He arrived with a highly mobile force of up to 5,000 Scandinavian warriors from bases in the Low Countries, it is said.

Their aim was to take revenge against the Anglo-Saxons for the death of Halfdan’s father, Ragnar Lodbrok, according to the Norse Sagas.

Halfdan’s fearsome brothers and half-brothers came along. They were the colourfully named Björn Ironside, Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye, Ubba, Hvitserk and the legendary Ivar the Boneless.

They were all highly experienced warriors. Ivar was held in particularly high regard as a fighter across Scandinavia.

He was the glue that kept the otherwise argumentative Great Army unified. Coming together like this was unusual. Scandinavian war bands rarely met except to resolve land disputes, make money, or kill each other.

Ivar was an advanced technician of death. The legends say he specialised in executing his enemies by the “blood eagle” method - severing a victim’s ribs from his spine and pulling out their lungs through the slits to create a pair of “wings.”

Modern historians and archaeologists think this is a myth, but standards of Viking cruelty were at least a match for those used by indigenous British Celts.

The raid on Carlisle was recorded in the early 12th Century by a monk known as John of Worcester.

He mentioned it in a chronicle John wrote about a military campaign in 1092 AD by the Norman King William II who conquered Cumbria and made it part of England for the first time.

We know this king as Rufus the Red. He was William the Conqueror’s son.

John wrote: “the king went into Northumbria and restored the city, which is called in the British tongue Cairleu, and in Latin Lugubalia (Carlisle).” The monk added that Rufus “built a castle there; for this city, like some others in that quarter, had been laid in ruins by the heathen Danes two hundred years before, and had been uninhabited up to this time.”

Many subsequent historians have been unsure whether to believe in John’s account. This hesitation was no doubt because John compiled his chronicle two centuries after the alleged Danish outrage and there are no accounts by contemporary witnesses to compare it with.

The destruction of Carlisle does get a mention in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Mike McCarthy’s excellent 2017 history, Carlisle: A Frontier and a Border City also quotes John too, although Mike hedges his bets by declaring: “Whether it was ever attacked by the Danes is an open question” and he adds “we can be sure it was never deserted.”

Yet there is some evidence that that the city continued to be occupied after any raid. It came in the excavation of an elite Viking-age cemetery under Carlisle Cathedral in 1988. Among the grave goods was found a single tell-tale fragment of Torksey pottery. Torksey in Lincolnshire as we shall see later, was the site of a Danish army overwintering camp.

Thanks to recent archaeology and dialect studies there is growing evidence that the raid or, certainly, a major incursion by Danish forces into the place we now know as Cumbria, did take place.

Among the towns and villages colonised by the Danish Great Heathen Army were: Appleby, Brough Sowerby, Rookby, Colby, Kirkby Thore, Temple Sowerby, Ellonby, Sowerby Row, Wiggonby, Newby West, Kirkby Stephen and Oughterby. (For more info, see below)

During this period, a number of Danish words entered the local language while a string of rural settlements, particularly up the Eden Valley leading to the Carlisle plain bear names with Danish components.

In fact, the indications are that something strange and much more significant took place than a single bloodthirsty attack on the city.

But to understand what happened we need to grasp the enormous scale of the fourteen years of conflict.

The Great Heathen Army was launched against Britain to take revenge for the killing of Ragnar by Aella, the king of Northumbria, it is believed. Hundreds of sleek, shallow-bottomed ships capable of sailing across oceans and up rivers landed in East Anglia in 865 AD. It was the largest Danish force ever to cross into Britain. Viking armies had overwintered in Britain before. But this time was different: it quickly became clear they were strong enough to embark on political conquest.

The Army began attacking the four Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that controlled the territory that would eventually become England. By the mid 870s, three of them, East Anglia, Northumbria, and Mercia had fallen to the Danish campaign of plundering, raping and town burning.

Only the southern kingdom of Wessex escaped this fate because Alfred, who was crowned King of Wessex in 871. The Danes were surprised to discover that Alfred had massively strengthened Wessex’s defences.

They were forced to concentrate their attacks on less well-protected lands to the east, west and north. The other factor they had not anticipated was the development of Danegeld.

The Anglo-Saxon King had raised vast amounts of cash and kept it ready to pay the attackers to go away. Collective Danish resolve to attack was weakened by this because individual war bands were easily tempted to go for the money.

This lack of unity was the Danes’ greatest weakness. At home during the Viking age, Danish tribes had fought each other incessantly over scarce land, food supplies, regional rivalries, and family feuds. Halfdan always known that keeping such a fractious force together would be tricky once the initial goals had been achieved in Britain.

So, despite its early successes, the Great Army was weakened by many flaws at its core. The alliance of Danish tribes was an uneasy union of war bands from small independent Scandinavian kingdoms and communities whose leaders had differing aims. They were poorly prepared, loosely coordinated and they chose targets to attack somewhat on impulse.

Rebuffed by Wessex, they moved on to their real target, Northumbria, arriving in York without warning in late 866, on All Saints Day. After chaotic and brutal street fighting, Aella was captured and, it is claimed, suffered the ritual “blood eagle” death.

The Danes installed a puppet as king of Northumbria, a man named Ecgberht, and they began collecting taxes on his behalf. Those Northumbrians who declined to pay were killed.

Then the Danes invaded Mercia, captured Nottingham, and made peace. In 870, Ivar the Boneless disappeared from the records, presumed dead. An 11th Century manuscript called the “Fragmentary Annals of Ireland” claims Ivar was felled by a “sudden and horrible disease.” His loss was a terrible blow to the morale, stability, and command structure of the Great Heathen Army.

With Ivar gone, Halfdan became the main Danish commander. He immediately invaded Wessex but Alfred’s well-organised resistance soon forced him to withdraw. In all, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Danes fought Wessex nine times, including at the battle of Ashdown in 871, but could not beat it. So Halfdan accepted a truce from Alfred.

A remarkable archeological excavation has given us a snapshot of the Great Heathen Army just before it attacked Carlisle.

The force spent the winter of 872-3 camped on an island surrounded by marshes just to the east of the River Trent near Torksey. A remarkable archeological excavation has given us a snapshot of the Great Heathen Army just before it attacked Carlisle.

It showed that the Torksey camp comprised up to 5,000 warriors, hundreds of prisoners in chains, craftworkers, merchants, metalworkers, and coin minters with 300 or more flat-bottomed longships, each capable of carrying thirty men. The army had amassed an enormous amount of wealth in the form of gold and silver, both from loot and tribute.

In 873, having been in the country for eight years, the Heathen Army made a fateful decision. It split, no doubt after a blistering row about strategy. Half of the marauding force travelled north under the stewardship of Halfdan.

He appears to have accepted money from Alfred to abandon his attempts to conquer Wessex. The other half, under Guthrum, moved south to renew the war against Wessex. Eventually, as Halfdan suspected, Wessex’s king Alfred defeated his army at the Battle of Edington, leading to peace and Guthrum’s agreement to be baptised and to split the kingdom between them.

For his part, Halfdan headed through Northumbria en route to attacking the Kingdom of Strathclyde which stretched from Loch Lomond to the Celtic kingdom of Rheged south of the Solway. This realm was also known as Cumbria and its inhabitants the Cumbrians.

So why did the Danes attack Carlisle? Well, with its Roman fortifications it was an immensely strong military centre controlling access to the north-west of England - and thus it was a severe threat to Danish power in Northumbria.

Register to read the rest of this article. This is an extract from a chapter in a new book called The Trophy at the End of the World. You can buy it instantly here:

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The most expensive substance known to the ancient world has been dredged up from a Roman gutter in Carlisle - and it is revolutionising a crucial part of British history.

Two slightly soft lumps of Tyrian purple, the costly substance used to dye an Emperor’s clothes, have so far turned up in a 1,700-year-old luxury Roman bathhouse being excavated at Carlisle Cricket Club.

But what is even more exciting, it looks increasingly as if, alongside the elite washing facility Severus built an extensive governing complex of other buildings. Taking all this evidence together, experts are becoming convinced the Emperor ran the empire from Carlisle for a significant part of his three-year stay in Britain. This complex was sited right next to the River Eden, providing swift river transport to the Solway.

Tyrian purple was made from the crushed bodies of predatory Murex sea-snails embedded in beeswax. Newcastle University testers have eliminated an earlier theory that the purple masses were amethyst crystals, which can be ground up to make pigment. Instead, they concluded the substance was a rare and precious fabric tint never before found outside Italy.

About 12,000 of the snails are needed to produce less than two grams of Tyrian purple. The manufacturing process was so time consuming and labour intensive that it cost three times as much as gold.

The discovery during a dig by Wardell Armstrong, an experienced team of professional excavators, is causing great excitement among academics, archaeologists and scientists because it transforms the importance of Roman Carlisle. The team is uncovering not just a luxury bathhouse, but what looks to be a residential and administrative complex fit for an emperor to run the world while on campaign. This makes it clear Carlisle was at the centre of world power for three years in the third century AD. Most intriguingly, it indicates the north western city played a central role in the biggest military operation that has ever taken place on British soil.

But why does the uncovering of purple stain in a bathhouse sewer change history? The answer is the colour produced by the costly dye, with its uniquely intense hue and resistance to fading, was used by ruling Roman elites as a key symbol of sovereignty.

Under strict Roman sumptuary laws at that time, the only people allowed to wear garments treated with Tyrian dye were the Emperor and the immediate royal family, on pain of severe fines or even death. The rules were tightened even further shortly after Severus’ death restricting pure to the emperor only. There would seem little point having the imperial dye on hand in Carlisle unless the Emperor was going to be present long enough to need new outfits apart from battle gear.

Perhaps just as telling, excavators found a coin bearing the image of Severus’ formidable and powerful wife, Julia Domna, on the site in Carlisle. It features her distinctive, wavy, highly cultivated hairstyle that also appears in other contemporary pictures and engravings of the empress. Cumberland council Economic Development Officer Nick Henderson, said the find was highly significant: ‘When you combine it with other evidence it makes a very compelling case that the Imperial family was in Carlisle.” It is clear that the northern English city was strategically vital to Septimius Severus’ campaign against Caledonian rebels, a fact that historians have largely ignored up to now.

 Of course, it has been known since antiquity that Severus, the powerful and highly successful North African born Emperor, launched a war in northern Britain between 208-211 AD.  His aim was to obliterate the threat from the widespread and numerous barbarian warrior elite causing havoc in the north. Roman historian Cassius Dio wrote that the unruly tribes dwelt in hill forts between 100 and 200 miles north of Hadrian’s Wall.

Led by bold Celts who trained all their lives to achieve excellence as warriors, the Caledonians  lived in a largely democratic form of government. The rebels astonished the Romans by wearing no armour or helmets into battle. But they had evidently developed the ability to launch devastating long-distance hit-and-run raids into the Empire before disappearing into the safety of highlands.  The raids often involved leaving cattle and sheep to entice Roman soldiers into the swamps where they attacked them. There were horrendously high numbers of Roman casualties, contemporary chroniclers said.

Before the fighting broke out, many of these Caledonian nobles were on first-name terms with senior Romans. One is even recorded chatting to the empress Julia Domna about the differing sexual practices of their two worlds. Rome tried to pacify the Caledonians using the traditional methods of silver-coin subsidies, present-giving, hostage-taking and treaties, resorting to actual fighting only as a last resort.

Silver denarius subsidy hoards keep turning up in archaeological digs across north-west Scotland, such as at Carpow near Perth in Scotland. But while the barbarians happily took the bribes, they proudly resisted anything that smacked of subjection and took opportunities to demonstrate their independence by force of arms whenever the Romans let their guard down.

The Romans took the Caledonian threat very seriously. In the early 200’s the governor of Britain, Alfrenus Senecio, became alarmed. According to the Roman historian Herodian,  Senecio wrote to Severus saying that the situation either side of Hadrian’s wall needed either a stronger army for the defence of the province, or the presence of the emperor himself because the ungrateful barbarians were rebelling.

 They rebels were “overrunning the country, taking booty and causing destruction,” putting the entire Roman occupation of Britain at risk, wrote Senecio.  “Severus was delighted with this news,” because he was bored in Rome, Herodian notes. 

Cassius Dio adds that the 63-year-old emperor was “getting angry” that Senecio and others were winning victories while he has reduced to chasing brigands around Italy. Severus seized the chance of major late-career glory, despite being increasingly crippled with gout.

Yet the strange thing is that Roman historians were to play down the scale and importance of what Severus did next.

Modern historians have largely followed the lead of the Roman writers in diminishing Severus’ aims and achievements when he got to Britain, saying he mainly set about repairing the wall. Durham University research fellow Nick Hodgson wrote that “modern accounts (of Severus’ visit) have tended to minimise the seriousness of warfare in Britain”. He claimed Senecio’s reported worries were a “probably a cliched invention” by Herodian. He added: it is “far from clear why Severus should have judged that disturbances on the fringes of one of Rome’s remotest provinces demanded the continuing presence of the emperor and his court from 208 until his death early in 211.”

Archaeologist Paul Bidwell insisted “the expedition [was] ... as much concerned with re-establishing the loyalty of the army as with dealing with barbarian incursions or the conquest of Scotland for its own sake”.

 Oxford University professor Francis J. Haverfield agreed: “Severus did not march to annexe. His reconstruction of Hadrian’s Wall proves conclusively that the day of Roman annexation was over.”   Repairing the wall would not have been necessary if Severus intended conquest, Haverfield argued.

But this ignores what was written by eye-witnesses at the time. Cassius Dio was an exceptionally skilful Roman historian. He knew Severus personally, served on the emperor’s council of advisers and remained as Caracalla’s aide after his father’s death. So, he was in a position to know.  Dio wrote: “Wishing to subjugate the whole of [the island], Severus invaded Caledonia”.

The word subjugate means the emperor aimed to bring the Caledonians under control and governance as subjects.  Dio’s remarks came from direct observation and personal experience.

Besides, refurbishments of military forts along Hadrian’s Wall and expanded food provision would obviously have still been necessary even if Rome was to conquer the north. So, the claim that Severus repaired the wall does not “prove conclusively” that Imperial expansion had stopped. Earlier in his career as emperor, Severus, for example, annexed the northern half of Mesopotamia to the empire. He also ruthlessly eliminated tribal enemies from a huge area on the north bank of the Danube. He was called an expansionist emperor, a “propagator imperii” by Roman authors.

To dismiss Herodian’s contemporary report that there was alarm at the highest imperial levels and ignore Dio’s explicit reference to the subjugation of the Caledonians seems odd, especially as the building work they refer to began years before Severus even got to Britain. There is an explanation for the modern historians’ behaviour - the vicious intrigues inside Severus’ family - which we will come to below.

But the problem with all this is that the current Carlisle excavation is not consistent with the idea Severus came all that way just to stage a modest military engagement and to put the wall back up. In fact, the hard archaeological evidence is that the garrison in the north had fallen well below full strength in the early part of Severus’ reign. The emperor had presided over a decline in the calibre of officers on Hadrian’s Wall. The barbarians had noticed the growing Roman weakness and that is a major reason for the dangerous increases in attacks.

Cassio Dio says “continual trouble and warfare” took place with the peoples beyond Hadrian’s Wall from the 190s onwards. It seems wrong therefore to downplay the seriousness of the unrest that summoned Severus. If it wasn’t actually a real threat, Severus certainly would not have come.

 No, the evidence emerging suggests Severus’ campaign against the Caledonians was one of the largest military engagements in Roman history.

What is coming out of the ground suggests Severus spent vast sums to create what looks increasingly like a huge palace-hotel, offices and an elite leisure complex in Carlisle. This allowed him to run the empire from Carlisle when necessary while at the same time making life bearable for his court while he went about smashing the rebel tribes in what he planned to be a long campaign.

The Emperor could not relax his attention to world affairs even as he fought from Carlisle. The burden of decision-making must have been exhausting. Historians say receipts, orders and letters signed by the emperor flew to and fro from Britain via Romes’ international courier system on subjects great and small. An inscription from Ephesus records how an ambassador from that city came to Britain to petition Septimius and his son Caracalla. Another shows Severus deciding on the seemingly trivial issue of the ownership of a slave.

Why would Severus want to take on the difficult task of conquering the northern savages that his illustrious Roman predecessors found too hard?

Well, Severus was an exceptional emperor. That does not mean he was a good man. But he was renowned for having an inexhaustible thirst for military conquest. He hated any other generals taking the limelight. He was a phenomenally ruthless and daring warrior.

He fought and won three brutal Roman civil wars to gain and keep power. He defeated Didius Julianus in 193, Pescennius Niger in 194, and Clodius Albinus in 197. Not satisfied by complete victory, he publicly trampled Clodius’ corpse with a horse. He sent his enemy’s head to be publicly ridiculed in Rome and the bodies of the rest of Clodius’ family to be thrown in the river.

Severus completely changed the nature of the Emperorship. Under him, the Roman monarchy became a military dictatorship. The Imperial State swallowed the Roman military and bureaucracy, removing all real authority from the Senate and executing 29 of its members. All subsequent emperors attempted to copy Severus’ extreme centralisation of power, which only hastened the western Empire’s decline.

A highly intelligent, ruthless and cunning man, Severus was poorly-educated and paranoically suspicious. He was also supremely cruel and vengeful towards those who crossed him. He is the source of our word, severe. Adding all this up, did he really go to the trouble of hauling the biggest army ever to operate in Britain just to inflict a light chastisement on the allegedly wild northern tribes and repair a wall?

 After all, he judged  it worth remaining in Britain for three years. The war was extremely difficult, fought over rough and unknown terrain, through deep bogs and over trackless wildernesses. Roman casualties were unusually high and Severus’s death during the course of it casts the image of failure over the whole campaign. But one little-remarked fact is that the terrifying blows Severus landed on the rebel tribes before his demise ensured northern Britain remained peaceful for the subsequent 85 years.

It is this challenge that enticed Severus into coming to Carlisle. The Roman city had the best cavalry regiment plus soldiers from his own home base in North Africa living there. It was on the western, side of the country, the perfect position to block the barbarians’ usual invasion route into the Empire. Carlisle had a formidable, well-established fort. Severus spent an enormous amount of money to install his entourage in Carlisle. The vast expenditure on the campaign sent inflation to ruinous levels across the empire after his death.

This is an extract from my book, Trophy at the End of the World. You can buy it instantly here:

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How old is Cumbria? Who founded it? Many people think the county was created by the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen in 1974.

But in fact the original Cumbria was not born during a 1970s local government reorganisation. It was created in 945 AD in the wake of  a bloody battle, a siege and refugee crisis in the so-called Dark Ages.

The event that led to the creation of Cumbria was a ferocious attack in 870 AD by Vikings on Alt Clut, the Rock of Dumbarton, a hundred miles north of Carlisle.

Alt Clut was a  supposedly impregnable fortress on a volcanic hill belonging to the Celtic Damnonii tribe.  The Damnonii had lived in the “broad valley of the River Clyde”, or Strathclyde, since at least the Roman era. When the Vikings attacked, the Strathclyders became refugees seeking a new home.

The displaced people gradually migrated south and took over a swathe of land that previously belonged to a kingdom called Rheged.

As they moved, the Strathclyders changed the name of where they lived to Cumbra-land. When written in Latin it was called Cumbria. These names first appeared in written form in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 945 AD. The change of name appears to have happened when the Strathclyders finally arrived south of the Solway.

The inhabitants of Strathclyde and Rheged had a lot in common. They were both descended from the Ancient Britons, the indigenous Celtic people who inhabited Britain at least from the Iron Age. The Strathclyders believed themselves to be descended from Dumngual Hen, the son of King Cinuit of Strathclyde. The Rheged people traced their ancestry back to Coel Hen, the king of northern Britain.

What does this tell us? Well, Cumbrogi is a word that goes back at least to the origins of Common Brittonic (the British version of Celtic) in the sixth century BC. That is when the Roman Republic was established and the Chinese philosopher Confucius was born. So, people have been calling each other Cumbrians for a very long time.

 Why does all this matter? Scholars believe the union of Strathclyde with the former Rheged sparked a revival in Celtic culture, re-established the Cumbric language, boosted the Cumbrian identity and enhanced its military power. This coming together united a multi-cultural population. Cumbria’s influence expanded and remained distinctive until 1157 when it was first incorporated into England as Cumberland by the Normans.

This slice of history helps explain why Cumbria has such a strong regional identity today. It is significant that when the Normans finally took over the north, Cumberland was the only county they created that was named after the people who lived there. All the others are named after administrative centres, for example, Lancaster, Staffordshire and Cheshire named after Lancaster, Stafford and Chester.

To properly understand how all this came about, it is important to rewind the calendar a few centuries

When the Romans formally abandoned Britannia in 410 AD, many of the garrisons on Hadrian’s Wall were auxiliary troops known as “limitanei”. They were local men. Compulsory hereditary recruitment operated from the early fourth century. That meant sons followed fathers into the same unit. The soldiers manning Hadrian’s Wall did not all leave  with the legions. Cumbria’s late Roman military community was made up of a mix of serving soldiers, wives, children and discharged veterans who lived in distinct settlements and who identified strongly with their unit.

These groups must have been very influential in a rural area. A document from the late fourth century called the Notitia Dignitatum details the way the Western and Eastern Empire was organised. It says that there were twelve garrisons in Cumbria. Although they were down to about a quarter strength compared to the peak of the Roman occupation, that still amounted to at least 2,000 enlisted men.

When you add families, veterans, servants, slaves and hangers-on, the total population of Cumbria’s military community could easily have been five times that number. The overall population of Cumbria may have approached 36,000. It is often said that the county was the least Romanised area in Britannia, but that does not mean Roman ways were not followed.

At many sites, including Birdoswald for example, the limitanei rebuilt many crumbling stone forts in wood, sometimes creating great halls where chiefs entertained their followers. When pay and instructions stopped arriving from Rome, they formed local war bands.

Archaeology tells us that the Cumbrian Celts worshipped gods such as Belatucadros and Cocidius, both of whom were equated with Mars, the Roman god of war. So, it seems unlikely that the war bands lived peacefully alongside each other.

The evidence suggests they carried on taxing the local people (some say they ran protection rackets). They also engaged in internecine struggles with rival bands mounting low-level raids to steal cattle (the common motif of early medieval poetry), capture slaves and acquire gold. After the Roman system of importing food from the south collapsed, it became vital for the warrior bands to acquire supplies locally.

The political landscape of late Roman Cumbria seems to have comprised a patchwork of military forts and civilian settlements. Most of the common people lived in roundhouses in open, country sites. 

Distinctively Celtic circular fields can be found dotted around the county today, for example at Bannerigg, Windermere and Braithwaite in Keswick. They may be the relics of ancient Celtic farmsteads that were originally surrounded by a hedge or stone wall. Status among the early Cumbrian people was expressed not in the magnificence of their architecture but through ownership of livestock and their ability to call on men to defend that livestock and to raid the flocks and herds of other tribes.

It is from a union between the descendants of Urien’s Rheged and the refugees from the Rock of the Clyde that the place we now know as Cumbria arose….

This is based on a chapter in my book, The Trophy at the End of the World. You can buy it instantly here:

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