Lake District forts
The fort of Galava, near Ambleside, lies at the head of Windermere and is easily recognisable as a rectangular platform raised above the surrounding meadows. The lake and the River Rothay defended the south and west, and on the other two sides ditches were added to strengthen the defences.
The first fort on the site, constructed of turf and timber, was too lowlying and suffered from flooding, and during Hadrian's reign it was replaced by a stonebuilt fort on slightly higher ground. Thi appears to have been occupied until the fourth century. What is left now is the platform it occupied and traces of the foundations of the walls and main buildings.
To the west of Gala va, across the Wrynose and Hardknott passes, are the remarkably impressive and dramatically situated remains of the Hardknott fort. This fort, Mediobogdum, covered about three acres and appears to have been started in 117 AD, with construction taking up to twenty years.
It was built to the standard Roman plan, with a tower at the four corners of a square walled enclosure and a gateway in the centre of each wall.
As a result the northern gate faces out directly onto a steep drop into Eskdale and clearly serves little or no purpose; but the commandant had no authority to vary the plan to uit local conditions. The walls, well restored by the Department of the Environment, are of roughlyhewn local stone except for the gateways, which were constructed from red sandstone brought ten miles or so from Gosforth.
Outside the fort to the south is the bathhouse, with three principal rooms (cold plunge, warm bath and hot bath) and a furnace, while to the northeast is the parade ground, three acres of smooth and level ground improbably located in the middle of a fell side choked with tumbled boulders.
But the best thing of all about the fort is its astonishing location, on a shoulder perched above the wilds of upper Eskdale and with a panorama of the more sylvan lower valley as it snakes between Harter Fell and the slopes of Scafell to Ravenglass and the Irish Sea.
Glannaventa and Ravenglass things to do
At Ravenglass the field evidence for the fort of Glannaventa is somewhat scanty and visitors determined enough to seek out the earthworks are the exception rather than the rule. In fact the visible signs of the fort itself were largely destroyed during the building of the coast railway.
However, to the north of the fort and its associated and apparently quite important civil settlement is a much more significant find, namely the remains of the fort's bathhouse, popularly known as Walls Castle.
This is the tallest surviving Roman building in the whole of northern England, with sections of the walls standing to a height of ten or twelve feet, yet it has suffered badly from abandonment and decay, so that its survival is all the more remarkable. The condition of the walls and of the pinkish internal rendering is in places excellent, and the main features of the building, including doorways, windows and little niches in the walls, can easily be distinguished. So too can the plan, with four rooms a changing room, an anteroom and the baths themselves.
At one time the remains were assumed to be those of a Roman villa, and previous legends, all lacking real evidence, variously suggested that it was a leper hospital or that it functioned as the manor house of the Penningtons before they took up residence at the nearby Muncaster Castle, or even that it was the castle of Eveling or Avallach, the Celtic lord of the underworld.
Dark Age Landscapes in the Lake District
Despite some pioneering recent work, it is still the case that all too little is known about the human geography of the Lake District in the years after the withdrawal of the Romans towards the end of the fourth century AD. It seems very likely that the Romano British settlements attached to forts such as Brocavum, near Penrith, continued in existence, and that the late Iron Age settlements described previously, which had survived under the watchful eye of the legions, also survived in the uncertain times after their demise.
The site at Threlkeld Knotts, for example, was probably occupied until the eighth or ninth century.By then the ancient settlement on its exposed bench on the slopes of Clough Head, with its wonderful outlook across the Glenderamackin valley to Blencathra, had outlived its usefulness; northfacing, at too high an elevation, on waterlogged ground and surrounded by poor soils, it may have been abandoned at the time of the Norse settlement, for the surviving settlements in the area, lower down in the valley and on southfacing slopes, are Threlkeld and Scales, both with placenames which are Scandinavian in origin.
After the Romans left it is likely that the British or Celtic nature of the region was reasserted, although the evidence for this is indirect, with place name evidence the only firm source. The word 'Cumberland', for example, is derived from the Celtic cymru, meaning 'fellow countrymen'; the word is still in use as the Welsh term for Wales.
Blencathra Penrith and Penruddock
Other British place names which have survived include Blencathra (blaen means 'summit'), Penrith and Penruddock (pen meaning 'head'), and Glencoyne (glyn meaning 'valley'). Most of the place names with Celtic elements are clustered on the fringes of the mountains, suggesting that there was little permanent settlement in the heads of the dales at this time, and Celtic church dedications support this theory.
Those dedicated to the sixth century St Kentigern (also known, particularly in Scotland, as St Mungo), for example, lie on the edges of the northern fells, as at Caldbeck and Mungrisdale, or in the wide bowl which now houses the town of Keswick, whose mother church at Great Crosthwaite is also dedicated to St Kentigern.
Although knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Cumbria is also largely confined to interpretation of place names, there is in this case a little evidence that is more tangible in nature. The place names include Brigham near Keswick and Helton and Bampton to the south-west of Penrith, though the overall distribution suggests that the Anglian settlers confined themselves mainly to the lowland edges of the Lake District, settling the Eden valley, the Kendal and Low Furness areas and the west Cumbrian coast.
Restaurants Lake District
There are such a wide range of things to do in the Lake District that you will struggle to see and do everything in a week. Most visitors want to explore the beauty of the lakes and make the most of the fabulous scenery and the excellent restaurants, bars and hotels around Windermere and the central lakes. Whether you are looking for a quiet time, or you want to splash out on a luxury spa hotel in the Lake District, you will find everything to suit your needs.
This impression is reinforced by the distribution of the scanty Anglican artefacts which have survived. The most notable of these is the Irton Cross, a splendid late Anglian piece of work which adorns the churchyard at Irton, itself an Anglian placename but now possessed only of a plain nineteenth century church isolated from any settlement, though one which is blessed with a splendid distant prospect of the beckoning Wasdale and Eskdale Fells.
The cross itself is a simple and quite slender slab of local red sandstone, intricately decorated with plaits and chequers and with scrolling on the narrower sides. Towards the eastern fringe of the Lake District, at Dacre, there are some fragments of the foundations of Anglian monastic buildings in and around the present church.
The Norse invaders and the Lakes
By the third quarter of the ninth century the Kingdom of Northum¬bria, which at that time included the Lake District, was under the control of yet another new group of settlers. The influence of the Norse invaders is very clearly seen in the place names of the mountain heart of the area: elements such as thwaite, denoting a clearing, are common in the dales, and the frequency with which the visitor encounters Scandinavian terms such as fell, beck, force (waterfall) and dale itself is indicative of the strength of the Norse colonisation in the dales and on the fell sides.
The greatest consequence for the landscape, and one which is still clearly visible, was the inexorable process of clearance which the Norse settlers instituted in the remoter daleheads, which had until then survived largely unscathed. At Wasdale Head, for example, the flat flood plain of the Lingmell Beck was cleared of the boulders which were liberally scattered there; the Norsemen expended considerable energy in piling them up at random, the massive heaps are still there to be seen and incorporated them in oversized field walls. Woodland and scrub suffered, too, as wholesale clearance and agricultural improvement took place.
Fell Foot Farm Little Langdale
Happily the most interesting of the physical remnants of the Norse colonisation is relatively accessible. This is the strange, flat-topped mound, its steep sides terraced into a series of steps, which lies behind Fell Foot Farm in Little Langdale. Informed opinion has it that this is a 'thing mount', the meeting place of the Viking council of the Langdales¬though the possibility that the mound is simply a natural phenomenon cannot quite be ruled out.
More certain indications of Norse culture are the surviving Viking crosses and 'hogback' tombstones (intricately shaped and sculpted, these were the characteristic tombstones of the Norsemen, their shape representing contemporary Viking homes). The place to find examples of both is Gosforth, where there are two hogback tombstones together with a fragment of a Norse cross inside the church, and a magnificent tall, slender cross in the churchyard.
Nearly fifteen feet in height, this sandstone cross has elaborate carvings which portray the triumph of good over evil in both Norse and Christian traditions. The base of the cross represents Y ggdrasil, the mythological ash tree which was the foundation on which the entire Norse world was based. The remains of over twenty early crosses have been identified in the district, together with hogback tombstones at Lowther, near Penrith, and in six other Cumbrian locations.
Borrowdale and Dunnerdale
Although the overall contribution of the Dark Ages to the present landscape is easily underestimated, the landscape itself was subtly fashioned during these mysterious centuries, with effects which are readily apparent to the visitor today. The Norse settlement of the ninth and tenth centuries brought into existence the dalehead hamlets such as the two Seathwaites, in Borrowdale and Dunnerdale, and enhanced the bare, treeless nature of the fellsides which Wordsworth regarded as 'natural' but which are clearly the work of successive colonists from prehistoric times onwards.
Before them the Anglian wave had produced a ring of villages around the mountain core but had largely left undisturbed the human geography of the dales. Here the Celts made their greatest landscape contribution, based on the creation of scattered settlements where even the church was isolated from the farmsteads it served.
Where to stay in the Lake District
Historians who visit the Lake District can still see many of the original sites where the Romans once worked and lived, and whether you want to enjoy the old attractions of the lakes, or see the more modern facilities such as Go Ape at Grizedale Forest, the World of Beatrix Potter at Bowness or the Lakes Aquarium near Bowness, you will not be disappointed by the range of romantic hotels, guesthouses, boutique hotels and bed and breakfast accommodation in the area.
The first fort on the site, constructed of turf and timber, was too lowlying and suffered from flooding, and during Hadrian's reign it was replaced by a stonebuilt fort on slightly higher ground. Thi appears to have been occupied until the fourth century. What is left now is the platform it occupied and traces of the foundations of the walls and main buildings.
To the west of Gala va, across the Wrynose and Hardknott passes, are the remarkably impressive and dramatically situated remains of the Hardknott fort. This fort, Mediobogdum, covered about three acres and appears to have been started in 117 AD, with construction taking up to twenty years.
It was built to the standard Roman plan, with a tower at the four corners of a square walled enclosure and a gateway in the centre of each wall.
As a result the northern gate faces out directly onto a steep drop into Eskdale and clearly serves little or no purpose; but the commandant had no authority to vary the plan to uit local conditions. The walls, well restored by the Department of the Environment, are of roughlyhewn local stone except for the gateways, which were constructed from red sandstone brought ten miles or so from Gosforth.
Outside the fort to the south is the bathhouse, with three principal rooms (cold plunge, warm bath and hot bath) and a furnace, while to the northeast is the parade ground, three acres of smooth and level ground improbably located in the middle of a fell side choked with tumbled boulders.
But the best thing of all about the fort is its astonishing location, on a shoulder perched above the wilds of upper Eskdale and with a panorama of the more sylvan lower valley as it snakes between Harter Fell and the slopes of Scafell to Ravenglass and the Irish Sea.
Glannaventa and Ravenglass things to do
At Ravenglass the field evidence for the fort of Glannaventa is somewhat scanty and visitors determined enough to seek out the earthworks are the exception rather than the rule. In fact the visible signs of the fort itself were largely destroyed during the building of the coast railway.
However, to the north of the fort and its associated and apparently quite important civil settlement is a much more significant find, namely the remains of the fort's bathhouse, popularly known as Walls Castle.
This is the tallest surviving Roman building in the whole of northern England, with sections of the walls standing to a height of ten or twelve feet, yet it has suffered badly from abandonment and decay, so that its survival is all the more remarkable. The condition of the walls and of the pinkish internal rendering is in places excellent, and the main features of the building, including doorways, windows and little niches in the walls, can easily be distinguished. So too can the plan, with four rooms a changing room, an anteroom and the baths themselves.
At one time the remains were assumed to be those of a Roman villa, and previous legends, all lacking real evidence, variously suggested that it was a leper hospital or that it functioned as the manor house of the Penningtons before they took up residence at the nearby Muncaster Castle, or even that it was the castle of Eveling or Avallach, the Celtic lord of the underworld.
Dark Age Landscapes in the Lake District
Despite some pioneering recent work, it is still the case that all too little is known about the human geography of the Lake District in the years after the withdrawal of the Romans towards the end of the fourth century AD. It seems very likely that the Romano British settlements attached to forts such as Brocavum, near Penrith, continued in existence, and that the late Iron Age settlements described previously, which had survived under the watchful eye of the legions, also survived in the uncertain times after their demise.
The site at Threlkeld Knotts, for example, was probably occupied until the eighth or ninth century.By then the ancient settlement on its exposed bench on the slopes of Clough Head, with its wonderful outlook across the Glenderamackin valley to Blencathra, had outlived its usefulness; northfacing, at too high an elevation, on waterlogged ground and surrounded by poor soils, it may have been abandoned at the time of the Norse settlement, for the surviving settlements in the area, lower down in the valley and on southfacing slopes, are Threlkeld and Scales, both with placenames which are Scandinavian in origin.
After the Romans left it is likely that the British or Celtic nature of the region was reasserted, although the evidence for this is indirect, with place name evidence the only firm source. The word 'Cumberland', for example, is derived from the Celtic cymru, meaning 'fellow countrymen'; the word is still in use as the Welsh term for Wales.
Blencathra Penrith and Penruddock
Other British place names which have survived include Blencathra (blaen means 'summit'), Penrith and Penruddock (pen meaning 'head'), and Glencoyne (glyn meaning 'valley'). Most of the place names with Celtic elements are clustered on the fringes of the mountains, suggesting that there was little permanent settlement in the heads of the dales at this time, and Celtic church dedications support this theory.
Those dedicated to the sixth century St Kentigern (also known, particularly in Scotland, as St Mungo), for example, lie on the edges of the northern fells, as at Caldbeck and Mungrisdale, or in the wide bowl which now houses the town of Keswick, whose mother church at Great Crosthwaite is also dedicated to St Kentigern.
Although knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Cumbria is also largely confined to interpretation of place names, there is in this case a little evidence that is more tangible in nature. The place names include Brigham near Keswick and Helton and Bampton to the south-west of Penrith, though the overall distribution suggests that the Anglian settlers confined themselves mainly to the lowland edges of the Lake District, settling the Eden valley, the Kendal and Low Furness areas and the west Cumbrian coast.
Restaurants Lake District
There are such a wide range of things to do in the Lake District that you will struggle to see and do everything in a week. Most visitors want to explore the beauty of the lakes and make the most of the fabulous scenery and the excellent restaurants, bars and hotels around Windermere and the central lakes. Whether you are looking for a quiet time, or you want to splash out on a luxury spa hotel in the Lake District, you will find everything to suit your needs.
This impression is reinforced by the distribution of the scanty Anglican artefacts which have survived. The most notable of these is the Irton Cross, a splendid late Anglian piece of work which adorns the churchyard at Irton, itself an Anglian placename but now possessed only of a plain nineteenth century church isolated from any settlement, though one which is blessed with a splendid distant prospect of the beckoning Wasdale and Eskdale Fells.
The cross itself is a simple and quite slender slab of local red sandstone, intricately decorated with plaits and chequers and with scrolling on the narrower sides. Towards the eastern fringe of the Lake District, at Dacre, there are some fragments of the foundations of Anglian monastic buildings in and around the present church.
The Norse invaders and the Lakes
By the third quarter of the ninth century the Kingdom of Northum¬bria, which at that time included the Lake District, was under the control of yet another new group of settlers. The influence of the Norse invaders is very clearly seen in the place names of the mountain heart of the area: elements such as thwaite, denoting a clearing, are common in the dales, and the frequency with which the visitor encounters Scandinavian terms such as fell, beck, force (waterfall) and dale itself is indicative of the strength of the Norse colonisation in the dales and on the fell sides.
The greatest consequence for the landscape, and one which is still clearly visible, was the inexorable process of clearance which the Norse settlers instituted in the remoter daleheads, which had until then survived largely unscathed. At Wasdale Head, for example, the flat flood plain of the Lingmell Beck was cleared of the boulders which were liberally scattered there; the Norsemen expended considerable energy in piling them up at random, the massive heaps are still there to be seen and incorporated them in oversized field walls. Woodland and scrub suffered, too, as wholesale clearance and agricultural improvement took place.
Fell Foot Farm Little Langdale
Happily the most interesting of the physical remnants of the Norse colonisation is relatively accessible. This is the strange, flat-topped mound, its steep sides terraced into a series of steps, which lies behind Fell Foot Farm in Little Langdale. Informed opinion has it that this is a 'thing mount', the meeting place of the Viking council of the Langdales¬though the possibility that the mound is simply a natural phenomenon cannot quite be ruled out.
More certain indications of Norse culture are the surviving Viking crosses and 'hogback' tombstones (intricately shaped and sculpted, these were the characteristic tombstones of the Norsemen, their shape representing contemporary Viking homes). The place to find examples of both is Gosforth, where there are two hogback tombstones together with a fragment of a Norse cross inside the church, and a magnificent tall, slender cross in the churchyard.
Nearly fifteen feet in height, this sandstone cross has elaborate carvings which portray the triumph of good over evil in both Norse and Christian traditions. The base of the cross represents Y ggdrasil, the mythological ash tree which was the foundation on which the entire Norse world was based. The remains of over twenty early crosses have been identified in the district, together with hogback tombstones at Lowther, near Penrith, and in six other Cumbrian locations.
Borrowdale and Dunnerdale
Although the overall contribution of the Dark Ages to the present landscape is easily underestimated, the landscape itself was subtly fashioned during these mysterious centuries, with effects which are readily apparent to the visitor today. The Norse settlement of the ninth and tenth centuries brought into existence the dalehead hamlets such as the two Seathwaites, in Borrowdale and Dunnerdale, and enhanced the bare, treeless nature of the fellsides which Wordsworth regarded as 'natural' but which are clearly the work of successive colonists from prehistoric times onwards.
Before them the Anglian wave had produced a ring of villages around the mountain core but had largely left undisturbed the human geography of the dales. Here the Celts made their greatest landscape contribution, based on the creation of scattered settlements where even the church was isolated from the farmsteads it served.
Where to stay in the Lake District
Historians who visit the Lake District can still see many of the original sites where the Romans once worked and lived, and whether you want to enjoy the old attractions of the lakes, or see the more modern facilities such as Go Ape at Grizedale Forest, the World of Beatrix Potter at Bowness or the Lakes Aquarium near Bowness, you will not be disappointed by the range of romantic hotels, guesthouses, boutique hotels and bed and breakfast accommodation in the area.
Labels: Restaurants Lake District, Where to stay in the Lake District
posted by Windermere Boutique Hotels | 07:27
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