The Lake District market towns

The history of the Lake District's market towns displays a similar pattern of successful growth and abject failure. Most of the successful towns, however, lie on the fringes of the Lake District, with many of them Kendal, Penrith and Cockermouth, for example situated just outside the National Park itself. Within the Park's boundaries the resort towns of Keswick and Ambleside and smaller centres such as Coniston and Hawkshead, which are to all intents and purposes merely large villages, are the largest settlements. Mention has been made earlier of the Scots border raids of the Middle Ages.

These too have left their mark on the present day landscape of the Lake District, not only in place names such as Scot Rake, the slanting path on the line of the Romans' High Street as it descends into the Trout Beck valley, but also in the pele towers, defensive structures which were thrown up to provide some protection against the surprisingly severe Scots raids.

Scottish raids in the Lake District

These cross border raids, at their height in the fourteenth century, had a devastating local effect. Indiscriminate slaughter, looting, and the burning of churches, houses and other buildings is recorded, and in 1322 the desperate abbot of Furness was forced to pay a ransom to secure immunity.

Pele Towers in the Lake District

Pele towers, the earliest dating from the middle of the fourteenth century, were built to the simplest of plans; essentially they are bulky three storey stone towers with very limited access on the ground floor level; often this level was used purely for sheltering livestock. The first floor, reached via a spiral staircase, housed the main living quarters including the 'hall', while the second floor or 'bower' was the private domain of the ladies.

Almost a hundred examples survive in Cumbria, with a number in the Lake District proper. Survivals in or immediately adjacent to the National Park include those at Kentmere and Burneside, in the southeast; Yanwath, Dacre, and Dalemain, all near Penrith; and Muncaster, near Ravenglass. Often the pele now forms only part of a much larger complex, notably at Muncaster, where the Castle is essentially a Victorian country house with a genuine pele and matching second tower of nineteenth century vintage.

At Yanwath the pele tower, built in 1323 by John de Sutton and including a massive tunnel vaulted ground floor and wellpreserved sandstone battlements, has a fifteenth century hall, kitchen and courtyard attached.

The pele at Kentmere Hall

The superbly situated pele at Kentmere Hall, nestling beneath the Garburn Pass road and the craggy lower slopes of Yoke, is now attached to a somewhat later farmhouse. An exception to the rule, however, is provided by Dacre, well worth seeing as a fine example of a free¬standing pele tower, solid and impressively battlemented.

Lake District industries

The natural wealth of the Lake District landscape has been exploited for thousands of years: rocks, fells, woodland and water have all been used to develop a series of rural and industrial economies. The mineral wealth of the area was probably first tapped by the Romans, though it was not until the sixteenth century that its exploitation was organised on a more commercial basis.

A little later the great rebuilding in stone which took place in Northern England vastly increased the demand for stone as a building material, and led to the appearance of quarries, many of them small, long disused and assimilated into the landscape but some of them bigger, longer lasting and with a much greater effect on the present day landscape.

The iron industry in the Lake District

The Lake District's woodland resources were by now in equally great demand as the basis of a flourishing iron industry in High Furness and a series of related commercial enterprises. Lakeland sheep provided the raw material for the district's woollen industry, while water power had been harnessed to provide energy for a considerable number and variety of mills. All these industries have left a distinctive imprint on the landscape, ranging from the blatantly obvious to the more subtle: these latter instances, requiring a little detective work to tease out the history of an area, are perhaps the most interesting of all.

The extraordinary geological history of the Lake District has left the area a rich and varied legacy of mineral wealth. Possibly the first workings were those of the Romans, who appear to have smelted iron ore at bloomeries primitive open hearths associated with forts such as Hardknott.

In medieval times the monks of Furness Abbey were equally industrious in smelting iron ore at bloomeries scattered around their extensive landholdings. But the most important Lakeland minerals were lead and copper, first seriously exploited by the Society for the Mines Royal, established under royal patronage in 1561 and using German mining expertise to develop a series of mines in the Newlands valley and, a little later, the Coniston area.

Coppper mining in Caldbeck

A third mining area, around Caldbeck, was also founded on copper but became just as important for other minerals such as barytes (used in paper making and paints) together with zinc, iron pyrites and manganese. Other rarer minerals were locally important, including graphite (also described as plumbago or black lead), which was mined at Seathwaite in Borrow¬dale and formed the basis for the Keswick pencil industry, still in existence but no longer reliant On local sources of graphite.

Also worthy of mention are haematite, a red iron ore which has been mined in Eskdale and the west Cumberland plain, and wolfram (tungsten), intermittently mined over the past hundred years at the Carrock mine in the lonely Caldew valley.

The Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway

The Eskdale venture is particularly interesting to visitors because it has left the legacy of the Ravenglass & Eskdale narrow-gauge railway, a considerable tourist attraction. The Nab Gill iron ore mine, on the fell side above the hamlet of Boot, was first opened in the 1870s by the Whitehaven Mining Company. The are was reached by driving an audi into the fell side, and it was transported to the coast along a 3ft gauge mineral railway.

Early expansion was rapid, and the mineral line was extended across the valley to the Ghyll Foss mine, but after the collapse of the mining company in 1877 this section fell into disuse. Production continued at Nab Gill until 1912, but the mineral railway was converted to 15in gauge in 1915 and brought back into use as a passenger line, a function which, happily, it still performs today.

Whilst it is impossible to do full justice here to the many and varied mineral ventures of the past four centuries, four classic examples will be sufficient to illustrate the development and decline of the industry, its imprint on the present day landscape, and its considerable attractions (with due care) for present day visitors: the Newlands valley, the Greenside Mine on the eastern flanks of Helvellyn, the Carrock Mine at the Back Skidda' together with the Gategill mine near Threlkeld, and the mines of the Coniston area.

Mining in Newlands the Lake District

Mining was in progress in Newlands by the thirteenth century, at which time a very rich vein of copper nine feet thick was already being worked at the Goldscope mine. Goldscope, which at this time was also producing lead, small quantities of silver and even a little gold, had its heyday somewhat later, however, following the importation of the German miners in the later sixteenth century specifically to exploit the Newlands mines.

A period of decline later set in, and although the mine was reopened to some effect in 1847 within a decade it was producing 300 tons of lead a year it was finally closed down in the 1860s. Now the site is best identified from the spoil heaps which still litter the slopes of Scope End above the Newlands Beck.

Although Goldscope was the best-known of the Newlands mines, it was by no means the only substantial venture. At the head of the valley, within easy reach of the direct path to Dale Head, which itself boasts a marvellous summit panorama, the ruined sheds of the Dale Head copper mines still stand in the shadow of Gable Crag; first worked by the Germans in the sixteenth century, the mine later came into the possession of the Duke of Somerset, who built a bloomery on the site to process the ore.

Amongst the spoil heaps stones with bright green veins of copper malachite can still be picked up. And at Stonycroft, below Causey Pike, a large lead smelter was built to cater for the Newlands ores; just to the north, too, the remains of the Uzzicar lead and copper mine can still be identified, though the 60ft waterwheel which distinguished the site is no longer there.

Honister Slate Mine

There are plenty of mines to visit in the Lake District, including the Honister Slate Mine with its guided tours and exhibitions. Visitors to the Lake District who prefer to take it easy can explore Windermere and Bowness at their own leisure, and book into one of the superb local hotels.

The surroundings of the Greenside lead mine, nestling in the valley of the Glenridding Beck on the eastern side of the Helvellyn massif, still proclaim that this was the most important mine of its type in the Lake District. For the industrial archaeologist the remains, which are spread over quite an area, are fascinating, not least because some of the interrelationships between the surviving remnants are not immediately obvious. The mine buildings, alongside Glenridding Beck, have been renovated (one by the YHA) but the spoil heaps are still evident despite efforts to disguise them.

Further up the valley are the remains of chimneys associated with a mile long stone flue which was in use. when the ore was smelted on the spot (later it was carted across Sticks Pass to Brigham for smelting, and later still it was sent by rail from Troutbeck station to Newcastle). Even higher there are more spoil heaps and also the site of a crushing mill below the marshy hollow which used to house Keppelcove Tarn, converted into a reservoir for the lead mine but drained when it burst its banks after heavy rain in October 1927.

Early industry in the Lake District

These, then, are the many and various visible reminders of a venture which began in 1822 with the formation of the Greenside Mining Company. The early success of the company was astounding, so much so that its shares increased tenfold in value in the first decade. As much as £400,000 profit seems to have been made from the quarter of a million tons of lead concentrate raised at the mine. Output in the early years of the twentieth century reached 3,000 tons a year, and the best equipment available was installed, enabling ever deeper levels to be exploited. The deposits were finally worked out, however, and the mine closed for good in 1962.

The Carrock mine, above the Grainsgill Beck in the heart of Back 0' Skidda' country, is one of the most interesting to visit. It is also a comparatively recent venture, having been started in 1854 when tungsten ore was discovered in quartz veins within the Skiddaw Granite there. Early exploitation was not particularly rewarding, since tungsten had little or no value until its use as a hardener of steel was recognised.

The Carrock Mining Syndicate

In the days of the Carrock Mining Syndicate, which was extracting tungsten ores (wolfram and scheelite) during World War I, the mine made a significant contribution to the war effort, but mining ceased when the price of tungsten collapsed in 1919. Activity has been sporadic ever since, though the mine has been periodically reopened, notably during World War II.

More than twenty minerals have been identified in the immediate vicinity of the mine, and it is this which draws amateur geologists and others to the cluster of mine buildings and spoil heaps, which form an unusual feature in the open, uninhabited Skiddaw Forest grasslands.

Elsewhere in the northern fells, the ruins of the Gategill lead mine can still be seen near the village of Threlkeld. They survive as a reminder of the brief period of late nineteenth century prosperity which transformed the hitherto sleepy village into a frontier mining settlement. The Gategill mine, together with the adjacent Woodend mine, was producing 500 tons a year of galena and a slightly greater quantity of zinc in the 1880s and 1890s.

The backbreaking 'stope and feather' method of extracting the ore, named after the iron implements which were used to shatter the country rock and expose the ore, survived longer here than in other ventures, but was eventually replaced by blasting with gunpowder. Now the derelict buildings, close to the kennels of the Blencathra foxhounds, add interest to the early stages of what many consider to be the best route to the top of Blencathra, via Hall's Fell and Narrow Edge.