After a brief pause for last month’s celebrations surrounding CA 400, I will now return to my ‘county’ theme, this time exploring Cumbria. In 2010, Rory Stewart – who was at the time the MP for Penrith and The Border – got into trouble when he was quoted as saying that ‘some areas around here are pretty primitive, people holding up their trousers with bits of twine…’. In his defence, Stewart clarified that he was highlighting local rural poverty, not commenting on the individuals who live there. But as an avowed fan of all things archaeological, he will hopefully be delighted by the riches that I am going to uncover in this month’s column on the county. Cumbria’s uplands, lakeland, and coastline offer a stunning diversity of sites and structures.
An Axe to Grind
As the starting point in my journey around Cumbria, I recommend that readers commence with CA 278 (May 2013), when Chris Catling reported on a survey of the Lake District undertaken between 1982 and 1989, and published in 2012 as Cairns, Fields, and Cultivation: archaeological landscapes of the Lake District uplands. This is an excellent introduction to these beloved upland landscapes, including its most famous prehistoric sites: the Langdale ‘axe factories’, which also feature in detail in CA 57, 102, and 134 (July 1977, November 1986, and May 1994). There, for the uninitiated, was a centre of specialised stone tool-production during the Neolithic, dating from around 4,000 to 3,500 BC. Axes from Langdale have been found at archaeological sites across Britain and Ireland, including an unusual concentration in the east of England, particularly Lincolnshire, which Current Archaeology stalwart Francis Pryor attributes to the axes being particularly valued on religious grounds. Indeed, of all the Neolithic polished stone axes known in the UK, roughly 27% come from Langdale – a remarkable fact considering that there were more than 30 such sources of material for stone axes, from Cornwall to northern Scotland and Ireland.
Cumbria’s later prehistory is not ignored in CA, either. There are some notable Bronze Age sites and finds mentioned down the years, including the cremation cemetery of Ewanrigg in CA 103 (January 1987) and the only Bronze Age hoard discovered in the county so far, in CA 331 (October 2017).
