This morning, looking in any direction from my home in the Eden Valley it seemed clear (although actually it’s ‘misty’ and unclear in a literal sense) that whether to the north (The North Pennines), to the west (The Lake District) or to the south-east (The Yorkshire Dales) it was quite probable that people were going to get rained upon today.

The Dales Countryside Museum, Hawes, Wensleydale

Here’s the first, of the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority’s “Dales Countryside Museum” at Hawes – telling “the story of the people and landscape of the Yorkshire Dales past and present … school days, home life, leisure time, religion, transport, communication and tourism, farming, local crafts and industries”. The museum shares the building with the Hawes National Park Centre, and is wheelchair friendly. Now, where next? Yes, there’s still lots more to do in Hawes.

The Wensleydale Creamery, Hawes, The Yorkshire Dales

With your mind thoroughly informed about the Yorkshire Dales from your visit to the Dales Countryside Museum you can now turn to thinking about your body and visit the Wensleydale Creamery. I suggest that, in common with the other 200,000 or so visitors that come here every year, you forget slimming for an hour or so and enjoy the creamery’s visitor centre with its museum and observation area – then, of course, there’s the shop with its Yorkshire Wensleydale Cheese and lots of other goodies!

Enjoy your Wensleydale “Day in the Damp” – and don’t forget the Wensleydale heritage railway with its station right next to the Dales Countryside Museum.

For many centuries the presence of copper in the Lake District mountain rocks above Coniston Water provided a livelihood for people in the area. Looking at the area now it is not easy to imagine a time (much of it before modern-style industrialisation) in which people living in the shade of Coniston Old Man made a living from iron, copper and slate.

Coniston is not the only Lake District area to have a copper-producing history. The Keswick area was another centre of this metal extracting industry. In their early years the Coniston copper mines sent their output there by packhorse to be processed. After the Keswick smelting facility was destroyed in the late-1700s the ore was taken by boat down Coniston Water from a quay at Coniston Hall to the Nibthwaite Quay. It was then carried to the coast by cart. From the port at Greenodd, and later from Ulverston through its canal, much of the ore went to St. Helens in Lancashire. There it was smelted and and made into copper cladding for the hulls of sailing vessels.

Coniston Copper: The Early Years

The Coniston copper mines certainly go as far back as the 1500s, and possibly longer. Most of what is currently visible dates from the mid-19th century. The mines were worked up until the English Civil War of the 1640s but then there was a break before they were revived. For some of the time, as also at Keswick, the enterprise was led by experienced German miners. The Company of Mines Royal, which had also run other copper extraction enterprises in the Lake District, had control of Coniston’s “Coppermines Valley” toward the end of the 16th century.

The Antiquities of Furness (1774)

In 1774 the antiquarian Jesuit priest Thomas West wrote in his book, The Antiquities of Furness, as follows:

“The fells of Coniston have produced great quantities of copper ore. During the rage of the civil wars the copper mines in Coniston fells were shut up. After the Restoration, Sir Daniel Fleming had an inquest of all the old workmen then living, concerning them, with their opinion of the charges necessary for recovering the said mines. The following abstract is given here, as it may be of some service to future adventurers. The original is at Rydal hall. … “

[West then lists nine different areas of working with depths, thickness of the seams, and comments on the quality of the the ore, including mention of other metals present such as lead, silver and gold. He then continues .... ]

“About 140 workmen were employed in these works, and the ore was carried on horses backs to the smelting-house at Keswick. About 20 miles distant from some of the works the ore was raised at different prices, according to its goodness, from 2s.6d to 8s per kible, every kible being near a horseload. The ore was first beaten small, and washed and sifted then weighed or measured.

“Before the works were left off, a proposal was made for erecting a smelting-house at Coniston, as more convenient for building houses, a nd better supplied with wood and peat, with the convenience of an iron forge, then at Coniston, being only seven miles from the sea-port at Penny bridge, five of which were by water down the lake, and two miles of land carriage on a good road.”

For reasons now unknown West does not mention in his 1774 Antiquities that the Macclesfield Copper Company reopened the Coniston coppermines in 1758. For almost the next forty years they were again in production but then there was a hiatus of about thirty years before they were once again reopened. This time production took off in a big way controlled by the firm of John Barratt, and copper became the basis for several generations of local prosperity, at one point employing as many as 400 men.

The Copper Mines in the 19th Century

This prosperity rubbed off not only on Coniston village itself but also on the surrounding area. The 1851 census describes John Biggins of neighbouring Torver as a “calker-maker”. As John Dawson says in his history of Torver, “Calkers are pointed pieces on horseshoes placed so as to prevent slipping; no doubt in regular demand at a time when so many horses would be working up and down the steep and slippery ways to the mines and quarries. Numbers of horses were also employed inside the Coniston copper mines to haul out wagon-loads of ore, a situation in which calkers would give the animal a better grip where the surface was wet and uneven.” Dawson also mentions other makers of industrial equipment such as pick and hammer shafts.

Coniston Water now became an even busier commercial route than it had been previously. Boats were already carrying slate from the quarries. Now they also carried copper ore. At Nibthwaite Quay, near where Coniston lake becomes the River Crake, two buildings became known locally as the “Copper Houses”.

By the late 1840s the Furness Railway had its line running from the Furness area and up the coast of Cumberland. Already thought was being given to the possibility of a branch line to Coniston. After an earlier false start the line was opened in 1859. It was promoted heavily by the owners of interests in the Coniston copper mines because getting the increased volumes of copper ore down to the coast by the traditional water and land route was becoming more and more difficult. In the following year the line was extended to run beyond Coniston to the Copper House at the mines. Although in later years the Furness Railway emphasised the tourism aspects of the Foxfield-Coniston branchline, its reason for existence was copper.

The End of Coniston’s Copper Era

Copper-based prosperity did not last. Good quality ore became available in large quantities from other parts of the world, especially South America, at prices with which the Coniston mines could not compete. By the end of the nineteenth century it was all over.

Coniston Coppermines Today

Today the Coppermines Valley is virtually silent apart from voices of walkers. Many signs of the old industry survive and remain the subject of great interest to many thousands of visitors each year as well as to industrial archaeologists.

There are, however, considerable dangers lurking behind the entrances to the mine workings. Visitors to the area should under no cicumstances enter the mine workings unless properly authorised, equipped and accompanied. Look at them from the outside only, and when back down in Coniston village take a look at the Ruskin Museum where you’ll find a wealth of information about Coniston copper.

(NOTE: This post is a slightly revised version of a 2009 page on our old Lake District site. Also, a 2009 blog post on Coniston Coppermines includes links to some very interesting and useful books.

The Keep, Brough Castle, Cumbria

Brough Castle is passed by thousands of motorists every day as they plough past on the A66 between Cumbria and County Durham at whatever maximum speed the traffic will allow, hurrying towards or on the way down the Pennine slopes from Stainmore. Those using the Kirkby Stephen road pass even closer to the castle’s nine hundred years of history – in fact it’s much more than that as a Roman fort was here long centuries before the Normans embarked on their fortification of England’s northern border.

How many stop to take a look at this interesting structure? I would very definitely recommend a break in your journey for a short spell of castle-browsing. Centuries ago this was one of the main residences of Lady Anne Clifford, that doughty owner and restorer of castles from Skipton in West Yorkshire almost to the Scottish border. (Castles at Brougham, Pendragon and Appleby were others of her rebuilding projects in this part of the country).

True, what is left today is merely a pale reflection of the splendour that once was there, but English Heritage have done an excellent job of bringing the ruin to life through the provision of a series of well-written and illustrated information boards. What is more the English Heritage web site contains several highly informative pages on the castle’s history and significance, as well as describing the underlying research and archaeological investigation.

Brough Castle, Eden Valley, Cumbria

Over the centuries the castle has suffered many bouts of ill-fortune including invasion, fire and sheer neglect – including being burned down during a 16th century Christmas party! In between, however, and especially in the hands of that great northern dynasty the Cliffords, it was restored, enlarged and equipped as an important noble residence.

Brough Castle, showing part of the interior remains

Visiting recently for the first time, I had expected to be in and out of the castle site in fifteen minutes to join my wife in the adjacent very pleasant tea room. But no, I found myself reading, viewing and attempting to visualise how life might have been within these walls after the renovation three hundred and fifty years ago – not to mention trying to get some good photos. It is interesting also to try to identify the different phases of building. For example, how many different window styles are there in the remaining structures?

The Tearoom, Brough Castle, Cumbria

If you’re in the Eden Valley around Brough, Kirkby Stephen or Appleby, or even just ploughing over the A66 across the Pennines, don’t miss Brough castle. The countryside is great, Brough being right on the edge of the North Pennines AONB – a designated “Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty”. The ice-cream here is really good too, and there’s a children’s play area behind the tearoom.

Last night, while scanning my shelves, I came across a book that I must have bought around twenty years ago, Roads and Trackways of The Yorkshire Dales, by Geoffrey N. Wright. I couldn’t recall reading it before so spent an hour or so, with everything except eyes under the duvet, reading the first few chapters.

This book of over 200 pages (initially published in hardback in 1985, and reprinted as a paperback in 1990) provides an captivating  description of the way lanes and roads in the Dales evolved over many centuries.  Starting with ancient hunter-gatherers and the transportation across the region (even to continental Europe) of axeheads produced in the Lake District, through the needs of the Roman military machine , into the Middle Ages with the massive impact of agricultural development, especially under the Cistercian monks in their abbeys of Rievaulx, Fountains and elsewhere.

I found it especially interesting to see how the author explored the writings of travellers in the Tudor and Stuart periods, who seemed especially keen to record the bridges they crossed, and so gave hints as to the routes they followed from place to place.  Then of course, there were the almost regal journeys of Lady Anne Clifford, Countess of Pembroke, that doughty mistress of Skipton Castle and owner of castles, houses and vast estates from Skipton to Penrith and beyond.

This is a fascinating book.  Be warned, though, that unless you have a detailed map of the region firmly planted in your brain you will probably need one in front of you as you read. The book does rather assume that its readers know the territory quite well.  However, that’s a minor difficulty.

It’s a pity that Roads and Trackways of The Yorkshire Dales is not currently in print. I’ve checked, though, and paperback copies are available secondhand from Amazon here. (Buy a copy labelled “Very Good”; remember that “Good” in secondhand parlance all too often means “just about holding together” or “creased and stained but reasonably legible”).  There are also hardcover copies available.

Yesterday I dropped my wife off for an hour in Newark-upon-Trent to do whatever wives do when they “go into town”, and with camera in my pocket I drove five or six miles down the A46 in search of a memorial. What I came away with was quite a surprise.

Having lived in this area for only seven years, and for the early years I was away travelling on business for much of the time, I can’t claim to be an expert on its local history. I was aware of a battle having been fought to the south of Newark during the fifteenth century Wars of the Roses but knew little about it.

At first attempt I missed the church of St. Oswald, down a narrow lane toward the Trent in East Stoke, but eventually found it on my way back toward the main road. The church building here is very ancient in its origins, although substantially rebuilt in the 1700s.

What I originally came to find was a memorial plaque bearing an inscription “Blessed are the peacemakers” (words of Jesus from the Gospel of St. Matthew). I found it, and the photograph above of the church shows at its far left the top of the statue rising out of the bushes. More on that in a later article. The thing that caught me by surprise, however, was a large stone plaque against the wall of the church itself.

As I’ve said, the fact of a battle was not new to me. What struck me was the sheer scale of the event. As I now know from further reading, in the space of just over three hours on June 16th 1487, in what today is a peaceful backwater overlooking the valley of the meandering River Trent, a total of 48,000 men fought so intensely that they left 7,000 dead behind them.

The Earl of Lincoln was in command of the Yorkist troops, a mixture of English rebels and Irish recruits backed by a mercenary force of Germans led by Colonel Martin Schwartz and funded by the dowager Duchess of Burgundy. The Yorkist rebellion had seemingly been defeated at the much better known Battle of Bosworth Field two years earlier. This was a ‘last-ditch’ attempt to gain the crown, and if successful the Earl of Lincoln was expected to be in a position of considerable power. It was not to be.

Although King Henry VII was present, and nominally at the head of his army, the effective military leader on the Lancastrian side was the Earl of Oxford. At first it appeared that the smaller number of Yorkist troops were about to prevail, but Oxford maneuvered skillfully and the King kept his throne.

In a field close by there is said to be another memorial stone with the inscription: “Here stood the Burrand Bush planted on the spot where Henry VII placed his standard after the Battle of Stoke (June 16 1487)” I haven’t seen that yet, and can feel another bout of exploration coming on. Map. More on the Battle. English Heritage Battlefield Register.

The copper mines around Coniston were worked from at least the middle of the 16th century and, with a number of breaks in production in between, up to end of the 19th when competition from high-grade ore imported from overseas killed this local Lake District industry.

Coniston Old Man, the mountain behind Coniston village, was a source of large amounts of copper ore. This ore was initially carried by pack horses to be processed at Keswick but from the 18th century onwards was transported by boat down Coniston Water and then carted by road to the coast.

Today the homes of generations of Coniston copper mine workers are mostly holiday cottages and the old mine workings are a tourist attraction, albeit mostly for those with enough energy to do some walking.

Anyone interested in old industries, or simply in the ways our forefathers earned their livelihood, or in the processes by which today’s Lake District landscape was shaped, will want to explore this aspect of Coniston’s past – either on the ground or in an armchair (see Coniston Copper Mines: A Field Guide by Eric G Holland).

Eric Holland’s much larger book, Coniston Copper: A History, gives a more extensive treatment of the subject. It is out of print but can still be found, albeit often quite expensive, at some book dealers either new or secondhand.

There is also a later blog post on the Coppermines at Coniston, expanding on this fascinating aspect of Lake District history.

Back in the early-70s, when what is now Cumbria was spread between Cumberland, Westmorland, and parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire, I became a frequent user of the county record offices. What began as a family history search became a local history study, and I came to appreciate the great value of the archive services maintained and operated by our county councils. Students of Lake District history would be in great difficulties without them.

Life has changed since then. There was no such thing as a laptop computer, and any thought of a handheld pda such as a Palm or Blackberry was the stuff of science fiction. Search rooms were small, and one sat at tables with paper and pencil poring over boxes of papers – yes, the originals, not images on a screen. Such indexes as existed were typescripts, and much of the contents of many boxes had never yet been indexed.

Of course the functions of a county record office are wider ranging than to provide a service for amateur, or even professional, historians. The county archivist has statutory duties with respect to the documentation of the various local government bodies. Nevertheless what most people these days experience is the provision of information in the form of old, even ancient, documents recording the history of towns, villages, parishes, houses and families.

Those of us with an interest in Lake District history, or Cumbria family history outside the National Park, owe a great debt to the professionalism of the staff at the record offices in Carlisle, Kendal, Barrow and Whitehaven. They, however, need modern facilities in which to provide the ever more sophisticated services we ask of them.

It is good, therefore, to know that the building of the new state-of-the-art Carlisle record office is under way and completion is expected late in 2010. The major task of packing for the move is already in progress. Apparently volunteers to help with this massive “house move” are still being sought. Click here for more details if you’re interested.

Recently (early 2009) I travelled up to the Lake District in the north of England to visit an elderly maiden aunt.  I say, “elderly,” but that’s not really an adequate expression.  Approaching a hundred and two years old she still has a lively interest in the present-day doings of her large brood of nephews and nieces, and the even larger numbers of great- and great-greats as well.  But also she thinks a lot about the past.

Having been born in 1907 there’s a lot of past for her to think about, and her memory is still amazingly intact.  Old photographs fascinate her, and this made me think of how important it is to record in writing for future generations something about those people on the sepia tinted pictures of yesteryear before no-one any longer has a clue who they were.

Memories, of course, often involve places as well as people. In family collections it is often the snaps of people rather than places that have survived. Photos of fondly remembered places as they were many years ago are often limited to a few creased old postcards. Occasionally a treasure hoard of old photographs is discovered and what memories they bring flooding back as they appear in the local newspaper.

Windermere, Sunset 1926.
Reproduced courtesy of Francis Frith.

The English Lake District for a century and a half has been one of the most photographed areas of Britain.  How good it is to know that many photographs – of lakes, rivers, towns, villages and individual buildings – have survived and are available to massage the memories of generations of lovers of Lakeland.

Holidays past, childhood homes, honeymoons among the mountains, visits to grandparents, sunny afternoons rowing on Derwentwater, the “steamers” on Windermere, paddling in the Rothay and scrambles up Scafell; all these and more come back to life through an old photo on the wall.

Increasingly, as photos of distant places long ago become conveniently traceable over the Internet, people living even thousands of miles across the world’s oceans can find and acquire beautifully printed copies of these records of the past.  More and more homes around the world are displaying fondly a picture of England’s Lake District, a valued legacy from the photographers of generations past.

—
David Murray, a native of Cumbria now returned to the North, is owner of a growing portfolio of niche websites including some about the English Lake District.  The Lake District In Old Photos, Around-England and The Lake District in Books are three of his sites about which he is especially enthusiastic. [This paragraph updated, October 2011]

In a previous posting I mentioned recently visiting the Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway after staying overnight at Muncaster Castle, Ravenglass.  During the same trip, while further north, I had a chance to slip into Michael Moon’s bookshop in Whitehaven.  I’d not gone for anything in particular but enjoyed maybe thirty minutes just browsing around and came out with a small paperback book about the Coniston railway.

Nowadays many people may be surprised to know that Coniston ever had a railway, but in fact for almost a hundred years there was a branch line from Foxfield through Torver to Coniston.  The Coniston copper mines were the principal reason for its existence in the early days but by the time it was eventually functioning in 1859 cheaper sources of copper were available from other areas of the world (globalisation is nothing new!) and in later years it became principally a tourist line – a wonderful entry point to the southwestern Lakes and, although popular, far less crowded than Windermere.

Personally I recall travelling on it as a child, catching the train from Askam, on the southern shore of the Duddon estuary with my grandfather and changing at Foxfield for the short trip up to Coniston.
That was in the early 50s. The line became seriously uneconomical (he clearly didn’t take me often enough!) and closed to passengers in 1958.

The Coniston Railway by Robert Western (ISBN: 978 0 85361 667 2) from Amazon.co.uk. (By the way, if Amazon says they have none look below the “out-of-stock” paragraph; there may be Amazon 3rd party dealers with copies; that was the case when I checked just now).

It was the year before I was married. (I’ll let you work out when that was; I’m just indicating that it was well within living memory). Windermere was frozen over for several weeks during that winter, and for the first time in many years it was safe to skate over large areas of its surface.

Going back a bit further – that is, a few thousand years – not only was the lake frozen, but it was under several hundred feet of ice as the glaciers of the most recent ice age (I won’t say “the last”, as it might not be, in spite of what we’re told about global warming) …. Anyway, as I was saying, just over ten thousand years ago Windermere was under a massive glacier.

Strictly speaking that isn’t true, for at that time there was no Windermere. There were two much smaller lakes, one up at the Ambleside end, and another down toward Newby Bridge. In between the two, Claife Heights (now on the western side of northern Windermere) and Cartmel Fell (now on the eastern side of southern Windermere) were joined together in one continuous belt of hills, and the two lakes were in totally separate valleys ….. although both valleys were invisible under the cold solid white stuff.

As the glacier crawled its way down toward the sea at Morecambe Bay it carved a swathe through the hillside and allowed the waters of the two lakes (once they’d thawed, centuries later) to run together and create a single lake, the longest in England, that we now know and love as Windermere.

My bookcases have for decades now carried a wide range of books about the Lake District. However, I have very few that focus on just a single lake … because there are very few such books in existence. There is, however, an excellent book about Windermere: Portrait of Windermere, by Christopher Taylor. I bought mine twenty-five years ago when it first came out and have dipped into it repeatedly down the years. The paragraphs above owe much to my most recent dipping.   Click on the title or the graphic above to find a copy through Biblio.com

Or click on this link for more on other Lake District Books

That’s all for now,

- David Murray -
England’s Lakes