Roman Eskdale

R. G. Collingwood

• Publisher: White Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781473330528
• eBook ISBN: 9781528766210
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This vintage book contains a detailed guide-book the Roman forts and ruins of Eskdale, a dale in Cumberland. There are two significant Roman forts at this location: one on the mountainside of Hardknot, the other at Ravenglass by the sea-shore. "Roman Eskdale" was written and published with the permission of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antquarian and Archaeological Society, and it is highly recommended for those with an interest in ancient Roman ruins and settlements or those wishing to visit the historic location. Contents include: "Eskdale Before the Romans", "The Coming of the Romans", "The Roman Road in Eskdale", "The Pottery and Tilery at Park House", "Headknot Castle", " Headknot Castle: Situation", "Headknot Castle: The Fort (defence)", "Headknot Castle: The Fort (internal buildings)", "Headknot Castle: The Bath-house", "Headknot Castle: The Parade Ground", "Headknot Castle: Its History", "The Roman Fort at Ravenglass", et cetera. Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.

ROMAN ESKDALE.

ESKDALE BEFORE THE ROMANS

Before the Romans came, and even after they went away, no one lived, as men live now, along the bottom of Eskdale. In those days the valley-bottoms of these parts were full of timber, great or small, and marshy with standing water or stony with the leavings of flooded becks. At the head of Wastwater there is a little patch of ground which to-day still shows what all these valleys were once like: banks of shingle and hollows of swamp, all overgrown with scrubby little trees. The green fields that follow one another down Eskdale are no more of Nature’s making than the stone dikes that divide them. They have been made by man; and man did not begin to make them, stubbing bushes and draining swamps and embanking becks, until hundreds of years after the Romans left. The Northern Farmer, old style, who “stubbed Thurnaby waste” in Tennyson’s poem, was of Anglo-Saxon or Scandinavian blood, the blood of a race which “mixed its labour with the land” and so, in the words of Locke, “put the greatest part of the value upon land, without which it would scarcely be worth anything.” In Eskdale this work was done by descendants of those Norsemen who settled outside the mountain district in the tenth century and, generation after generation, worked their way up the dales, until, by about the thirteenth century, the farms were disposed very much as we now know them.

Prehistoric man never set himself this task of reclaiming the valley-bottoms and using them for agriculture. Not that he was ignorant of agriculture; on the contrary, it was his staple livelihood as far back as we can trace him in these parts of the country; but he worked the soil where, poor though it was, it could be got at with less difficulty and worked without elaborate clearing and draining.

This state of things he found on the high ground that lies between the mountains and the valleys. These shelves of upland, too high to be encumbered with marsh and wood like the valleys, not high enough to be incapable of cultivation like the mountain-tops, are the places where we find all the prehistoric remains in the Lake District. Such remains are plentiful on either side of Eskdale. On the north are the Bronze Age circles of Burnmoor; burial-places of people who must have tilled the ground on the plateau between Eskdale and Wastdale, and hunted on the higher fells, perhaps a thousand years before Christ. One of them lost a flint arrow-head when hunting along the Wastwater Screes. South of Eskdale there is a vast collection of hut-circles at Barnscar, on the high shelf of land south-west of Devoke Water. “British Settlements” like these belong to the Early Iron Age, which, hereabouts, means the last few centuries B. C. and the first few centuries A.D. The beehive huts at Barnscar were very likely inhabited for a good many generations before the Romans came, and during all the time the Romans were here.

Thus we get a fairly complete idea of Eskdale before the Romans. The sides and bottom of the valley uninhabited and covered with scrub; the bottom marshy as well; people living a rough and poor kind of life on the uplands, tilling their little fields and eking out their produce by keeping a few cattle and sheep and hunting on the mountains and in the forests.

THE COMING OF THE ROMANS

A British chief, taken to Rome as a captive, asked why the men who possessed so splendid a city should have envied him his poor dwelling. We need not ask here what it was that brought the Romans to Britain, but we must certainly ask what brought them to Eskdale.

South-eastern and central England, invaded in A. D. 43, were quickly overrun by Roman armies. But Wales and the mountainous north were another matter. It was not until the governorship of the great Julius Agricola (77-84) that the conquest of Wales was finished and that of the north seriously taken in hand. In 78, the last resistance in Wales crushed, Agricola turned northward and began the systematic conquest of Brigantia—all England between the Humber and the Tyne—which had been rapidly overrun, some years earlier, by Petilius Cerialis.

Antiquaries used to believe that they could establish Agricola’s precise line of march, and took sides in favour of this route or that. To-day we are content with less; but we demand a higher standard of proof. We know that there were then, as there are now, two ways to the north: one by Cheshire and Lancashire to the Lune valley and so to Penrith and Carlisle, the other by the Vale of York to the Tyne. We may be sure that Agricola’s armies used both these routes, and built roads and forts along them; for we find relics that can be dated to his lifetime when we dig at sites along these lines. At one such site, Lancaster, a branch road leaves the main Carlisle road and bends off westwards. It goes to Watercrook, just south of Kendal, where there is a Roman fort in an elbow of the river Kent. Thence it goes to Ambleside, where there is another, down by the water’s edge at the head of Windermere. Thence it strikes up Little Langdale, over Wrynose, past Cockley Beck, over Hardknot Pass, and down Eskdale to the sea at Ravenglass.

When and why did the Romans build this road?

First of all, when? The answer is given by digging done some years ago at Ambleside. The fort whose stone foundations are still visible in Borrans Field, owned by the National Trust and open to the public, dates from the second century A.D.; but underneath these foundations were discovered the remains of an earlier Roman fort, with earthern ramparts and wooden buildings, and the things found in it showed that it had been built late in the first century, no doubt in the time of Agricola. Now the fort cannot have been earlier than the road; and the road cannot have stopped short at Ambleside; therefore it is safe to argue that Agricola was responsible for the whole of this branch-line from Lancaster through the mountains to Eskdale and the sea.

Roman Eskdale, then, is Agricola’s work. But why was this work done?

The branch-road from Lancaster to the sea cannot be explained by the necessity of keeping touch between the army and the fleet. That could be secured at Lancaster and again at Carlisle; and nothing in that respect could be gained by driving a road through the Lake District. Nor can it be explained by any fancied necessity of conquering or patrolling the Lake District mountains. The central mountains were practically uninhabited, and what population there was lived on the uplands on the edge of the mountain region. Agricola’s road does not touch these inhabited regions, and was plainly never designed to keep their inhabitants under control. In short, we must look rather carefully at the facts if we are to explain the motives which led to the construction of the Lancaster-Ambleside-Ravenglass road.

At no time in history has there ever been any permanent reason for a road over Wrynose and Hardknot. The permanent economic needs of the country do not require it, and never did. Permanent military considerations do not require it, and never did. Such a road could be of no value to West Cumberland, whose natural land communications are with Carlisle and Penrith, or to South Cumberland, which is easily accessible from Broughton-in-Furness. For a while, in the nineteenth century, a carriage-road existed along this line in modern times; but it was allowed to fall into disrepair simply because it was not worth keeping up. The insignificant traffic which it might carry could not justify the cost of repairing it. The project of a new road on the same line would never have appeared but for the system under which main roads are heavily subsidised by the State, which makes it possible in certain circumstances to gain trifling local advantages by a large expenditure of other people’s money.

The reason for Agricola’s road between Lancaster and Ravenglass was a purely temporary reason. Tacitus, in his Life of Agricola, tells us that in the year 81 Agricola “placed troops in that part of Britain which faces Ireland, with a view to hope [of invading that country] rather than through fear [or Irish raids]; because Ireland, lying midway between Britain and Spain, and within easy reach of the Gaulish sea, would unite the most flourishing regions of the Empire with great advantage to each”

(eamque partem Britanniae quae Hiberniam aspicit copiis instruxit, in spem magis quam ob formidinem, si quidem Hibernia medio inter Britanniam et Hispaniam sita et Gallico mari opportuna valentissimam partem imperii magnis in vicem usibus miscuerit).

Agricola’s geography may have been a little shaky, but he was right in thinking that prehistoric Ireland was a country in regular communication with Spain, and that its possession would, together with that of Scotland, round off and secure the Roman Empire in the west of Europe. And this passage tells us that he actually chose a place on the western coast of Britain from which an invasion of Ireland might be launched.

Where was this place? A careful study of all the known Roman sites on the western coast of Britain seems to prove that there is only one which can seriously claim to be Agricola’s choice. It must be on a first-rate harbour; it must face Ireland; it must have first-century Roman remains; and it must be connected with the army headquarters at York or Chester by a direct road. Ravenglass fulfils all these conditions. The harbour is now silted up, but it must have been a magnificent one in Agricola’s time; and the fort lies right by the water’s edge as if to impress on every visitor the connexion between the fort and the harbour. On fine days the Isle of Man is visible from the shore, and in very clear weather you see the Mourne Mountains from the hills a little way inland, even at times from the shore itself. The road to Ravenglass, we have seen, dates from Agricola, and therefore presumably the fort does too. And the road gives direct communication with Chester, Agricola’s chief army-base.

The whole situation is now clear and intelligible. The Eskdale road is a purely strategic road, leading to Ravenglass; and the reason why a road is needed is that Ravenglass has been chosen as a naval base for the projected campaign against Ireland. Apart from this project, there was nothing to bring Agricola into the Lake District at all. His main road up the Lune valley could easily be secured against native raids on its left flank by an occasional demonstration on the part of the garrisons placed in its forts; he could leave the Lake District alone, just as he left Galloway alone.

Roman Eskdale, then, is a by-product of a scheme that never came off. But the Romans were tenacious people. Having established a fort at Ravenglass, they did not like to abandon it. So they kept it up; and, as we shall see, they even reinforced it by building Hardknot Castle, some years later, to make it a little less isolated, a little less remote from its nearest neighbour. Later, when Hadrian had built his great wall across England, Hardknot was abandoned, but Ravenglass still remained. It was a useful port of call for coastwise shipping, and it acted as a kind of remote outpost far away on the left wing of the Wall. But the road, once Hardknot was given up, can have been very little used. At any rate, no milestones have ever been found on it; and since old milestones were thrown away and new ones put up whenever a road was extensively repaired, the number of milestones found along the line of a road gives a hint of the amount of work that was done on it.

THE ROMAN ROAD IN ESKDALE

If their road had been of real permanent value to the Romans, they would have kept it in repair; and if they had kept it in repair, it would have been fairly easy to trace. But, even on ground that has never been cultivated, it is a curiously elusive road; as contrasted with other mountain roads of the Roman period, the difficulty of tracing it is quite extraordinary. This difficulty of course increases when we come down to cultivated ground intersected by all manner of medieval and modern tracks. Therefore everything that can be said about the Roman road in Eskdale must be said with caution and accepted as purely tentative.

Plainly, the road must have entered the valley at Hardknot pass, run down past Hardknot Castle into the valley, and so to Ravenglass. The two forts, Hardknot and Ravenglass, are fixed points, and we may begin—remembering the Roman engineers’ passion for a bee-line—by ruling a line on the map to join them. This line will not quite do, because it takes us over a formidable crag opposite Eskdale Green. But if we divert the line so as to clear this crag, we find it following a not impossible track. At first it runs down the left bank of the Esk, to Spothow and Low Birker; then it leaves Dalegarth Hall on the right and climbs over a pass nearly 500 feet high, coming down into the valley again at Field Head; thence it runs down the dale, crossing the Esk somewhere, and so by Muncaster Castle to Ravenglass.

But this is a merely theoretical line; and it would be very definitely improved if instead of climbing the pass to the left of Dalegarth Hall it bore to the right, keeping closer to the river and crossing it at Forge House. Thence it could proceed in a fairly straight line to Ravenglass without further obstacles.

Such is the train of thought which we imagine to pass in the mind of a Roman engineer laying out a road from Hardknot pass to Ravenglass harbour. We can now turn to the ground itself, and see whether any visible relics confirm or overthrow our hypothesis.

In the first place, there is a Roman site two-thirds of the way from Hardknot to Ravenglass. This is a pottery and tilery, situated a mile S.S.W. of Eskdale Green, at Park House. In the absence of thorough excavation we cannot as yet say much about its history, but there is no doubt of its character, and it was certainly working when Hardknot Castle was built, about A.D. 100. We cannot doubt that it lay on the line of road, or quite close to it. And it lies on what is still a road, running N.E. and S.W. and connecting Muncaster with Eskdale Green.

In the second place, a careful study of the ground had been made by an Eskdale archæologist, Miss Mary C. Fair, who has brought to light many stretches and fragments of old roads which provide a clue to the line probably taken by the Roman engineers. Miss Fair’s view of the Roman road is that it branches off to the left from the modern road at the foot of Hardknot pass, travelling in a straight line still marked by gateways in the modern field-walls, and so by a still visible causeway to the demolished farm-house, Spothow. Hence it went, she thinks, in a straight line to Low Birker, and then through Underbank Wood to a ford in Stanley Gill Beck and so to Dalegarth Hall. Passing just south of the Hall it follows a line marked by stiles in the walls, and after passing the ruined farm of Red Brow crosses the Esk north-west of Forge House, at a place where in dry weather may be seen some indications of a made ford. It then crosses Mere Beck and skirts a swampy hollow north of Muncaster Head farm, where Miss Fair found it by excavation 9 feet wide and solidly constructed with good kerbstones. It comes to a hillock locally known as Bull Kop, 300 yards north-west of Muncaster Head; and passing round the north side of the summit it picks its way between patches of soft ground and slopes down to join the private drive (that is to say, the road that runs by Muncaster Head and High Eskholme) 700 yards W.S.W. of Muncaster Head and 300 yards N.E. of Park House. It now follows the private drive for just over a mile, to a point 200 yards beyond High Eskholme. Here it has been thought to leave the private drive and slant up the side of Muncaster Fell to a point 500 feet above th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Contents
• Introduction
• Eskdale before the Romans