I’ve just taken a 10-day trip to the Lake District, which is one of the few English regions I have never explored before – in part because it’s an area that has the reputation of being a tourist hotspot, and I prefer to avoid busy places. Although I had planned several locations to visit in advance, on my arrival I purchased a copy of Adam Morgan Ibbotson’s Cumbria’s Prehistoric Monuments (2021), which I found very helpful. I am no expert on prehistory (or archaeology, for that matter), so a book like Ibbotson’s strikes the right balance for me between depth and general coverage. It is a paradox of British archaeology that (at least in the west of the island of Great Britain) some of the oldest archaeology survives a great deal better than relics of more recent times. Iron Age, post-Roman and Anglo-Saxon archaeology are notoriously ephemeral, and in Cumbria even ancient churches seem rather thin on the ground – the vogue for rebuilding them in the late 19th century, when this remote region suddenly had a bit of money from tourism, seems to have obliterated a lot. Yet, because prehistoric people focussed much of their attention on stone monuments, their traces remain in plain sight. Or, in some cases, hidden in plain sight.
What surprised me most in reading Ibbotson’s book is the extent to which Cumbria’s prehistoric archaeology remains undiscovered. As I have already mentioned, I carried to Cumbria the prejudice that this is a region excessively visited by tourists – and therefore, I had assumed, somewhat bereft of mystery. But whilst it is true that some sights are much frequented – the famous stone circle at Castlerigg even had its own ice-cream van when I stopped by – most seem to be almost unknown. I was intrigued by Ibbotson’s coverage of prehistoric rock art – mainly cup and ring marks found incised on the surfaces of the vast boulders deposited by glaciers in Cumbria’s many dales and valleys, as if hurled there by giants. Astonishingly, the first examples of cup and ring marks were found in Cumbria only in 1999, and new examples are being discovered by ordinary walkers to this day. Ironically, this kind of rock art is apparently best investigated at night, when high-powered lights show the ancient markings in relief. This is prehistoric archaeology hiding in plain sight: a testimony to a different kind of activity, and perhaps a different kind of religious focus, in comparison with the megalith-building we usually associate with Britain’s Neolithic and Bronze Age inhabitants.
Because I am not a trained archaeologist, the question at the forefront of my mind when visiting a stone-rich county like Cumbria is always ‘Is this archaeological, or geological?’ To the untrained eye (mine), many a natural rocky outcrop looks like a collapsed megalith or the wreckage of a half-destroyed stone circle; and in response I tend to overcompensate with scepticism, in case my enthusiasm runs away with me and I make unwarranted assumptions. But Ibbotson’s book shows that the usual authoritative sources for the locations of ancient monuments – such as Ordnance Survey maps – are not always reliable when it comes to comprehensive recording of Cumbria’s prehistoric sites, simply because there remain so many sites in the county that have yet to be investigated. For instance, in my journey along Hagg Gill to reach the Roman road on top of High Street mountain (Roman archaeology remains my primary interest, and was the primary focus of my trip – but more of that another time) I passed several assemblages of stones that seemed to me could be prehistoric cairns – but could also have been glacial phenomena (unfortunately, I’m not much of a geologist either…). In many cases, however, the answer to my ‘archaeological or geological’ question seems to be that we genuinely do not know, because the area has never been archaeologically investigated. Cumbria may be much visited, but its visitors do not always have much interest in archaeology, and so uncertainty hovers over the status of many features of the landscape.
The familiarity of great megalithic monuments like Stonehenge and Avebury and their iconic status can make us oblivious to the fact that they are part of someone else’s landscape, but the human monumental detritus in a more remote landscape like the Cumbrian fells brings this out more clearly. Things stay put here, and we are lodgers stumbling among the furniture left behind by past inhabitants whose identity we have little sense of. All we can be sure of is that they were not our ancestors. Or perhaps, in a non-biological sense, they were? I am always fascinated by the phenomenon of newcomers to a landscape adopting its pre-existing sacred sites; we see it, for instance, with the co-option of Bronze Age tumuli as a focus for an Anglo-Saxon cemetery – and High Street itself, on a more practical level, is almost certainly a prehistoric trackway that the Romans decided to turn into a road. This kind of adoptive ancestry is the keynote of the British landscape; we are not a country where archaeological and ethnic continuity move in tandem, as they do in much of northern Europe. And we ourselves are great adopters of prehistory, assigning it significance in folklore that (if we are not careful) the cold gaze of modern archaeology risks stripping away.
I gather that a second edition of Ibbotson’s book is in preparation – I am sure it will prove even more useful, although I am not sure when I shall return to the region. But Ibbotson strikes a judicious balance between the necessity of speculating about the purposes of monuments – for speculate we must – and refraining from certainty and assumptions. In the contemplation of British prehistory, we are thus caught perpetually in a state of hermeneutical indecision; a bleak prospect for the intellect, without consolation or satisfaction for our curiosity, that somehow mirrors the starkness of these monuments themselves – standing for unimaginable aeons against the unforgiving Cumbrian weather. I hope I shall be back.