A DAY WITH ROMAN AND NORSE.
It was burning June. The sun shone on lake and fell. Skiddaw was cloudless and lifted into the clear heaven its purple lilac shade powdered with the fresh fern and the emerald green of the bilberry. The corn-crake cried in the valley, the throstle whistled from the larch plantation; in and out of the elder-blossom the tireless bees went humming, and the haymakers could hardly get on with their work for gazing at the exquisite beauty of the wild roses on the hedge. In Cumberland, as Southey said, we miss the violet, but we make up for our loss in April and May by the blush roses of the June. They embroider the lanes, they dance upon the hedgerows, they flash against the grey blue waters of the lake, they flutter against the green fellside. Such roses! not faint in colour and scent as we see in the South, but red of heart and filled with fragrance, wonderful wild roses of Cumberland.
What a day of life and loveliness it is! On the old Millbeck Hall door stone up yonder are the words, 'Vivere mori, mori vivere,' but we feel that the living, the living are the hearts that praise, and death is, even by suggestion, out of place here.
To-day as we dash along under Skiddaw to see where Roman and Norseman once had home, we feel that the same beauty was beheld by earlier races, and the wild rose that gladdens our sight was very dear to eyes of far-off generations, and has been a perpetual garden of life and loveliness for all the passing years.
We are going to see the camps of the warriors of old, and we do well to gather and put in hat and buttonhole the emblem of England's warrior saint, the good St. George. As one thinks of the flower, one's mind does not only go back to Pisanello and his picture of St. George away there in the church of St. Anastasia in Verona, but to the hundred shrines wherein are seen that fair Madonna, the Rose of God, whose painters honoured the wilding rose for her sake, and gave it immortality on their canvases. To Roman Catholic and to Protestant alike, how significant and full of tender association is the wild dog-rose of Cumberland! How close it brings the church days of an older time back to the present dwellers in this country, seeing that both on Carlisle's city arms and Carlisle's bishop's coat of arms, the wild rose shines, memorial of the monastery that honoured the Rose of Heaven.
But to-day we are going back to times that antedate those mediaeval church days. We are on visit bent to Roman and Viking who dwelt in sight of Skiddaw—the cleft one, in the days,
'When never a wild-rose men would braid
To honour St. George and the Virgin Maid.'
We dash on by Dancing Gate, a farm beyond Scalebeck, with its quaint holly trees, whose sons have never forgotten the art of dancing, on by Mirehouse with its memories of James Spedding and Thomas Carlyle and Alfred Tennyson, on under Ullock slope, and by Ravenstone till we reach an old farmhouse, quaint with its Jacobaean door-pilasters.
'For Orthwaite Hall and Overwater,' said the coachman, 'we should turn off here to the right and go up the Rake,' as he slackened his paces.
There was an old Norse ring about that word 'rake,' for the Icelanders still talk of their sheep 'rachan' just as our Cumberland shepherds do; when the sheep follow one after another along the mountain side, they are hereabouts said to be 'raking,' but though we were bent on a Norse chieftain's home we refused to ascend the Rake. It was very hot and sultry, and we preferred the shady woodland of Bassenthwaite 'parks,' and so drove forward. We passed the Vicarage house and the Bassenthwaite Church, crossed a small stream, and, turning sharply by a deserted chapel towards the village, drove by the village green, thence entering a kind of meadow road, were soon in shadow, and for more than a mile went, beneath bowery oak, and fragrant larch, and gleaming hazel, along this copse-lane sweet with wild woodruff and gay with lychnis, towards the hillside opposite the Dash, where stands Orthwaite or Overthwaite Hall. It is worth while turning for a backward gaze as we ascend the hill; Bassenthwaite and the fells that close round far Derwentwater look nowhere more beautiful than from here.
That little tarn on our left is not Overwater, but it has its history; one hundred sheep went on the ice one wintry day, broke through, and all were drowned. The current superstition is that the pike in that tarn are as large as donkeys; whether before or after the feast of plenty accorded by the mountain sheep is not told.
Here is Orthwaite or Allerthwaite Hall grim and grey, its little Elizabethan window mouldings, its diamond squares of glass, its quaint low-ceilinged dining room. There is a look of drear sadness and of pale sorrow about the quiet half-hall, half-farmstead, and there may well be, for its owner William George Browne, the traveller, went forth therefrom to explore Tartary and Bokhara in the year 1812, and being suspected by the Persian government of sinister design, was, under instruction from headquarters, taken captive beyond the Kizzil Ozan river, blindfolded and barbarously murdered. Poor Browne! he had better have stayed in sight of harmless Skiddaw, but his was the gipsy's mind, and though none knew quite why he journeyed, and his journeys in Africa, Egypt, and Syria show that he travelled more from love of wild roaming than for aught else, home for William George Browne had no attraction in its sound. His was the restless wanderer's heart.
Now we leave the carriage, and while it goes round to pick us up at Whitefield Cottage on the Uldale and Ireby road, we descend into the meadows and find ourselves gazing on a large square entrenchment, at the angles of which were once raised mounds, lying to the south-west of Overwater. No Roman camp this, for Romans did not place their camps in the bottoms, unless they had a secure look-out above them, or a fortified camp on a height near by; and Romans did not when they dug an entrenchment round their camp, throw the earth out to right and left and make an embankment either side their fosse, as it is plain was the case here; besides there is but one entrance to the camp, and that was not the Roman way. No, the camp we are looking upon was probably the kraal or stockaded farmstead of a Norse chieftain, any time between 874 and 950 A.D.
Its owner probably came up the Derwent with Ketel, son of Orme, with Sweyn and Honig or Hundhr, what time they harried Cumberland under Ingolf or Thorolf the Dane. For aught we know, he may have been tempted hither by some sudden surprise-peep he got of the Overwater tarn and neighbouring meadowland, from the heights of Skiddaw, the first time he clomb that double-fronted hill.
It is true that a Roman tripod kettle is said to have been discovered near, but the Romans were not the only nation on the earth that worked in bronze, and knew the advantage of putting legs to their kettles; and both in the museum of Copenhagen and Christiania such tripod kettles may be seen to-day that came from the hands of the Norsemen of old time.
As we gaze across the quiet meadow land to the north-east, we see the high raised hill, where it is more than probable that the Viking chieftains, who here had their steading, 'died into the ground,' as they expressed it, when the death hour came. At any rate that hill is called Latrigg, which may well mean the 'Hlad Rigg' or 'Ridge of the Dead,' and as at Keswick so here, the Vikings may have carried up their dead chieftains for their last long rest to yonder height. It is by some thought possible that the word Latrigg may come from Norse words that signify the 'Lair Ridge,' the ridge of the lair of wild beasts, and doubtless in those early days the farmer who built his stockade had cause to dread other wild beasts than such as now trouble the hen roosts beneath Skiddaw. Now on still nights the shepherd of Underskiddaw may hear the fox of Skiddaw calling across the waters of Bassenthwaite to the red-coated vixen at Barf, and hear her shrill bark answer to his cry, but then the wolf howled and the wild boar prowled, and there was need of stockade not only against man but against the creatures of the wild woodland.
We leave the meadow with its Viking memories, walk on to join our carriage at Whitefield Cottage, thence, driving along towards Uldale and Ireby, see, far off, the common of Ulph the Norseman that was often waked by John Peel's 'horn in the morning,' and, instead of descending into the valley that separates us from that long moor that stretches to Caldbeck, we turn sharply to the left, pass a lonely house of some pretension, and drive by a narrow lane through hedges covered with wild-rose; away to the west, upon surmounting the ridge, we suddenly come in sight of the littoral plain—all peacock green and blue, the Solway flashing in the distance—and the grey hills of bonnie Scotland beyond. We descend the hill and pull up at a lodge gate. "Snittle Garth," says the driver. The very name has a Scandinavian ring about it; we enter the Park and pull up at a pleasant-looking country house.
By courtesy of the owner we pass in front of the garden, gay with its flowers, and full of the sense and sweetness of an English country house. We can hardly gaze at the camp we have come to see, so fair and beautiful is the vision outstretched before us of Bassenthwaite laid in gleaming whiteness beneath the dark hills of Wythop and the purple vastness of Skiddaw, so exquisite the shadowy foldings of the blue hills that take the eye far up beyond the gates of Borrodale to Gimmer Crag, to Great-End and far Sea-fell. But when we look at the camp we have come to see we find ourselves standing on a high plateau, sheltered on north and east and west by rising ground. The site of the camp is rectangular, eighty-three feet by thirty-one; isolated by a trench with regular scarp and counter-scarp. This trench is twelve feet broad at the bottom, twenty feet at the top; the scarp and counter-scarp are each nine feet, and the depth is five feet. The work, to all appearance, is freshly done, and but for the fact that no pottery has been revealed, might well be work of Roman engineers. As we wonder at the quaint oblong island of green carved in the hill side, surrounded by its dry moat, we listen to what the sages say and archaeologists guess about its origin and intent.
'The remains of a mediaeval pleasaunce,' says one antiquarian.
'Not a bit of it,' says another, 'this was no sheet of water for ornament, with an island in its midst, this was a Roman sanitary camp. Hither sick and sorry came the poor fellows, whom the frosts of Cumberland had pinched, or the dews of Cumberland had rheumatised, or the malaria of the Derwent Vale had febrified, or the swords and clubs of the stubborn British had wounded, and here girt round by friendly fence of water, sheltered from the wind, uplifted in this quiet pastoral scene, they built their rough wattle hospital, and prayed to the goddess of health.'
'No, no,' says a third antiquarian, no authority he, and therefore likeliest to be right. 'This was a battle holme. Here in the olden time men met for holm-gauge or wager of battle; on that oval sward was decided, in the sight of the assembled multitude, the feud of families or the strife of tribes.'
We can, as we gaze, conjure up the whole scene, and hear the crash of battle hammer, and see the flame of the circling brand; but the peace of the present subdues the passion of the past, and the sound of the quiet grass-cropping hard by of the unfearful sheep, the song of the thrush from the neighbour sycamore recalls us to such pastoral tranquillity as ill assorts with the stormy drama
'Of old far-off unhappy things
And battles long ago.'
Now rejoining our carriage let us drive west, up hill, to the neighbouring Caermote. We shall feel all the time that the tribesmen, gathered at their battle holme, can follow us with their eyes, and wonder what on earth can possess us to leave them with their fierce axe play just going to begin, for the old deserted look-out camp on the slope a mile away. We leave the carriage to descend the hill to the south and await our arrival at the large square double camp of the Romans on the lower slope, and not without many pauses to wonder at fair scene of the seaward plain, we make our way up to the northern peak of Caermote Hill.
This, with its circular rampart, was probably the 'mons exploratorius' of the large double camp on the lower south-eastern slope, and a glorious look-out the Roman legionaries must have had, if on such a day of June they came with their wild roses in their hands to see the sun come with its wild rose over Helvellyn, or move slowly to its setting and turn the whole grey Solway into gold.
Down now we go southward across the pleasant green sward, negotiate one or two rather awkward fences, and bearing a little to the left, towards the main road that runs to Bewaldeth, we soon find ourselves in the midst of ramparts of the quaint double Roman camp. It is a camp within a camp, the larger of the two being about 180 yards by 160 yards square. There is evidence that the cohort that first encamped here must have felt that it was a place of much strategic importance, for they made the road from 'old Carlisle' to Keswick run right through the middle of it. The continuation of this road, though it remains untraced, probably ran along the east side of Bassenthwaite up to the tiny Roman watch camp at the 'Gale,' and so by Guardhouse towards Penrith, and to Causeway Foot, on the road to Ambleside.
They appear also to have felt that they were in a dangerous country when first they rested beneath Caermote, for they circled themselves with a triple rampart and a double fosse.
But not for ever was there to be war at the gates, even in Roman times. The cohort gave way to a 'century,' and the centurion, who remained to keep the way from 'old Carlisle' to Keswick open, was content to trust his safety from attack to the guardianship of a single ditch and rampart; and yet the fierceness of fire and sword must in after times have been felt again at this place. Not many years ago the ruins of some buildings near the north gate of the large camp were discovered, that had once been roofed with lead, but the buildings had been set on fire, and the lead had poured itself away into the ground. There was nothing to suggest that these buildings had been of Roman workmanship, and though it is possible that this was a kind of half-way store-house for the lead miners of Caldbeck, who were sending their mineral booty to the sea, it is quite as probable that at some time or other a farmer had here his 'strength' or 'strong house,' and that 'rievers' from over the Border had made short work of him, and given his farm-stead to the flames.
We leave the Romans of Caermote, and are not surprised to think a sanatorium hard by was necessary for the cohort of old time, if there was as much water in the ground as there is to-day within and without the ramparts. Thence we drive by way of Bewaldeth and the inn by the Bassenthwaite cross-roads, to the shores of what Southey called 'westernmost Wythop.' Hardly are we able to get forward, for the cries of those who are with us in the carriage to draw up, that we may gaze at this or that wild-rose bush in all its tender fluttering beauty. But at last we win our goal—Castle How Inn, near Peelwyke; then scrambling up the hill we inspect the four trenches on the side of the hill looking towards Peelwyke, whence of old time gazed out the hardy Britons upon the Roman camp fires blazing at Caermote.
As we gaze we think not only of Roman times, but of the Viking times also; for down below us lies the wyke or harbour where the first Norsemen who ever came up Derwent from the sea ran their boats ashore.
Who, or whence the Norse ancestor of John Peel, who hewed the trees of the woodland at our feet into planks and built his 'Pride of the lake,' we cannot know, but he probably had friends, Ketel and Ormr, and Sweyn, and Honig and Walla, who would from time to time come across the Crosthwaite Vale and step aboard his galley, and sweep with flying sail or gleaming oar along by the woods of Mirehouse or the shadowy cliffs of Barf to his 'steading' here at Bassenthwaite; and it is more than probable that he and his family 'died into the ground' at Castle How, and there await the glory of the gods and the coming of Odin.
We, as we gaze out south from the How of the Viking, can see plainly to-day the burial ground of other Viking chieftains of the dale on the grey green Latrigg's height; and sadly enough, we think, must they have passed into the dark, if so fair a sun as this shone upon so fair a scene, and the roses and elders were as sweet for them as they are for us to-day.
On now through fragrant briar wood and odorous larch to Keswick, and the ghosts of Britain and Rome and Norway keep pace with our hearts as we go.