These hoary relics had a narrow escape of being totally destroyed by those who pulled down the old church; and the work of breaking them into pieces had already begun when the indignant people of the town stopped it. The clamps marking where the broken pillars were mended are clearly to be seen. A stone, really the head of an ancient cross, near by, is said to mark the place where the giant’s thumb is buried.
Penrith has suffered much in its time from wars and tumults, but it was afflicted in a dreadful manner by a great plague which almost depopulated the neighbourhood between September 1597 and January 1599, as an inscription in the church relates. In Penrith itself 2,260 people died, and in Kendal 2,500.
The chief streets of the town have been much modernised, but some old landmarks reward the diligent. The “Prince Charles Restaurant,” a baker’s shop, occupies the mansion where the Young Pretender lodged, and some old Penrith merchants’ houses remain: notably one in Angel Lane, on whose front the old local passion for remembrance, that usually finds expression in dates, initials, and improving maxims, develops into family history and epitaph, as thus:
This acquird by Robt Miers
Merct, who was interd the
19th of May 1722 His Wys
Margt and Ann Sepbr ye 19
rebuilt in ye yr 1763 Sepbr ye
30 by W. M.
This is mysterious, beyond hope of solution.