Archaeology of the English Lake District and Cumbria

I recently had the opportunity to review Alex Gibson’s thought provoking volume, 'Enclosing the Neolithic: Recent studies in Britain and Europe'. That review, to which the reader is directed for further commentary, identified as a weakness the uneven spread of regional case studies, and in particular the omission of studies from the West Country, Wales and North West England, which are so important in understanding the Irish Sea Zone. The aim of this paper is to address this with regard to the material from the North West of England, and in particular Cumbria. This paper is therefore meant to be read in conjunction with Gibson’s edited volume.

A general introduction to the Kentmere Archaeological Project carried out in the Kentmere Valley in the southern English Lake District: which lays out the scope of the fieldwork programme and gives an interim statement regarding the archaeological excavation of the Viking Age structures at Bryant's Gill, citing one of three radiocarbon dates that fixed the the date range of the site. Updated subsequently (see author's papers).

In the forthcoming blogs I like you to take me along with a journey to Cumbria, England wich I just visited. Several interesting Viking Age stone sculpture artefacts can be seen there. The attractiviness is, they can be seen 'on the spot' (or very nearby, sheltered in the churches !) where they have always been. Almost no need to go to musea here - it is still there, in the wild..

Walking is fundamental and prevalent in all tourist settings. As the most popular activity in natural spaces and managed outdoor recreation areas, it receives less attention in academic literature than it should. This paper conceptualizes recreational walking, using the findings of a UK-based exploratory study. Twenty-three in-depth interviews were undertaken with expert practitioners involved in managing the walking world. The discourse revealed insights into a diverse range of individuals. They demonstrate differing levels of commitment to walking, from short walks for sightseeing purposes to more challenging physical experiences on a more frequent and committed basis. Individual confidence is particularly important in determining how people undertake walks, their level of involvement in the activity, and how they navigate themselves. The findings suggest that walkers can be casual or serious in their interest in walking. These distinctions are useful in separating walking in terms of adventure tourism and other forms of tourism.

This was a very productive field survey of an area of upland adjacent to Dunmail Raise, an axial crossing point of the mountains of the Lake District. It was carried out as part of a project to consider the use and significance of the Cumbrian Mountains in the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Periods when the Stone Axe Factories of the Central Fells were in production. Clearance cairns and likely burial cairns as well as ring cairns were amongst the prehistoric features identified hereabouts.

Shielings-early medieval earthen, turf and stone footings of distinctive montane structures-can articulate and further our understandings of Scandinavian montane colonising and diaspora communities. In the Faroe Islands, Iceland and Greenland the structures represented by these footings referenced key elements of those societies' farms and their associated montane landscapes. Their builders and users utilised farm outfields and more, as well as occupying significant landscape and liminal locations. These not only allowed a focus on a wide range of task, craft, domestic stock and wild game management, hunting and fodder/ resource collection, production and consumption activities, but possibly allowed for exploration and expression of different gender identities, alongside demarcating specific territories (Borchegrevink 1977, Øye 2009, Kupiec and Milek 2015, Svensson 2015). As Daniël Postma recently pointed out, there were, (in 2019) no demonstrable archaeological examples of early medieval shielings in Britain (Postma, in Strachan

(2019 Postgraduate Dissertation) - This study uses a two-pronged research approach to questions of identity, heritage, and landscape in present-day Cumbria. The first research chapter looks at the ‘strata’ of literature and heritage discourse over the last century to discern a structure of feeling in Cumbrian popular literature centred on Romantic and later Postromantic tropes about that county’s landscapes and culture. The second research chapter presents thematically analysed data from semi-structured interviews with eight local residents, to ascertain attitudes and perceptions about identity, heritage, and landscape. Viewed in light of the structure of feeling, the thematic analysis concludes that Cumbria represents a polity marked by both peripherality and geohistorical centrality within the British Isles; further these two concrete features have seen the region become a theatre for overlapping but contested local and national claims that are seen through the divisions between the West Coast and the central Lakeland Dome.

Following further recent discoveries of abstract rock art in the Lake District the rapidly growing corpus of evidence indicates there is a preference for the use of bedrock sites over boulders. This paper addresses the question of why this might be so from a landscape and social perspective. In considering these sites we can see that they share a somewhat predictable landscape setting, consequently their immediate environs are examined and the wider influence of the limbic landscape setting of these sites - within a mountain environment, between earth/water and sky. Discussion will include the sensual effect of the creation of cups and grooves on participants and audience, where the rock slab can be seen as a stage and the extent to which this was a cohesive performance that strengthened the social bonds of those involved in and viewing their production. Anthropological comparisons to other rock art sites suggest that these were not sterile places on cold rock but dressed with all manner of things which are invisible in the archaeological record. I will argue that some rock art sites are analogous to other contemporary prehistoric stone and timber monuments, where recent research has proposed new interpretations from a social perspective that sheds light on the function of these enigmatic rock art sites in the land of lakes.

Pillatt, T., Thorpe, G., Marwood, K. and Johnston, R. 2018. 'A Break in the Clouds: Connecting community experiences in Mosser, Cumbria' Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 5 (2): 117-134.


This photo essay accompanies a short film, A Break in the Clouds, which explores everyday life in Mosser, a small former township on the north-west edge of the Lake District. Prompted by the historical diaries of two eighteenth-century Quaker farmers from the same area, connections were drawn between the experiences of the current farmers and those in the past. The text discusses those connections, the making of the film, and how our approach was designed to democratise the research process. The images, selected by the photographer, reflect on the key themes or ‘spaces’ that emerged during the research: home/work, land/family, landscape/weather.