Cumbria 3: Castles and Ruins

Like South Wales, the Borderlands of Scotland and England were violent and debated, so there’s a good supply of castles and similar fortifications, although I went in virtually none of them. Durham Castle is part of the University so you have to book a tour, and at Carlisle I was wincing from being overcharged for postcards at Tullie House Museum (already an expensive enough visit) so I kept outside that one too; while Clifton Hall, incongruously sited next to a working farmyard, was shut. Penrith Castle is a shell; I glimpsed the private Naworth Castle and Langley Castle (the latter rebuilt in the 19^th century) from the roadside.

Hexham’s Old Gaol is like a little castle, but in fact is a purpose-built judicial prison built by the Archbishops of York. The Old Keep at Newcastle is a proper fortification, linked to its Black Gate by a walkway, so that was the closest to an ordinary castle visit I got.

The mighty Lowther Castle just south of Penrith is a different matter. This is a largely ruinous neo-Gothic mansion from the early 1800s, once the seat of the Lowther Earls of Lonsdale. The First Earl, ‘Wicked Jimmy’, was so notoriously miserly that when his heir took over the estate in 1802 he advertised for anyone who believed they’d been cheated or owed money by the Earl to make a claim. Hugh, the 6^th Earl, inherited his family’s colossal wealth derived from coal and land and managed to get rid of most of it thanks to extravagances such as spending £3000 per annum on cigars, insisting that his dogs travel first-class in their own rail carriage, and taking a 24-piece orchestra with him on trips. Three years after Hugh’s death in 1944, his brother and heir Lancelot sold off the contents of the massive Castle, though it was another ten before the 8^th Earl, James, despairing of finding any other use for the wreck, took its roof off, and transformed it into what amounts to a colossal garden ornament, which is what it now is. You can walk through what were once enormous halls and reception rooms and gulp as you realise quite how much money the Lowthers must have had to construct this fantasy building.

Lanercost Priory was the only ruined abbey I could easily get to.

Cumbria and Northumberland have an older stratum of ruin, of course: fragmentary but still charismatic, Hadrian’s Wall runs across the neck of Britain, punctuated by Roman forts and waystations. I went to Chesters, where local landowner James Clayton excavated the huge fortress after realising the importance of the walls his workers kept turning up just beneath the soil. The remains are now a strange intrusion in the gentle, sloping fields west of the North Tyne River. The soldiers stationed here were a largely Spanish cavalry regiment: five hundred men and as many horses, a bath house, a multi-storey headquarters building, gate towers and a commandant’s house. What must the Britons have made of it? A couple of miles further along the Wall is Carrawburgh – Brocolitia – with its Mithraeum. I was startled by its small scale: its aisles can only have accommodated eight people at once, watching as a new member was brought in to be initiated into the cult of Mithras. This is an even odder thing to find in the Northumbrian fields than a cavalry fort, a dark, secretive religious building, overlooked by sheep.

Finally, even before the Romans arrived, there was Long Meg and Her Daughters: the third-largest stone circle in England, and fully as odd as any of the Roman remains. There’s a farm close to the circle, and comfortable trees, but the stone ring itself seems resolutely undomesticated. This has a lot to do with Long Meg herself, a tall, narrow monolith of red sandstone standing outside the circle of dumpy grey limestone blocks. She is so clearly separate and different that you can’t help ascribing personality to her, and an eerie one at that. The story goes that Colonel Lacy of The Caves (who we will discuss later) tried to have the stones blown up with gunpowder so the field could be usefully ploughed, but after sudden and inexplicable thunderstorms while the explosives were being laid, the locals refused to co-operate. And so the circle stands.