Still in the Past, But Looking Forward

My museum visiting this holiday hasn't stopped just because I left Cumbria: this last week I've made my way to a few more places I've either never seen, or wanted to revisit. The Carrawburgh Mithraeum up near Hadrian's Wall is a strange place to find in the middle of nowhere; it has a larger equivalent in London, now beneath the premises of finance house Bloomberg on Walbrook, and thanks to their largesse costs nothing to visit. You are pointed in front of a wall of artefacts, then go downstairs into a darkened chamber to learn more about Mithraism, and finally are ushered down yet again to the Temple itself - rather more expansive than the Carrawburgh one, this is enlivened with an 'immersive experience' of sound and light, Latin chanting and quite subtle visual effects doing just enough to conjure a sense of being somewhere you really shouldn't be.

This Thursday I was in Cambridge visiting Dr Bones and spent a couple of hours at the Fitzwilliam Museum: it could have been longer, but two hours in a single museum is enough for anyone. The Palladian Hall is, perhaps, the most lavish introduction to any museum anywhere; there were plenty of tourists like me, but also a remarkable number of young people sat drawing in front of archaeological fragments. 

Finally, I last saw inside the Museum of London while I was on my Museum Studies course, so that was a good thirty years ago, and my visit was a bit of a last-minute decision not to drag myself across the capital last Tuesday. It turned out to be the right one, because the other option, the Wallace Collection, isn't going anywhere, while the MofL is going to close in December pending its move from the Barbican, where it's been since 1975, to a new site at West Smithfield occupying the cavernous ex-market buildings there. There was much to delight in, though I found the reconstructed debtor's cell from Wellclose Square Prison terrifying.

Telling the story of a sprawling capital city from the time before it was a city throughout its incarnations towards becoming global and multivocal, with no one coherent story of any kind, is a daunting prospect: the existing MofL does it so cohesively and concisely that were I a member of staff I wouldn't be sure whether I should be excited or terrified by the idea of uprooting the whole place and doing it all again somewhere else. I wonder if the mocked-up Lyons Corner House complete with back-projected 'nippy' will make it through (she even appears on Wikipedia). 

Cumbria 5: Museums

History needs to be interpreted and that, of course, is what museums do! Both Newcastle Black Gate and Hexham Old Gaol describe their displays as ‘museums’, but they’re the kind of museums that have more mannequins than objects. In complete contrast is the mighty Tullie House in Carlisle. When I was doing Museum Studies at Leicester in 1991, Tullie House was the model we were all supposed to look to. It had just had a massive extension and redevelopment to give it displays worthy of the 21^st century: but it was also charging what seemed then to be an eye-watering admission fee to try to recoup some of the cost. If my party had consisted of more than me, my eyes  might have watered a bit on my visit too, but if you’re local you can get a discount, and no one can deny that it’s very good. Even a temporary exhibition about ‘Hair’ which didn’t inspire me very much turned out to be interesting (and included a photo of Goth model and DJ Parma Ham with their unfeasible mohican).

Penrith Museum is volunteer-run and tiny, though Tullie House have given them a hand with the displays. There is more about sport and geology than any other subjects, an unusual combination.

My biggest museological delight came very unexpectedly, in my visit to Chesters Roman Fort. James Clayton, who inherited Chesters in 1832, spent fifty years excavating the remains, and by his death in 1890 owned twenty miles of Hadrian’s Wall and five of its forts. The Clayton Collection Museum was opened in 1895 to display the portable results. There is some modern interpretation, but what makes the Museum so exciting is that so much of it remains a Victorian wunderkammer: lines of altars and broken statues, shelves of millstones, dark wood cabinets and red-painted walls. For this to work you have to have powerful objects in the first place, but here you have.

Cumbria 4: Wells and Follies

Bellingham is the last town along its road before the Scottish border, and here you find one of England’s better-known holy springs, St Cuthbert’s Well, gushing out of a fountain of rough stone in a lane down from the church: for some reason I pictured it as being in the middle of a field, but that was because I wasn’t paying attention. It’s also no more than three feet high! 

Many people make it to ‘Cuddy Well’, but fewer pick their way along the lane beside the road at Brisco just south of Carlisle to find St Ninian’s Well beneath its Norman-style arch. This is the work of the idiosyncratic architect Sarah Losh: there is no record of it before she constructed what we see today, probably in the 1840s, so we’re not sure whether she invented it.

Meanwhile, next to the church Sarah Losh built in her estate village of Wreay, there seems to be another well, now dry. There are rails around it, steps down to it, and a gargoyle’s head at the bottom which must have been a water-spout. Jenny Uglow points out in her book about Losh’s work, The Pinecone, that the well seems to act as a drain for several sources of water in the vicinity of the church. Is this a holy well Miss Losh wanted, next to her own church with its strange and not-all-that-Christian symbolism? Nobody is sure what she meant by the image of the downward-pointing arrow.

While on my way to Bellingham I spotted another well on the map, with what looked like a fairly easy path to it, so I went to check. Lady Well at Nunwick, which is probably referred to (under Simonburn) in RC Hope’s Holy Wells of England, turned out to be a tiny moss-covered stone arch over a very active spring. I can’t recall ever seeing any images of this site though one neopagan artist seems to have been there!

Finally in the grounds of Lowther Castle we find Peg Hook Well. At least we do if we look hard, even with the aid of a map! It’s a stone structure covering a brick tunnel a few feet long, full of water. The current head gardener of Lowther writes that it’s really an ice house, but the old OS map – which names it as Peg Huck Well rather than Hook – shows an ice house some distance away, and it sits at the head of a pond, so I think it may be the real article.

Headley & Meulenkamp include Sarah Losh’s Brisco well as a folly, and I came across some others too. One of them is The Count’s House in Durham, a tiny classical temple down by the River Wear and which was built by the Dean & Chapter of the Cathedral in the grounds of a cottage where ‘Count’ Joseph Boruwlaski, the ‘Polish dwarf’, lived in the late 17- and early 1800s. H & M include the Count’s House, but not a classical seat decorated on its rear with grotesque stone faces, close by; this is ‘Cathedra’, an artwork created by sculptor Colin Whitbourn during a residency at the Cathedral in the late 1980s.

Now, coming across a folly which isn’t in Headley & Meulenkamp is the greatest thrill a folly enthusiast can enjoy; coming across four – well, I was almost overwhelmed. The great authors can be forgiven for not listing Durham’s Cathedra, given its recent origin, and the same applies to the castellated garden building I spotted by the path leading to Lady Well at Nunwick, as that bears the date 1987 on a stone. But Greenholme Lodge sits right by the A69 on the way into Carlisle. It seems to have been a gateway to Edmond Castle; because Robert Smirke designed that building, Historic England assumes he was responsible for the lodge too, but if so he must have had an off-day. It’s just a red stone Gothic façade whacked onto the front of an ordinary cottage. 

A more serious omission is Lacy’s Caves, although admittedly I only discovered it while trying to find directions to Long Meg & Her Daughters. A sequence of five chambers with arched doorways and windows sits above the River Eden, hollowed out of the sandstone, like a rough hermitage for a rough hermit. The nutcase responsible is supposed to be Colonel Samuel Lacy of Salkeld Hall (owner 1790-1836), who entertained his guests there, although it would have been a bit of a jaunt if so. Nowadays there is a path to the Caves along the line of the tramway that once serviced the Long Meg Gypsum Mine: you can still see sleepers and couplings, chutes and steps, and, up a steep bank in the woods, graffiti-adorned mine buildings.

I’m not the only person to have noticed another feature of that path, but nearly: it’s a brick artwork laid into the ground, showing features of the River Eden between Langwathby and Culgaith, made by local schoolchildren. You are lucky if you can find it: a few more years and it may have disappeared entirely. Can you spot the 'Hermit' - looking a bit like a spaceman, to me?

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.

Cumbria 2: Three Cathedrals and an Abbey

This holiday was a chance to bag three northern cathedrals I’d never seen before – Durham, Newcastle, and Carlisle. Durham, seat of the Prince-Bishops, is of course the grandest of the three and of almost anywhere, virtually spanning the whole of the hilltop on which it sits. The sheer mass and weight of the Norman arches may be what gives it its atmosphere of intensity; I can’t recall seeing so many people praying in a cathedral before, a verger lighting a candle and another praying the collect for St Cuthbert at his shrine.

Newcastle is a bumped-up parish church cathedral, so it’s much smaller in scale, with a lot of intimate details (I especially like the memorial brass to Bishop Wilberforce in his distinctive headgear). They put out no more seating than needed for services, meaning there’s a lot of exhilarating space.

Carlisle is a bit of a shock when you walk in: half the nave was dismantled in the Civil War and the remainder now forms a regimental chapel, so when you enter through the transept door you find a westward-facing altar to your left and the organ and choir screen to the right, which feels completely incorrect. It was even more of a surprise when I arrived, just after a service for the county’s legal establishment, complete with bewigged judges, ended, and someone turned the lights off: the degree of gloom took me aback. The choir is the main space, with a sumptuous, elaborate altar designed by Charles Nicholson.

The cathedrals supplied me with my images of St Catherine this time, in the form of a (?) Kempe window at Newcastle and the 14^th-century embroidered orphreys of a cope in the treasury at Carlisle.

I entered Hexham Abbey in pouring rain and emerged into the sunshine. The nave of Hexham is Victorian but the eastern portion is old, including a stone screen with some very weird carvings. My favourites were the fox preaching to the geese, and the figure with four faces including a death's-head and a demon. An entirely different experience awaits beneath the nave floor: the crypt St Wilfrid built in the 600s out of salvaged Roman stone to house relics, we believe, brought back from his continental sojourn. Pilgrims would have made their way through a passageway in and out, pitch-dark as far as anyone can tell, pausing in a central chamber in the presence of whatever it was that was installed there, lit by four flickering oil cressets. The passages can only accommodate one person at a time: it’s almost traumatically intense.