BLACK DUB AND THE FORGOTTEN ARTIST OF THE LYVENNET.

On an August day in 1651, with the heather blooming bright on Crosby Ravensworth Fell, Charles II and his army rested by the source of the Lyvennet at a place called Black Dub. Beside the spring, on this most solitary tract of moorland now stands a grey limestone obelisk, mottled with bone white lichen. Unseen from almost all directions it rises uncertainly from its tiered pedestal, in memory of a brief sojourn by the Lyvennet and a momentous day in the long history of these fells.

Despite its baroque appearance, its shadowy carved profiles of a king, a crown and a lion, the monument was in fact constructed two hundred years after the event in 1851 by Thomas Bland of Reagill. Time and the weather take its toll in these fells and the now barely legible inscription reads: ‘Here, at Black Dub the source of the Lyvennet, Charles II regaled his army on their march from Scotland August 8th, AD 1651’. It fails however to mention that just short of a month later, in September 1651, the King delivered up his troops to Cromwell’s New Model Army and destruction at Worcester.

In 1860 Whellan in his History of Cumberland and Westmorland described Black Dub as a ‘solitary spring… surrounded on all sides by unenclosed moors, and though now so silent and deserted, it was once a great thoroughfare from Scotland by way of Lancashire, to the south.’ Across the moor runs the cattle drovers' road following the ancient line of Wicker Steet, the route the Romans used for centuries between their forts at Low Borrow Bridge (Tebay) and Kirkby Thore. However, long before this it had been a focus of prehistoric activity. Stone circles survive at Castlehow Scar, Iron Hill, Oddendale and White Hag and cairns at Seal How and Raise How, with many more littering the high ground of the Westmorland Plateau to the south. To the east around the Lyvennet are extensive Iron Age settlements, most notably the long-lived Ewe Close with its sprawling field systems.

In summer there is a rare light here, and all across the Westmorland Plateau, between the high fells of the Lakes and the great wall of the Pennines. This is a moorland of white-blond calcareous (limestone) grasses interspersed with heather. Incongruous stands of beech trees encircled by walls more than two centuries ago form islands, remarkable in their formality, along with scattered birch and ash woodland and numerous rare plants including bird’s-eye primrose, grass of Parnassus and alpine bartsia. Amidst all this is Black Dub where the infant Lyvennet snakes from an almost circular pool of clear water to become the River Lyvennet at King's Meaburn. Described by the Reagill poet Anthony Whitehead as ‘pure and breet as glass’ it flows through the green heart of Westmorland eventually giving up its waters to the Eden near Temple Sowerby. The music of its name is arguably ancient, linked to King Urien’s court of ‘Llwyfenydd’, and the post-Roman kingdom of Rheged, immortalised in the songs of Taliesin. In Welsh the word ‘llwyfen’ refers to the elm tree.

It was here on an August day in 1651 that Charles II and his army of 16,000 men and horses were to be seen moving slowly across this landscape along the old drove road towards the Lune valley. Cautious of local reaction to this largely Scots army, they settled on this less conspicuous route, avoiding the dusty road over Shap, two miles to the west. Spirits were low, skirmishes and defeats north of the border had ebbed morale; men and horses were tired, hungry and thirsty, and the great moorland they were crossing seemed limitless. Here however they found a guide, a local shepherd by the name of Thwaytes whose family had lived near the edge of the fells for generations. He led them to the great basin of Black Dub, a place that could hide an army.

Despite this, the presence of a vast army could not go entirely unnoticed. News would have travelled, and cautious sightseers gathered to watch the camp preparations. They would have heard the shouts of command and the voices of the sentries and pickets out on the heather who spoke in their strange Gaelic tongue. But most crucially, they would never before have seen such a vast array of men and horses and wagons. Before dawn the army was active again moving in long lines along the straight green road southwards, a thudding, creaking progress, passing into history. For the reluctant army of Charles II, this was ground to be trodden, passed over as quickly and quietly as such a vast force could contrive; it was a place to be forgotten. For those who witnessed it, it would live long in their minds and be repeated down the generations. Two hundred years later Thomas Bland erected his monument to a memory, a last stand against the bleak, disinterested amnesia of time.

A month later the army arrived in Worcester. On the 8th of September Cromwell launched an attack on the city, which, by the end of the day, left 4,000 Scottish troops dead and up to 10,000 captured. Parliamentary losses are put at 200. The Royalist cause was shattered, and Charles fled for his life. The battle was the final conflict of a civil war that had cost the lives of an estimated 100,000 civilians, nearly 4% of the population. Hugh Peter, chaplain to the New Model Army, preached to the victors: ‘When your wives and children shall ask you where you have been, and what news: say you have been at Worcester, where England’s sorrows began and where they are happily ended’.

The monument at Black Dub is indeed a most unusual object to be found in the middle of a remote tract of moorland, and yet more extraordinary is Thomas Bland’s other creation, his ‘Image Garden’ at his home in Reagill. A self-taught sculptor, painter and composer who came from a local family of Westmorland yeoman farmers, Bland created his garden, at Yew Tree Farm, to celebrate the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1837. According to contemporary accounts it was a thing of wonder. At its centre a bandstand set within terraced lawns around which the rough drystone boundaries were embellished over time with a series of up to eighty sculptures, and many paintings, all his own work. The statues included the writers and poets Robert Burns, Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott, the physician Thomas Addison and geologist Hugh Miller, along with characters from history and mythology. Flanking these were bas-reliefs and paintings depicting scenes or characters from novels, poems and plays. The compositions were known as 'galleries'. Elsewhere on the terraces stood pedestals, urns and further statues of both humans and animals, ‘…girt skelping jades’ and a veritable menagerie of sphinxes, tigers, wolves, deer and dogs.

It was here, within this ‘Image Garden’ that each year, on the anniversary of the accession of Queen Victoria he hosted a large entertainment. It is described by Whellan in 1860, as ‘A festival of a somewhat unique character … on the grounds of Mr. Bland, which are richly ornamented with pictures, statuary, etc. A band of music is engaged for the occasion, and the day’s amusements are interspersed with lectures, addresses, music, dancing, and other recreations.’ On some occasions as many as 1,400 guests were present. Thomas Gibson recalls that on one occasion when he himself was present, Anthony Whitehead appeared as a giant, walking on stilts and dressed in flowing robes and carrying a huge staff whilst reciting poems of his own composition.

In the century and a half since Bland’s death the garden has gradually became neglected until in more recent years some seventy of his stone sculptures (listed grade II) were saved and remain, scattered around the walls. It is an unsettling, almost melancholy place, a chaotic repository of the imagination where headless gentlemen turning to mossed green loll beside lions, and elegant, robed figures balance precariously on sinking sandstone plinths. The bleak disinterested chaos of time has taken its toll, and yet inescapably there is still an echo of that playfulness and joy that had inspired its creation.

According to his contemporaries Bland was a man of infinite curiosity, intellect and generosity of spirit, with a fascination for geology and archaeology, for stories and music and with an overwhelming desire to give substance to his vision of the world. He was, it seems a man thoroughly content in this place, a place where everything was of fascination to him. It is not difficult to imagine him up here on Crosby Ravensworth Fell, ever preoccupied, with a rare light in his eye, stooping over molehills in search of microliths, flint arrowheads, or perhaps a Roman coin; a world of fragmentary, intriguing connections. Here was a man who well understood that the past is always with us, at one remove or another.

The Reagill Image Garden by Joseph Hardman c. 1940

First published in ‘Cumbria’ magazine June 2023.