BURIED IN SILENCE: THE CITY OF BARNSCAR

Large are the treasures of oblivion, and heaps of things in a state next to nothing almost numberless; much more is buried in silence than is recorded.

From Hydriotaphia (Urne-Burial) Sir Thomas Browne 1658.

Photograph by Bill Birkett

Barnscar is a haunted place, desolate and thickly scattered with reminders of lives lived. Lying on a broad raised terrace, treeless and grass covered, high above the steep-sided Esk valley; it is a place where the present has little consequence and the days merge into years and years into centuries. Yet for all that, the desolation is deceptive. This is a place of extraordinary richness, one of the most complex and extensive prehistoric landscapes in Northern England, where the ‘treasures of oblivion’ are truly laid bare.

Over six hundred clearance cairns mostly dating from the Bronze Age cover this landscape. Each stone methodically collected and removed to create a complex and widely dispersed field system with numerous small plots, flat, stone free and well drained. These fields are bounded by stone banks or cairn alignments representing the line of old field boundaries in which sporadic patches of stone clearance were piled against a fence or hedge. At the southern and western edges of the cairnfield are hut circle settlements and death is also represented by the presence of at least fifteen prehistoric funerary cairns lying at the margins of their world.

At the western edge of the Barnscar ridge are the most well-defined monuments, three stone banked enclosures arranged in a radial pattern with stock enclosures and hut structures; the remains of a Romano-British farmstead, one of many in the area built by the native population throughout the Roman occupation. A coaxial field system surrounds it, partly overlying the earlier cairnfield and small irregular fields of the prehistoric period with its straight stone banks. Finally and partially overlying the most northern of the three enclosure groups is a mediaeval sheiling in the form of a single-roomed stone-walled rectangular structure.

If you try to imagine this place four millennia ago during the first wave of Bronze Age settlement, some things will have remained unchanged: the profile of the high blue fells to the north-east and the sea to the south -west, the solid whale back of Black Combe and the terrier rough tops of White Pike and Knott near at hand; but beyond these invariable boundaries, you would not know it. Pollen records indicate that during this period the landscape was richly wooded with birch, oak, alder and hazel with occasional clearings. These trees were gradually felled and replaced by extensive grassland for pastoral farming with much later evidence for the production of cereal crops.

William Hutchinson in his 1794 History of Cumberland cautiously describes, ‘ruins of a considerable magnitude, called by the country people Barnscar, or Bardskew, or, in the maps, Barnsea: there is no tradition that gives us any light what this place was, or to whom it originally belonged…’. This may be the first documented account of the site; however he does refer to a more particular narrative furnished by the Rev. Aaron Marshall, incumbent of Eskdale from 1770 to 1814. In this account, ‘tradition gives the place to the Danes’ and describes it as:

‘…about 300 yards long, from east to west; and 100 yards broad, from north to south, now walled round, save at the east end, near three feet in height: there appears to have been a long street with several cross ones: the remains of housesteads, within the walls, are not very numerous, but on the outside of the walls they are innumerable, especially on the south side and west end : the circumference of the city and suburbs is near three computed miles; the figure an oblong square. About the year 1730, a considerable quantity of silver coin was found in the ruins of one of the houses, concealed in a cavity, formed in a beam; they were claimed by the lord of the manor.’

This litany of misconceptions has been repeated by many later writers, lacking Hutchinson’s caution and good sense, and who clearly had never visited the site. One can but marvel at this vast city with its great walls and suburbs and bags of silver stuffed into roof trusses, but by no stretch of the imagination can it refer to the Birkby Barnscar. The truth most likely lies in the existence of another ‘Barnscar’, a great curving rocky outcrop, semi-circular in form, enclosing a sandy beach, opposite to, and about a mile from Drigg. When Mary Fair, archaeologist and resident of Eskdale, visited Drigg Spa Well in 1956, she was surprised to discover an adjoining plot ‘thickly dotted with mounds regularly circular or roughly square in shape, and trenches’. The impression given was of an early mediaeval settlement close to the then navigable River Irt and well protected by a rampart of sand-dunes and the great reef of Barnscar from the sea. Two hundred years earlier this may have been Marshall’s Barnscar. As far as the silver coins are concerned, we must consign them to the oblivion of time as well as the pocket of the Lord of the Manor.

Rev. William Ford in his Guide published in his 1839 notes that ‘... On Birkby Fell, the antiquarian may find employment for his conjectural genius in researches among the ruins of the city of Barnscar…’. ‘Antiquarianism’ had indeed became a field sport for local squires and parsons during the 18th and 19th centuries who, under the guise of scholarship, plundered the graves of their distant ancestors. With a few notable exceptions their methods were lamentable, and into this category falls the 1890 excavations undertaken by the owner of the land, Lord Muncaster. It is reported that his workmen ‘cut a few trenches’ and ‘dug into’ several cairns, in which were found several small, collared urns with burnt bone, but no record of this work was kept. There are indications of earlier ‘burrowings’ which also have not been recorded. Miss Fair claims that most of the urns and bones were reburied without being examined, while the account in the Victoria County History adds that the excavation was abandoned on account of the reluctance of the local people employed to disturb the bones of the dead. A not uncommon response. Five years later Charles Dymond FSA produced a meticulous and beautiful plan of the site. Since then further survey work, most recently by Oxford Archaeology North, has vastly extended and deepened our understanding of the site.

At the northern extent of the Barnscar complex is Devoke Water, the name possibly derives from the old British word dubaca ‘the black one’. Certainly the author Hugh Walpole considered it had a curiously disconcerting quality which perhaps explains why hem used it for the scene of a murder in his novel The Bright Pavilions. A little to the south east is the farmstead of Woodend, a small patch of green amongst the grey rock and heather. According to the artist William Heaton Cooper, in the 18th century it was home to seventeen Quaker families, with their own school and Meeting House. He also notes that down by the tarn where the ground is softer are Quaker graves, small, rough standing stones amongst the green mounds. Yet more ‘treasures of oblivion’.

Looking down from the high cairn at the western end of Devoke Water over the valley of Black Beck, the spur of Barnscar forms a palimpsest, both strange and familiar, each age a thin layer visibly overlying but never quite erasing the previous. What we can discern of each layer is fragmentary and elusive and carries with it a sense of absence, a sense of the abstract. It seems that we can only return to the simple truth of the place, the lichen covered Eskdale granites from which our distant ancestors built their lives and their graves and to the same simple truth for us all, ‘I was here, I existed, this was my place’.

First published in ‘Cumbria’ magazine April 2023.