LOST IN TRANSLATION: LAMMERSIDE and PENDRAGON.

‘... Eden making on,
Through Malerstrang hard by, a Forrest woe begone
In love with Edens eyes…’

From Poly Olbion by Michael Drayton, 1622.

To early travellers on foot or horseback the journey through the valley of Mallerstang induced fear and foreboding. Camden in the 17th century referred to ‘a horrid silent wilderness’ and a century later Daniel Defoe described ‘a country eminent only for being the wildest most barren and frightful of any that I have passed over…’. To the west is Wild Boar Fell so often bonneted with cloud, to the east the grandeur of Mallerstang Edge, its names ringing out like a peel of bells from Careless Bank to Hugh Seat; and between them the uncluttered valley gouged out then smoothed by the movement of ice. From here the infant Eden rises as Red Gill Beck oozing from Black Fell Moss, the peat bogs below Hugh Seat. A little further downstream it becomes Hellgill Beck; and still cold, takes the name 'Eden' below Hell Gill Force, gathering strength for its journey northwards to the Solway. At the mouth of the valley, perched like a pair of broken teeth, are the castles of Lammerside and Pendragon guarding the ways into this land once described as England’s last wilderness.

The Rev. H. S. Cowper began his 1903 article on Lammerside Castle with the words, ‘the grey old fortalice on the bank of the Eden, between Wharton Hall and Pendragon Castle, has no history’. Not a promising start. He goes on to describe a large and ruinous pele tower, a remnant of border warfare, with nettle-grown foundations to the north and south. The plan of Lammerside is unusually complicated, with a main chamber and four smaller ones vaulted in different directions and crossed transversely by a passage. The large chamber above is now an alpine meadow over collapsing vaults.

The situation is indeed romantic, and although not easily defensible, it commanded the pass between Wild Boar Fell and High Seat, one of the main approaches from the south to the great plain of Kirkby Stephen and Appleby. Yet still it remains stubbornly mysterious. Thomas Pennant is the only early visitor to mention it in his Tour from Downing to Alston in 1773:

I proceeded from Wharton Hall along a very narrow vale watered by the Eden and passed by a very ancient square tower called Lamerside Hall, formerly by the sad name of the Dolorous Tower. Something was told me of a Sir Tarquin and a Sir Caledos, so that probably the place had been the subject of dire contention.

The Arthurian connection with the mediaeval strongholds of both Lammerside and Pendragon is to say the least, curious. Pendragon was reputed to be the stronghold of Uther, father of Arthur, where he and a hundred of his men were poisoned by the Saxons. It is said that Uther, a giant warrior and a cannibal, fought the Saxons from Dumfries to Cornwall and tried unsuccessfully to divert the Eden to form a moat. Awkward stuff, water and remembered in the verse ‘Let Uther Pendragon do what he can, Eden will run where Eden ran’.

These stories flowed from the pen of the 12th century Welsh monk Geoffrey of Monmouth and became the basis of the Arthurian tradition. However, the assessment of Geoffrey by his contemporary, William of Newburgh was damning. He writes ‘It is quite clear that everything this man wrote about Arthur and his successors … was made up, partly by himself and partly by others…’. Working from dubious source material, Geoffrey added not just his own fictions, but others culled from Roman and early medieval histories. Despite legend (and the discovery of a Roman coin at Pendragon) there is no evidence of any pre-Norman use of either site.

Of the fragmentary information we have for Lammerside, there is a reference to one Thomas, son of Thomas Warcup of Lamberstete, Sheriff of Westmorland, living around 1404. Nicolson and Burn in their 1776 History of Westmorland and Cumberland also mention a Thomas Warcop of Lambertseat in 1422. Lambertseat and Lamberstete are almost certainly Lammerside, and in these old spellings, we can trace the origins of the place-name as the seater or seat of someone called Lambert, perhaps a twelfth century Fleming, or an earlier settler.

Some clue to the abandonment of the castle may be found in the preoccupation of the neighbouring Wharton family with the erection of deerpark walls at Ravenstonedale and Wharton. In 1549 John Warcop of Smardale and Lammerside launched a series of complaints in the Star Chamber against them, for interference with his customary rights on the common. They also contain the allegation that Wharton's servants had destroyed the fences of a close at Lammerside called `Thwatebreaton', a name now lost. We also know that in February 1537 ten men from Mallerstang were hanged in the dale for taking part in the Pilgrimage of Grace. The local protesters had gathered at Lammerside and joined the 6000 men who marched through Westmorland towards Carlisle. This uprising was put down by a military force aided by Sir Thomas Wharton.

By 1638, Lammerside was part of the Wharton Estate, the old house was deserted, and its history forgotten. Perhaps this was always the plan. The Whartons had indeed grown fat in the land, with Sir Philip becoming the 1st Duke of Wharton in 1718. A politician, his interests outside Parliament were said to have revolved around whoring, gambling, drinking and mischief making. Nothing unusual there but he also founded the original Hellfire Club and fought on the side of the rebel Jacobite army in the siege of Gibraltar. After his death in 1731, Alexander Pope wrote an excoriating character assignation, portraying a man consumed by self-doubt.

 Wharton, the scorn and wonder of our days, / Whose ruling passion was the lust of praise...

Pendragon Castle pre-dates both Lammerside and Wharton Hall, with the first stone structure built in the 12thcentury. One of its early inhabitants was the infamous Sir Hugh de Morville, Lord of Westmorland and one of the four assassins who murdered Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral. There is a story that he took refuge here before being banished to France. Hugh Seat (or Morvil Hill as it was previously known) bears his name and near the summit a column of cut stones, inscribed ‘AP1664’ was erected by Lady Anne Clifford, rather intriguingly to commemorate her murderous predecessor as Lord of the Manor of Mallerstang.

 It is hard to imagine that this picturesque ruin was once a formidable four-level castle, one of the largest keeps in Northern England. In fact George Clifford, Lady Anne’s father, in suitably Arthurian style, titled himself ‘Knight of Pendragon Castle’ and had a paste board replica built in the tilt yard at Whitehall. However the renaissance of Pendragon was entirely the work of Lady Anne, fulfilling her childhood dream of restoring the ruin. She spent Christmas 1663 here, noting that this was the first time for over 100 years that her family had stayed in the castle. Her bedchamber, a first-floor vaulted room had a view to the west and Wild Boar Fell. Her retirement here was peaceful, but as the 17th century antiquarian and rector of Kirkby Thore, Thomas Machell records this was not case for all her retainers. The wife of Robert Braithwaite who lived at the castle for four years after its restoration took her own life by throwing herself from the castle roof. And of course there was the infamous Capt. Robert Atkinson of Bluegrass, a ringleader in the Kaber Rigg Plot and Lady Anne’s ‘great enemy’ who, as the result of a duel, killed a man in the close beside the castle on ‘the Lord’s Day’.

 Her successor, the Earl of Thanet, had no use for the castle and removed anything of value from it, including the lead from the roof. By the 1770s much of the building above the second storey had collapsed. A contemporary account records:  

I have seen the walls of Pendragon, but they are desolate. The music resounded in the halls; but the voice of its people is heard no more. There the thistle shook its lovely head. The moss whistled in the wind. The fox looked from the windows and the rank grass of the walls waved around his head.

 The stories that surround these places are fanciful and no doubt there is something in this landscape that suggest such possibilities. Dark Age legends and medieval myths, wild boars and wolves as well as those figures real or imagined, exalted or debased by their own vanity: Uther Pendragon, Hugh de Morville, Phillip Wharton, Anne Clifford and Robert Atkinson. A fox scanning the ruined ground around Pendragon from the window of Lady Anne’s bedchamber or Hugh de Morville in search of redemption, but instead, seeing the profile of the murdered archbishop in the lines of Wild Boar Fell are powerful images. A plague of ghosts has been conjured and they will not rest easy.

 It is difficult now to imagine the landscape in which these buildings flourished but certainly before the 17thcentury it was a much more wooded place with alder along the river, hazel and oak above, birch and rowan climbing the fellsides. In recent times sixty thousand trees have been planted in and round Birkett Common. In the higher meadows wood cranesbill and lady’s mantle flourish once more and the fell tops still crackle with bleached grasses in the summer heat and the scent of wild thyme. Occasionally emerging from deep in the high peat bogs are birch twigs, a thousand years old, still perfectly preserved. From Mallerstang Edge the stoop of a peregrine is a frequent sight, and the spade winged buzzards circling. On Wild Boar Fell the rapid shrilling of dunlins gives way to the January yapping of the hill foxes and most evocative of all the long-awaited cry of the curlew which brings with it the Spring.

 A correspondent to the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1761, writing from the relative safety of ‘St Paul's Coffee-house’ begins with the words, "Few are perhaps acquainted with that dreary part of Westmoreland which borders on Yorkshire. Indeed its forbidding aspect … tends to extinguish curiosity…’. However, induced to visit Mallerstang in the high Summer, his attitude changed markedly and what he goes on to describe is a rural arcadia of finely observed detail. Perhaps Camden and Defoe saw this transcendent place only under a pewter sky with the helm wind raging from the north east, drawing their carriage curtains firmly closed against it.

 First published in ‘Cumbria and Lakeland Walker’ July 2024.