MATTY BENN’S BRIDGE AND THE CALDER: A RIVER THROUGH TIME

Photograph by Bill Birkett

The river Calder (Old Norse for ‘cold stream’) rises in one of the bleakest parts of the Lake District just below the path to the old iron ore workings on Crag Fell. Here, ancient mine workings and trackways appear and disappear, chimerical with the changing light, like an old photograph fading into the deep past. Several streams spring from the southern flank of the Crag Fell-Caw Fell watershed. Their names vary from the lyrically common Bleaberry Gill to the unusually unsavoury Stinking Gill and then there are the intriguing Whoap and Ya Gills, names which no doubt meant something a thousand years ago. They join to form the two main arms of the river. To the east of Lank Rigg is Worm Gill and to the West the Calder itself, which gives its name to the whole river from source to sea.

This is a land of heath and bog, in summer a place filled with light where the blond grasses crackle in the heat. Loud with larks and pipits, the occasional insistent ‘kek kek kek’ of a peregrine and always the dolorous mewling of the buzzard, the shadow of its wings crossing the fell in slow turns. Around Lank Rigg there is blanket peat bog fragrant with myrtle and glowing bronze with asphodel and pillows of lush sphagnum. Reach into the bog and you will find the roots and branches of trees that died thousands of years ago. This area was once deep in a vast forest that covered much of the land from Eskdale northwards as far as Cockermouth, a limitless source of oak, ash, birch and hazel which did not finally succumb to the axe until the 17th century.

Typically droll, Alfred Wainwright explains that on Lank Rigg ‘meeting another human is outside the realms of possibility. Die here unaccompanied and your disappearance from society is likely to remain an unsolved mystery’. Fifty years later little has changed. Few people are found in this area. There may be a farmer on a quad bike or someone searching for the last fragments of a plane that crashed into the fellside decades ago. More regular visitors are those with an eye to the past, combing the fellsides, reading the landscape for traces of those early settlements scattered along the lower slopes of Lank Rigg, at Tongue How, Boat How and Grey Crag. In fact this whole area, known as Town Bank, is archaeologically extraordinarily rich. From the Neolithic to the mediaeval period man has been active here with evidence of complex Bronze/Iron Age settlements in the form of permanent stone founded roundhouses, field systems and funerary monuments. Settlement here was long, permanent, extensive and sophisticated.

One of the highest crossings on the upper Calder is by a packhorse bridge known locally as Matty Benn’s Bridge. Perfect in this lonely setting, forming a single span arching a rocky gorge, opening like an eye on the bright amber waters of the Calder. Alfred Wainwright described it as ‘a thing of beauty’, a structure which flies upwards, like some elegant leap of faith. Little is certain about it, even its name is a matter of personal choice. On Ordnance Survey maps it is Monks Bridge, but locally it is known as either High Wath Bridge, Matty Benn’s Bridge, Hannah Benn’s Bridge or Roman Bridge.

Built of roughly dressed red sandstone blocks rising to a single slightly pointed arch it is dauntingly narrow, less than a metre wide with alternate rows of stone slabs projecting outwards. Irons still fixed in the stone show that a wooden handrail formerly existed. Little has changed here since C. A. Parker in his Gosforth and District described it as a ‘ruddy coloured arch 20 feet in width which spans the turbulent little river at a considerable height above a miniature waterfall, between picturesque flood worn rocks of bright grey, and the drooping ash boughs and berries of the rowans, waving ferns and flashes of golden gorse, combine to make up a charming scene.’

‘Matty Benn’s Bridge’ is the name preferred locally and probably refers to Martha ‘Matty’ Smallwood, born at Egremont in 1831 who married John Benn in 1856 at Haile church. They lived and farmed at Brackenthwaite, Wilton in the parish of Haile. She would frequently use the bridge and from there the bridleways and pathways on route to the market at Gosforth. She died in 1888 and is buried at Haile Church.

Obviously, the bridge must have existed long before Matty made her frequent crossings, and it is traditionally said to be a medieval structure associated with Calder Abbey some 4km downstream. The monks of Calder Abbey had a wealth based on wool. At dissolution, aside from lower land, they also owned ‘Symonkeld’ Grange, now Side Farm, with land stretching down to the west side of the Calder from Thornholme to Friars Gill, just down from the bridge, as well as a string of upland farms encircling Cold Fell. It is interesting that all the bridges in the north of England which are mentioned by Leland in his 1539 Itinerary have, like Matty Benn’s Bridge, slightly pointed arches. Another good example of this type is the old bridge over the Whillan Beck at Boot in Eskdale; which carried the corpse road to Wasdale Head, as well as traffic from the peat houses on the moor above; and led to a mill with medieval origins.

However the majority of these packhorse bridges were constructed or rebuilt in the 17th century and associated with the period known as the ‘great rebuilding’. Laws passed at this time gave greater security to traditional rights of tenure, and more lasting stake in the land. At a time when industry was also booming in the Lakeland dales it also saw in a period of agricultural prosperity. It also seems that grants of land were often given in consideration of building or repairing bridges. One early 18th century Egremont grant refers to ‘… the building and ever maintaining of a bridge to carry loaden horses…’. They might therefore have been closely associated with particular farms and land holdings.

To the modern eye Matty Benn’ Bridge appears disarmingly fragile, yet with the arch high enough above the water to protect it from the rapidly rising flood waters so characteristic of these western dales, it has withstood the centuries. As Wainwright so simply puts it ‘Once men built to last, now they build for the temporary requirements of a changing world. Matty Benn’s Bridge was built hundreds of years ago by men who worked with their hands and is still there, a joy to behold and functional. But modern footbridges put across these western rivers too often perish with the storms. The tragedy of our age is that we are not ashamed.’

Immediately to the east of Matty Benn’s Bridge lies a main drove route, which can still be followed on foot, from Eskdale to Cockermouth. From the late Middle Ages the movement of large herds of cattle southwards through Cumbria was a common sight and by the 17th century Lakeland farms were also actively engaged in the cattle trade. From Eskdale Green the route followed the present road to Santon Bridge and from there to Strands where it crosses the River Irt. Beyond here it turned north-westwards and out onto open country remaining on the lower fells in order to avoid the hedges of the enclosed farmland. The route can be traced from Hollow Moor to Sergeant Ford over the River Bleng and then around the edge of Stockdale Moor to cross Worm Gill. On Town Bank it skirts through the ancient settlement sites to High Wath and over the Calder close to Matty Benn’s Bridge. From here it can be traced along the present fell road to Ennerdale Bridge and then to Croasdale, Lamplugh, Mockerkin, Mosser and Cockermouth.

Time flows slowly along the upper Calder, from the empty uplands to the softly folding valley, and below the Abbey and the sandstone outcrop at Calderbridge it enters its quiet stage, passing through the rich and luxuriant Sella Park Meadows. Having started its journey in the wilds of the prehistoric world it now slides gently towards Europe’s largest nuclear waste reprocessing site at Sellafield. Here it is artificially straightened and confined to a concrete channel and like so many other rivers, these last reaches of the lovely Calder are blighted with all the usual pollutants: agrichemicals, sewerage and very possibly worse. Wilfully, it seems we poison for profit and to echo the words of Wainwright, the tragedy of our age is that we are not ashamed. Finally the Calder emerges from beneath a high wire fence to reach the sea, joining the Ehen from Ennerdale just a short distance to the north. Wheeling gulls and oystercatchers hunt the tide over those last salted inches. Its journey is finished, and its waters set free into another kind of emptiness.

First published in ‘Cumbria’ Magazine October 2023.