SCRATCHING THE SURFACE: THE ECCLERIGG AND BAYCLIFF INSCRIPTIONS.

A man kneels on a quarry floor beside a lake. Close at hand is a small bag, and in it is a set of chisels, a mallet, chalk and a ruler. His head is full of words, yet he works meticulously, inscribing each letter near perfect in symmetry and form. For six years, by day and night, his clandestine work continues, the sound of his rhythmic tapping ringing across the water. On a different shore, thirty miles away and a hundred and fifty years later, another man runs his hand over the smooth limestone bedrock and bends to the same purpose. The first is John Longmire, whose family had called Troutbeck their home since the 16th century, and the second, engineer and carpenter, Bill Stables of Ulverston, who died in 2000 aged 85. The two men carved messages, ciphers to the future, and in so doing revealed that complex relationship between language and manufacture, between making words and making things.

According to Charles Mackay, in his 1856 The Scenery and Poetry of the English Lakes, Longmire ‘was, as our boatman took great pains to impress upon us, rather 'dull' at the time’. He explains that the phrase, in this part of the country, implies that he was ‘deranged’. But Mackay, who incidentally was the author of the book,Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, seems to have found meaning, ‘solace under calamity’, where the boatman saw only wild eccentricity. He concludes that, ‘There was a method in the work, which showed that his sympathies were in favour of the moral and intellectual advancement of mankind; and that …he could do honour to those whose intellect had benefitted and adorned our age’. Clearly Mackay’s curiousity was piqued, but he could discover no more, ‘our friend the boatman being unable to say whether he (Longmire) was dead or alive ...".

A little more information can be gleaned from Lakeland writer John Wilson, who forty years later noted that on Ecclerigg Crag at Craam’s Bay (White Cross Bay), on the eastern shore of Windermere, ‘John Longmire spent some six years of the prime of his life with mallet and chisel, in the task of letter cutting which to him was a pleasant but unremunerative task’. Yet John Longmire still remains elusive. Sometimes he is referred to as police constable in Ambleside, and at others as a monumental mason residing at Troutbeck Bridge. Most likely, he was both, first a skilled stonemason and later, in 1845, at the age of 50, assuming the role of policeman.

Ecclerigg Crag quarry was an important source of building stone which operated periodically from the late 18thcentury, when stone from here was used to build the Rotunda on Belle Isle, until 1910 and the construction of the nearby Crag Wood House. On the quarry floor three main slabs are visible, though more lie just below the surface of the lake, some horizontal, the rest inclined at various angles, all bearing precisely carved inscriptions.  Scrape away the moss and leaves and the words erupt from the rock, somewhere between a curious cryptogram and the ruins of a classical city forcing its way back to the light.

Dr Blake Tyson recorded the inscriptions, published in an article for the Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society, 45 years ago. Since then many have been subsumed under the scrubby canopy of oak, hazel and alder at the water’s edge, blanketed in mosses and leaf litter. He records that four of the slabs are dated from 1835 to 1837, with two further fragments lying just within the lake, where the waters lap against the word ‘Neptune’. Frost and other hazards have taken their toll, but most destructive was the quarrying of stone for Wray Castle in the 1890s. The earliest dated slab, inscribed ‘LIBERTY’, is the largest and lies in the middle of the quarry, its letters in raised relief. In a sense this first inscription is the key to the rest.

Mackay, who marvelled at the inscriptions in their entirety, less than 20 years after their creation, describes them as ‘the greatest curiosities of the place… with every smooth surface afforded by the rocks - every slab on the stratified formation, covered with inscriptions … in letters varying from six to twenty or twenty-four inches in height.’  He records one large red stone of at least ten feet square, with the date '1833’ and the words ‘MONEY. LIBERTY. WEALTH. PEACE.'  Others read, 'A SLAVE LANDING ON THE BRITISH STRAND, BECOMES FREE’, ‘THE LIBERTY OF THE PRESS’, ‘MAGNA CHARTA’, ‘NATIONAL DEBT £800,000,000’, (perhaps referring to the costs in the Napoleonic War) ‘O SAVE MY COUNTRY, HEAVEN!’, 'MONEY IS THE SINEW OF WAR.' One immense surface of rock bore the names, 'DRYDEN, DAVY, BURNS, SCOTT, BURDETT, GARRICK, KEMBLE, GRAY, KEAN, MILTON’.  Other names dispersed about include politicians: ‘HENRY BROUGHAM’ and ‘WILLIAM PITT’, scientist ‘DR. JENNER’ and engineer ‘JAMES WATT’. Literary figures include ‘WORDSWORTH’ and ‘J. HOGG’ the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’, Polar explorers ROSS and PARRY and national heroes including, 'FIELD MARSHALL WELLINGTON’, ‘HEROIC ADMIRAL NELSON’ and ‘CAPTAIN COOK’.

Names which are less familiar refer to local benefactors including: Matthew Piper a Whitehaven Quaker who endowed National Schools in Lancaster, Kendal and Whitehaven, and left a substantial legacy to feed the poor of Whitehaven. One which sits less comfortably in this testament to liberty is that of John Bolton of Storrs Hall who made his fortune in the West Indian slave trade. His inclusion here relates to his local charitable donations. As does that of Giles Redmayne, of Brathay Hall and Lydia Freeman, the only woman commemorated.

General Lafayette, the lifelong republican, is also present. Described by Thomas Jefferson as ‘the doyen ... of the soldiers of human liberty’, he fought for the Colonists in the American War of Independence and commanded the Paris National Guard in the French Revolution. Robin Hood also, understandably, gets a mention.

But perhaps most striking is the single word ‘STEAM’ which sits alone like an exclamation. The image of Turner’s near contemporary painting, ‘Rain, Steam and Speed’, inevitably comes to mind with its locomotive exploding through the sulphurous rain into a new world; the sublime convergence of technology and natural forces, the wonder of the age at 36 miles per hour.

As a curious aside, John Wilson, in response to the heated debate concerning the ‘Rock of Names’ at Wythburn, and how much Coleridge and Wordsworth could actually have carved with a penknife, pointed out that it was ‘…pretty well established, that the rudely carved scratched initials were the work of a rather clever but eccentric amateur stone-cutter who adopted the business solely for his own recreation and was in the habit of occasionally spending a few days near to Wythburn. His name was John Longmire, who was for some years active as paid parish constable for Ambleside.’

That Longmire added a more ‘professional’ finish to the original scratched initials is entirely plausible. His motivation may well have been a desire preserve the originals, but also, as with his work at Ecclerigg, as an act of homage.

In another, very different place, a quiet wooded coast where the humic smell of damp wood and earth meets the sharp tang of wet sand, Bill Stables worked on his own inscriptions. Bare chested and supremely fit he walked every day to this his favourite bathing spot beyond Bardsea, at Baycliff.

 Bill was a carpenter by trade, well known for his craft and engineering skills. His famous steam-driven model carousel, which took eight years of his spare time to hand carve and build, was based on the machines which were a common site on travelling fairgrounds from the 1880s to the 1930s. Among his other steam-powered models was an Emerson and Hazard engine, called Gavioli Bill, built with the aid of photographs and his own memories of similar engines in use. Bill but never lost his enthusiasm to learn new techniques and in later life these included stone carving.

 His style in all respects was very different to Longmire’s. His letters small, free flowing capitals lightly but evenly incised, stylistically less the monumental mason and more the maverick. For his rock he chose a flow of bone grey limestone where water worn channels snake, forming shingle scoured pools. His words flow down a single plane beginning with a simple thank you to Baycliff ‘FOR ALL THE WONDERFUL SUMMERS…’. the year ‘1977 AD’ and the silver jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II. It continues with a complaint about ‘SOCIALISM’ and the ‘UNCHRISTIAN SOCIETY’, with references to the industrial troubles of the time. Another panel provides a long list of all his fellow ‘ALL YEAR ROUND SWIMMERS’, from a time when swimming was just that, and nobody had thought it necessary to prefix it with the word ‘wild’. And finally his ‘GREETINGS TO THE PEOPLE OF 2077 FROM US BOYS AND GIRLS…’.

 These are the messages of the moment, a little at odds with a landscape where sand and water shift endlessly; but perhaps, subliminally that was the intention. Bill would have known this place in every light and at every turn of the tide, from acres of sand smeared by grey water, where stick-legged oystercatchers are constantly busy to the times when the water is close and restless. For a man who did not want a gravestone, this is his place to be remembered. Here there are no beginnings and no ends, no boundaries and true to place, where even his words are slipping off the stones, syllables dissolved in water.

 People have always carved their names into rocks, craving connection with the infinite, or as near to it as might be managed.  The quarried faces at Wallthwaite, the summit of Caw Fell, the cliffs at Fleswick Bay, a gate stoop at Rosthwaite and innumerable other places, have become ‘visitors’ books’, vehicles of posterity, fragments that say, ‘I was here’. But Longmire and Stables were more ambitious. They left their cryptograms, and whether slight or grandiose, the philosophies of two ordinary men with the determination to articulate ideas that may dissent from the mainstream.

 But in Longmire’s work, however cryptic, there remains something unsettling. The convulsion of words that Mackay marvelled at 170 years ago, with its telescoping of complex ideas into concise messages, is now fragmentary, choked by time and neglect into near silence. Yet Longmire carved his letters deeply and those themes of war, debt, liberty of thought, press freedoms and the tensions between technological advance and humane values, remain, not only written in stone, but as the same profoundly pressing concerns for our own times as they were nearly 200 years ago.

First published in Cumbria and Lakeland Walker October 2024.