Long Meg & her daughters

I confess to a great liking for Long Meg. For one, I live very near to it and being handy for one of this land’s ancient monuments really tickles my historian’s cockles. It’s enormous – some say the third biggest in the country, but frankly, I’ve also heard second, fourth, fifth and sixth – so let’s just agree that, at a diameter of 109m, it is really big.

The largest of the stones in the circle is 3.3m high and estimated to weigh 28 tons. There are 27 stones still standing in the circle, with a whole load of others reclining. ‘Long Meg’ herself is an outlyer, made from local sandstone, and is 3.7m high. The pink stone has a strange quality in certain lights – it ‘glitters’ – and it’s then that you catch sight of the faint, eerily ancient, spiral carvings.

Michael Scot, wizard or genius? (c.1175-1235)

I feel there should probably be something of a drum roll here. Scot was an extraordinary man – it’s even been said that he was the leading intellectual of his generation. His story deserves a much longer telling (and I promise to add more), but here’s the synopsis.

Michael Scot lived in the 13^th century. He is said to have built a church in a single night; thrown rocks on to Carrock Fell, and turned a coven of witches to stone to create Long Meg stone circle. He could summon demons, and command the sea; he cured the illnesses of the Holy Roman Emperor, and measured the distance to the stars.

The Croglin Vampire

I hope you will not be too frightened to hear that Cumbria is one of the few places in Britain with a recorded sighting of a vampire. You may think that they are all in Whitby, Forks, or Volterra, but a Twilight style drama happened right here in Croglin in 1875-6. A young lady tenant of Croglin Low Hall woke one night to see two points of light and hear ominous scratching at her bedroom window.

Famous Cumbrians: St. Patrick (5th century)

Best known as the patron saint of Ireland, most sources agree that St. Patrick was born in Cumbria some time in the fifth century. Opinions are divided as to whether he was brought up at the Roman fort of Birdoswald, in the northeast of the county, or the west Cumbrian coastal village of Ravenglass, site of another Roman fort. Patrick, who had been kidnapped into slavery in Ireland at the age of sixteen, escaped his bondage, landed at Duddon Sands and walked to Patterdale – ‘St. Patrick’s Dale’ near Ullswater. He travelled via Aspatria – ‘ ash of Patrick’ – where the locals took so long to be converted that his ash walking staff grew into a tree! There’s also a St. Patrick’s Well near Glenridding, where the saint baptised the people of the Ullswater area.

©Diane McIlmoyle 27.10.10

Famous Cumbrians: Catherine Parr, Queen of England (1512-1548)

Queen of England from 1543 – 1547, Catherine Parr was the last of Henry VIII’s six wives. Catherine was born at Kendal Castle just south of the Lakes, and was an excellent example of Cumbria’s strong-willed, outspoken and fair-minded womenfolk. She had been widowed twice before she caught the king’s eye in 1543 and was obliged to marry him despite her relationship with Sir Thomas Seymour, brother of the nine-days’ queen, Jane Seymour.

Famous Cumbrians: Fletcher Christian (1764-1793)

It’s probably safe to say you’re famous if Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Marlon Brando and Mel Gibson have all played you in blockbuster films. Fletcher Christian was born in Brigham, near Cockermouth, where he went to school with the poet, William Wordsworth. Christian had travelled to India and twice with Captain Bligh to Jamaica before they set off on the ill-fated trip to Tahiti in April, 1789. Later that year, 1300 miles west of Tahiti, Christian led the mutiny on the Bounty.

Adam Bell: Cumbria’s own Robin Hood

Cumbria has had its very own Robin Hood character for centuries. As it says in the poem, Adam Bell, written in 1557,

Mery it was in the grene forest

Among the leves grene

Where that man walke both east and west

Wyth bowes and arrowes kene