The Bewcastle Cauldron

Here’s a picture I thought you might be interested in. It’s the Bewcastle Cauldron, and it’s in Tullie House Museum in Carlisle.

Bewcastle Cauldron, Tullie House, Carlisle

I wish I’d had a ruler on me for scale when I took the picture – it’s enormous! – certainly big enough to hide a couple of six-year-olds.

Cocidius, the Cumbrian god

Cocidius altar, Tullie House, Carlisle

Sometimes it’s easy to forget that there were people here before the Romans. But they were here, leaving echoes of their lives and beliefs through place names, 5,800-year-old tools and 2,000-year-old weapons. When the Romans first encountered us 2,000 years ago, they wrote down some of the things they discovered. They said that there was a people in northern Cumbria called the Carvetii, ‘the deer people’, who were a sub-group of a large northern tribe called the Brigantes – at least that’s what the Romans called them; we don’t know what

Eveling, Cumbria’s faery king and Celtic god

I can’t honestly say my Cumbrian grandparents ever mentioned faeries. And yet, when I look into Cumbrian History & Folklore, I find them all the time. Normally they’re a clue to a history that has faded from popular memory; faery processions at crossroads and over mountains, treading routes to ancient burial grounds, and Bronze Age barrows that turn into faery halls.

Walls Castle,Ravenglass Copyright Mick Knapton

The coastal village of Ravenglass is pre-eminent amongst these with its claim to be home of Eveling, King of the Faeries. He lives in the ruins of the Roman castle of Glanoventa (Walls Castle) – complete with luxurious indoor plumbing – with his daughter, Modron. His rath or fort is at Mediobogdum, the ruins of a Roman fort located on the hair-raising Hardknott Pass between Eskdale and the central Lake District.

Elf-shot by mermaids…

It’s a good theory that faeries are most strongly associated with the ‘Celtic Fringe’ (Scotland, Ireland, the Isle of Man, Cornwall and Wales) because these areas were not overrun by later beliefs that came with the Romans and Anglo-Saxons. Cumbria also largely missed out on the Saxons, so our traditions have a lot in common with the classic Celtic areas. But a perusal of a map, never mind a tome of folklore, shows that Cumbria has at least as many elves as faeries.

Dancing Elves (1866) by August Malmstrom

The word, ‘elf’ is derived from ‘alfar’, the Scandinavian word for diminutive supernatural types; they are, if you like, Viking faeries. There are several Elf Howes; the Elfa Hills; Elva Hill, Elva Plain and Elva stone circle; Elf Hall at Hallthwaites, Ellabarrow at Pennington, and lots more.

Scary, Scarier & Scariest: Halloween lanterns to Celtic headhunters!

I’ve had a little question running on Twitter and Facebook:

Jack-o'-Lantern c. Toby Ord

If you’re over 40 and were brought up in Britain or Ireland, did you make Halloween lanterns when you were little?

I had over 300 responses and this, roughly speaking, is the result.

The Embleton Sword

A few months ago, I came across a fabulous description of a sword found near Embleton. WG Collingwood, writing in 1902, described, ‘…an iron blade in a bronze sheath, with red and green jewels on the hilt–the Excalibur of some ancient Briton not without wealth and art.’¹

Then, last weekend I was wandering the halls of Tullie House’s new Roman Gallery² and found myself face-to-face with a narrow iron sword, not too short, not too long, with a matching scabbard. They were decorated in a very distinctive red and greenish chequerboard design and bells started ringing in my mind. There was no label, so I enquired of the attendant who informed me that yes, it is the Embleton Sword, on short loan from the British Museum.

With the assistance of the curator, I was finally able to track down some information about the sword which meets the exacting standards of professional historians, which I hope will be used to correct some of the more random information found on local sites across the county.

The sword is iron, and is believed to have been made in the Late Iron Age – somewhere between 50BCE and 50CE – before the Romans reached Cumbria in 72CE.³ The style is officially La Tène (Celtic).⁴ It’s nearly 58cm long, and is in good condition barring a few chips on the blade. The cast guard is decorated with a double-lobed motif with rings and dots in red and yellow enamel (although the yellow looks more green now). Below that is a row of twelve rectangular cells, each also filled with red and yellow enamel to create its distinctive chequerboard effect; the copper alloy scabbard has similar decoration. The domed pommel is worn, but also has red enamel cells.

The people who lived here at the time were a Brythonic (an old Welsh dialect) -speaking people, who the Romans later called the Brigantes. We’ve no way of knowing if that was what they called themselves, as they didn’t write anything down, and we have to use archaeology and legends written in decades and centuries afterwards to work out what they believed. We know that they had their own pantheon of gods – Afallach, Modron, Mabon, Belacutadrus, Cocidius, Hueteris, Lugus, and almost certainly lots of others – and, like other Celtic cultures, revered the head; there are lots of Celtic head sculptures at Tullie House in Carlisle. We have also discovered bog bodies – well-preserved human remains ritually deposited in boggy ground. Cumbria was a pretty good place for a culture that found land that was half water, half land interesting; they believed that these ‘liminal’ areas were routes to their gods.

Mary Fair, a stalwart of the Cumberland & Westmorland Antiquarian & Archaeological Society, stated in 1947 that the collection was found near Wythop Mill, a mile south of Embleton. The word, ‘wythop’ means ‘open area of willows’, which makes me wonder if the sword was ritually deposited in liminal boggy ground, as is seen elsewhere in the country.  This location is interesting for another reason – directly in line between Wythop Mill and the Bassenthwaite Lake is Castle How, a scheduled ancient monument and ‘Iron Age or Post-Roman’ hill fort.⁶ Castle How is a high point, with naturally steep slopes on two sides and rock-cut defences on the other two. This was a place lived in by ‘some ancient Briton not without wealth’, to quote Collingwood, and it’s very enticing to wonder if he was the owner of the sword.

By 1870 the Crosthwaite Museum was closed and the contents put up for auction. Mr Bryce Wright, believed to be a dealer acting for the British Museum, bought, ‘a beautiful Roman (sic) sword… after an exciting contest… knocked down to Mr Wright at £32.‘⁷ He also acquired another sword blade and two spearheads, which were believed to have been found with the Embleton Sword; nobody knows what happened to the triangular and circular pieces described by Smith.

The Embleton Sword is on display in the Roman Gallery at Tullie House until 30^th November 2011, when it will be returned to the British Museum. Update: as of 30.11.12, the sword is still at Tullie House, where – dare I offer – it belongs.

©Diane McIlmoyle 21.09.11

1. The Lake Counties by WG Collingwood, 1902
2. See www.tulliehouse.co.uk. My thanks to Tim Padley, who was both gracious and informative under fire.
3. Although I understand that CM Piggott, in Swords and Scabbards of the British Early Iron Age, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 16. 1-28 (1950) argues that the date could be a bit later than that.
4. See the British Museum’s entry: http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database/search_object_details.aspx?objectid=831601&partid=1
5. Smith, 1857, quoted by the British Museum, see above. Source described as ‘Smith (1857), 153 and 22on., pls 33 and 34′.
6. See English Heritage’s entry: http://www.pastscape.org.uk/hob.aspx?hob_id=9936
7. Carlisle Journal 23^rd September 1870.

Please note that the images are shown here courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum. The licence does NOT cover you to copy these images from this site, but you can get them for free from The British Museum by asking them. It’s free, easy, and quick, so please do this rather than pinching them from me!

Luguwalos: Carlisle’s ancient roots

Regular readers with be getting major deja-vu here! I’m afraid this post had been mashed in WordPress’s cogs for a while and hence invisible.  But it’s back…

It’s always struck me as odd that the only people who know about our native British gods are either specialist academic historians or wearing a pentacle (or indeed, both). Even those of us in Cumbria who live and work alongside the evidence – as we’ve already seen with Eveling/Afallach of Ravenglass – don’t know about them.

Carlisle Castle copyright Neil Boothman

Well, here’s another one. Carlisle’s oldest-known names are Luguwalos (‘strength of Lugus’) and Luguvalium (‘walled town of Lugus’). Without boring you with the minutiae of how languages evolve and pronunciations change, we go through Caer Liwelyd¹  (‘Fort of Lugus’), Caer Ligualid² (‘Fort of Lugus’), and Caer Luel³ (‘Fort of Lugus’), to end up with ‘Carlisle’. Lugus is mentioned in a number of inscriptions in old Celtic Europe⁴, and Lyons (formerly Lugdunum), Laon (Lugdunum Clavatum), Loudon and Dinlleu are just a small selection of place names also dedicated to him.We don’t have a lot of definite detail on Lugus, because the first people to write much about non-classical deities were the Romans. Their convention was to describe ‘barbarian’ gods by the name of their Roman equivalent. In Lugus’s case, it’s thought that they believed him to be another version of their very own Mercury⁵, and it’s by looking at the version of Mercury described in Celtic nations that we find out a bit more about Lugus.

We get another insight into Lugus with inscriptions that describe him in the plural: ‘lugoues’. There is a Celtic tradition of three-fold things: gods, deaths and trials; we’ve already seen this with Merlin/Lailoken’s triple death and the actual evidence seen in bog bodies. Lugus may be a triple god, comprised of three separate identities, Esus, Toutatis (sometimes spelt ‘Teutates’) and Taranis⁶. Esus was worshipped in Celtic Gaul, and required sacrifice by hanging from a tree. There are records of personal names in Britain which show that he was popular here, too. Taranis, the thunder god, is represented by a wheel, reflecting the idea that sky gods rotate around the earth. The Celtic wheel symbol, with either four or eight spokes, is believed to represent him and is seen across Bronze Age Europe. Toutatis, the ‘protector of the tribe’, demanded that sacrifices were drowned. An inscription dedicated to Toutatis was found right here, at Cumberland Quarries.

Celtic wheel god, Tullie House Museum

The real detail on Lugus comes from studying the Irish and Welsh folklore that derives from the god. The Irish Lugh was one of triplets (three-fold things, again) and he is a legendary ‘high king’ of the Tuatha De Danann, Ireland’s ancient people. His epithet is ‘of the long arm’, which is used in a similar context to our modern ‘long arm of the law’; it refers to his extensive geographical influence. Lugh, like Lugus, was skilled in crafts and had a magical spear, which proved handy when he needed to kill his one-eyed Fomori grandfather, Balor. The Irish Gaelic word for August is named after Lugh, as is Lughnasadh, the harvest Festival held on August 1^st which is popular with modern pagans. The festival of Lughnasadh is said to have been started by Lugh himself in memory of his adoptive mother, who died of exhaustion after clearing Ireland to enable agriculture. The festivals traditionally featured games, bonfires, dancing and engagements.The Welsh Lugus was Lleu Llaw Gyffes, who features in the story of Math Fab Mathonwy in the Mabinogion. The story of Lleu’s birth has a lot in common with the Irish Lugh; he was rejected by his mother and brought up by a foster parent. Lleu ended up raising trees to fight against Arawn, the Lord of the Underworld⁷, and married Blodeuedd, the girl made from flowers who was turned into an owl for her unfaithfulness⁸. He turned into an eagle, but was returned to the shape of a man by the interventions of his beloved uncle.

How could Cumbrians have forgotten about the owls and ravens, the sacrifices, thundering wheeled-chariots and magical spears? Perhaps it’s time that Carlisle re-adopted its ancient British heritage. All hail Carlisle!

©Diane McIlmoyle 15.04.11

1. Taliesin.
2. Nennius.
3. The earliest English reference, c. 1050CE.
4. As seen in Lugo, Galicia, in Spain and Nimes in France, amongst others.
5. Julius Caesar, De Bello Gallico.
6. Described by Lucan in his Bellum Civile.
7. See The Battle of the Trees in the Book of Taliesin.
8. Blodeuedd’s story is wound into the excellent children’s book, The Owl Service by Alan Garner.

Look at this series of posts on Clas Merdin entitled Lud’s Church for more related history and legend.

The Men in the Moss

Tollund Man, a well-preserved bog body from Denmark

Towards the end of May in 1834, a farmer digging for peat at Seascale Moor found human remains just one foot below the surface. The bones had been dissolved by the acidity of the moss, but the same process had tanned the skin like leather. The man was naked and buried with a long hazel rod. No one knows what happened to the remains.

On 25^th May, 1845, a man was digging peat for his fire at Scaleby Moss, north of Carlisle. At a depth of nine feet, he came across human remains.