LAKE DISTRICT
Our resident historian chooses a suitably atmospheric day to take a Neolithic pilgrimage deep into the heart of the LAKE DISTRICT, from Castlerigg Stone Circle to the remains of Langdale’s famous axe factories.
I t’s funny to think that there was a time, in the deep past, when the Lake District was a popular destination. Go back 5000 years, into the Neolithic (New Stone Age) and you wouldn’t have been able to move for the stone circle-building, axe-wielding, Lake District visitors. It seems there’s always been something special about this part of the world.
I’ll put my hands up to the fact that I’m fascinated by prehistory; I even have a collection of stone tools for heaven’s sake. But we’re all allowed to be a bit geeky, aren’t we? I think it’s what makes us interesting.
In many ways, 5000 years isn’t actually that long ago. The Neolithic people were exactly the same type of ‘intelligent’ human beings as us. They no longer lived mobile, hunter-gatherer lifestyles. Instead they’d embraced the sedentary ways of farming and with that came population increase and stone monument building. All of a sudden, humans were changing their landscape, even the mountains.
Everybody knows about Castlerigg Stone Circle, just east of Keswick. It is, after all, brown signed. Not as many people know about the importance of Langdale in prehistory. As well as having some ‘rock art’ on one of the boulders in the valley, the Langdale Pikes were the site and source of a rock type that the Neolithic people favoured for making stone axe heads from. So much so that this particular part of the fells is known as the ‘axe factories’.
I spend a lot of time looking at Lake District maps (don’t we all?) and some years ago it dawned on me that Castlerigg Stone Circle and the Langdale axe factories (both Neolithic things), were (more or less), connected by a continuous ridge of upland fells. It runs south from the stone circle, up Castlerigg Fell, over High Seat, through Long Moss, up and onto Ullscarf, along Greenup Edge, summiting High Raise, before reaching the Langdale Pikes and the area of the axe factories. Now, I’ve no idea if this was a route between the two things back in the day, no-one does, but what I did know was that I just had to walk it.
Historic journey
One fine summer’s morning last year, I stood, pack on back, before those standing stones and wondered before I wandered. The sun was out, along with a few ‘New Age’ types, fellow disciples of the stones. If I had the courage (and didn’t have a mortgage and kids), I think I could live in a smelly van, going from one ancient location to another, searching for the los
