Ten

In Search of Lynx, Elk and Wolves

Imagine the bay not being there. Imagine standing on a hilltop looking out at a great plain that extends as far to the south as the eye can see (though maybe you don’t know it as south). The plains are rimmed with hills and forests receding into the distances. From this vantage point you look over the grasslands and in the distance pick out a single, gigantic elk, or herds of horses grazing the rich grasslands, unaware of predators watching, wolves, or man, staking out the kill. Dust trails as the chase begins. Imagine the decisions: which herd to follow, which spear to use, which animal to single out for the kill.

* * *

I went looking for a cave, or rather, more than one. I’d read about Kirkhead Cave and Kents Bank Cavern – the news had broken just a year or two ago that human bones excavated from Kents Bank Cavern, near the village of the same name, were officially the oldest human remains found in northern Britain.17 Two of the caves are set in a steep-sided, complex limestone valley and there’s a third on a sheer escarpment amongst layers of receding cliff edges in thick woodland. Underfoot the terrain is difficult; although there’s the approximation of pathways, much of the ground is clogged with mossy boulders and rocks, fallen trees and brambles. Without a guide and good light you’d be hard-pressed to find them.

It was mid-November. The time of year when, if the sky is clear, the light is at its most dramatic and intense, providing short but memorable sunsets. I’d gone to Kents Bank and, walking up the hill from the coast, the view over the bay opened before me like a map. The tide was out, the channels were there, filled with water and snaking away towards the Irish Sea.

Finding my way onto the land wasn’t exactly straightforward, and after walking up and down a suburban road trying to find a way onto the fell, I saw a man clipping his hedge. As he crossed to my side of the road and stood back to admire his handiwork, I asked if he could tell me the way.

‘It’s literally just there,’ he said, pointing at a driveway past garages and a farm gate. ‘I don’t know if it’s a public right of way but that’s the gate.’

‘I’ve come to have a look at the caves,’ I said.

‘Oh yes, I know. They’re not easy to find though,’ and he set about describing the most direct route.

‘Stick to the north side of the fell. Follow the line of the valley, keep north. I’ve been in them myself – took my lad down when he was a teenager. I heard someone’s covered them over with brushwood to put people off going inside.’

‘Why would they do that? Are they dangerous?’ I asked.

‘Not what you’d call dangerous, but you need to take care scrambling down into them. The worst part is getting at them. Don’t leave it too late,’ he said, looking at the sky, ‘there’s only about an hour of daylight left.’

I walked onto the headland. On the summit there’s a Victorian folly, Kirkhead Tower, built of local limestone – it’s a brilliant viewpoint. The light was monotone, the bay rendered cold and hard, all was steely grey. I climbed up the few remaining steps of the folly and, as I did, the sun burst out from behind a bank of grey cloud and sunlight flooded into the bay from the south. The low-lying fields at the edge of the bay turned a bright, intense green as if released from anonymity. Adjacent, I spied the roll-back form of Humphrey Head, its wooded, gentler face towards me.

I moved down into the woods. There was the approximation of a footpath, but more, thin trackways had been worn along the ground – badgers’ foraging routes. A young deer crashed out of a thicket and bounded up the cliff edge and away in seconds. The winter song of a blackbird drifted up from the direction of the village and a distance away I saw sheets of bright light reflected from suburban windows. I pushed past holly trees, the bright red of their berries the only colour in the wood. The whippy stems of young beech trees filled the spaces between older trees, and there were ancient dark yews, of that dense, light-denying, midwinter, midnight green. I found a fence and a stile but decided not to cross; the land beyond it fell steeply away. I’d hoped for easier terrain.

The wood began to darken. Through the vertical spaces I saw low sunlight illuminating the water in the bay, but in the wood there was already a sense of the light dimming down. I found a couple of orange ropes suspended from thickened branches overhead. They made me think of that great freedom of my generation’s childhood, and the way this was so often diminished these days. At least my own kids had the woods down on the Green to spend hours in. Now my eldest, Callum, had rediscovered the outdoors and was spending his evenings up on the fell and in the woods, building bonfires and taking seriously the business of being out there. Top of his Christmas list this year? New fell boots. That’s my boy.

The caves eluded me. Using the map, it seemed they should be here, just here, but there was no sign of them. I felt useless, unsystematic, and defeated. I remembered what the man up on the road had said about the caves being purposely hidden, and as I walked the terraced cliffs backwards and forwards, and finding nothing and retracing my steps, I decided to give up. I needed more specific information, and maybe a guide. As I came out of the woods onto the open fell, a deer shot ahead of me and back into the woods again. A train rattled around the coast, though I couldn’t see it. Out on the open fell-top again the light grew more intense. As I moved towards the tower and the gate back to the road, my elongated shadow made a path for me to walk upon.

* * *

‘I wouldn’t be surprised if this whole area is covered in caves, given the limestone. We’ll never know though.’

I had my guide. I knew that my friend Brain Hardwick had been acquainted with the caves and that he’d been inside them, but what I hadn’t realised until we spoke recently was that he’d been involved in digging and surveying two of them during archaeological investigations in the early 1990s.

‘Must be 15 years since I was here. I was slimmer then, of course. I’d be down on my belly slithering along and into some tiny spaces. I pulled a huge length of rope out from inside the back of one of them – badgers must have dragged it in for nest material.’

We planned to meet on the first Sunday of the New Year. ‘If we don’t go then, the weather’s going to be against us for the rest of the week,’ Brian had said. His wife, my friend Astrid, came too. We set off down the hillside and into the scrubby undergrowth and came to the stile that I’d stopped in front of last time. Brian stepped over it and disappeared over the lip of the steep slope, Astrid and me following in his wake.

Kirkhead Cave was recessed underneath an overhang of limestone cliffs. Once we reached the terrace of earth outside it, we scrambled over boulders and leaning trees and down into the lip of the entrance. The cave was last officially investigated in the early ’80s, though it wasn’t until seven years later that the floor was covered with a protective fabric membrane and gravel, to protect further layers of undisturbed deposits.

The place had clearly been used by local youths, and fair enough. But the place was a mess: ubiquitous plastic bottles slung into corners, redundant tea-light candles on rock shelves, even black bin bags filled up with rubbish but left in a heap at the entrance. Astrid and I despaired. In a far corner someone had left a tidily rolled duvet and a folded towel, as if they might reappear at any moment.

‘Come and look at this,’ Brian said. We wandered to where he stood, looking up at the ceiling of the cave.

‘When it was discovered, it was nothing like this size. It’d filled over the centuries with earth and deposits.’ He was looking intently at a low section of roof. ‘All this carbuncle-looking stuff is calcite flow. And here...’ – he pointed at a sheer roundel of rock wrapped in the yellow-white of calcite – ‘there’s been a big stalactite broken off from here, probably by Victorian enthusiasts. They have a lot to answer for.’

One of those Victorian enthusiasts, John Bolton, published an account of his explorations of Kirkhead Cave in 1864.18

I have been acquainted with it for about ten years; my first visit being in 1853... We found the height of the cave at its mouth to be three feet; consequently admittance could only be gained by crawling in on hands and knees. Beyond the mouth, the height of the roof varied from eighteen feet, at the part nearest the entrance, to twelve feet; the length of the cave we found to be forty feet, and its width twenty feet; the area consisting of one irregularly oviform chamber.

During excavations of the top few inches of soil deposits he described finding a Roman coin: indication, or proof, as Bolton thought, that the cave had remained undisturbed for the past 1,800 years.

He described his two labourers digging out an area that measured seven feet in depth over an area of around 50 feet. They found the bones of birds and badgers, fox, goat, pig, wildcat and the tusk of a boar. There were axes and animal bone fragments thought to have been inscribed with simple patterns. Then:

At the depth of four feet, a portion of the right parietal bone of a human skull was thrown out. Continuing the excavation to a depth of seven feet, we obtained another human bone, which proved to be the second lumbar vertebra, and the radius and ulna of a young human subject.

Towards the base of their excavation they found significant quantities of blackened sticks of wood, potentially showing that they’d reached the oldest layers, and evidence from the late Interglacial period and of potential funerary rights:

There was also found a rude bone implement resembling a knife, a piece of carpal bone of goat two inches long, having a round hole through it, as though it had been suspended as an amulet; together with several fragments of pottery rudely burnt, similar in composition to ancient British cinerary [funerary] urns.

They also found the hollowed-out bone of a pig, similar to finds from other locations that had been made into primitive musical instruments. I’d heard one played at the Kilmartin Museum in Scotland, its spectral sound whistling down the aeons.

Much later on in the 1960s further work was carried out in the cavern and finds included further remains of a stalagmite floor, flints and other implements and evidence of human activity that dated back to the Late Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic, as well as intermittent activity in the Late Neolithic and Bronze Ages associated with the interment of human remains. An antler boss of Megaloceros, an extinct giant deer akin to the Irish Elk, was recovered in 1969 and yielded a radiocarbon date of over 10,500 years of age.

* * *

We left the cavern and walked north and into a valley I hadn’t known existed; I’d not walked this far in the dimming light of my first visit. The valley floor sloped back up towards the fell in a tumble of thickly mossed boulders. The place had the feel of orc country. Brian led us scrambling up an increasingly steep incline to a shallow terrace and there, unseen from below, was Kents Bank Cavern.

‘This is the one I helped to dig out. When we were here it didn’t have a name, it was just a hole in the ground.’ Two caverns burrowed into the earth, converging and connected by a hole too small for us to scrabble through. We switched on head-torches. Astrid moved into the deeper, right hand tunnel and Brian and I entered the left. A large, bulbous bloom of calcite covered the rock and a white, more liquid-looking sheet flowed through its midst.

‘That’s the more recent formation,’ Brian said, and then, ‘I’m afraid someone’s using this as a public loo. Look – badger latrine.’

I scrambled out again and as Astrid came out of the deeper channel I went in. A chunk of timbers was propped between two rock faces.

‘I probably put that in,’ Brian said.

I clambered down into the deepest chamber, and in the bottom of the cave the beam from the torch became diffracted, filling the small space with a globe of misted opalescence, a halo of artificial light following my gaze. Deep in the bottom of the furthest space another channel no more than 18 inches high led away into the dark. Brian was behind me now and, pointing at the aperture, said, ‘That’s where I found the rope. I ended up with a cut finger too – when I looked at what I’d grabbed, it turned out to be a flint. No wonder it was sharp.’ I thought of Brian’s hand being the first to take hold of that flint cutting edge in over 9,000 years. I’d have gladly suffered a cut for that.

‘The dig was run by Chris Salisbury,’ he said. ‘He lived back on the road up there. We used to climb over his garden fence to get down here. I was brought in to do some of the donkey work, the uncomfortable stuff. Chris was the brains. You could have done with talking to him, but not much chance of that now.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘He got cancer, poor bloke. The thing is, most of the stuff he got out hasn’t been seen since he died. No one knows what happened to it all; it seemed to disappear into thin air.’

* * *

Looking over the small, deep valley we were almost at eye level with the third cave, known as Whitton’s Cave. Evidence of at least three further human interments had been discovered in this cave together with a shard of primitive decorated pottery beside one of the skulls, thought to have been Bronze Age. But once again, looking up information in the records, the whereabouts of the finds are mysteriously not known.

The three of us scrambled down the valley side and back up again. Astrid dived straight inside. This cave had a level entrance accessed by a recess in the rock, like a lean-to natural porch, a home from home. I struggled with my rucksack straps and faffed about trying to find my head-torch. I was about to follow when Astrid came out again and looked me straight in the eye.

‘I went in so far, and I’m not going any further.’

I thought she’d found a body. ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

‘There are spiders. Huge spiders.’

I went into the cave to check for myself. There were a series of chambers with linking arches, each one successively lower than the last. The third arch implied a tight-fitting squeeze into the furthest chamber, and I didn’t want to be denied access.

‘I can’t see any spiders. Well, not big ones anyway,’ I said, peering at the roof of the chamber where a few small arachnids crawled over the stone.

Astrid came in behind me.

‘Not there – there!’ She pointed to the narrowing entrance into the furthest chamber. Giant spiders covered the archway.

My family will tell you, I’ve always struggled with spiders. On a sliding scale there are some I don’t mind, and even some I quite like – the wispy, long-legged Huntsman spiders with the tiny round bodies that come in the summer. But big spiders and I don’t mix. At summer’s end, when the females come into the house looking for a place to hole up, I go into the rooms at the back of the house with a wary eye. If there’s an intruder, I’ll catch it in a plastic cup and take it outside, and if no one’s looking I encourage them to go and live next door by shaking the contents of the cup into the neighbour’s garden. Squashing up close to these cave-dwellers was just not going to happen.

Whitton’s Cave had a warmth to it. Situated on that side of the valley wall, I guessed it must catch the afternoon sun, and the cave air was filled with small flies. I’m sure it was a really good place to live – if you were a spider. Astrid and I peered into the furthest chamber and then Brian arrived, expressing indignation at our attitude to the occupants. He moved in, took close-up photographs and came out to show us. That was close enough for me.

We left the cave and its inhabitants behind and clambered up the valley, a place that seemed ancient, hidden and untouched. We ducked underneath fallen trees and climbed over boulders before emerging into the light on the top of the fell again, and five minutes later we stepped back onto the suburban road with its clipped hedges and orderly winter gardens.

* * *

Before we left that day Brian suggested I get in touch with another member of the Chris Salisbury team – Dave Coward. ‘He kept detailed notebooks. He’d be able to tell you more about the place.’

Later that day, I re-read the report detailing the age of the remaining human bones. The remains had found a secure home in the Dock Museum in Barrow. On the website I found Dave’s name associated with the finds, so I got in touch. A day later, we talked on the phone.

‘Chris was very much a “gentleman archaeologist”,’ he told me, ‘a maverick, an old style academic. He’d not have been out of place 50 or 100 years ago – I mean in the way he related the stories of discoveries from the past. He was following in the footsteps of John Bolton, the local Victorian “earth scientist”, known for writing Geological Fragments of Furness.’19

I told him I was familiar with Bolton’s reports of Kirkhead.

‘Bolton was working at a time, I forget the exact year, when his discoveries and the thirst for knowledge amongst the public were so strong, they had to find a big enough hall to fit everyone in. Up to 1,500 at a time went to listen to his talks. His samples are in the British Museum and I believe are even now a major part of the reference collection for that period.

‘But as for Chris, well, there’ll never be digs again like the ones that Chris ran. We had no risk assessments or hazardous substances statements; nothing like that. I remember questioning Chris about this, because it’s something I have to deal with at work. He said, ‘I’m not joking when I tell people they can sue me; I’ve got nowt so you’ll get nowt.

‘After Chris became ill, I asked his wife, Anne, if we should stop – but she said to keep going, it would be a distraction. I used to visit Chris in hospital. I’d find him sitting up in bed drawing some of the finds from Kents Bank. He kept them in a box in his hospital locker. After he died, they weren’t seen again.’

Thankfully some of Chris Salisbury’s work on Kents Bank Cavern had found a secure home at the Dock Museum and were eventually tested by a team from John Moore’s University in Liverpool. Amongst these were pieces of skulls from at least three individuals and also a femur, a radius, an ulna from the forearm and two humeri from the upper arm. Humans were here in Lakeland from 12,000–13,000 years ago, evidenced from the finding and dating of stone tools. But the femur found at Kents Bank was subsequently radiocarbon-dated to 9,100 to 10,380 years ago, placing the individual to the early Mesolithic period, making the Kents Bank Cavern bones the earliest dated human remains found to date this far north in Britain.

It’s likely that the cave had been used as a place of interment. The bodies could have been laid out here unburied, and might have been subject to excarnation, where the flesh is removed and then the bones left at different specific important sites across the landscape. This would have left the remains vulnerable to removal by carnivores or indeed to trampling by animals. Again, this is one of the earliest and most northerly pieces of evidence of Mesolithic mortuary practices in the British Isles.

But what of the other finds? As well as the human remains, the jawbone of a lynx was unearthed at Kirkhead Cave. Lynx became extinct in the UK about 1,800 years ago, but I found it exciting to think of these beautiful, lithe creatures roaming over my home landscape. There were the bones of a 7,000-year-old dolphin that had most likely been dragged up to the cave by an animal. And a short distance away, in fact just an arrow’s flight from Kirkhead Tower, is Humphrey Head, the place where the last wolf in England was reputedly killed. And although this idea might be fanciful (how on earth would anyone know where the very last wolf died anyway?), there’s evidence of wolves right here on the doorstep. Elk had been roaming northern Britain over 1,300 years ago and their bones were found in the cavern. They had been gnawed by a large predator. The most likely candidate? Wolf.