Two

Heysham Head

At any time the graves are a remarkable sight. Six tombs hewn out of the rock on the top of a headland overlooking the bay, sarcophagus-like, and lipped for a covering of stone or wood. Less obvious at first, two more of them further back in the shelter of a line of wind-blasted trees. One infant-sized and, close by, another, the length of a child. In their own time they must have been eloquent, intended for highly regarded people, a family perhaps, who might continue to influence their community even after death. On the frozen January afternoon I went to see them, it was as though the bodies had morphed back into their stone graves. Rainwater, collected and frozen, gave them a sense of the corporeal again. Shrouds made of layers and whorls of ice were packed tight into each one.

* * *

These were short days when afternoons segued into evening before you knew it. The light had intensified early and looking out from the beach at Morecambe Bay, brimful with the tide, the mountains of Cumbria appeared like a lost snowbound kingdom, coloured a ghostly, veiled pink. The beach at Half Moon Bay was alive with dogs that ran into the sea or bothered other dogs as their owners chatted with one another, idly throwing sticks or balls. A man walked past me and, whilst looking at his dog, uttered ‘Nice day in’t it,’ and I answered yes, it really was. Two different kinds of black and white on the sand: oystercatchers and lapwings dotting about, following the imprint of the waves as they rose and fell. The light over the bay clarified all the time so that across on the long reach of the Furness peninsula individual houses and farm buildings were visible. A single glint of sunlight was reflected back from a window in the hills. At Barrow the land slid seawards and the giant hangars where nuclear submarines evolve mirrored the scale of the two brooding nuclear power stations half a mile south from where I stood. In the middle of that great expanse of water one small sailboat caught and reflected the light on its bright white sails.

As I began to walk, one ferry was embarking for the Isle of Man or Ireland and another was heading back into Heysham Port. I followed a path that meandered past gorse bushes and the skeletal heads of cow parsley, dogwood stems plum-red against the grass. Coming towards the top of the headland, the sun caught the ruins of St Patrick’s Chapel. It seemed to glow, giving out a warm, ochre-red light. Through the Saxon arched doorway the sea of Morecambe Bay was a vivid blue. On the top of the ruins a pair of magpies fretted, casting out clattering cries like ill-tempered guardians. There were visitors, though very few; a woman sitting in the grass with her eyes closed and her face raised up to catch the slight warmth from the sun.

I looked down at the stone graves. They exude mystery, and enigma. There’s nothing else like them in the country. I wanted to be able to place them accurately in their own time, but any grave goods are long gone and it’s virtually impossible to locate them in a particular culture or to impose a date on them. It’s thought they pre-date the first chapel to be built on the site. The 7th to the 11th century was a time of huge flux and change at Heysham that witnessed a mixing of cultures and belief systems. I wondered if the proximity of the graves to the chapel might only confuse things, or conflate the idea that they both existed as integral parts of an organised and influential early Christian site.

I wanted to understand something of their significance, but to do this I had to take away the present, the visitors and the housing estates with glowing red pantile roofs, the habitation on Furness across the bay and Piel Castle afloat on its island haven. The immense shipyard hangers at Barrow, the ferry heading out to Ireland and the one coming back in and the one sailboat out on the bay. Last of all, I took away the power stations.

There’s a local story that St Patrick, after whom the chapel is named, landed at Heysham bringing the Christian message from Ireland, founding one of the earliest Christian Oratories and communities here on the headland. Vikings moved into Heysham during the 10th century, travelling in from existing communities in Ireland and the Isle of Man. Some of them had been absorbed into the Christian tradition, but some remained pagan. Without doubt, the historical edges here are blurred.

A 1970s inspection of the site found that the chapel was ‘rapidly deteriorating’ as a result of the severe weather on the headland, vandalism and the constant stream of tourists traipsing through the ruins. As a consequence, human bone fragments could be seen in the earth and the ‘underlying stratigraphy was greatly at risk’.1

Archaeologists and restoration teams moved in to survey the site and to preserve the ruins from imminent collapse. Amongst the remains they found a Viking woman together with her decorated, carved bone comb. She’d been buried in a shroud beneath a fine spread of charcoal. The presence of the comb infers that she was buried within the Scandinavian pagan culture. Many of the graves were either overlaid with stones or else the bodies had been laid into natural cavities in the bedrock. One of the burials incorporated a stone with a detailed carved bird’s head, thought to have originally been a section from a carved stone chair or throne of the style seen in the 7th century. More carved birds were found, both in the headland burials and in the chapel, and on a richly decorated Viking Hogback stone.

This intricately carved stone was found in the chapel ruins and had been exposed to the elements for centuries. In the 1960s it was taken indoors to the neighbouring church of St Peter, built in a dip of the land just beyond the line of trees. The narrative scenes carved on the stone have been variously described as the victory of Christianity over pagan belief, or to show Germanic or Scandinavian legends or myths. On one face, there are wolves, men and a deer; on the other, a tree, birds, saddle horses and a man, possibly with a sword raised above his head. Surrounding all four faces of the stone, a serpent. It may illustrate the Viking legend of Sigurd. In this tale the hero overcomes attack by wolves as told in the poem ‘Eiríksmál’, written to commemorate the reign of Eric Bloodaxe, the last Viking King of York, and whose rule probably extended over Heysham at about the time the hogback stone was carved. But beware of false idols, say the archaeologists, who argue that a true and detailed interpretation of the stone’s carvings is nigh on impossible given that it dates from a time when ‘Christian iconography, folklore, convention and mere decoration are inextricably mixed together’.2

Me, I like a bit of legend. I think I’ll stick with Sigurd.

I like too the symbolism of birds. Looking out from the headland that mid-winter afternoon with the light at its zenith, birds were so much part of the place. Oystercatchers went spinning past, following the edge of the headland, gulls winged languorously out into the middle of the bay, and, on the headland, small birds bounced on pockets of air between the trees. There’s a natural justice to their inclusion in the symbolic and celebratory carvings of the time. Given the abundance of birdlife on Morecambe Bay and the idea of migration, perhaps the stone-carver thought of birds and people, journeying into unseen places, and most, though not all, returning home again.

* * *

The first building on the headland was a simple, smaller structure than the ruins that remain might suggest. It had plastered and painted interior walls and a door that faced towards the west and the horizon of the sea. For me this immediately resonated. The Gallarus Oratory in Ireland, ‘the church of the place of the foreigners’, is a small but perfectly formed and ingeniously corbelled building in the shape of an upturned boat. It sits on the lower slopes of Brandon Mountain, close to the Cosán na Naomh pilgrimage route, its function to offer shelter to those venturing on to the holy summit of Ireland’s second highest mountain. I’ve been to Gallarus many times. Even allowing for all the Germans and Italians doing the tourist rounds of the Dingle peninsula, there’s something quietly wonderful about it. If you have the Oratory to yourself, even for just a few minutes, the meditative qualities of the place become clear.

The last time I was there I fell into a conversation with the young Irishman at the gate as he collected our tickets. I’d asked him about the tradition of offering shelter and mentioned the chapel at Heysham. He knew his stuff and was aware of it as another early Christian site.

‘There was a whole network of these paths right throughout Europe,’ he told me. ‘Spreading out from Rome into the east, to Palestine and Jerusalem, through the Byzantine Empire, through Spain and all the way up into Ireland. And there was a great tradition of offering pilgrims food and shelter. What you have here is the end of a major pilgrimage route and so the Oratory would have been a place to shelter, somewhere to find food and to pray on the way up and back again from the summit of Brandon Mountain.’

He talked about the route of the pilgrimage through Ireland, about how routes connected one to another, and how sometimes those undertaking the journey were returning from, or originating from, the far edges of Europe. Their destination this, a mountain on the Atlantic coast of Ireland and from where, if you were to carry on travelling, as St Brendan the Navigator had, you might come to an island in the middle of the ocean that was in reality a giant fish, inhabited by birds and monsters and veiled by mists that would hold you there for years.

The guide’s enthusiasm for the subject and his knowledge about Gallarus and its associated history was truly impressive but I couldn’t begin to remember it all. I asked him if this stuff was available on a website somewhere.

‘No,’ he answered, as if taken aback, ‘it’s all in me head.’

* * *

More digging, more discoveries. In 1993 another excavation at Heysham turned up more than 1,200 artefacts, arrow-heads and spear barbs and showed that the area had been occupied from at least the Mesolithic period of 12,000 years ago. To put this into context, the Irish elk was still roaming throughout Eurasia and into Africa and would continue to do so for a further 2,000 years. Land ice was retreating in northern Europe as Earth entered the Holocene period – the warming up of the planet. You might still catch a glimpse of a woolly rhinoceros or a mammoth on your way back from the hunting grounds of Morecambe. That’s if you hadn’t already speared and dismembered it yourself.

* * *

They’re found in the turned earth, brought out into the light again by the plough or picked up from a riverbed, mistaken for a cobble. They’ve been recovered from bogs and springs and streams and trawled up by dredgers from riverbeds. Fifteen of them were found in the River Thames.

Smash one onto the floor and notice the momentary smell of burning as it breaks apart; proof of its origin as the shard of a spent thunderbolt. Keep one in the rafters as protection from lightning; it rarely strikes the same place twice. Put one in the water trough to keep cattle free from disease and increase the milk yield of cows, or use its finely ground powder as a cure-all for illness, to assist in the birth of children or to prevent putrid rot or decay.

Or go for a walk on the beach at Half Moon Bay one day and, having noticed it amongst all the other beach stones, see that the shape of it was just the thing. Pick it up, carry it home and put it to good use as a doorstopper, the thing unidentified and therefore diminished. But then a neighbour called in for a chat, noticed it and recognised it for what it was. They took it away, released it from obscurity and donated it to the museum up in Lancaster. You can see it there now, one of three on permanent display. But hold it. Heft it, feel the weight of the thing and the way it fits into your hand. Look at the colour – jadeite, greenstone – such a dark green it’s almost black. Look at the edges, the way it was made, or manufactured. Precision engineering – a measured and balanced gradient from the widest holding point to the fine sliver of the working edge.

Axe: a noun and a verb. Something to work with, something to grind, an action, a transformation.3

The very first factory of any kind in Britain, its location at the top of an inaccessible corrie high up in the mountains of the Langdale valley. A cave hacked out of the rock and measuring six feet wide, seven feet deep and seven feet high, greater than the height of a Neolithic man. The same fine-grained stone was found at other locations too, many much more accessible, but this was the chosen place. From a point 700 metres up on the headwall of Cumbria’s Pike o’ Stickle the trade in axe-heads began. Imagine then, the mythology that travelled with the axes, and that attached itself to them because this was the place of origin.

Francis Pryor writes in Britain BC that ‘in simple, practical terms, it doesn’t make sense’, any more than the transporting of the stones of Stonehenge from the mountains of south-west Wales to Wiltshire. But this is exactly what happened. Both locations are difficult to access and no doubt possessed an other-worldly mythology of their own.4

Most of the Langdale axes that have been found were rarely used to chop or to cut. Sometimes called ‘celts’, from the Latin for chisel, they were keystones of Neolithic life. (They have also become, literally, touchstones in the very foundations of archaeology.) Axes from Langdale travelled extensively and the journeys they were taken on and the destinations they arrived at have given archaeologists insights about how and why they were used. A tool, a token, a symbol. The Langdale axes make articulate statements not only about their practical use, but also, and more importantly, about how they existed as part of a system of belief.

Axes were statements in stone... They built up biographies and associations and some may even have had names. It was this potential that came into focus when they were singled out for special attention: held aloft or handled as cues in the telling of stories or the recitation of names; treated like those they lived alongside, buried or broken just as bodies were.5

Axes spoke of cleared land, of the very beginnings of farming and were widely used in the creation of order and settlement. Across the 2,000 years of the Neolithic, axes were made and used all over the country from locally available materials. But axes from Langdale are amongst the most travelled. They’ve been found in Lancashire, Wales, Scotland, in eastern England and at Ballygalley on the north-east coast of Northern Ireland. On a clear day you can see that coast from Heysham.

When Professor Bill Cummins examined nearly 2,000 Neolithic axes from all over England and Wales, a staggering 27% were made from polished Langdale volcanic tuff and found in the greatest concentrations in Peterborough, in Lincolnshire and the east Midlands.6 In a separate study of axes found in the River Thames, out of 368 specimens a mere 17 were damaged and most were in remarkably good condition. Fifteen of them came from Langdale.7 Rivers travel through time as well as through the land and may have been regarded as a link between worlds. Axes found in rivers may have been thrown there as part of a ritualistic offering to spirits belonging to a different world and who demanded gifts.

This Heysham Langdale axe, once employed in the mundane task of a doorstopper, was and is, still, a thing of awe and wonder. You can sense the weight of the thing, imagine the way it would fit into a man’s hand, or see him hefting it, balancing it in one hand and weighing up the thing’s potential. I think he would have spoken with it, about it and valued it intrinsically. The reason it was found on the beach will probably never be known. It may have been lost while on a journey south, east or west. And it’s not inconceivable that the people who made and traded axes transported semi-completed pieces to finishing stations further along the route, and perhaps Heysham was part of a chain of trade.

I’ve been up there to the cave in the headwall of the Langdale Pikes. I’ve slid and slithered my way down the great stone gully there, the first time as a teenager on a 1970s school fell-walking trip. But I’ve been back since; it’s one of those places that call to you from time to time over the ether, that come in unbidden when least expected. I’ve walked to the top of both the peaks, of Harrison Stickle and Pike o’ Stickle and looked out over the valley that cuts a swathe through time. In fact it was there on one of those summits that I first had any real understanding or sense of time, of how it grinds on imperceptibly, slowly forming valleys and rivers and mountains, and how I, my teenage self, was no more than a speck on the surface of it all. I found it an uncomfortable reconnaissance then. Perhaps less so now. Perhaps.

The school fell-walking club had a different kind of day on offer than the usual walking in the hills and then eating the ubiquitous left-over bar of emergency ration Kendal mint-cake on the bus home. The plan was for ghyll scrambling and scree running. No one thought anything of it then. Having gained both summits we retraced our steps to reach the start of the descent at the coll between two of Cumbria’s most characteristic peaks, the Langdale Pikes. Mr Hawksley instructed us in the gentle art of scree running; to descend crab-wise, one leg dropping and the other catching up, like wading downhill fast through snow. Except it wasn’t snow, but layers of scree, the jumble of rocks and stones that form where the gradient of the mountain is steeper and where ice and water have made the rock faces crack and splinter, shatter and fall. The headwall of the scree slope had become eroded and difficult, nothing much to hold onto, mainly thanks to hill-walking enthusiasts descending by this route. The surface had become reduced to shale and there was nothing good to grab onto in the event of a stumble.

We found the axe factory. I hadn’t known what to expect, but I think I thought it would be more than this, a small cave dug out of the side of the mountain. But the more we looked, and then found it more demanding than we’d anticipated to scramble up to it, and then measured it against the size of an axe-head, we began to understand. Think of the people who made this. We wore well-designed leather fell-boots; they had skins. Little wonder that Langdale axes acquired status and garnered mythologies that ultimately travelled with them. Stories of arduous climbing, of inaccessibility, of struggle and of reaching a place above the cloud high in the mountains. An other-worldly place that assumed importance above all others. Of the axe makers maintaining their intention to create not only the product but the source and the meaning and the journey. Imagine then, hearing all this in the flat Neolithic fens of Lincolnshire. Of handling a dark, polished, greenstone axe that has travelled along invisible pathways to arrive here in your hands. Turn it over and round and listen to the story of its place of origin. It would be unbelievable.

On the way down the scree we searched for ‘rough-outs’, roughly-shaped stones that had been tried and rejected. I went down more slowly than the others at first, searching for treasure amongst the tumble of scree. There was a piece I chanced upon. I took it home and kept the thing for years in my room. But it may have been a fancy on my part that once it was held by a man, that he’d chipped and knapped for a while, turning it over and over in his hands to assess its potential before coming to the truth of it, and casting it aside.

* * *

‘Are you doing a study?’

A man had appeared at my side. I’d heard, rather than seen his arrival, the brakes of his bicycle squeaking as he came to a stop and jumped off. With the slightest nod of his head the man indicated the notebook and pen in my hand. He had a small white dog and, on his command, it took off, scarpering down the hillside in a way that told me the dog knew the routine.

‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘No, just interested, really. It’s such a great place.’

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘It is indeed. In fact it’s a very ancient and mysterious place. Very mysterious.’

As we talked he held the bike by its handlebars and brakes and a continuous high-pitched squeak underscored our conversation. The man’s hair was long, grey. He was tall and had the look of someone noble, of someone slightly lost. As we talked he looked out at the bay in front of us and then he gestured, sweeping his whole arm over the headland to drive his point home.

‘They reckon this whole headland is covered in ancient burial sites.’

The small dog foraged, following scent trails in the grass.

I saw exactly what was happening. I thought the man probably talked to anyone if he could catch them unprepared. But I didn’t mind; the sun was out and I had time. We exchanged a few sentences about the rock-graves, and then, as I thought he might, he hijacked the conversation. It began with the lack of access to library toilets for non-library users, the cost of water rates, the fact that it’s impossible to own water, or to sell it for that matter, the fact that no one even owns their own name. We were heading downhill fast. I listened, trying to understand how he’d got to this point. But I wanted the day to be positive after weeks and weeks of rain. I wanted the mood to be light. I used what tactics I could muster.

‘I know what you mean,’ I said, ‘but the thing is to know about all that stuff, to think about it and acknowledge it, but then move on. I mean – look at this wonderful place.’ And then I swept my arm over the bay.

The man paused, lifted his head slightly and regarded me down his long, aquiline nose.

‘So,’ he said, ‘where do you come from?’

‘I live in Kendal.’

‘Ah. All the way from sunny Kendal. Well, don’t get me wrong,’ he said, ‘you’re right but...’

...and on he went. There were peaks and troughs in the monologue but I stuck with it, butting in when I could. Being Cumbrian I’m a self-confessed admirer of banter, in fact I think at best it’s a highly developed art, but more, I like people who take on the fabric of oppression and unfairness and who do write to their MPs about stuff that matters.

‘I’ve been writing to the government about how you can’t own water. So if you can’t own it, you can’t sell it, can you? And did you know that when the government write back to you their letters are full of magic words? They’re very powerful words too. You have to work hard to decipher it all, to work out the secret codes. Then you’ll see the real message. Once you’ve done that, you can write back. Play them at their own game.’

It was, I thought, a very mysterious place. I looked out at the bay again and down at the icy graves. The light had begun to decrease in its intensity already. I took a glance at my watch.

‘I’d better get going soon,’ I said, and detected a slight shift in his eyes, a small sinking of the light. I wondered if once I’d left that would be all the company he’d have today. ‘I’ve to collect my kids from school. I’d better not be late. It’s been really interesting talking to you. And thanks for telling me all this.’

As I headed off towards the beach again, the man set off walking down over the Barrows. He waved a long arm in farewell and at the same time made bird-like, fluting whistles in the direction of his dog.

A single oystercatcher piped me back along the shore.