Roads and Tracks of the Lake District

Traces the history of Lakeland's roads and tracks from the ancient times up to the present. Looks at Roman roads, medieval and monastic routes, drove and sands routes, trade routes, turnpikes, enclosure roads and more recent developments to Lakeland’s lanes.

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CHAPTER 3 - Medieval Routes

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The Dark Ages
If Roman rule had come virtually overnight to Cumbria, then its departure was much less dramatic, and in places some of the trappings of Romano-British culture seem to have survived for several centuries. The Roman legions were probably withdrawn from Hadrian’s Wall in 383, but the occupation continued in some places for at least another ten years. The de jure end came in 410 when the Britons asked for Roman aid against the invading barbarians, but were told that Rome was powerless to help, and that they must defend themselves. Thus began the Dark Ages - so-called because these were centuries of unrest and invasion, but also because there was little written history. Our knowledge of these years is thus sparse and fragmentary, relying substantially on legends, folk tales and place-names as evidence. Such evidence is particularly difficult to interpret.

In Cumbria the invading Picts and Scots, coming from Scotland and Ireland respectively, made life difficult for the romanised Britons, and yet it seems likely that the larger settlements, such as Carlisle and Old Carlisle, remained occupied for many years; as late as 685 St Cuthbert was shown the Roman water system and the town walls of Carlisle, both evidently still intact. However, new invaders were now reaching Cumbria; these were the Anglo-Saxons or English. They had started to invade south-eastern England before the Romans had left, and in 615, at the battle of Chester, they drove a wedge between the British (or Celtic) peoples of Wales and Cumbria. Little now remains to link these divided peoples, apart from the names of Cymru (Wales) and Cumberland which have survived into modern times.

A study of the distribution of Anglian place-names shows that these new settlers broke little new ground, preferring the lower lying lands around the margins of the Lake District, and barley penetrating its core. The commonest Anglian place-names are ham and tun sometimes preceeded by ing; ham means a ‘farm’, tun a slightly larger settlement with perhaps more than one family unit, and ing, the followers of ...’. And yet the earlier British place-names such as blean (top), pen (hill or head), glyn (valley), and caer (fort) are all found in the Lakeland core, testifying perhaps to the continued occupation of this area by the British. Indeed, they may have been forced into these more rugged areas by the arrival of the English, whose name of Westmorland probably means ‘land of the western border’.

As if the Roman and Anglian invasions were not enough, two more were yet to come. The first began in about 910 when Viking raiders, many of whom had previously settled in Ireland or the Isle of Man, started to arrive in Cumbria. They have always received a bad press, mainly because the few histories of the time were written by Anglo-Saxon monks, who would hardly have a charitable view of these pagan pirates. Despite occasional excesses though, it is clear that the invasion of Norse farmers, some of whom were probably refugees anyway, was essentially a peaceful process; their type of agriculture was mainly pastoral, and did not compete with the arable farming of the Anglo-Saxons. In any case there was hardly any shortage of land for such a small population and both peoples seem to have lived side-by-side. The Vikings settled around the coastal inlets, and in the mountain core, leaving their distinctive place-names as indicators of their presence: dalr (dale), thwaite (clearing), saeter (summer pasture), booth (shelter), as well as the commoner fell, beck, gill and tarn. The penetration of Cumbria by the Norse can be seen clearly from the forty-one Norse place-names within 9½km (6 miles) of Keswick (including the fells around Borrowdale), while a similar circle centred on Sleagill (between Appleby and Shap) contains no less than eighty-four Norse place-names.

It would be wrong to suggest that there were three distinct periods in this period of the Lake District’s history, for the British, Anglian and Norse peoples co-existed for most of the time; indeed there was a British enclave in the area west of Penrith until the late eleventh century. The mixture was unique in the whole of Britain, and has helped to give the area its distinctiveness ever since. The different peoples not only had different languages and customs, but also different types of farming and settlement, varying from the individual pastoral farmsteads of the British, to the more highly organised arable villages of the Angles, and the pastoral hamlets of the Norse. Perhaps the simplest description of the social changes of the Dark Ages would be that the British were slowly replaced by the Norse as pastoralists, balanced by the relatively limited areas under Anglian arable farming.

If no mention has yet been made of roads and tracks in the Dark Ages, then that is partly a result of the paucity of the historical record, and partly due to the small number of people who would have been travelling from place to place. Both the Anglian and Viking settlers must have used tracks in order to reach the sites of their new settlements, but there is little to indicate which routes were used. It is likely, for example, that the Anglians would have approached Cumbria on the three routes from Lancaster, York and Newcastle which the Romans had built; however as we have already seen Anglo-Saxon villages were generally sited away from Roman roads, on the assumption that subsequent invaders or armies would also use those routes. The Vikings, on the other hand, arrived by sea, whilst the Danes came across Stainmore from Yorkshire.

Once the settlers had become established, tracks must have come into use between each settlement and its fields. In Borrowdale, for example, each hamlet in the valley has a section of fell named after it; each of these saeters (summer pastures) would have been linked to its settlement by a path. Next, each settlement would have had a well-trodden route to the neighbouring settlements, and, as the influence of the Church became more strongly felt, to the nearest chapel or parish church. From the early stages when each settlement no doubt tried to be fiercely independent and self-sufficient, it would soon become obvious that some areas were better suited to grain production, others to sheep rearing, and that any surpluses could be bartered between villages. Here lies the origin of the trading system of medieval times, the growth of which went hand-in-hand with the growth of a network of paths and tracks along which produce was moved. This unplanned growth of a route network was very different to the imposed Roman network which had been devised for the defence of the northern frontier of Roman Britain; the roads of the early medieval period were essentially a response to the growth of trade.

In more populous areas of Britain it has been possible to trace roads which are specifically Anglo-Saxon in date, for example the Portways from Southampton to Northampton, and those in the Peak District, but in Cumbria there is no such clear evidence. Nevertheless, it is certain that the skeleton of the present-day road system was created piecemeal by farmers travelling from one small settlement to another in the centuries around the turn of the millennium, and this period was very important in the growth of the whole road network.

Medieval Lakeland
Medieval roads were fundamentally different to their Roman predecessors; medieval roads were not engineered but made and maintained themselves, and were thus very different to those Roman roads which remained in use. Furthermore, a road in medieval times was not a narrow strip of land with definite boundaries; rather it was an ‘easement’ or right of way, having both legal and customary status, leading from one place to the next. If such a route was used often enough, then it would become a physical track, but always with the understanding that the traveller had the legal right to diverge from it if there was some obstruction or difficult section, even to the extent of trampling crops. On steep slopes this often led to the development of multiple tracks - the traveller taking the easiest route available.

During the tenth and eleventh centuries most of Cumbria was effectively controlled by various Scottish kingdoms, and by the time of the fourth and last invasion, that of the Normans, most of Cumbria was not regarded as part of England at all. The Domesday Survey of 1086, which is such a vital record for most of England lists only a few manors in the south of Cumbria. However, in 1092 ‘King William [II] marched north to Carlisle with a large army and built the castle...and afterwards returned to the south, and sent thither very many English peasants with wives and stock to dwell there, and to till the ground.’ The Normans had waited for twenty-six years before bringing their conquest to Cumbria, but the changes that were to ensue were to be every bit as great as those wrought by the Roman occupation a thousand years earlier.

We can trace William Rufus’s route along the Roman road from Yorkshire by the castles he caused to be built - at Brough and Appleby - and during the next two centuries other major castles were erected at Brougham, Cockermouth, Egremont and Kendal. Once again a ruler in Britain had chosen the Solway as the border with Scotland, but this was not to go unchallenged and the Scots again held most of Cumbria from 1135 to 1157 during that period of anarchy in England. Scots raids continued into the next century, and all this activity gave Carlisle and the border area a great strategic importance for well over two hundred years...