The garden of Eden

A journey from source to sea but this time the Irish sea. The River Eden starts in the south and flows north before turning west near Carlisle and heading to the Solway estuary. There are quite a few places we’ve already visited along the river in previous podcasts so we’ll do a quick recap and you can always click on the earlier episodes if you’d like to know more.

Transcript

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Episode five The Garden of Eden Another journey from source to sea, but this time the sea is the Irish Sea. The River Eden starts in the south and flows north before turning west near Carlisle and heading to the Solway Estuary. There are quite a few places we've already visited along the river in previous podcasts, so we'll do a quick recap, and you can always click on the earlier episodes if you'd like to know more. The source of the River Eden is on Carboniferous Moorland above the Malastang Valley. It is almost on the border with North Yorkshire. It begins as a beck called Hellgill, which flows down the valley side through a gorge in the Great Limestone. Then it turns north and heads for Kirby Stephen. That's a town with buildings made of blocks of a weird looking rock, a bit like rough concrete with angular aggregate. It's called the Brockram. That's a local Cumbrian name and means broken rock, which is exactly how it looks. Head for Senthrith Bridge and you'll see beneath it the river Eden has cut out a spectacular narrow slot channel. It's called the Span of Eden through the Brockram. You can also see Brockram in old quarries west of Nateby, probably the source of some of the stone used to construct Kirby Stevens' distinctive buildings. The river passes just west of Kirby Thor with its working gypsum mine. Gypsum's a Permian rock, an evaporite that originated in desiccating seas in the Permian period two hundred and seventy million years ago. It is present all along this section of the Eden Valley and used to be extracted further downstream at Long Meg Mine and Cock Lakes. Time to make a longer stop, just north of a village called Little Selcald. In eighteen eighty three William Wordsworth said Next to Stonehenge it is beyond dispute the most notable relic that this, or probably any other country, contains. That's quite the accolade for a stone circle that sits in a quiet corner of a distant northern county. But it is a very large and complex monument with an equally enigmatic narrative. Sixty eight daughters plus Long Meg stand around a perimeter almost one hundred and thirteen meters in diameter. And the stones are only part of the archaeology. The name according to folklore, Long Meg was a witch, and her daughters her coven. They danced on the Sabbath and were turned to stone. The stone circle is Neolithic and more than five thousand years old. Long Meg herself is a nine ton block of two hundred and eighty million year old Permian Penrith sandstone, almost four meters high, which was probably collected from the cliffs beside the nearby river Eden. The majority of her daughters are volcanic rocks from the Ordovician Borodil volcanic group of the Lake District, around five hundred and fifty five million years old. Most appear to be made up of angular fragments and blocks, breccias formed by the flow of volcanic lava and debris. The others are multitun boulders of criffled albiti granite and threlceld microgranite. In the last two point six million years it was ice sheets that transported these large stones, called erratics, from the lake district to the Eden Valley. Most would have been collected by their prehistoric builders quite locally, but the very large ones probably needed a wider search. So this, and probably all other northern English stone circles, are not at all like Stonehenge, which archaeologists assert was the product of purely human transport. Is it possible that these archaeologists could be being a little too overconfident? Because a number of expert geologists and geographers think nature may have had a part in the movement of Stonehenge's stones. Certainly here at Long Meg, it was nature and glaciers that did the heavy lifting. What the Stone Circle was for and why it is here are the subjects of continuous archaeological debate too. Such circles may have been important ritual sites, and Long Meg is aligned to this winter solstice. It is probable that the people who erected it had a much greater affinity with the spiritual and material assets of the natural landscape than we do today. Five thousand years ago such sites might have been places of celebration or gathering, monumental shrines to ancestors, or for religious ritual, and it seems safe to assume that their purpose may have changed over time. As the river wends its way north we probably pass the area where Longmeg herself was collected or quarried, the cliffs near Lacey's caves. But there is a less well known stone circle on our way too, and one reputed to have a stone with rock art. This circle is on private land at Glassenby. Near that village is a timely reminder of the power of nature. There used to be a village called Addingham here, but it was abandoned in the twelfth century when the Eden changed its course and carried away the church and the graveyard. The red permatriassic sandstone church, Saint Michael's, or Addingham Church, was rebuilt south of Glassenby. It is a beautiful little church and is well worth a visit. There's a Viking hogsback stone grave covering the porch. It was recovered from the river Eden in nineteen thirteen, during a drought. We are now just south of the village of Armouthwaite. Cross the bridge and walk south down the riverside path. Sixty million years ago lava started to pour out of an enormous rift that was to become the Atlantic Ocean. North America and Europe have been drifting apart ever since. This split in the Earth's crust and the volcanic activity that heralded it produced the youngest bits of rock in these stories. Geologists call them dikes. Near vertical blades of molten rock. There's one that crosses the river near Armouthwaite, injected into the local softer red sandstone. You can get very close to it and even walk on it. The relative hardness of the rock the dike is made of creates a natural weir here. It's one of several dikes that are thought to originate from beneath the Isle of Mull in western Scotland. The theory is that a single pulse of molten magma spread laterally at a velocity of up to eighteen kilometers per hour, filling up on echelon tension cracks in the Earth's crust, so the injection of the whole dike would have taken less than five days. On past more red cliffs at Weatherill with their Roman quarry and carvings, and Saint Constantine's cells all cut into this Triassic Sentby sandstone, an easily worked building stone that was popular here and across the Atlantic, and for the rail and road bridges the river Eden passes under. Weatherall used to be a famous and productive and expensive salmon fishing spot. I wonder if it still is. After being joined by the rivers Earthing and Petrol, the Eden cuts through Carlisle. You will catch a glimpse of the cricket club beside Eden Bridges, now famous for the excavation of a building said to be the largest on the frontier. Its excavations have produced some spectacular finds, including two carved heads and many, many intaglios. We covered that site on our Roman trail. Just below that is the crossing point of Hadrian's Wall, nothing to see now, but some very large stones were retrieved from the bed of the river Eden. Near a hamlet called Stainton, the newish northern bypass crosses the river. It's not a place many had heard of, but the results of a rescue archaeology program ahead of the construction of the Carlisle Bypass changed that. Excavations at West Stayton between 2008 and 2011 on the floodplain, just north of the crossing of the River Eden, discovered extensive and previously unknown evidence of Mesolithic and later occupation. The site is underlain by silt, sand and gravel, alluvium deposited by the river in the last fifteen thousand years. The earliest deposits are from a period just after the ice sheet melted away. The youngest river sediments overlie these. Beneath them all is bedrock, 250 million year old Triassic mudstones, which peep out in the south bank of the river. The excavations and high resolution topographic surveys, including Lydar, a technique that uses lasers to measure the ground height very precisely, produced a detailed picture of several river terraces and intervening channels. The evidence for Mesolithic occupation of an island between two channels included over 300,000 lithic flakes, plus pits, hearths, and signs of shelters. The finds and their location are interpreted as evidence of seasonal visits of groups of hunter-gatherer people between 8,000 and 6,300 years ago. The stone artifacts are mostly small microliths and flakes, predominantly flints and churts, rocks made of microscopic silica that occurs as nodules and layers in chalk and limestone. They are thought to have originated as beech pebbles from the Solway Coast and from the Eden Valley. Other less common rock types from remote locations were also found, churts from the southern uplands, flint from East Yorkshire, volcanic tufts and stone axes from the Lake District, and pitch stone, a glassy lava from Aron. The current archaeological interpretation of how these remote rocks reach West Stanton is that they were collected, carried and exchanged by ancient people, and that they are evidence of a wide mesolithic social network. This conclusion, rather too confident, some geologists think, discounts the possibility of at least some of the remote raw material being transported by a natural agent, the last ice sheets. These flowed in a variety of directions at different times and dispersed diverse rock debris across northern England, including the rocks from Aron, Northern Ireland, the floor of the Irish Sea, the southern uplands, the lake district, and the Eden Valley. If the Lakeland axes and volcanic material were acquired and transported by people, as opposed to glacial ice, rivers and the sea, the implications are very significant. Ancient people were exploiting the renowned and remote Langdale axe resource thousands of years before the first axe factories of their Neolithic successors were in production. Stanton's revelations don't end at the Mesolithic. In succeeding centuries the river Eden's course and the adjacent landscape changed. Wooden Neolithic structures and artifacts, including two wooden tridents and a paddle, were found in these sediments. Elsewhere, other excavations along the course of the bypass produced Bronze Age pottery and cut through the Roman turf wall and Vallum. Rescue archaeology may have its issues, but it would be difficult to argue against the astonishing stories that West Staten has generated. Seen from space, there are two features that dominate Cumbria's geography. One is the Lake District, and the other is the Solway Firth. The River Eden, along with the river Esk, empties into here. Unlike its prominent neighbour to the south, the Lake District, the Solway may appear passive, a flat land devoid of much appeal, and certainly any geological interest. But to adapt a quote about land around the wash, any fool can appreciate mountains, it takes someone of true discernment to appreciate the Solway. The inner Solway is perhaps one of Cumbria's most active environments. The estuarine system of mudbanks, sand flats and salt marshes is dynamic, with shifting channels and multiple episodes of erosion and deposition. This place is one of the youngest rocks in our book, and it continues to change dramatically. In the nineteenth century tidal flows and then thick ice moved at such speed that they damaged the iron piers of the Solway Rail Viaduct near Bones on Solway, a precursor to its ultimate demise. Within a decade of eighteen eighty, the channel to the harbour at Port Carlisle shifted, leaving the harbour and the canal to the city of Carlisle silted up and marooned. The foreshore muds and sands change their distribution daily, and tides can strip them bare to reveal scours, oscars, banks of stones and clays. These were deposited by ice sheets around twenty thousand years ago, when the solway was a junction for glaciers flowing across northern Britain. On occasions the stumps of submerged forest around seven thousand years old are revealed. Today the Solway is of international importance to wildlife and to naturalists. It is home for migrating, wading and wintering birds, and is the third largest intertidal habitat in Britain. Tranquil it may be, passive it is not. It would be a bit of a stretch on a route defined by a river, to now take you a few kilometres south onto one of the big solway mosses. Peat bogs of enormous proportions that not only produce peat for fuel, but also preserve probable prehistoric bog bodies. I did want to travel a few more kilometres to Great Orton and Watch Tree Nature Reserve to tell a tale about Cumbria's very own secret Jurassic Park. Yes, with fossils to prove it. But that's for another set of stories. Next time it's back to the North Pennines and down the river Weir.