Cumberland
The Shape of It
A county named after its people, bounded by a Roman wall, and wetter than almost anywhere in England.
The name says everything, though few visitors stop to hear it. Cumberland — land of the Cumbri, the people who called themselves kumbri or kambri, from a Brittonic word meaning, roughly, fellow countrymen. The same root gives us Cambria, and Cymry, the Welsh word for the Welsh. In other words, the county’s name is the last faint echo of a time when Cumberland and Wales shared a language, a people, and perhaps a sense of having been pushed to the margins by every successive wave of invaders.
In 945, Edmund I ravaged all of “Cumbraland” and handed it to the King of Scots in exchange for military support. The arrangement did not last, but the name did. The border between England and Scotland was not settled permanently until the Treaty of York in 1237, and even then it remained the scene of continuous raiding and bloodshed for four more centuries. Carlisle alone was besieged, captured, and recaptured so many times that the castle lost count.
Two kings died here without achieving what they came for. David I of Scotland died in Carlisle in 1153. Edward I of England — Hammer of the Scots, as his admirers called him — was carried north to Burgh by Sands in 1307, eight miles from the border, and died there. He never crossed it. The village has a monument to him. Scotland has not erected one in return.
The landscape that shaped all of this is not modest. Scafell Pike at 978 metres is England’s roof; Seathwaite in Borrowdale receives more than three metres of rain per year, making it the wettest inhabited place in England. Hardknott Pass, at a gradient of one in three, is still enough to stop an unprepared motorist. Long Meg and Her Daughters — a prehistoric stone circle near Little Salkeld, the third largest in England after Avebury and Stanton Drew — stands on a broad plateau as if it has been waiting for someone to ask it a question. The red sandstone outlier known as Long Meg is said to be a Scottish witch petrified by a wizard. Local tradition holds that if you count the stones twice and get the same answer, the spell will break and she will walk again. Nobody has managed it yet.
Hadrian’s Wall, begun in AD 122, runs from the North Sea to the Solway Firth, ending on Cumberland’s shore at Bowness-on-Solway. The Romans were here for nearly three hundred years and left an infrastructure of forts, roads, and civilian settlements that outlasted the empire by centuries. Their principal civilian settlement, Luguvallium, became Carlisle. The name survived two language changes and several sieges to remain, improbably, the county town.
Notable Folk
The Cumbrian tradition is to produce remarkable people and then not to make too much fuss about it.
The Local Tongue
Three languages met here over fifteen centuries and left their words in the landscape, the farming calendar, and the sheep pens.
Cumbrian dialect is descended from Northern Old English, shaped by Norse settlement along every beck and fell, and still carrying traces of Cumbric — the ancient Brittonic language that died elsewhere in England a thousand years ago, but survived here as numbers. Shepherds in the Cumbrian fells counted their flocks not in English but in the remnant of a language more closely related to Welsh than to anything their neighbours spoke.
Sethera — Lethera — Hovera — Dovera — Dick
Yan-a-Dick — Tan-a-Dick — Tethera-Dick — Pethera-Dick — Bumfit
Yan-a-Bumfit — Tan-a-Bumfit — Tethera-Bumfit — Pethera-Bumfit — Giggot
One to twenty in the Lakeland sheep-counting system. At twenty — a giggot or score — the shepherd transferred a pebble from one pocket to the other and began again. It is the most practical form of the Cumbric language still in use. Some linguists believe the same number words, worn smooth by centuries of children, survive as the nursery rhyme “Hickory Dickory Dock.”
The Norse contribution is harder to miss, because it is written into the map. The fell, the beck, the tarn, the ghyll, the dale — these are all Norse words, carried here by settlers from Ireland and the Isle of Man in the ninth and tenth centuries. They gave the landscape its vocabulary so thoroughly that it is now impossible to describe the terrain without speaking Old Norse. A few ordinary dialect words:
Place Names
Latin, Brittonic, Norse, Old English — Cumberland’s map is a stratigraphy of everyone who passed through.
Most of the fell and valley names are Norse, carried by settlers from Ireland and the Isle of Man from the ninth century onwards. The coastal and lowland names are older — Brittonic survivals or Roman settlements wearing medieval English clothes. The county’s own name is the oldest layer of all.
A characteristic of Cumberland is the ‘thwaite’ suffix: clearing, from Norse thveit. It appears dozens of times across the county and marks the locations where Norse settlers pushed back the forest to farm. Every thwaite was once a small act of land-clearing, and the name has lasted seven hundred years longer than the trees.
At the Table
A county serious enough about its sausage to have it legally protected, and honest enough about its fish to admit it is found nowhere else.
The Cumberland Sausage
The Cumberland sausage is long, made only of pork, heavily seasoned with black pepper and herbs, and coiled flat in a spiral rather than linked into segments. It has been made this way for over five hundred years. The coil is not an eccentricity but a practical consequence of the sausage’s length — traditional versions ran to fifty centimetres or more and would not fit in a pan any other way.
Some food historians believe the recipe was introduced by German miners who came to work the Borrowdale graphite deposits in the sixteenth century, bringing their spicing traditions with them. Others find no evidence for this at all. The sausage itself has not settled the question. In 2011 it became one of the first British foods to receive Protected Geographical Indication status, meaning that a sausage labelled “Cumberland” must now be made within the historic boundaries of Cumberland and to a defined specification. The coil is in the definition.
Then there is the char. Daniel Defoe, passing through in the early eighteenth century, recorded Windermere as “famous for the char fish found here and hereabout, and no where else in England… It is a curious fish, and, as a dainty, is potted, and sent far and near, as presents to the best friends.” The char (Salvelinus alpinus) is a relic of the last ice age: a cold-water fish left behind in the deep lakes when the glaciers retreated, surviving in Cumberland’s water when it could no longer survive in England’s warming lowland rivers. It is still there, and still potted, though Defoe’s claim of exclusivity is somewhat weakened by its presence in several other deep lakes.
Cumberland rum butter — dark rum beaten with butter, brown sugar, nutmeg, and cinnamon — was traditionally served at christenings, where the baby was passed over the bowl, and at funerals, where no explanation was required. The custom of serving it at both the beginning and end of life suggests a sensible attitude towards occasions that call for something stronger than tea but more dignified than just drinking.
Customs & Contests
A county that has maintained the world championship of face-pulling since at least 1267, and sees no reason to stop.
Chartered by Henry III in 1266, the Crab Fair takes its name from the crab apples that the Lord of Egremont traditionally threw from a cart to the crowd along the main street. This custom continues. The fair also includes a greasy pole, a pipe-smoking competition, a wheelbarrow race, a parade, and Cumberland and Westmorland wrestling. It is one of the oldest continuously running fairs in the world. In 2023 the Guinness Book of World Records confirmed it holds the longest-running gurning competition in history.
Gurning is the competitive pulling of the most grotesque face possible through a horse collar called a braffin. The origins are obscure: one account traces it to the mockery of a village idiot; another to a farmer arriving home to an angry wife; a third simply to the existence of a horse collar and too much time. Tommy Mattinson of Egremont won the men’s title eighteen consecutive times, a world record confirmed by Guinness. His dominance is less mysterious than it appears: he had his remaining teeth removed to improve his range.
Wrestlers begin by standing chest-to-chest, each placing their chin on their opponent’s right shoulder and wrapping their arms around them. They must not release this hold, and the first to touch the ground with any part of the body other than their feet loses. The style is said to derive from Viking and Irish settlers, and the rules have been substantially unchanged for centuries. Competitors wear white jackets and long-johns, often embroidered. It is a sport that looks decorous from a distance and is extremely difficult up close.
Signs & Songs
What gets written down in a county where even the pub songs turn out to have a philological problem.
D’ye ken John Peel wi’ his coat so grey,
D’ye ken John Peel at the break of day?
D’ye ken John Peel when he’s far, far away,
With his hounds and his horn in the morning?
— John Woodcock Graves, Caldbeck, 1829; dialect version
And the cry of his hounds has me oft-times led;
For Peel’s view-holler would waken the dead,
Or the fox from his lair in the morning.
John Peel (1776–1854) was a real huntsman from Caldbeck who hunted the fells on foot for over fifty years, keeping a pack of hounds and a reputation for endurance that outlasted several horses. His friend Graves wrote the song one evening in 1829 while their children played around the hearth. The original dialect word was grey — the undyed, natural-coloured wool coat that fell farmers wore. When the song was published and spread south, an editor changed “grey” to “gay,” which scanned the same and meant nothing at all. It is the version most people know. Caldbeck knows otherwise.
And ye shall walk in silk attire,
And siller hae to spare,
Gin ye’ll consent to be his bride,
Nae mair o’ grief and care.
O wha wad prove sae base a heart
For gear or for estate,
To wed the ane that she lo’ed na,
And let the true love wait?
— Susanna Blamire (1747–1794), “And Ye Shall Walk in Silk Attire”; two stanzas. Set to music by Joseph Haydn. Not published in her lifetime.
Nowt wrong wi’ t’ weather in Cumberland —
it’s just t’ wrong weather comin’ at t’ wrong time.
Local saying, provenance varied.
Did You Know?
A selection of facts that reward sitting with.
- That George Washington’s paternal grandmother, Mildred Gale, is buried at the Church of St Nicholas in Whitehaven? She had moved to Cumberland after remarrying a local man. The grave is still there. It is not particularly well signposted.
- That the world’s first pencil was made of graphite discovered in Borrowdale in the sixteenth century — initially used by shepherds to mark their sheep? The Borrowdale deposit was the only known source of solid, pure graphite in the world. It was so strategically valuable (essential for lining cannonball moulds) that the Crown took over the mines, flooded them between workings to prevent theft, and imposed penalties for smuggling. England held a pencil monopoly until 1662.
- That John Paul Jones, the American naval commander, attacked Whitehaven with two small boats in April 1778 during the American War of Independence, in what is considered the last naval raid on a British port by a foreign enemy? His plan was to burn the entire fleet in the harbour. His crew stopped at a tavern on the way to the docks and the operation stalled. Only one ship was set alight before they retreated.
- That Fletcher Christian, who led the mutiny on the Bounty in 1789, was born less than a mile from where William Wordsworth was born, in a valley just outside Cockermouth? The two left Cumberland in different directions. Wordsworth’s journey is better documented.
- That John Dalton, who gave us the modern atomic theory, was also colour-blind — and that his investigation of his own condition produced the first scientific paper on colour blindness? He left his eyes to medical science, and they were examined in 1995 using DNA analysis, confirming what he had always suspected about himself.
- That Long Meg, the red sandstone outlier at the Long Meg and Her Daughters stone circle near Little Salkeld, is decorated with spiral carvings that have been there since the Bronze Age? The circle is the third largest in England. Local tradition holds that counting the stones gives a different number every time, and that anyone who counts them twice and reaches the same answer will break the witch’s spell.
- That Edward I — who had himself carried north on campaign against Scotland — died at Burgh by Sands in 1307, within sight of the Solway Firth, eight miles from the border? He never crossed it. His last instruction was that his bones be carried at the front of every future campaign into Scotland. His son had them buried in Westminster Abbey instead.
- That Carlisle is named after a Roman fort, through a Cumbric word meaning “fort,” applied to a Latin personal name, transliterated through Old English? The name Luguvallium became caer lwywelyd in Cumbric, then Luel and Carliol in Middle English, and finally Carlisle. At no point did anyone particularly agree on how to spell it.
- That the sheep-counting numbers yan, tan, tethera are derived from Cumbric, the Celtic language that died out in most of England by the sixth century? The system was still in use among fell shepherds in the eighteenth century. Some linguists believe the same number words, compressed by children into a rhyme, survive as “Hickory Dickory Dock.”
- That Cumberland sausage was one of the first British foods to receive Protected Geographical Indication status from the European Commission (2011), legally protecting the name and method? The coil is specified in the definition.
- That Seathwaite in Borrowdale receives more than three metres of rain per year, making it the wettest inhabited place in England? It is in one of the most visited valleys in the Lake District. The two facts are not unrelated.
- That during the Second World War, the Cumberland Pencil Company in Keswick manufactured special pencils for Royal Air Force airmen containing hidden compasses and silk maps? They were designed to be issued in escape kits and looked, from the outside, entirely ordinary.
- That Carlisle once had a ship canal? Built in 1823 and running eleven and a half miles to Solway Firth, it allowed ships built inland to be floated out to sea. It was in use for barely thirty years before the railway made it redundant. The railway arrived in 1847.
- That the fortified churches of Cumberland — a number of medieval churches built with pele towers for defence against Scottish raids — are unique in England? Nowhere else found it necessary to give its congregations a refugetower attached to the place of worship. The raids that made them necessary continued for three hundred years.
- That George Graham of Kirklinton, Cumberland, built the transit instrument used by Edmond Halley at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, and is largely responsible for the precision of eighteenth-century British astronomy? He charged nothing for instruments lent to scientists who could not afford them. He was the greatest instrument-maker of his age and is buried in Westminster Abbey next to Thomas Tompion. He is not especially famous there either.
This page draws on original research, including: the Cumbria County History Trust’s published facts; the Victoria County History of Cumberland (1901, 1905); William Hutchinson’s History of the County of Cumberland (1794); Henry Lonsdale’s Worthies of Cumberland (1867–75); the Lakeland Dialect Society glossary; Patrick Maxwell’s preface to The Poetical Works of Miss Susanna Blamire (1842); William Rollinson’s A Cumbrian Dictionary of Dialect, Tradition and Folklore; and miscellaneous local and county histories. The editorial voice, emphases, and errors of selection are a later hand’s.