Prehistoric Man At Portin-Scale.

( Originally Published 1902 )

PEOPLE who have passed through Portinscale heretofore, have been chiefly in mind of the Romans, who perhaps ran their Finkle Street therefrom on the way to Causeway Pike ; of the Vikings, who had their huts near the " Ford of the Thing," which probably gave the name of Portinscale to the hamlet ; or of the Norse chieftain Sweyn, who had his "high seat" on the hill that still bears his name, " Swinside," of today. Henceforth they will remember that long years before the Romans came, or the Viking Shepherd lords were paramount, there were dwelling a race of men hereabout whose weapons and tools were of chert or volcanic lava, whose home was on the border of a woody swamp, and part of whose craftmanship and means of livelihood was the making of stone axes.

Anyone who walks along Finkle Street towards "Nichol Ending," en route for Borrow-dale and Newlands, will note that rather more than a quarter of a mile from Portinscale, the hill slope of Portinscale on the north, of Fawe Wood on the south-east, and of Swinside on the south, sink down and converge, on the right hand of the road, in a wooded bottom a bit of marshland, which time out of mind has been called "The Moss." Many of the landholders, the Vicar of Crosthwaite among them, have certain rights of peat-getting in the moss, and the peat-getting of ancient days has added to the swampy character of the little woodland.

The swamp comes to within 150 yards of Derwentwater; but unless Derwentwater's level was in old days very much higher than it is now, it is not likely that the lake entered the moss. The Romans, when they ran their Finkle Street, probably knew that the lake did not overflow into the marsh, and as there is enough fall for the water of the moss to the west, when the drains are kept clear, to make it improbable that if the lake at full flood flowed that way it would have permanently stayed in 'the bottom.' In the earliest times,. before the peat was, and when the oak trees grew up out of the blue clay, it is, I think, improbable that there was more than a swamp, which could doubtless have been made into a permanent bit of water if it had been dammed up at the western end of the moss. No trace of such dam is found. From the northern side of the wood the meadow land slopes up gradually to high ground between the moss and the road from Portinscale to Braithwaite. Of course it is possible that when Derwentwater and Bassenthwaite were one lake, this hill slope was an island," but that would be before the stone-axe-maker's day.

There is no fairer slope for sun and warmth than this hill-side ; and I have often thought that in the olden days, when the forest was down in the meadows towards Ullock, there may have been here a clearing for huts and village life. When Mr. Birkett, the owner of the sloping meadows, determined to parcel it out for building, and an old fence was being dug down between the moss and the slope, the diggers came upon a well-made hard-gravelled road, which joined the main road from Portinscale to Nichol Ending. This may be evidence of such a village, or of the roadway to Ullock and Swinside—Sweyn's Sitting—or of the long lost ancient Pilgrim Way to Nichol Ending and St. Herbert's Isle.

As the diggers dug out the soft soil to construct the main carriage way up to the new houses from the main road, a singularly interesting little find of pre-Reformation time was found. It was the centre matrix of what had been a triple stone-mould used by some travelling moulder in old days, to mould little crosses and crucifixes, with pins for the affixing of these to the coats of purchasers ; those purchasers, in all probability, being the pilgrims who came across from the west to take boat at Nichol Ending, the landing where stood the chapel of the boatmen's patron saint, St. Nicholas, and to cross over for the famous shrine of St. Herbert in Derwentwater. I have had a cast made, and a photograph taken of this, and the stone, which is of a close-grained silicious slate, is now in the Fitz Park Museum. The remarkable feature of the crucifix is that it represents the Christ, emaciated to a skeleton, upon the cross. In the British Museum are specimens of the same kind of moulder's stone, and Mr. Reid, who examined this specimen, pronounced it to be late fourteenth or early fifteenth century work. The shrine on St. Herbert's Island to his memory, and the memory of his friend St. Cuthbert, was erected in the year 1374 ; so that it is not unlikely that a great number of pilgrims would be passing to the lake from the west, any time at the end of the fourteenth century or the beginning of the next.

But it is not of Roman or Viking or middle-century pilgrim we think as we gaze down on the moss today. I t is of the aboriginal and pre-historic man who here had his abode and followed his calling. Mr. Tyndall Harris, of Moss Garth, had determined to dig out the peat moss in the meadow beneath his house on the southern side of the woodland, and make a little bit of ornamental water for fish-breeding purposes there. In the third week of October, a man named Downie found some queer-looking stones at the south-east side of the bit of pond work, and threw them aside on the bank, which they were building to form the pond side. In the last week he and his fellow-workers uncovered what seemed to be the branch of a large oak tree, or the stem of a young oak tree, about 18 inches in diameter, lying east and west. It lay on blue clay, about 18 inches beneath the peat. The tree was very much corroded, and had probably been once of greater girth ; on the south side of it there were lying four more of the queer stones, not in a clump, but more or less end-on, and by the side of the tree. Birkett, the contractor, knew these to be shaped by the hand of man, and secured them. They were unpolished Celts, but very beautifully worked, and very carefully graduated in size. These sizes were as follows :

Chips were, so I learned, lying about, but none of these could be afterwards found, and I doubt if they were chips at all. No stone hammers nor stone polishers were discoverable anywhere near. The tree itself was lifted and buried away in the pond bank. As soon as I heard of the find I went over with a friend, got the spot marked down as near as possible, and had a photograph taken. What interested one most was to find that, lying in what appeared at first sight to be a rough circle, were small boulders of apparently the same material as that of which the celts were made, with the same white patina upon them as we found upon the ' celts ' themselves. One boulder had marks upon it made either by man or by ice before the patina of ages of peat moss had overlaid it. Another small boulder was split, perhaps by fire, with a cleavage as clean as if it had been cut with a saw.

No traces of ashes, or urn, or bones were to be found ; and though there were many tree branches and bits of oak, some soft, others hard as bog oak, which had been unearthed, none appeared to have been trimmed for use. It was clear, however, that one trunk had been very roughly hacked at, perhaps with a stone tool.

I heard of only one upright, about 4 feet 6 inches long and I0 inches in diameter. It had apparently some rude tool marks on it, but I could not decide if it was the standing stem of a tree or a stake. Of course, it suggested a lake habitation, but it did not seem likely that the moss was extensive enough, nor the place of the find of the stone axes far enough from the upward slope of the hill or moss edge, to warrant more than the suggestion that this was a lake dwelling. There were no whorls, no sinkers, no shells, no fish-hooks to be found in the moss.

But the fact of the stone axes being found lying along the side of the tree trunk, made one hazard the guess that whoever worked these axes had used the tree trunk, which in those days before its disintegration was larger in girth, as a snug and rememberable place to hide them under. Death came upon him, or he fled in some tribal attack, and never returned to claim his stock-in-trade. But the reason for their making at this particular place was plain. Here primeval man, the cunningest axe-maker for all one knows of the whole Crosthwaite valley, had found as he wandered through the wild wood just the bits of fine-grained lava and altered volcanic ash he needed for his axes, and here, with patience and skill unspeakable, he had followed his difficult calling here he set himself to turn out the big axe for the big man, the little axe for the little lad ; lava for the weapon was in plenty round about him, oak in abundance, for the axe hafting, to his hand.

I wrote Canon Greenwell of the find, and asked him if a date could be fixed for the Celts, and subjoin his reply :

"DURHAM, Nov. 26, 1901.

" I am much obliged for telling me of the stone axes, etc. It looks as if they were the stock-in-trade of a manufacturer of such tools, and which had somehow or other been left before they were finished by polishing. Though I think in the polished stone period, 0r even in the bronze one, some folk were satisfied to use a stone merely chipped into shape, while others had them polished. The pieces of the same stone as that of which the axes were made seems to indicate their having been made on the spot.

"The axes were probably of Neolithic times, certainly not of Paleolithic, but stone was used to a great extent throughout the Bronze Age, and it is therefore unsafe to say that such axes as these certainly belong to the Neolithic Age."

The experts I consulted at the British Museum, put the Celts at any date between 3000 and 1500 B.C., but were not disposed to agree with my suggestion that we had here an axe factory of Neolithic man, pending some confirmation such as the flakings of axes or the bruised stones used by the flaker, as may be seen in some of the finds preserved in the British Museum. At Ehenside Tarn, axes both rough and polished have been found ; here in the Portinscale Moss only axes in the rough had been discovered. But late in January by good fortune another, making in all the eighth Celt, was found bedded in the blue clay, and this was a polished Celt. It remained for us to find some trace of the polisher's tool. This, or a stone that might well have served for this, was found in the same week, a stone that had evidently been itself polished by being used in the polishing process. At the same time in another part of the moss a flake of flint was discovered, which bore traces of having been worked by some flint-knife or arrow maker of olden time. This looked as if the axe maker was an arrow maker as well.

But the interest of the find did not cease here. Laid on the boulder clay were smallish boulders of the volcanic ash or lava of which the Celts had been made. One had apparently been partially bored by some weapon that looked as if it had been shaped like a small hand-pickaxe ; the boreholes were on opposite sides of the stone. Birkett the contractor, a handy ingenious man, determined to try his hand at axe-making after the ways of Neolithic man, and feeling that " t'awld fellers hed bean at this particular stean," he split it, and found to his surprise that within the bore holes were still sticking solid cores of whitish-grey lime, and bits of the same lime were lying on the clay near by. He remembered that his father had told him how in Borrowdale it was the custom to split boulders in this same way by use of quicklime. The Borrowdalian within the memory of man bored his boulder, put in quicklime, which he "stemmed " down or rammed tight, round a little conical piece of iron called a " pricker." The pricker was withdrawn, water was poured in, and a bit of wood hammered down tight as a kind of bung in the bore-hole mouth. The expansion of gases evolved by the action of water on quicklime was so great that it caused the boulder to split, and, without knowing it, the Borrowdalian had been but carrying on a method his fore-elders had learned from Neolithic man in days when blasting powder had not been dreamed of.

One cannot of course do more than hazard the guess that here in the Portinscale Moss are proofs, not only that the stone axe-maker of prehistoric time was busy, but that he was helped by chemical laws he could not understand, yet could trust to do his work for him, to prepare the rough material for his clever hands. That power to split volcanic-lava stones, by the use of a little quicklime and water, would invest him doubtless with consider-able awe, and we can believe that this little clearing by the Moss, with its surrounding sanctuary of oak-wood, was looked upon in Neolithic days as the abode of an enchanter and the home of mystery.

It is still the home of mystery, and if we allow of romance in the realm of prehistoric investigation, it is more than ever the abode of enchantment still. Echoes of the axe-maker hammering away at his stone weapons are lost in the chanting of pilgrim litanies to the shrine of the friend of Cuthbert of Lindisfarne. And what can we do but reach out hands across the centuries hands of wonder for the patience of those who chipped the lava into shapely axes, of reverence for the faith and love of the later craftsman who, near by, moulded his little crucifixes and ornaments for the pilgrims to St. Herbert's Isle.