BY W. G. COLLINGWOOD, M.A., F.S.A., Editor to the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archæological Society; Author of "The Life of John Ruskin," etc. THIRD EDITION—REVISED AND ENLARGED. Kendal: Titus Wilson, Publisher. 1906. PRESS NOTICES OF THE EARLIER EDITIONS. "A capital little guide book."— Daily News. "It is an interesting little volume."— Manchester Guardian. "The ideal of a guide book."— Carlisle Patriot. "An excellent guide."— Carlisle Journal. "Confidently recommended."— Ulverst

Our first walk is naturally to climb the Coniston Old Man. By the easiest route, which fortunately is the most interesting, there is a path to the top; good as paths go on mountains—that is, plain to find—and by its very steepness and stoniness all the more of a change from the town pavement and the hard high road. It is quite worth while making the ascent on a cloudy day. The loss of the panorama is amply compensated by the increased grandeur of the effects of gloom and mystery on the higher cr

Coniston Water it is called by the public now-a-days, but its proper name is Thurston Water. So it is written in all old documents, maps, and books up to the modern tourist period. In the deed of 1196 setting forth the boundaries of Furness Fells it is called Thorstanes Watter , and in lawyer's Latin Turstini Watra , which proves that the lake got its title from some early owner whose Norse name was Thorstein; in Latin, Turstinus; in English, Thurston. In the same way Ullswater was Ulf's water,

The Beacon of Blawith, already noticed, can be climbed in about half-an-hour from Lakebank Hotel. South of the cairn on the top is Beacon Tarn, and two miles south-west over the heather (in which are various unimportant cairns and platforms, perhaps ancient, but more probably "tries" for slate) rises Blawith Knott, and beyond, at its foot where four roads meet, the Giant's Grave. The Giant's Grave can be easily reached by road; 2-1/2 miles from Woodland Station, or 4 miles ( via Blawith and Subb

South of Lakebank, turning to left down a narrow lane through the hamlet of Water Yeat, we reach Bouthray (Bouldery) Bridge over the Crake, and see, half a mile further down, the new Blawith Church on the site of an old Elizabethan chapel. Opposite it, across the river by a footbridge, is Low Nibthwaite bobbin mill—in the eighteenth century an important "forge" where iron was smelted with charcoal. Crossing the bridge, and leaving Arklid Farm on the right, 1-1/2 mile from Lakebank brings us to N

Up the road behind the Railway Station, in twenty-five minutes you reach the gate of Banniside Moor, which we passed in descending the Old Man. Along the quarry road to the right towards Crowberry Haws, about a third of a mile from the gate, below you on the right-hand side is an ancient garth of irregular rectangular shape, with a circular dwelling in the middle of the highest side. A small outlying building is just to the south-east. This seems more modern in type than some of the remains we f

There are no Roman remains at Coniston; but a great Roman road passed just to the north of the township from the camp, still visible, at Ambleside, through Little Langdale, over Wrynose and Hardknott to the camp at Hardknott Castle, and so down Eskdale to the port of Ravenglass, where at Walls Castle there are the site of a camp and the ruin of a Roman villa. It is possible that a trackway used in Roman times passed through Hawkshead, for fragments of Roman brick have been found at Hawkshead Hal

After the Romans left, until the middle of the seventh century this district remained in the hands of the Cumbri or Welsh, who probably dwelt in some of the ancient moorland settlements we have already visited. They have perhaps left traces in the language, but less than is often asserted. Some have thought "Old Man" to be a corruption of the Welsh Allt Maen , "high stone" or "stone of the slope." But even if it be more reasonably explained as we have suggested, the word "man" for a stone or cai

When the Angles or English settled in the country, as they did in the seventh century, they came in by two routes, which can be traced by their place-names and their grave monuments. One was by Stainmoor and the Cumberland coast, round to Ravenglass; and the other by Craven to the coast of Morecambe Bay. There is no evidence of their settlement in the Lake District fells, except in the Keswick neighbourhood, where the story of St. Herbert gives us a hint that though the fell country might not be

Who then settled the dales, cleared the forest, drained the swamps, and made the wilderness into fields and farms? Let us walk to-day through the valleys to the north of the village, and ask by the way what the country can tell us of its history. Leaving the church we come in a few minutes to Yewdale Beck. Why "beck?" Nobody here calls it "brook," as in the Saxon south, nor "burn," as in the Anglian north. In the twelfth century, as now, the name was "Ywedallbec," showing that it had been named

The Norman Conquest, it must be understood, did not touch the Lake District. William the Conqueror and his men never entered Cumbria, nor even High Furness. The dales are not surveyed in Domesday , and the few landowners mentioned on the fringe of the fells are obviously of Norse or Celtic origin—Duvan and Thorolf, and Ornulf and Orm, Gospatric and Gillemichael. After William Rufus had seized Carlisle, the territory of Cumbria and Westmorland was granted to various lords; but the dales were the

The Furness monks were of the Cistercian order; which is to say, they were farmers rather than scholars or mere recluses and devotees. To understand them in the days of their power, we must put aside all the vulgar nonsense about fat friars or visionary fakirs, and see them as a company of shareholders or college of gentlemen from the best landowning families, whose object in their association was, of course, the service of God in their abbey church; but, outside of it, the development of agricu

In 1196 the baron of Kendal was Gilbert fitz Roger fitz Reinfrid, who had got his lordship by marriage with Heloise, granddaughter of William I. de Lancaster. In her right he claimed Furness as well. So did the abbey, and the result of this dispute we have seen in the division of the fells. There was a family at Urswick who, to judge by their name, might have been descendants of the old Norse settlers. Adam fitz Bernulf held land there of Sir Michael le Fleming about 1150; Orm fitz Bernulf was o

There was probably no church at Coniston before the time of Queen Elizabeth, though services may have been held by the squire's chaplain. Monk Coniston was, and still is ecclesiastically, in the parish of Hawkshead. Coniston Church was built in 1586 by William Fleming, the "gentleman of great pomp and expence." It was consecrated and made parochial by Bishop Chaderton; the original dedication is not known. In 1650 the Parliamentary enquiry shows that there was no maintenance but the £1 19s. 10d.

That the copper mines were worked by the Romans and the Saxons is only a surmise. Dr. A. C. Gibson, F.S.A., writing in 1866, said:—"Recent operations have from time to time disclosed old workings which have obviously been made at a very early period, by the primitive method of lighting great fires upon the veins containing ore and, when sufficiently heated, pouring cold water upon the rock, and so, by the sudden abstraction of caloric, rending, cracking and making a circumscribed portion workabl

In our tour of the lake we have noticed that there are remains of old iron works along its margin, now difficult to trace. In High Furness, the district of which Coniston Lake is the centre, and the most northern part of Lancashire, there are about thirty known sites where iron was smelted in the ancient way with charcoal, producing a bloom —the lump of metal made by blowing in the furnace—whence the name bloomeries . Of these sites about half are in the valley of Coniston, and eight are actuall

Roofing slabs have been found in the ruins of Calder Abbey and the Well Chapel at Gosforth, both mediæval; in the mansion on Lord's Island, Derwentwater, destroyed before the end of the seventeenth century, we found green Borrowdale roofing slates. Purple Skiddaw roofing slates were also found in the ruins of a seventeenth and eighteenth century cottage at Causeway Head near Keswick. But it was not until the eighteenth century that quarrying began to develop. Mr. H. S. Cowper, in his History of

In spite of local production, iron was not plentiful in the eighteenth century. Iron nails were too valuable for common use, though they are found in quantities at the old furnaces on Peel Island and elsewhere, which must date from an earlier period. Wooden pegs were substituted in making kists and other furniture, house roofs, doors and boats. The trade in woodwork of many kinds flourished in Coniston and its neighbourhood. We have already mentioned the sixteenth century "Cowpers and Turners, w

The poet Gray, author of The Elegy in a Country Churchyard , in his tour of 1769, and Gilpin, in search of the picturesque, in 1772, did not seem to hear of Coniston as worth seeing. The earliest literary description is that of Thomas West, the Scotch Roman-Catholic priest, who wrote the Antiquities of Furness in 1774. He illustrated his book with a map "As Survey'd by Wm. Brasier 1745," in which are marked Coniston Kirk, Hall, Waterhead, Townend, Thurston Water, Piel I., Nibthwaite, Furnace, Ni