Epitaph for the Ash: In Search of Recovery and Renewal. Lisa Samson

clusters of the plants, heavy with fruit, ripe for the table.

      We are climbing up a slope stretching down to the Ingleton road, which cuts through the valley. Beyond the road many gentle humps rise like sand dunes. They are glacial landforms called drumlins. Their names reveal much about local concerns: Hunter Hill, Goat Close Hill, Swinesett Hill and, higher up, Deer Bank. The original forest would have covered this field and the road, but was cleared before the 1600s, when Furness Abbey used the area for grazing and parkland. That was how it came by its present name: Colt Park. Colt Park Lodge was a stud farm belonging to Furness Abbey, which managed its land by dividing it into lodges or farmsteads. A high ground limestone pasture, such as this, contains more calcium in the soil than low-lying fields and would have made the perfect grazing area for young horses. It would also help to prevent them developing laminitis, an unpleasant disease that swells their hooves and leaves them lame.

      We retrace our steps across the meadow, passing the barn and the farmhouse. Sheep graze on rough grass above Ribblehead Viaduct and a curlew calls from Park Fell above us. We are walking downhill, past the northern end of the wood, which I am sure would once have extended much further towards Gauber High Pasture, where we are heading. Above the quarry, a few piles of rubble are hidden among the grassy hillocks and sheep droppings. I climb up and walk around them, trying to make out the shape of the former structure.

      As I stand facing Park Fell, the remains of the building are barely discernible, just tufts of grass and stones poking out of the uneven slope of the fell. When initial excavations of the site took place in the last century, it was thought that the structure resembled a Norse farmstead, and three Viking coins from the ninth century seemed to confirm this. The reason there are hardly any ruins left to study is not that archaeologists have taken them away: extraction of stone for sale became a lucrative business from the 1870s, reaching a peak in the 1930s, when a number of ‘rockery merchants’ sprang up in the area.

      Whoever built here on Gauber High Pasture would have been well aware of the protection the trees would afford their families, livestock and crops in this unforgiving landscape. The trees create and maintain warmth, a serious consideration on a windswept hillside. It is likely that the wood stretched across the pasture, and that some of the trees were cut back for crops to be planted. The ashwood would have protected homes from heavy rain and strong wind and helped to keep the occupants warm, providing wood for fuel.

      The Coucher Book of Furness Abbey, published in 1916, includes a reference to a hermitage near a wood on the land owned by William de Mowbray, who appears to have ceded certain land rights to Lord Adam de Staveley: ‘and the hermitage will remain waste on condition that there will be none there except with the permission of William de Mowbrai save for the woods, meadow and pasture for Adam and his heirs’. Arthur Batty and Noel Crack, members of the Ingleborough Archaeological Group, developed a theory that the ruins of the building might be the hermitage, while the woods de Mowbray’s document refers to are Colt Park ashwood and the pasture is Gauber. They reached this conclusion after spending many years searching the landscape and the literature relating to the area’s religious houses; they located this spot on Gauber High Pasture following directions from The Coucher Book.

      In 1974 when Alan King unearthed certain artefacts from the ruins of the larger section of the dwelling, he found a complete rotary quern for grinding cereals, a lath-turned spindle whorl for turning wool into yarn and a small bell. Batty and Crack concluded that these items, along with a sword beater of iron with a wooden handle, indicate that the inhabitants were highly skilled and self-sufficient. The presence of the ashwood supports their theory: it would have supplied wood for tool handles, herbs, some fruit and other flavourings for food.

      It is possible to imagine a life for the hermits or monks, who would have walked daily up to the ashwood to forage, wearing their homespun robes. They would probably have had a sturdy loom made from ash. They would have grown their own crops, ground their grain with the quern and baked it into bread. These utilitarian objects have survived many hundreds of years to tell us about their simple daily lives. In Ireland, Wales, northern England and Scotland, there were many such small monastic outposts on hillsides, beside lakes and rivers in uplands and isolated valleys in the early centuries of Christianity. The monks sought a life of solitude and prayer and were usually highly skilled in crafts, with a good knowledge of agriculture and herbs. Colt Park Wood would have provided for all their needs.