100 Interesting Facts
We have now achieved our target of posting 100 Interesting Facts! These Facts have been submitted by our volunteers and friends. Click on a 'fact' for more Backgound information. If YOU have a Fact you'd like to share, please Contact Us , giving us references so we can check - as before posting anything, our team of historians have to be sure it REALLY IS a fact, not a myth!
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It’s been called Cumbria for more than a thousand years – but the county of that name only lasted forty-nine
The third largest stone circle in England (after Avebury and Stanton Drew) and the 6th largest in Britain, Ireland, and Brittany) lies just to the north of the small village of Little Salkeld.
Cumbria has a unique group of fortified churches, built for defence against the Scots
Daniel Defoe wrote, concerning Windermere, that it was “ … 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 ‘Giant’s Grave’ in St Andrew’s churchyard, Penrith, is in fact an important collection of Viking-Age monuments.
Eliza Lynn (1822–1898) is difficult to pin down. She broke boundaries by becoming England’s first salaried female journalist.
Was there a Roman Fort at Hincaster? The place-name element ‘caster’ usually means the Anglo-Saxons recognised a site as Roman – but there is now no trace of a fort there.
Morecambe Bay did not exist before 1774 – that’s when Fr Thomas West first gave the Bay its name.
The Highland commander, George Murray, saves Tom Robinson from execution at the hands of the Jacobites at Eamont Bridge in the '45'
St Patrick was a Cumbrian. But where exactly was he living when he was captured by those Irish slave-raiders? Ravenglass or Birdoswald?
From 1816 to 1895 St Bees boasted a higher education college for theological students awaiting ordination. A bid by its third principal to award its own degrees was unsuccessful.
That mountain chain to the east of Cumbria was given the fake name of The Pennines by Charles Bertram, an Anglo-Danish student, in the mid-18th century. He claimed to have found the name on a copy of a Roman map, made in the 14th century by the monk Richard of Cirencester. It wasn't true
In 1672 Thomas Lancaster, of High Wray, was hanged, then ‘hunge oopp in Iron Chaynes on a Gibbet … until such tyme as he rotted away bone for bone”
For centuries, street performers have filled our streets with music. Few, though, found fame like Carlisle’s itinerant fiddler, Jimmy Dyer.
The sound of six-shooters, war drums and stampeding bison once echoed around Cumbria. That was when Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show came to visit, in September 1904 - taking in Carlisle, Penrith, Maryport, Workington, Whitehaven, Barrow and Kendal.
A wall in Plumpton bears a memorial to an heroic policeman, Constable Joseph Byrnes, who was murdered by jewel thieves in 1885.
A deadly storm rocked Cumbria before Christmas 1894. Temperatures plummeted afterwards, until even Windermere froze. Then the skaters arrived…
Gunpowder from Low Wood and Sedgwick, in South Cumbria, was shipped out to West Africa, to be traded for slaves.
Freshwater Biological Association scientists spent the war years in Wray Castle, helping to feed the country.
Cumbria played its part in providing a safe haven for children from the Basque region of Spain from 1937 -1939.
