100 Interesting Facts
We have now passed our original target of posting 100 Interesting Facts - and are still adding to them! We began posting these back in 2017, with the Facts being submitted by our volunteers and friends. Click on a 'Fact' for more Background information.
You can access a full list of all the Facts here, so you can browse looking for anything that takes your fancy. Click on the title to take you to the 'Background' page. Next to the title is a brief explanation as to what the story is about. The date is the date the Fact was first posted to the site. Please note that when we first started on this series, these Background entries were short and sweet- but over time we have tended to put more and more information into our new postings - along with references so you can follow up on more about the story at your leisure.
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!
Reveal Facts by:
Henry VIII’s last Queen, Catherine Parr, had strong links to Cumbria, especially to Kendal.
In the past, people thought Barnacle Geese did not hatch from eggs like other birds – but emerged from barnacles, at places like Piel Island.
Allegedly, Kendal Mint Cake was an accident. A local confectioner was making glacier mints. He spoiled the batch, but his mistake proved a sweet success.
When Shap Abbey was dissolved in 1540, the former monks all got pensions for life averaging over £5 a year. Other monks elsewhere were not so lucky.
Iron, copper, lead, zinc, cobalt, antimony, silver, tungsten, manganese and barium have all been mined in the Lake District.
Hugh de Morville, Lord of Westmorland, with three other knights, murdered Thomas à Becket on 29 December 1170. They afterwards fled to Scotland, and then to Jerusalem.
Two Kings died in or near Carlisle. David I of Scotland (d. 1153) and Edward I of England (d. 1307 at Burgh by Sands).
From 1881 the Corkickle Brake wagonway ran to one of the Earl of Lonsdale's collieries. Later it was used for hauling sulphuric acid
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
