Wordsworth's Guide 1810, edn 1835
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page 39
of Furness and Cumberland, they seem to have had little connexion with the mountains, except for military purposes, or in subservience to the profit they drew from the mines. |
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Saxons Danes Druids |
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When the Romans retired from Great Britain, it is well known
that these mountain-fastnesses furnished a protection to
some unsubdued Britons, long after the more accessible and
more fertile districts had been seized by the Saxon or
Danish invader. A few, though distinct, traces of Roman
forts or camps, as at Ambleside, and upon Dunmallet, and a
few circles of rude stones attributed to the Druids,*
are the
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* It is not improbable that these circles were once
numerous, and that many of them may yet endure in a perfect
state, under no very deep covering of soil. A friend of the
Author, while making a trench in a level piece of ground,
not far from the banks of the Emont, but in no connection
with that river, met with some stones which seemed to him
formally arranged; this excited his curiosity, and
proceeding, he uncovered a perfect circle of stones, from
two to three or four feet high, with a sanctum
sanctorum, - the whole a complete place of Druidical
worship of small dimensions, having the same sort of
relation to Stonehenge, Long Meg and her Daughters near the
river Eden, and Karl Lofts near Shap (if this last be not
Danish), that a rural chapel bears to a stately church, or
to one of our noble cathedrals. This interesting little
monument having passed, with the field in which it was
found, into other hands, has been destroyed. It is much to
be regretted, that the striking relic of antiquity at Shap
has been in a great measure destroyed also.
The DAUGHTERS of LONG MEG are placed not in an oblong, as the STONES of SHAP, but in a perfect circle, eighty yards in diameter, and seventy-two in number, |
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