From "The Wind Among the Reeds" 1899, by W. B. Yeats, the exceptional Irish poet.
Quoted from the poem "He Remembers Forgotten Beauty"
"The jewelled crowns that kings have hurled
In shadowy pools, when armies fled;"
Similarities to the King Dunmail legend?
|
The armies of the Saxon King Edmond and the Scottish King Malcolm joined forces to fight Dunmail, the King of Cumberland in AD 945, and won. It is said that Edmond himself killed Dunmail at the place where the cairn now stands.
He ordered his prisoners to collect rocks to pile on Dunmail's body, thus forming the cairn.
As Dunmail lay dying he shouted, "My crown - bear it away; never let the Saxon flaunt it."
A few of his warriors fought their way through the Saxons and bore his crown up the fell to Grisedale Tarn, where they threw it into the depths. They said, "Till Dunmail come again to lead us."
Every year the warriors return to the tarn, retrieve the crown, and carry it down to the cairn on Dunmail Raise.
They hit their spears on the top of the cairn, and a voice issues from inside, saying "Not yet, not yet; wait awhile my warriors."
The other legend of the cairn is that when two armies were about to join in battle each soldier from both sides placed a stone on the spot. Those who survived returned and removed a stone.
And I thought it was Bronze Age.
|
The full story of the Burnmoor corpse road ghost is as follows:-
A young lad died, and was being carried across Burnmoor, in a coffin strapped to the back of a horse. At a certain point the horse was frightened and bolted into the mist and couldn't be found.
His mum was told of this and suffered a heart attack. A few days later she died. She, too, was carried in her coffin by horseback over Burnmoor. Her horse bolted at exactly the same place.
A search was made, and the son's horse and coffin were found. The mother's was never found.
In times of storm and mist, a ghostly horse, with a dark, box-like shape on its back, thunders past anyone alone on Burnmoor.
|
The only folklore I've read is that it's impossible to count the stones and come up with the same number on two consecutive occasions.
Old hat - how many stone circles have that old chestnut accorded to them?
|
|
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
T.S.Eliot "The Hollow Men"
|
|
Log in |
Register
Top of page