The road to Furness, the pudgy Abbot and leaving some for later

When we chatted with Christopher, our chance encounter friend outside the hotel in Nottingham, he asked us casually where we were headed next. We told him we had two nights booked up in Tirill. He didn't know where that was.

"Just outside of Penrith," I said.

He didn't know where that was, either.

Our choice of lodging for the Cumbria leg, the Queen's Head in Tirill,

Queen's Head - Tirill

was merely a function of geography and proximity. Furness Abbey, one of the great monastic sites in Britain, had been on my list since our first trip in 2012, but it was located inconveniently in the extreme northwest of the country. We found Tirill by just doing a scan of little villages that would put us within striking distance of Furness and a clutch of castles in the area. There wasn't much in the way of lodging, until we looked deeper in the Lake District, where the accommodations became more expensive and more obviously biased toward caravan (RV) parks and holiday cottages - not our thing.

Tirill is actually one of three villages - the other two being Stockbridge and Thorpe - which, in essence, comprise a single, somewhat scattered entity outside the town of Penrith. Sparsely populated, the place is a barely a murmur in the yawning expanse of sheep country...peaceful and, if not exactly idyllic, at least pastoral and unhurried. It also had a car-park, a bonus amenity we had come to appreciate as a not-to-be-taken-for-granted feature of historic inns.

We checked in, the stiffly polite lady at the bar showed us up the absurdly steep and slightly creaky stairs of the 18th century converted brewery and to our room. Sharon had gotten into the habit of immediately checking the wi-fi; it didn't really work, but we figured we'd be downstairs in the pub most of the evening anyway and we could plan the next day's route from there. Had the place been a Best Western or some other modern hotel deal, we would have said something. Out here, there wasn't much point.

We dropped off the bags in the room, went downstairs for a couple of pints and took them out to the smoking area, thankfully sheltered from a healthy rain. Chatted with a 30-ish guy about The North and the Scottish referendum on independence from the UK. The argument seems to go something like this: the Scots feel like their income from North Sea oil was appropriated by the UK to fund England's generous social programs, with disproportionately meager benefit extending back to the Scots. For their part, the English regard Scotland as economically unviable without membership in the UK, and that independence would create a kind of trickle-southward economic malaise. Plus, y'know, the Scots are...well, Scots. 'Nuff said, right?

Consistently impressed by the durability of ancient quarrels and side-eye stereotypes between the various peoples of the British Isles, we'd be heading toward the borderlands in a few days to prowl the historic record of more impactful friction between the English and their barbarous neighbors to the north. But as far as the referendum, we had no pony in this race. The guy himself, an Englishman with family and some roots in Scotland, admitted he saw both sides of the argument, leaning somewhat toward Scotland staying in the UK. One of the Inn's staff girls came out for a quick smoke - he asked her what she thought about it. She just smiled and shrugged.

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There were a couple of guys loading in kegs of beer through the cellar door in the morning, right in front of the smoking patio. The older guy, well into his sixties and built like a oak, wished us a good morning and asked where we were headed. "Furness Abbey, outside of Barrow," I called back. "Hello then, that's where I live !! In Barrow. Lovely place."

The beer truck bore a Coors Light logo. I told him we live pretty close to the Coors brewery, in Colorado. He seemed impressed with that, even if he wasn't quite sure where Colorado was, and even somewhat less impressed with the product itself, conceding it was actually fairly popular in the pubs around there.

"I don't drink the stuff," he said. We don't either, I said, as if apologizing.

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Sharon set the GPS and we took off. About a mile down the road there was a sign that said "Ancient Church" and an arrow pointing down a narrow lane. "Ack !" I shouted, but Sharon said we didn't have time, we'd try to hit it on the way back. The sign retreated in my rear view mirror.

The two laned A592 wound its way around Ullswater, one of the Lake District's namesakes, and became tortuously narrow along the forested lakeshore. Compact cars pulling compact pop-up campers, cyclists cheating death, tiny French hatchbacks with roofed kayaks (hey, kayaks !), climbing over blind curves that relaxed and constricted with diabolical randomness. This was not an easy drive.

Eventually the road starting climbing as we approached Kirkstone Pass. We were stuck behind a bus, sliding pass endless miles of drystone fence walls. A cyclist was drying off at the top.

This was an England we'd never seen before; rolling treeless hills patched with gloomy banks of limestone, uncountable sheep grazing on the tundra in the light rain. And mountain passes. What ?

The sun came out and we started to see gulls, a sign we were approaching the seaside town of Barrow, where the beer guy lived.

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Furness Abbey - Cistercian - c.1123 AD

Furness is one of England's great monastic sites. Founded in 1123 and one of the wealthiest of the Cistercian monasteries, Furness has been a romantic ruin of English lore for centuries. Wordsworth came here. So did Robert the Bruce, in 1322 - the abbot paid for his lodging and put him up, mindful that the Scots, when irritated, had a habit of sacking and looting anyplace less than welcoming to their arrival. On this visit, they did pillage the neighboring villages, and partly destroyed nearby Cartmel Priory, but Abbot John Cockerham managed to save Furness by (nervously) hosting Robert and his boys for the night.

More mutton, Bob? And please don't burn our abbey down.

Built from sandstone, Furness seethes with a ruddy red in the sun (and by now, the sun was out). The grass was a little wet as drifted across the site.

At the center of the church ruin, a robust tangle of bracing and industrial scaffolding crisscrossed the ancient walls. Furness is in the midst of a ten year stabilization program. When the railroad went in a few decades ago, running just past the trees bordering the site, the tracks changed the drainage pattern. The abbey itself, remarkably, was actually constructed atop a series of timber rafts, which had survived more or less intact for better than eight centuries. But once the drainage pattern changed, the timbers started to rot and the surviving walls cracked as the place began to sink.

I was having a hard time wrapping my mind around this idea; a meticulously detailed ten year program, monitored weekly, to preserve an almost 900 year old monastery ruin with hardware that looked like it came from an airport construction site.  The preservation of these ancient sites, which the English take very seriously, is a game of millimeters, drawn out over years.

The ruin itself was beguiling and seemed to glow in the summer sun. No one was there, but the place felt busy anyway. The place is evidently teeming with ghosts, including that of a headless monk. On horseback.

In the visitor's center, a display case held a bishop's crozier, that curved doodad thing at the top of a staff. The item was found in 2012 in the church section of the abbey ruin during digging for the stabilization footers. They also found a ring and the skeleton of its wearer, probably a 14th century abbot who was short, overweight and probably suffered from diabetes. They weren't certain whether the crozier was related to the abbot - they think the crozier was older, as the carving depicted St Michael, who was a more commonly venerated saint in the 12th and 13th centuries - but the ring certainly was, likely a bit of bling presented to the guy upon his consecration. They could tell the abbot was portly by how wide the ring was, and they gauged his general health (he died in his forties) by analysis of his bones. They don't know who he was - buried in the church, though, meant that he was probably big swish.

Crozier

Abbot's ring

I asked about the crozier. Although cleaned up a bit when first unearthed, it was still encrusted in some places; it looked like a restoration job left half-done, a toothbrush's scrape away from being all new again. The girl explained that the archeologists removed as much they could safely, and left the rest for future generations of archeologists, when (presumably) the technology for doing such things improved and the work could be completed without damage to the object.

Maybe this is a common practice in archeology - leaving stuff in the ground, or half-cleaning up artifacts with the anticipation that future archeologists with better tools can do it better. The mission to embrace and know the past is a measured one in English archeology. Time plays tricks in the English soil, and you don't always defeat it.

Sometimes, you just kind of wait it out.