It was a grey day with light drizzle that my friend and I ventured out across overgrown footpaths to visit St Constantine’s caves at Wetheral, near Carlisle.
Fortified by tea and scones served at the local animal sanctuary, we spied a bulky gate by the roadside running towards the River Eden. As we headed towards an open field, we were not sure if this was the right way, but a route was faintly marked by a darker strip of glass, then reassuringly over to a stile leading us through a field of barley with swallows swooping overhead. A narrow streak of mud between the long golden fronds dripping with dew showed the way. Soggy but not disheartened, a track of long grass and thistles fenced off from the cows led us towards the treeline. There were no sounds except birds and a distant dog barking, and our phones were no longer any use for directions. The path skirted the edge of the trees parallel to the river with cobbles poking through the mud, suggestive of an ancient trackway.
Stepping into the woods, down steep rocky paths towards the caves, through the gloom and smell of damp wood we reached a rockface overlooking the wide shallow river, it was pock marked with centuries of graffiti. A stone staircase led us towards a neatly built sandstone doorway looking incongruous in the wilderness. It drew us into a corridor with three deep but regularly cut caves. These had been modified by the monks of Wetheral priory in the fourteenth century as a place of storage and protection. One could imagine a bossy and efficient prior ordering the movement of supplies here to keep the community through winter, or worried novices being introduced to the caves as a hiding place should marauding Scots make a foray towards their castellated gatehouse.
The caves were named after St Constantine whose cult seems to have multiplied, giving many variants, but according to some, he was a British king who travelled to Ireland for religious training and then crossed the seas to Scotland where he died. His legend was linked to the Brittonic kingdom of Strathclyde which once stretched across this area. There are Pictish kings in the ninth and tenth century that bore his name. According to local tradition, the caves are where he rested and prayed.
Since the Reformation, the caves may have long served a place for youngsters to hide out away from prying adults, for trysts to occur and for visitors to be intrigued. Many have etched their names into the sandstone in a mixture of styles from deliberate and austere Victorian capitals to more zig-saggy scrawls. One of the most mysterious inscriptions is confidently inscribed in Welsh at eye-level and we photographed it to consider later.
Emerging from the belly of the stone outcrop we took the path hugging the river bank filled with meadowsweet, purple cranesbill and forget-me-nots and occasional butterflies, past more modern relics, including an eighteenth-century Italianate waterfall, a sandstone bench marked to carve the millennium and a nineteenth century viaduct. The path curled inland towards the parish church, a route which must have been trodden for centuries.
The enigma of the worn Welsh inscription was soon helped by the internet. It is a verse attributed to the sixth century prince and poet Llywarch Hen of Rheged, a lost kingdom which straddled the modern Scottish border. It can be loosely translated as follows:
“This leaf, the wind carried it to and foe
Woe to it for its fate
It is old, born a year ago”
The royal poet is seen to meditate on the vanity on earthly riches, as life is fleeting and fate can be cruel. We are the leaves borne by fortune.
The inscriber also left clues to his identity. There is a star of David, date symbols, a year and initials. This tells us it was carved one Sunday, on 14th November 1852, a day perhaps more cold and wet than our own. The caves had attracted the interest of local eccentric William Henry Mounsey. He was a local lad, who came and left this world in Carlisle, but he travelled extensively as a soldier and antiquarian, learning many languages along the way. He adopted the robes of a Jewish priest, a striking figure visiting ancient sites. He was drawn among other things, into the growing fad for medieval Celtic literature in Victorian Britain.
A visit to St Constantine’s caves is a refreshing escape from the buzz of modernity, bringing together tales of medieval Scotland, Ireland and Wales in a quiet corner of England. It is a reminder of the long, interconnected stories of these islands and the vigorous nineteenth century antiquaries who rediscovered them for a new generation.