Meet Cumbria's terrified but highly skilled Stone Age inhabitants

A 6,000-year old pot of toasted hazelnuts found near Fitz Park in Cockermouth has revealed our anxious but surprisingly well-dressed Stone Age predecessors.

Facial reconstruction of a Neolithic woman from 5,650 years ago (by the sculptor Oscar Nilsson).

With trembling fingers and fearful hearts, a few Stone Age families baked a pot full of a delicious meal. They broke it apart and scattered the pieces in a stream, hoping to placate the water gods threatening their homes and livelihoods.

This is the story that archaeologists uncovered when they were forced to excavate a muddy field beside Cockermouth’s Fitz Park hurriedly in 2015 because it was earmarked to become a housing estate.

They unearthed 53 fragments of an orange-brown bowl. Touchingly, one of the shards of this pot still bore the impression of three finger tips left near the inside rim by its maker nearly six thousand years ago.

Forensic scientists later discovered the broken carinated bowl, a typical household item of early Neolithic people in this part of Cumbria, had been filled with a meal whose recipe included primitive emmer wheat that the Stone Age families grew and hazelnuts harvested from nearby woods and roasted. Hazelnuts were believed by prehistoric people to ward off evil spirits.

Neolithic carinated bowl of the type found in Fitz Park

These early Cockermouth residents had toasted the pot, deliberately broken it up and then spread the pieces up and down for a distance of 60 feet in a tributary of the River Derwent. Wetland areas, whether open water or bog, were profoundly important religious sites for these people.

This was a votive offering made at a time of great crisis for the settlement. Rising sea levels and the flooding of low-lying coastal and inland areas were reaching their zenith - a life-or death issue for the community.

The people living near what is now Fitz Park could not afford to lose their garden-sized patches of wheat in another flood. The produce from the cattle they grazed on the uplands in the summer would not be enough to replace the lost grain.

The round Neolithic settlement near the River Derwent in Cockermouth where the bowl was found

Radio carbon dating indicates with 95% certainty that our worried ancestors placed the pot in the water between 3,707 and 3,638 BC. That’s about 1,200 years before the Great Pyramids were built in Egypt.

These were the earliest inhabitants of the place we now know as Cockermouth. (The town was given the name we are familiar with by the Brittonic Celts who arrived in the area from - believe it or not - Portugal in 2000 BC.) No one lived in Cumbria during Old Stone Age in the years up to 11,500 BC because the area was still covered in ice then.

But a few short, long-necked Middle Stone Age (Mesolithic) people made a surprisingly good living from 10,000 BC onwards at coastal sites such as Maryport by catching fish, hunting on the fringes of the then-unbroken forest, snaring wildfowl and harvesting fruit and nuts from trees near the shore.

Salmon supplies were abundant in the Derwent River during the Neolithic period

It was in the New Stone Age (Neolithic) period that hunters and fishers spread to the Cockermouth area and introduced the revolutionary idea of combining the herding of cattle with very small scale cereal growing - a mixture that provided a more balanced and predictable diet.

Their arrival coincided with a jump in average temperatures to 2 degrees centigrade above the level they are at now. This period, between 4,000 BC and 3,500 BC, is known as the “climactic optimum” among scientists. The Neolithic incomers brought with them the crafts of pottery and weaving and ey used wood and leather for household utensils. Cockermouth lay directly on the export route for advanced tools being made in the axe factories of the Central Fells. These axes enabled the first attacks on the forests to create grassland and get timber for houses, tools, fuel and fodder.

Like our Cockermouth family, Neolithic Cumbrians concentrated on clearing the coastal lowlands. The mountainous interior was left largely untouched. The trees they felled were mainly oak and alder with hazels making up the understory. From the Neolithic farming people’s point of view it was essential to clear the trees - otherwise there would not have been enough land to keep the people alive.

When the first settlers arrived in Cockermouth they chose to exploit the easiest, open sites. They cleared the lighter woodland with fire and stone axes lashed to wooden hafts in a very similar way to the “slash and burn” techniques used by present day tropical cultivators. They created small garden-like plots to cultivate crops. But the soil in these patches became exhausted within a few years, something the Neolithic people neither understood nor foresaw.

They resorted to magical rites in an attempt to restore fertility. But ultimately they were abandoned and became overgrown by weeds and bracken, then small trees like birch and hazel, and finally tall trees. It is not surprising Neolithic farmers shifted gradually away from solely cultivating vulnerable crops to also taking herds of cattle and flocks of sheep into mountain pastures for summer grazing as well. Evidence that they had the tools to do all this is surprisingly substantial.

Polished Langdale greenstone axe

Axes of impressive quality and workmanship regularly turn up in the area. Neolithic people seem to have regarded the axes made of green stone as having particularly magical significance. A spectacular, highly polished example was found at Ehenside Tarn in the western fringes of the Lake District.

A canoe burned out from a tree trunk turned up on the Stanger stretch of the Cocker. A late neolithic 9-inch long, 7.5 pound hammer axe was dug up in a local garden. Two smaller unpolished ones were unearthed at Eaglesfield last century, a blue 5.5-inch hammerhead axe made of  Derwent coble was discovered at Waterloo Farm just over the A66 from Cockermouth.

An 11-inch specimen was found at Bewaldeth, and in 1879 a 10-inch polished blue whinstone axe was discovered six miles away at Isel. Inside the Cockermouth town boundary in 1949, an eight-inch square butted axe head with a central hourglass shaped hole turned up at Anfield Farm next door to the Strawberry How housing estate.

So what were their lives like? Well, archaeologists often found evidence that, in good times, our predecessors lived well. Alongside the tools they have discovered huge quantities of bones, shells and pieces of broken pottery showing they ate oxen, sheep, pigs, goats, deer, porpoise, fish and shellfish. Harvesters painstakingly reaped the cereal crop with little flint sickles.

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This is an extract from our book Secrets of the Crooked River, which is a kind of historical biography of the Northern Lakes and Cumbria, centred around the lovely town of Cockermouth.

You can pick up a copy, and of our latest book Secrets of the Lost Kingdom, from the New Bookshop on Main Street, Cockermouth. It is also available at the Moon and Sixpence, Lakeside, Keswick. You can get it at Bookends in Keswick and Carlisle, along with Sam Read in Grasmere.

Or you can buy it instantly here: www.fletcherchristianbooks.com