THE FELL-FOLK’S HOME.
Beyond the heather was the giant’s home, on the fell between Blawith and
Broughton. You may find the spot even nowadays with little searching,
if you make for a farm called Heathwaite, and up behind it to the
brackenbeds between Kirkby Moor and Blawith Knott. There among the
borrans which the mowers have heaped of autumns to clear the land for
their leys, there is a deal of other borrans, and older ones, that no man
minds the building of: though yearly work on the land keeps them up, so
to say. You can see that they are ruins of a kind of homestead, with its
little garths, and greater intakes on a ridge of fell. On one hand there
are the waste wet mosses of the moor, and on the other hand, far below,
the great flats of Woodlands, dotted with old farmsteads and thwaites,
and surrounded by the tossing rocky range of Dunnerdale fells, from
the Coniston Old Man on the right hand away down to Black Comb and the
glittering sea.
In a high place like this, people might live for many a long year unseen
and unknown of their neighbours in the dales: and if they were hunters
and robbers, no doubt they could pick up a living of a sort even now:
but in old times when the land was waste, it was as good a place as
could be for the home of wild half-savage fell-folk. The ground is not
so high as to be bitterly cold in winter, and at a time when there were
trees in plenty where now is only fern or heather, they could find cosy
shelter. Down in the valley at that time every thing was smothered up in
wild wood, or uninhabitable for swamps and dampness, except where the
ground had been cleared and drained by the hand of man. But high on the
moors the ground drained itself: so that both for health and wealth it
was the moor that was the chosen home of the earliest dwellers among the
mountains: and their children lived on in the old places here and there,
even after new comers had begun to make their farms and villages where we
see them nowadays.
Here at Heathwaite fell you can see the walls of their buildings,
and even in little corners what may be chambers, or store-houses, or
fire-spots, or what not, curiously built of great stones: but all quite
different from the farm-buildings of our own people, and plainly the
relics of an earlier race. Beside these homesteads there is one heap that
is round and hollow in the midst, with a spot for a doorway, and well
built within and without. Though the top of it is all fallen in, one can
see that it might have been a hut shaped like a beehive, and roofed over
with stone walling like those Pict-houses they tell of in other parts:
this would be high enough inside for a big man to stand up in, and broad
enough for him to lie at length. And all about the place there are the
remains of huts ruder and more ancient than even this, though not of the
kind that were made in the earliest ages of all, when folk used only
stone tools. These show some knowledge of walling; and yet among them is
plenty of graves where the fell-folk doubtless lie buried. At one end of
this settlement, as they call it, there is a great barrow in which folk
digging found burnt bones and you can see the tall stone that stood at
the head still standing there. They call this place the Giant’s Grave:
and old neighbours tell that it is the burial place of the last of the
giants who dwelt in that moorland village, and that he was shot with an
arrow on that very fell side, and so was killed, and his race ended.
[Illustration: THE GIANT’S GRAVE.]
Well, when the big red man strode off through the heather and the ragged
birches of the moor with Thorstein under his arm, this was the spot he
came to. He marched in at the gate of the intake, and up to the homestead
through cattle-folds with little cows of the old Northern breed and
rough mountain goats, grazing between the walls: and through patches of
kale and rye by the side of the tarn which lies blue and clear in the
midst of the place. There in the evening sunshine, among the huts, would
be a dozen or so of women and children, dirty and half-naked, both the
old hags and the little goblins. They had four posts set upright in the
earth, and a skin stretched over them in which was seething upon a fire
of sticks a mess of flesh in its own broth. Some were making ready for
the evening’s feast, and some were cobbling skins together: but for the
most part they were a set of idle do-noughts, to reckon by the filth and
hugger-mugger in which they lived.
They raised a screech when Thorstein was brought in and cast on the
ground: and set upon him to stare at him and pull him about; until
what with the raggedness of his torn clothes and their handling he was
mother-naked, and not a little ashamed of his plight, and of his white
skin. Not that the fell-folk were blackamoors; but they were sunburnt
with going half-naked, and grimy with dirt. So there he sat, part covered
with litter and bracken which he pulled over himself; and he brazened it
out as well as he could.