Stone age tales from band’s festival travels
MY band The Curragh Sons has been playing in the Lakes for nigh on 30 years, in fact we played at the New Dungeon Gyhll in Great Langdale every month in the 90s.
These days we play at the wonderful Kings Arms in Hawkshead, June 1 is the next outing, and we perform at Hawkshead Brewery in Staveley.
Thankfully most of these gigs then bring others, including weddings, funerals and parties.
For many of these jaunts my old friend Oaf played a willing part, sometimes as the worst roadie in the world, but always as my right hand man and drinking buddy.
At one early festival the organisers had slung up a makeshift tarpaulin to protect us from the elements.
Both of us had done our best to tick off all the ales on the list before we even struck up a note.
I don’t want to boast but I recall eight or nine ticks.
Oaf was doing his best to stop us getting electrocuted by funnelling the water from the ever-filling tarp’ onto the floor and away from the instruments and microphones.
This was fine until, and with Oaf chuckling like an hyena, he saved the biggest deluge for a couple of Hells Angels taking shelter.
The air was blue but both guys saw the funny side and ensured we obtained a few more ticks by sending beer to the stage on a regular basis. Good lads. I obviously use my travels with the band to fuel my weekly wildlife columns which go into twenty titles in the North West and beyond.
Recently, when in Langdale, I was investigating in a little more detail the so-called Axe Factory below the Pike, only to discover that an absolute perfect specimen of the greenstone tuff Stone Age axe was discovered in a field in County Clare only a few miles from the village of Kinvara where we have been playing festivals for the past 20 years.
I just love these links, the very spice of what I do.
Langdale is sparsely wooded these days and is basically a flat-floored rugged valley with few people in residence, supplemented by thousands of weekend visitors throughout the year, climbers, walkers, photographers, painters and the occasional vagabond musicians like us.
Not many birds about, apart from a solitary kestrel, who was only hunting because hunger was kicking in after a week of awful weather.
Snow, ice, wind, hail and rain, makes life hard for birds of all species and the little falcon was no exception, there was nothing stirring in the fields that day.
However, in days gone by and I’m talking stone-age here, Langdale was the hub of early man’s tool and weapon manufacture.
Thousands of stone axe heads were produced.
Indeed, there is virtually a whole scree-slope of shards and rejects in situ to this day.
I love the notion that, when you pick one of these early workings up, the last person to touch it was one of our hirsute ancestors.
We don’t even know if they had much language, but we do know they had initiative, because apart from County Clare which involved sea-travel, the axes and other tools have been found from Cornwall to Aberdeen.
When Professor Bill Cummins examined nearly 2000 Neolithic axes from finds all over England and Wales, he found that 27 per cent were made from the polished greenstone volcanic tuff of Langdale.
The British Museum’s 1978 catalogue of 368 Neolithic axes found in the Thames lists 15 from Langdale.
Which brings me to the serendipity which often accompanies my writing, and best of all, Oaf would not believe me, until I showed him the beautifully polished axe head seen here.
This stone axe, which had been hewn in Langdale, was found in the Doolin townland, of Killilagh parish in County Clare.
It was discovered in the corner of a field that had been disturbed through the removal of a field wall, along with several other artefacts all concentrated in an area approximately 5m x 5m.
About 100 axes from Langdale have been found in Ireland, but this is the first for County Clare, the very heartland of traditional Irish music.