HISTORY is disappearing through the cracks in the floorboards at an alarming rate. And this corpse road has been caught just in time. As far as we’re aware, this will be the first written account of this corpse road which we stumbled across in one of those typically serendipitous moments. We had just put the first edition of this book to bed and attended a music event at Bassenthwaite parish room. During the interval we were looking at a millennium map the village had published – and in one corner it showed the ‘corpse road’! We were unable to add this to the first edition so are happy to include it now. The corpse road starts in the south-east corner of the parish near to (and running through) Barkbeth farm. Farmer Malcolm Ewart added a vital piece of the jigsaw when he told us that his grandfather had always said an old dilapidated barn on the path was once an Inn that had been used by the pall-bearers as a place to eat, drink and stay the night. The corpse road is said to continue to Caldbeck – a distance of nine miles. Without any other evidence this was just an oral tradition. So it was with some delight that several months later we came across Tony Vaux’s newly-published comprehensive history of Caldbeck. In Caldbeck: A Special Part of Lakeland (2018) he says: “…many centuries later people in Caldbeck continued to tell a story about a ghostly woman who appeared dressed in white at the foot of Flatt Lonning, a lane used to carry corpses to the Caldbeck churchyard from the hamlet of Fellside”. Fellside is to the south of the village and it’s quite possible this is a memory of the road coming up from Bassenthwaite to St Kentigern’s church in Caldbeck. It’s particularly nice that it also has a ghost! Although the precise route is lost we’ve followed the Cumbria Way, a long-distance path created in the 1970s by members of the Ramblers Association (Malcolm Ewart says the corpse road originally headed south-east from the farm onto the fell). And Vaux also mentions another possible corpse road entering Caldbeck from the north through Brownrigg Farm. Flatt Lonning ran south from the B5299 near to Stadle Dykes.

We hope further research fleshes this corpse road out but there’s no doubting that it’s one of the more enjoyable – if exhausting – walks.