Dunmail Raise

Dunmail Raise is the name of a large and ancient cairn in the English Lake District, which may have been an old boundary marker. It has given its name to the Pass of Dunmail Raise, on which it stands. This mountain pass forms part of the only low-level route through the mountains between the northern and southern sides of the Lake District. According to legend, the pass was the site of a battle in which the last king of Cumberland was slain, and the cairn was raised up over his body.

The Pass of Dunmail Raise

The Pass of Dunmail Raise connects the Vale of Grasmere to the Thirlmere valley. It forms part of the main east-west watershed of the Lake District: all streams to the north eventually drain into the Solway Firth or the adjacent coast, while those to the south drain into Morecambe Bay. To the east of the pass are the mountains of Helvellyn and Seat Sandal, and to the west lies Steel Fell, part of the High Raise massif.

The pass rises to a height of only 238 m, so the two valleys it connects provide a low-level route of communication, in fact, the only low-level route, between the northern and southern parts of the Lake District. Today the A591 road between Kendal and Keswick takes this route, and the section over Dunmail Raise is a short length of dual-carriageway. There remains a rare example of an AA phone box in a layby to the south of the pass.

Dunmail

Dunmail, last King of Cumberland (died 945) is a figure of both history and legend.

In AD 945 the Saxon king Edmund I of England conquered Strathclyde and ceded Cumbria to his ally, Malcolm I, king of Scotland. This historical conflict is the subject of a traditional King in the mountain myth with strong echoes of the King Arthur legend of the Once and Future King, as follows:

According to the legend, Dunmail, king of Cumberland, was attacked by the combined forces of Edmund and Malcolm and retreated into the heart of the Lake District. Dunmail met the kings in battle in the pass that divides Grasmere from Thirlmere but was defeated, was killed in the fight (it is said at the hands of Edmund himself) and his sons were subsequently blinded by the victors. Some of the surviving Cumbrians, taken prisoner by Edmund, were ordered to collect rocks to pile on Dunmail's body, forming a cairn that still exists to this day and gives the pass its modern name, Dunmail Raise. Others of Dunmail's warriors fled with the crown of Cumberland, climbing into the mountains to Grisedale Tarn below Helvellyn, where they threw it into the depths to be safe until some future time when Dunmail would come again to lead them. Every year the warriors are said to return to the tarn, recover the crown and carry it down to the cairn on Dunmail Raise. There they strike the cairn with their spears and a voice is heard from deep inside the stones, saying "Not yet, not yet; wait awhile my warriors."