The New Old North
Jasmine Donahaye travels in search of Rheged, the ancient Welsh kingdom belonging to the Hen Ogledd, which may or may not have been in Cumbria
Seventy-two dead moles hang from the fence, strung to the wire through their snouts. They’ve been here a while, and some have slipped their skins. Below, in the valley, the rain is approaching in a dark fringe above the village of Cumrew. The dead moles – a traditional or barbarian practice, depending on your point of view – are not sobering enough to suppress my amusement at this name Cumrew, which so unhelpfully reinforces the English mispronunciation of Cymru.
The first time I visited Cumbria it felt surprisingly familiar, and that has only grown each time I have returned – not because I recognise in it the England I left in 1989 (I grew up in the southeast, where the alien North begins just beyond London), but because I recognise in it the Wales where I have long since been living.
The North is always another country, even if it’s the same country – in England, in Wales, and further back in time, in Rome. Perhaps that’s why, when I first read Game of Thrones, its threatening old North beyond the Wall rang true to me: it works so well as an evocation of deep cultural memory. There’s always this dualism of the border – ‘civilised’ language and ‘barbaric’ language; ‘civilised’ practice and ‘barbaric’ practice; the familiar holding back the unknown that threatens change.
At the beginning of the Wall – Hadrian’s Wall – in Bowness on Solway, a finger-post reads ‘Rome 1150 miles’, but when this border area ceased to be the Roman north, it became yr Hen Ogledd – the Old North of Wales. And just in case you’re in any doubt about being in the Old North, there’s the sign for the turning to Rheged a few miles away. Scholars might argue about the true location of this ancient Welsh kingdom, but apparently it’s a petrol station off the A66, part of a cinema, café and gallery complex that opened in 2000.
The owners of Rheged are not the first to defy scholars and decide where Rheged lies. In 1852, a Captain William Mounsey from Carlisle did the same thing, if somewhat more elliptically. It wasn’t quite the ‘Ivan + Hayley 23’ graffiti that got carved into the wall of the Colosseum in 2023, causing outrage and the threat of a lawsuit, but it wasn’t far off: at Wetheral, above the steps leading down to St Constantine’s cells, you can read Mounsey’s initials, the date, and three lines of Welsh cut into the rock. Above it there’s a heavily eroded six-pointed star. Now weathered and difficult to make out, like the much older Roman graffiti nearby, his graffiti reads:
Y DEULEN HON NEUS CYNDYFED GWYNT
GWAE HI O’I THYNGED!
HI HEN ELENI GANED!
This englyn from the medieval manuscript Canu Llywarch Hen on a wall in Cumbria seemed bizarre to me, but then it began to make sense. Surely it’s possible to decode in it an identification of Rheged with Cumbria (or Cumberland as it was in 1852): Llywarch Hen was one of the poets and rulers of the Old North, and the graffiti is in a place associated with St Constantine, who was known as the son of Rhydderch Hael; both of these were also rulers of Rheged.
When I first saw Mounsey’s graffiti, I did what most people do, of course: I googled it. That pulled me into a maze in which I still find myself – not so much a Wikipedia rabbit-hole that took me away from my original quest, as a labyrinth that keeps returning me to the beginning. Perhaps that’s appropriate, given Mounsey’s alleged identity as a spy (I have been unable to verify this) and his interest in codes and mazes (this is rather more certain: he wrote an article about turf-cut mazes in Notes and Queries).
Of the many mentions of Mounsey, usually in the form of blogs, most appear to embellish a brief single-authored Wikipedia article and two interpretation boards – one at a site in Outhgill, up the River Eden from St Constantine’s cells, and the other on the island of Hoy, in Orkney, where Mounsey vandalised another ancient monument.
The interpretation boards are informative, but the source material behind the information they give about Mounsey continues to elude me – sources that might explain or support certain questionable assertions, such as him having been a spy, or his identity as ‘The Jew of Carlisle’, or the reasons and meanings of his inscribing his work with a putative Star of David. Curiously, there are no speculations about his use of Welsh, and yet his Welsh proficiency turns out to be the one thing, beyond basic biographical information, that I can trust.
Mounsey’s vandalism of the Dwarfie Stane in Orkney is what has brought him most internet fame, because of the monument’s archaeological interest and its folklore and neo-pagan possibilities. He turns up regularly in incidental travel blogs, newspaper articles, works of folklore, and publications on popular and New Age religion and rituals as a Victorian eccentric with a great back-story, much of it imagined. He’d visited Hoy two years before his Welsh carving in Cumbria, and he marked the interior of the Dwarfie Stane with a line of Farsi. The Historic Scotland interpretation board had it translated as ‘I have sat for two nights and have found patience’. In contrast, I have googled for two nights and gone mad, because from here I pursued a reference to an article that does not seem to exist – or, more probably, that does exist, but not where anyone says it is, and not anywhere that I can find it. In Cumbria, I came to a similar halt with another set of assertions without references – a booklet vividly entitled William Mounsey and the “Jew” Stone, A True Story of Mystery and Detection from the Eden Valley of the Lake District by local historian Charlie Emett. I regret now that I never contacted the author at the time: sadly, he died in 2016. Meanwhile the Dutch author of the Wikipedia article, who cites his own publication (another thrilling title: William Mounsey: A British Spy, allegedly published in 2010), has proved equally inaccessible, as has his book.
References to the vandalism of the Dwarfie Stane often misspell Mounsey’s name as Mouncey, and the misspelling acts as a sort of fluorescent dye that traces the path of source material. I followed it back to the first mention of that elusive 1864 article (where the spy story apparently originates), and was none the wiser.
Just as intriguing as the ‘facts’ about ‘Mouncey’ the spy are the ‘facts’ about the ‘Jew Stone’ or “Jew” Stone, the monument that Mounsey created and sited at the source of the River Eden (so many inverted commas: they, too, are a kind of fluorescent dye tracing the path of unreliable claims). Allegedly Mounsey made this engraved stone monument in the same year, 1850, as he marked the Dwarfie Stane, and he placed it (or had it placed) on Black Fell Moss, above Mallerstang. But here too the story leads to an absence: a marker on a map that as far as I can tell does not exist, and maybe never did, and a destroyed monument that only exists in replica form.
That replica, created in 1989 and sited in a fenced enclosure in the village of Outhgill, is now nicely lichened and looks appropriately aged. The peeling veneer of its interpretation board is rather less attractively weathered. It tells two stories: one is the story of the original stone carved by Mounsey in 1850, along with a transcription and translation of its Greek and Latin texts; the other is the story of how and why it came to be recreated in 1989.
Everything in these accounts suggest that the structure was and is called ‘the Jew stone’ because of its six-pointed star. And there is also everything in these accounts to suggest, both in the way the story is told on the information board and in the later booklet, that a great deal of what is claimed about Mounsey is the result of imaginative projection based on assumptions about this use of a six-pointed star. That includes Mounsey wearing a long beard in a Jewish fashion (whatever that might mean); his sympathy with the Jewish people, and the assertion that ‘the inscriptions could only have been done by someone conversant with the Jewish Scriptures’ (needless to say many Christians of the period would have been conversant with Jewish scripture).
What did Mounsey mean by the star, though – here juxtaposed with a Greek text, and at Wetheral juxtaposed with a Welsh text? The Greek text does not appear to be ‘Jewish scripture’ after all, but instead a composite of the Iliad and Revelation. Far from being sympathetic to Jews, the words ‘when you have acknowledged your duty to the sacred Scriptures you will be raised again to the order from which you are fallen’ read to me more like plain old mid-century Anglican conversionism – which is to say intolerance of Jews as Jews, not sympathy.
It’s always possible, however, that the six-pointed star had no Jewish meaning to Mounsey in 1850, nor the text, and that the inferences from it – by two enthusiastic men in 1989 and by me in 2024 – create whole narratives about him that are wrong. All of which seems entirely appropriate, given what Mounsey himself appeared to be doing with his graffiti puzzles.
His graffiti has provoked some rich historical storytelling not unlike his own apparent assertion about the uncertain location of Rheged. But what can be known about him with certainty is just as rich – and that is his relationship to Wales, which I discovered when I came back home from the Old North to Ceredigion. Here, in the Cwrt Mawr archive housed in the National Library, there are several bound volumes and seven letters written by Mounsey, and there are also several letters written about him and the work in these volumes.
The books are the product of long periods that Mounsey spent in the British Museum transcribing Welsh manuscripts from the medieval period to the eighteenth century. Some of those transcriptions were published in 1859 and 1860 in the journal Y Brython. It must have been laborious work, and it included extensive annotation (one of them also includes many images, some of them bizarre and garishly coloured, which have been pasted in).
But it is Mounsey’s letters to D. Silvan Evans, the editor of Y Brython, that bring him alive – as do the letters Evans wrote about him. Mounsey’s are energetic, wide-ranging and long – scrawled, with many dashes – some of it personal, some anecdotal, some scholarly. There are vivid and evocative descriptions of his travels, including a return visit to Orkney where he had been ‘boating, fishing, shooting etc in very wet weather; out all day, coming in tired every evening, & with no conveniences to sit down and write and a strong disposition to go to sleep after getting the calls of hunger appeased’. He stayed a month in Orkney, fishing at different lochs, and ‘occasionally sleeping at farmhouses but our principal place was the great loch of Stennis, where we used to catch trout, & lighting a fire to broil them & feast in the open air’. In the end he was ‘obliged to come home on account of a troublesome affair with a Dentist who had made me a set of teeth which did not fit, and caused me such pain that I was required to make a shift to do without them in Orkney. Which I could do, as we were living chiefly on fish. —’.
From Galway in 1862 he wrote Evans a gossipy letter about John O’Beirne Crowe, the Celtic Professor at Queen’s College, whose knowledge of many languages hints at the kind of broad linguistic aspirations of those involved, like Mounsey himself, in philology. Crowe evidently had a high opinion of his own linguistic abilities, though Mounsey evidently did not have a high opinion of Crowe:
Arabic? Oh, Crowe says he knows Arabic – Turkish? Oh, Crowe has a grammar – Crowe has a Basque grammar – Crowe has some theories about Albanian etc etc etc The truth seems to be that … unluckily having no common sense his knowledge is of no avail – If there had been no such thing as whisky poor Crowe would have stood in a very high position. He will probably now drink himself to death. It is really grievous to think of a little man with so much learning in his head, and such a round face, going to the dogs in this way.
Mounsey must have spent weeks transcribing the manuscripts that other scholars could then read when they were published in Y Brython. Maybe that reduces him to a sort of human photocopier, which is unfair, because he also annotated his work, informed by what was evidently a deep and wide reading in the scholarly literature of the period. Based on that reading, by 1869 he had amended his view of Rheged’s location, and accepted that it was in Scotland. William Forbes Skene’s The Four Ancient Books of Wales ‘makes some things clear which were dark before’, he wrote to Evans in 1869. He conceded that Skene had:
rightly fixed that slippery place Reged in its real locality. Iolo Morganwg & his party placed it in Gower. Dr Pew removed it to Cumberland, and claimed the giants grave at Penrith as the tomb of Owen Mab Urien — Sir Walter Scott, when residing in Ettrick Forest, used to date his letters from Reged, so it seems he had an affection for Reged, and wished to have it in his own neighbourhood … But, as Skene points out, the mention of Loch Lomond is conclusive….
In a letter earlier that year he had asked Evans to return his books and manuscripts, which he was anxious to have back again, ‘especially the M.SS. books, which cost me great pains and trouble to write — I have often wished much to have them, but put off reclaiming them in order to give you a little longer opportunity to make use of them, but as it is now more than seven years since I saw them, I think I may fairly call them in. —’. When he did not receive a reply, he wrote again:
I am getting extremely anxious to see my books again. I therefore write to ask when you will have finished your extracts from them. If I had thought of it before I might have told you to mark the passages on the margins with pencil, and I could then have transcribed them for you. I have written 347 … pages since my last letter to you, but I suppose you must have nearly copied all by this time —
Evans must have responded to that second request, because on the 1st of May Mounsey wrote: ‘The books and M.S. arrived safe yesterday, but I had a hunt after them, the stupid people at the station having taken them to the house of my cousin Mr P. Mounsey, who being Captain of the Rifle Volunteers, thought at first that the box contained some unexpected present to himself – so he hastily paid the carriage, but before proceeding to open the box his hopes were suddenly chilled on looking again at the direction.’
Some years later, in 1876, Evans sent Mounsey a copy of his new book about Ieuan Brydydd Hir, in which he acknowledged Mounsey’s contribution. He was warm in his thanks: ‘Nid bychain yw fy rhwymedigaethau i’r Cadben W. H. Mounsey, o Gaerliwelydd, Sais cynnwynol, ond gwr tra chydnabyddus a llenoriaeth Cymru’ [To Captain W. H. Mounsey, of Carlisle, a native Englishman, but a man extremely familiar with Welsh literature, my indebtedness is no small thing]. In reply, Mounsey thanked him for the copy of the book, and told Evans that he meant to visit while walking in Wales. ‘It is 14 years since I left you, short as the time seems,’ he wrote. ‘Indeed I did not then expect to live so long, for the doctor said I must go every autumn to Spain — so I considered myself on a ticket of leave which might be cancelled suddenly any day.’
Sadly, his ticket of leave was cancelled a year and a half later, on the 3rd of December 1877. It seems Evans did not know about his death for another fourteen years, as the final document in that collection is a black-bordered note from Robert Mounsey, dated the 5th of September 1891: ‘My great uncle Capt. W. H. Mounsey (late of the 4th and 15th Regiments) died at Rockliffe Hall near this city on Monday Dec 3rd 1877 after a weeks illness caused by bursting a blood vessel.’
Mounsey, a practising solicitor, did not make a will, and it is not clear to me yet how his manuscript books came back into Evans’s possession. But their connection was evidently a strong one, as in the same archive collection there are also several letters from Evans that mention Mounsey and the value of his transcriptions. The claim, since 1989, that Mounsey dressed and wore his beard like a Jew, which gave rise to him being called ‘the Jew of Carlisle’, looks rather less certain after reading these letters. Mounsey had stayed on the Llŷn peninsula improving his Welsh with Evans from November 1858 until the following spring. His appearance, Evans wrote, was ‘primeval’, as he wore his beard long ‘like a druid’.
I’m not yet out of the maze that Mounsey’s piece of Welsh graffiti opened up. There is more evidence to explore in the National Library, and there are archives in Cumbria as well. There’s also the original site of the Jew stone on Black Fell Moss to visit, the bleak boggy upland overlooking Mallerstang – and there Welsh raises its head again in the landscape, though this time bald: the mal in Mallerstang appears to be the Welsh moel.
You can tell a good story about those old Welsh Cumbrian (Cumbric) place-names – Mallerstang, Cumrew, Penrith, Rheged – but like any good story, including the stories about Mounsey (including this story about Mounsey), it involves implication by virtue of selection and omission, because, inconveniently, Welsh/Cumbric is not the only language marking the landscape of the Old North. The village of Hoff is my favourite of these (Hoff yw fy hoff), but it might not be Brythonic at all – it may well be the Norse hof. Cumbria is just as peppered with Norse and Anglo-Saxon as Welsh remnants, marking the path of invasions and migrations, including the Celtic one from the continent. The names are a vivid reminder that this island’s humans have all at some point been seen as threatening barbarians, and that even ‘indigenous’ is no absolute origin: it is merely an older arrival from elsewhere.
Jasmine Donahaye’s latest book is Birdsplaining: A Natural History. She previously wrote for Cwlwm about climate anxiety.
What a lovely piece jasmine!