|
Bowness on Solway has the distinct flavour of a border town. It's almost possible to lob a stone into Scotland across the Solway marshes. Years ago, it ancient times, when it was England's turn to settle differences, the villagers would have been able to watch Annan burn (as in 1547).
Just before the Cardurnock road begins to rise to Bowness, you will note on the left a great embankment crowned with gorse, and hawthorn jutting out into the firth. There is a similar one on the Scottish side, for this is where the Solway Viaduct, a huge iron bridge, provided a rail link between the two countries from 1869 to 1921. It was intended for the transportation of West Cumbrian iron ore to the Lanarkshire steelworks, but it later carried passengers also. The engineer was Sir James Brunlees and at that time his achievement in constructing a bridge across the Solway's shifting sands was considered a mighty feat, notwithstanding the fact that he had also built the longest bridge in Britain too.
At Bowness, the firth is little more than a mile wide, and is the last westward place where it can be forded. The Romans were aware of this too and built one of the biggest forts here at the believed end of Hadrian's Wall. There are many humps to be seen in the fields relating back to those days for the wall was used as a quarry by builders. Some Roman masonry, in fact, was used to build St Michael's Church. These days, the village occupies the fort site and there are Roman stones also in the walls of many of the houses hereabouts, one of them a tablet of the 3rd cohort of the 2nd Augustan Legion. In a roadside barn wall near the Kings Arms Inn is a small inscribed altar. The Roman guard-room was near the school.
In the days of the Border raids some stranger things than cattle were taken across the firth. In the year 1626 some Scotsmen saw fit to visit Bowness and take the Bowness church bells. Rather naturally, this irritated the local men who launched out in chase of the Scots. To lighten their boat which was being overtaken, the Scots visitors threw the bells overboard into the Solway, at the place now called 'Bell Dub' or 'Bell Pool'. A short time later, the Bowness men paid a visit to Dornock and Middlebie in order that St Michael's church could be fully equipped once more. They were fortunate and arrived home safely complete with the bells.
There are smuggling stories too. In the churchyard a headstone of Snaefell slate marks the grave of a Manx smuggler who was drowned on a free-trading run to this coast. It is said that his young widow had the stone brought over by boat and then carried it to the churchyard herself.
At Drumburgh, four miles from Bowness, is the site of the smallest Roman station on the great Wall, a few mounds being left to mark it. Here too amid the houses clustered on the hillside, risea a tall gaunt farmhouse that was once a castle, with a fine flight of steps leading outside to the second storey where an ancient doorway has kept its old studded door. Over the doorway is a coat of arms and on a small parapet of the roof are two stone eagles keeping watch above the hamlet.
|
