Ings History

• Early history
• Earliest buildings
• St Anne's Church
• Ings benefactors
• Road, rail & water
• Ings garage in WW2
• Acknowledgements

Ings Early History

Iron Age

10,000 years or so ago, Ings would have been under a sheet of ice. The landscape here testifies to the shaping it carried out; to ice scoured rock and moraine debris; to the valley through which the River Gowan runs. It is not known when man began to inhabit and cultivate the land here. William Rollinson, in his 'History of Cumberland and Westmorland' supposes that iron-using Celtic folk arrived from Yorkshire around 200-300 BC, and might well have introduced an early form of farming economy. Such Iron Age folk lived in circular wooden or stone huts, and it is possible that the ancient settlement of Hugill dates from this period.

"At High Hugill, near Windermere, in Westmoreland, the site of the settlement consists of an enclosure, two sides of which are angular and two rounded. It was encompassed by the foundations of a wall or rampart, which has been, in places, 14ft in width. The foundations were apparently formed by stones set on edge, the spaces in between which was probably filled in with smaller stones. Within this enclosure are sundry ill-defined lines of division walls, courts, and hut-dwellings, one or two of which are circular, and measure about 7ft and 13ft in diameter."
Remains of the Prehistoric Age in England, Bertram Windle 1909.

 

The Romans

After the Romans invaded Britain in AD43, it took them another 30 years or so to enter our area. A study published in 1980 'Rome and the Brigantes' edited by Keith Branigan puts ten Roman 'settlements', not villages as such but a 'scatter of farm sites on well-drained locations', in the area of Hugill, Staveley and Kentmere. A fort at Watercrook, Kendal was built in AD90 from which a road was built though Ings to the head of Windermere Lake and then through the hills to Ravenglass, with forts at Ambleside and Hardknott.

The exact line of the road is unknown but authorities suggest it would have passed High Borrans, then past the Iron Age settlement, probably inhabited, on to Broadgate Farm, St Anne's Farm at Grassgarth and passing through Ings near Raw Ghyll and thence under Reston Scar.