Last updated 05:27, Friday, 16 May 2008

No one has ever questioned the date of the find of antiquities at the Cumberland and Westmorland Lunatic Asylum, now the Carleton Clinic.

Ashes to ashes: The burial urns, drawn by a patient in the asylum at the time of the find

As recently as 2005 it was stated that “in 1861, during the construction of Garlands Hospital, about 15 early Bronze Age funerary urns were discovered”.

Even 30 years after the find was made, Canon Wilson said: “No written or printed account of this interesting discovery exists,”

It was not until 1956 that Kate Hodgson assessed their importance.

She referred to “15 urns found in 1861 when the new buildings were erected”, adding: “an old directory states that the urns were discovered under the new croquet ground (now a bowling green)”.

Her uncertainty of the exact spot was evident when she said: “Mr Richie, to whom I owe most of my information on the subject, believes that they were really found on the site now occupied by the buildings and that is the find-spot named in the museum’s catalogue.”

Mr Richie had been told by an old gardener at Garlands “that they were found in a sand pit”.

Three potentially different locations for the find were thus given by Miss Hodgson and this had led to confusion.

A further gift to the Tullie House collection was a Bronze Age beaker in 1928, “brought by Mr Rogerson”.

This, said the accessions register was “found in a sand pit at Garlands, 1893”.

From newspaper references we know that the asylum buildings had been completed by 1861 and were being fitted out for opening on January 2, 1862. No antiquarian finds at Garlands were reported in the newspapers at that time or earlier.

In the Carlisle Patriot on April 8, 1870 was a report on a monthly meeting of the Society of Antiquities in Newcastle, at which the Rev Bruce read a letter from Dr Clouston, superintendent of the Garlands Asylum. It referred, said Bruce, “to some Celtic remains which had been found near the asylum”.

The circumstances of the find were given: “In lowering the level of a piece of ground, nearly 20 urns had been found within a radius of 20 yards and they were daily coming on more urns.”

It was clear that this was still happening in 1870, as the doctor was writing.

It is apparent this is the same find which Kate Hodgson had mistakenly thought was found in 1861: “The urns were made of course clay,” said the doctor, “and have an ornamental rim and taper to the bottom.”

The ornament differed from one urn to another as did the sizes, “some 15 inches diameter to one inch and a half”.

Very often, said the superintendent, “a small urn was found alongside a large one and all were filled with ashes, sand, charcoal and half-burnt bones, and in one a small flint arrowhead was found”.

Dr Clouston noted: “The urns were usually found bottom up.”

It seems that the letter may now be lost because at the meeting in Newcastle it was agreed that it should be forwarded to Canon Greenwell, Durham, an expert in “unravelling the story of Primitive man”.

A similar report appeared in the Carlisle Journal on the same day, the difference being that this said the cinerary urns were “found by patients levelling ground near Garlands”.

It may be significant that Miss Hodgson said: “Mr Richie believes the sand pit to have been near to Garlands farm”, a place where patients worked, opposite the hospital.

Bulmer’s 1901 directory says of the institution: “A farm of 100 acres affords profitable occupation to a number of patients to whom this outdoor labour is most congenial.”

The fact that this find at the Garlands had been reported to the Newcastle Society worried local antiquarians, as evidenced by the Journal on April 22, 1870, which asked: “Are we to let so rich a treasure leave the county and be sent to Edinburgh, Newcastle or some such place, away from where it was found?”

What was needed, said the newspaper, was a museum in Carlisle.

Carlisle Museum did open in 1872, in the former Academy of Art on Finkle Street, which had been leased for three years at £20 per annum.

What had been collected over the years was not necessarily local and was badly displayed.

The lease was renewed but with visitor numbers dwindling the museum closed in January 1878 for refurbishment under a new committee.

For the re-opening in April, the Journal remarked on the local theme adopted in a new case, in which “the Garlands Asylum Committee kindly sent a lot of cinerary urns found on their property and never before exhibited”.

The reason the finds had survived was given by Canon Wilson in 1900 when he said of the hospital architect: “The late JA Cory, an able and skilful antiquary, had all the objects found placed in a case and kept in the committee room at the asylum.”

A further excavation of a “burnt mound” at Garlands took place in 1997. It proved to be Bronze Age and was thought to represent a cremation site.

In the report on that dig it was explained that while “the precise location” of the earlier finds was “no longer known, it is clear that they must have been removed from within a few hundred metres of the burnt mound at Garlands”.

One of the larger urns from Garlands is on display in Tullie House today, along with others of the Bronze Age from the area, but the label on the Garlands urn states “the cemetery from which it comes is the largest known in Cumbria.”