100 Interesting Facts
We have now passed our original target of posting 100 Interesting Facts - and are still adding to them! We began posting these back in 2017, with the Facts being submitted by our volunteers and friends. Click on a 'Fact' for more Background information.
You can access a full list of all the Facts here, so you can browse looking for anything that takes your fancy. Click on the title to take you to the 'Background' page. Next to the title is a brief explanation as to what the story is about. The date is the date the Fact was first posted to the site. Please note that when we first started on this series, these Background entries were short and sweet- but over time we have tended to put more and more information into our new postings - along with references so you can follow up on more about the story at your leisure.
If YOU have a Fact you'd like to share, please Contact Us , giving us references so we can check - as before posting anything, our team of historians have to be sure it REALLY IS a fact, not a myth!
Reveal Facts by:
Morecambe Bay did not exist before 1774 – that’s when Fr Thomas West first gave the Bay its name.
The Highland commander, George Murray, saves Tom Robinson from execution at the hands of the Jacobites at Eamont Bridge in the '45'
St Patrick was a Cumbrian. But where exactly was he living when he was captured by those Irish slave-raiders? Ravenglass or Birdoswald?
From 1816 to 1895 St Bees boasted a higher education college for theological students awaiting ordination. A bid by its third principal to award its own degrees was unsuccessful.
That mountain chain to the east of Cumbria was given the fake name of The Pennines by Charles Bertram, an Anglo-Danish student, in the mid-18th century. He claimed to have found the name on a copy of a Roman map, made in the 14th century by the monk Richard of Cirencester. It wasn't true
In 1672 Thomas Lancaster, of High Wray, was hanged, then ‘hunge oopp in Iron Chaynes on a Gibbet … until such tyme as he rotted away bone for bone”
For centuries, street performers have filled our streets with music. Few, though, found fame like Carlisle’s itinerant fiddler, Jimmy Dyer.
The sound of six-shooters, war drums and stampeding bison once echoed around Cumbria. That was when Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show came to visit, in September 1904 - taking in Carlisle, Penrith, Maryport, Workington, Whitehaven, Barrow and Kendal.
A wall in Plumpton bears a memorial to an heroic policeman, Constable Joseph Byrnes, who was murdered by jewel thieves in 1885.
A deadly storm rocked Cumbria before Christmas 1894. Temperatures plummeted afterwards, until even Windermere froze. Then the skaters arrived…
Gunpowder from Low Wood and Sedgwick, in South Cumbria, was shipped out to West Africa, to be traded for slaves.
Freshwater Biological Association scientists spent the war years in Wray Castle, helping to feed the country.
Cumbria played its part in providing a safe haven for children from the Basque region of Spain from 1937 -1939.
The first Turnpike Road in Cumbria was built under the Whitehaven Harbour Act of 1739. It joined St Bees to Whitehaven
Without Wray Castle we might not have had the National Trust – or Peter Rabbit
A number of old churches in Cumbria have slots in an outside wall, which were used by walled-up anchorites, to witness the mass.
With Carlisle’s pubs in mind, David Lloyd George declared in 1915 ‘We are fighting Germany, Austria and drink, and so far as I can see the greatest of these deadly foes is drink’.
Conishead, once a priory of Augustinian Monks, founded in the 1180s, has since 1976 been home to a community of Buddhist monks
It is claimed (but it can’t be proved) that the last wolf in England was killed at Humphrey Head in the fourteenth century
In medieval times, leprosy was endemic in Cumbria – but everything changed with the Black Death
