Helsfell Cave, Kendal
John Beecham excavated this cave, on the outskirts of Kendal, in the 1880’s. Beecham (1815-1894) was a local master chairmaker in his mid 60’s when he started work at the cave. According to the Reverend H.A. MacPherson, Beecham ‘worked on with dogged pluck for five continuous summers’ to excavate the site. The only written account of this work is given in MacPherson’s A Vertebrate Fauna of Lakeland, published in 1892. In this he lists a range of animal bones excavated by Beecham, which he says were identified by Prof W. Boyd Dawkins. However we have failed to find any reference to this material in Boyd Dawkins' papers (either at Manchester or Buxton Museums, both of which hold Boyd Dawkins archives). The only archaeology described from the site at the time was a single bone point. During the time he was excavating at Helsfell Beecham lived at 17 Shaws Brow, about 15-20 minutes walk from the cave. He is described as carefully washing all the sediment from the cave in a nearby spring to extract the smaller bones; while sieving from small mammal bones is now standard practice this was very unusual in the 19th century. The photograph below shows one of the paths up from Shaws Brow to Helsfell Cave (which is in the wooded hill on the left of the photo).
In 1888 part of Beecham's Helsfell collection was bought by Kendal Museum. This was included in material sold to Liverpool Museum in 1960. However, the Helsfell collection at Liverpool contains many bones of species not originally described as coming from Beecham’s excavations, including both human and Giant Deer bones. Our studies of documentary material in the Liverpool Museum archives show that there was considerable uncertainty as to where this material came from, and we are currently of the view that almost none of the material in Liverpool can be confidently attributed to Helsfell, the exception being some goose bones which appear to be the same as the ones described by MacPherson.
The photograph below shows part of the ‘Helsfell’ collection in Liverpool Museum, note the range of types of bone preservation. The dark coloured bones (such as the Badger mandibles in the foreground) are highly mineralised while other material appears very ‘fresh’. This is consistent with the documentary evidence, which suggests that the ‘Helsfell’ collection is probably made up of material from several different sites, possibly including Whitbarrow bone cave, Helsfell and Arnside Knott.
A preliminary account of the history of archaeological investigations at this site can be found in Wilkinson et al. (2006). In 2007 we located a small number of bones from the cave in Coniston Museum and we re-identified all of these bones as those of domestic animals. As the original identifications of this material had included human, deer and bear (see photograph below), this illustrates the need for caution in accepting some 19th century identifications (O'Regan et al., 2008).
Reference
O’Regan, H.J., Clare, T. & Wilkinson, D. (2008) The nineteenth century excavation of Helsfell fissure near Kendal, Cumbria, and a reassessment of the surviving bone assemblage. The Naturalist 133: 121-133.
Wilkinson, D.M., O'Regan, H.J. & Clare, T. (2006). A tale of two caves: the history of archaeological exploration at Haverbrack and Helsfell in southern Cumbria. Studies in Speleology 14, 55-57.
