The Langdale Axe Factories

The hillsides around a few remote valleys in the Lake District became the hub of activity in the Neolithic period, attracting people from across Britain to quarry stone to make polished axes.

The crags around Langdale, a few miles west of Lake Windermere, contain a natural band of volcanic tuff or hornstone, a deep green rock which was greatly prized by the Neolithic people. This hornstone is found from Stickle Tarn, a mountain lake high above Langdale, through the Langdale Pikes to the west to Scafell Pike, England’s highest mountain, and then petering out further north.

The stone can be found in streambeds and dug from pits on the level heights, but the Neolithic people went to great effort to quarry stone from the most dangerous and inaccessible rockfaces they could. They climbed the precarious crags, balanced on narrow and unstable ledges a dizzying distance above the valley floor, and hewed blocks of stone from the rockface, often using fire to fracture the rock. The almost ubiquitous rain and fog of the area made the stone dangerously slippery and the climb up and down near impossible. The stone was gained at a high price.

The stone was flaked like flint into a roughout axe at the quarry site, and when the maker was happy they had drawn the essence of an axe from the raw stone, they returned to the lowland areas where hours of painstaking polishing and grinding removed all ridges and imperfections and the perfect shine of the greenstone remained. The axe was finished.

The importance of the axe went far beyond its practical function. The deliberate and unnecessary danger the axe makers underwent suggests that the spiritual power of the crags, the willing trial which would end either in a messy death or the mastery of death, suggests an initiation into the brutal powers of the mountains, and that power infused into the finished product, giving it a highly prized power or prestige. Magical objects such as the Norse God Thor’s hammer likely have their origin as a stone axe.

Many of the stone circles and henges in Cumbria, including Castlerigg by Keswick, Grey Croft on the western coast, Long Meg and her Daughters in the Eden Valley, and Mayburgh Henge near Penrith are linked to the trade of axes and the control of access to the quarry sites, which were worked for over 1500 years.

                                A freshly broken rockface, showing the prized green stone.

Langdale axes were prized and have been found across Britain as far as Etton, a Neolithic causewayed enclosure near Peterborough, Stanton Harcourt, a monumental complex on the River Thames, and Llandegai, a vast but now destroyed henge complex in north Wales. It’s telling that all these were ritually deposited in sacred places at the end of their life. Axes made from local stone for mundane purposes such as chopping firewood didn’t receive such treatment.

                       Harrison Stickle, one of the most well-used quarry sites.

During the Bronze Age, the symbolic power of the stone axe declined, and the Langdale quarries were slowly abandoned. Those polished axes which were later discovered took on a new purpose. They were believed to be lightning bolts, and were used to ward off lightning, were placed in water troughs to give healthy livestock, and many other protective purposes. The magic of these once sacred objects never really died.