#299: The Nine Standards
Where did these figures come from?
Though our Sunday walk started with only a little drizzle and even a rainbow, as we headed uphill, we found ourselves coated in cloud. Water droplets pelted us, and we could no longer see the quaint towns sprawling below. So I looked instead to our goal, and as we neared, dark shapes rose from the mist. Nine ten-foot structures looming like ghosts in the fog. We had found the Nine Standards.
The Nine Standards are nine stone cairns, stretched on top of a 2172-foot hill in the North Pennines. Their stones have loosened, and they are no longer the stable giants they once were, but their stature remains impressive. As we sheltered behind one of the cairns, the eerie stone mounds became a much-needed harbour.
Until 2005, only local hearsay could tell you anything about the stones, which seems a remarkable fact in an age of information. Then the Friends of the Nine Standards project began, aiming to find out more about these structures and how they came to look over Eden Valley.
The Nine Standards are now known to be over 800 years old, and feature in various documents over time, as a clear marker of the border between Yorkshire and Westmorland. But they could be much older than 800 years, and the Friends of Nine Standards are keen to find this out. Their website explains that if the cairns were to date back to the Bronze Age, then their importance would rise significantly.
I find this idea intriguing: that age denotes importance. Clearly, I am not an archaeologist, and I am not able to judge what is and isn’t deemed historically significant, but reading the Friends of Nine Standards’ website it’s clear how beloved these structures are, with or without a national significance. In 2010, a survey of people in the Eden District found that the most-loved view in the area is that of the Nine Standards. The stones are frequently visited by walkers, and a search on Instagram shows photos of people visiting the structures, accompanied by everything from bikes, to dogs, to babies.
People have been carefully rebuilding the cairns for years too. There’s even a record of some nineteenth-century shepherds who took stone from the cairns to build a hut and were ordered to replace the stones. The cairns’ importance has been passed down through generations via this urge to preserve.
And as I saw their shapes darkening the fog, I could see why. There is a power in something so simple, but so ancient. A connection between our Sunday walk and the routes taken by whoever brought the stones to the hill in the first place. I hope more is found out about the Nine Standards, purely to satisfy my own curiosity. But I don’t need proof of their importance, nor the exact details of their history, for them to stop me in my tracks.
