Simon English
England Revisited

On wall by chapel in Outhgill in Mallerstang Common. South of Kirkby Stephen.

On an electricity pole in a drystone wall recess next to where the fence post supporting barbed wire was in 1971. As to why this post was removed became apparent later.

Outhgill seems much the same with a well kept green now owned by the village. On the green two new additions are apparent. Firstly the red telephone box, put up after my visit, which has served the village and travellers for decades, but now is due to be removed. Like phone boxes all over the country and on every village green our privatized GPO finds that its use is no longer economic. Villagers are invited to either buy the box, without equipment, for £1 or subsidize retaining the hand set. The company have a point in these days when every house has a telephone and everyone carries a mobile. Except when one finds one has no signal in these valleys. The other is the erection of the ‘The Jew Stone’, a monument with such a curious history as to absolutely characterize the aims of England Revisited.

The original was erected by a local man to celebrate his walking from the mouth to the source of the River Eden. Here he put up a tall narrow stone on which, being a multilingual scholar, he carved an inscription in Latin and Greek surmounted with a Star of David. Decades later, navies building the Settle to Carlisle railway found the stone and, not able to read the inscription, smashed it.

The bits remained on the moor for another 80 years before members the Fell Rescue team took the bits to a local farm with the intention of repairing it. It was too badly weathered. Meanwhile an artillery officer training with the ‘Jewish Brigade’ at Catterick during the Second World War had been intrigued by the inscription of ‘Jew Stone’ that he saw on the ordnance survey maps used in training. In his retirement, now living in Israel, he set out to solve this mystery. He found the pieces stored at the farm and with other local people, appreciably funded a replica to be made and have this erected not on the fell but in the nearby village of Outhgill in Mallerstang.

I was bemused by the apparent change in the course of the stream. This was revealed by my leaving my book of photographs at point 14. A local resident kindly took it upon herself to return it to me. She told me that two years ago there was a heavy rainstorm. Water poured off the fell, the stream burst its banks and a huge quantity of rocks and soil was washed onto the green and blocked the road. Clearing up this mess and restoring the stream would have changed its shape and taken away the original fence post. I also learn that a large number of the original family farms have changed hands so there has been quite a change in the local residents.

I see that St. Marys, the chapel originally re-built from its ruinous state in 1665 by a philanthropic countesse, and given lands to give it an income, is still open and being used. I am glad; this in a land where so many churches have been closed, demolished or converted to other uses. I wonder if her endowment still operates after 350 years.

Later I was written to by another resident who, as a student, remembers seeing the ‘All England Sculpture’ in an art exhibition in 1972. Then in 2010 finds the new flag put up near his house and how it reminded him of his youth, life’s journey, buying a house in Outhgill and up to a flags’ reappearance there some 39 years later.
Point 14