Page 121 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

And so the day wears on, wnue uie sun oaKes uuwn uh me
chipping-floors, sited in sheltered gullies high up among the
scree slopes, or while the low clouds scud overhead, spilling an

occasional shower that brings the buckskin hoods over the heads
of the men and sometimes, though rarely, drives the children

to the shelter of the nearest rock face.
When the call comes for the evening meal, the men will
pack their axes into leather bags and sling them on their backs,

and, with the laughing children astride their shoulders, plod
down the slope to the camp. There the results of the day’s work

will be spread out, for inspection by the master smith, and each
man will have his tale of finished axes notched on his tally stick,
before the axes are packed away, to be taken on the morrow

to the polishing yard down the valley. There the final edge will
be given to the stone axes, and they will be put aside against the

arrival of the traders and the great fall market.
It is no trade for weaklings, that of axsmith. The rhyolite
boulders of the scree slopes are a tough material to work, well

able to raise blisters on the horniest hands, and they weigh
heavier and heavier as the day wears on. The off-days are eagerly

anticipated, when, for a change, the men will take their flint­
tipped spears and arrows and go hunt the red deer over the moors
of Watendleth and through the valleys running down to Borrow­

dale.
Hunting is more than a mere holiday. Although they live

mainly on the produce of their sheep and cattle, and although
their importance to the economy of this time (and to prehis­
torians of a later era) lies in their seasonal manufacture of stone

axes, the people of the Langdale fells look upon themselves pri­
marily as hunters, and know, without thinking much about it,

that hunting has been their people’s way of life from time im­
memorial.
The land of Britain belongs to this people, and to their cous­

ins across the length and breadth of the country. That they are
the original Ancient Britons they could, of course, hardly know,
though they are in fact the linear descendants of the hunting and

s ing tribes who had entered the country from the south and
east thousands of years earlier, on the heels of the retreating