(This post is a bit of a ‘Filler’ as i have been unable to visit any sites for the last 3 months. This has been due to a leg injury which has been very slow to heal, and has stopped me driving or walking any distance. However things are finally improving and i am hoping to get out and about again.)
Back in October 2025 i tagged along with Gavin Parry (link) and Graham Vasey (link) to look at the row of tall cairns on Nine Standards Rigg near Kirkby Stephen in Cumbria. These cairns are something of a mystery as it is unclear when or why they were built, and no real history or tradition has survived to explain them.
Due to my dodgy legs i have recently had plenty of time for reading, and i came across an old reference to ‘Lammas Towers’, which used to exist on the hills to the west of Edinburgh (Anderson, 1792). These towers were large conical cairns built as part of the annual Lammas day celebrations on 1st August – which was an ancient festival for the ‘first fruits’ of the harvest. The Lammas Towers were built by groups of young men who were employed during the summer months to look after herds of sheep and cattle on the hills. The towers were built on high ground, and were around 6 to 8 feet tall, being built of turfs or stone, and rising to a point on which a flag was raised on Lammas day. In Scotland this Lammas Tower tradition had died out by the mid 1700’s, and very few records of it exist, although cairns of this type were to be found in other parts of Scotland.
As noted above there are no records or traditions to explain when or why the cairns on Nine Standards Rigg were built, although the name does appear in old boundary perambulations dating back to the 1500’s. Archaeological survey work carried out in 2012 suggested that the Nine Standards cairns may stand within a much earlier prehistoric hill top enclosure, which contained a group of Bronze age burial cairns. This site was later reused, with some of the tall cairns being built on top of the older mounds. Although nine cairns stand on the hill top today, their number has varied between 7 to 13 cairns as they have been rebuilt at different times in the past. (more details at the Friends of Nine Standards website).
It is worth noting that flags were raised on the Lammas Towers in Scotland on Lammas Day, while the word ‘Standard’ can also denote a flag or banner, suggesting that flags may have been displayed on the Nine Standards cairns in the past. The Scottish Lammas Towers were also built by shepherds and other cattle herders, and there are the remains of a shepherds hut and livestock pens close to the Nine Standards cairns.
The northern part of Cumbria shares a border with Scotland, and this area was once part of the ancient kingdom of Strathclyde, so it is possible that the old tradition of building Lammas cairn in Scotland could have extended down into Cumbria. Drovers routes also connected this area of Cumbria with Scotland so the tradition could have spread in this way too.
Here is a video taken with a DJI Flip and my rather lame piloting skills, but it does show the cairns and the panoramic views from their location at the head of the Eden valley. (Try full screen for a better view).
Reference
Anderson, J (1792) An Account of the Manner in which the Lammas Festival used to be celebrated in Mid Lothian, about the Middle of the Eighteenth Century ….
Archaeologia Scotica, 1, 192-198. https://journals.socantscot.org/index.php/arch-scot/article/view/336
Information from the Friends of Nine Standards website now archived at …
https://web.archive.org/web/20180829095427/http://ninestandards.eu/index.htm
