Qualla: Egremont, Cumbria

Egremont, Cumbria: Introduction

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit steven ruffles, CC BY-SA 2.0. Once a year, on the third Saturday of September, sane adults in this West Cumbrian market town pull faces so grotesque that strangers cheer. The World Gurning Championships, held inside a horse collar called a 'braffin,' is not a stunt invented for tourists. It descends, in a more or less unbroken line, from a market charter granted by King Henry III in 1266 or 1267, when the Lord of Egremont gave away crab apples to the poor at the foot of Main Street. Nearly 800 years later, the apples still get tossed, the high street still closes, and the gurners still climb under the collar to compete for the ugliest face in the world.

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Image: steven ruffles | CC BY-SA 2.0

Egremont, Cumbria: The Pointed Hill

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit VanuitVoorburg, CC BY-SA 3.0. The name itself comes from Old French: aigremont, meaning 'pointed hill.' That hill rises at the south end of Main Street, and on it sits Egremont Castle, begun around 1120 by William de Meschines when Henry I gave him the Barony of Copeland. It took roughly 150 years to finish. ...

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Image: VanuitVoorburg | CC BY-SA 3.0

Egremont, Cumbria: Lords, Wolves, and a Drowned Boy

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tim Herrick from Sheffield, UK, CC BY 2.0. The barony passed through hands quickly in its early generations. Around 1205, Grunwilda, wife of Richard de Lucy, was reportedly killed by a wolf during a hunting trip - a story preserved in the medieval poem 'The Woeful Chase.' One of the strangest threads in Egremont's lineage...

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Image: Tim Herrick from Sheffield, UK | CC BY 2.0

Egremont, Cumbria: Red Earth, Red Iron

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Karl1587, Public domain. For more than 800 years, Egremont's other identity was iron. Hematite, the dense red ore that makes the soil here run rust-coloured after rain, was mined industrially from about 1830, and the last working deep iron ore mine in Western Europe - the Florence Mine, just south of tow...

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Image: Karl1587 | Public domain

Egremont, Cumbria: Sellafield and the Modern Town

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ben Brooksbank, CC BY-SA 2.0. Most of Egremont's modern story is bound up with what people locally just call 'the site.' Sellafield, the vast nuclear complex a few miles south, transformed the town from 1970 onward, drawing workers and rebuilding the housing stock. The town's character is industrial and quiet...

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Image: Ben Brooksbank | CC BY-SA 2.0

Egremont, Cumbria: A Town That Lost Two of Its Own

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit H Stamper, CC BY-SA 2.0. On 2 June 2010, Derrick Bird, a 52-year-old local taxi driver, drove through West Cumbria killing twelve people before taking his own life. Two of those killed were in Egremont. Communities like this one absorb that kind of grief differently than cities do - the dead are neighbou...

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Image: H Stamper | CC BY-SA 2.0