William Hutchinson's "History of the County of Cumberland", of which the first volume, featuring Eskdale, was published in 1794, is not the best book ever written on the history of the county. It is, however, tremendously useful for its information on places as they were then, supplied by local residents. In fact, much of this information is available in two forms, because Hutchinson reprinted as footnotes the information gathered a short time earlier by John Housman- also on this website. For this page, most of the historical material had been removed; also, the order of paragraphs has been rearranged.