There are four stone bears in the churchyard at Dacre. Each is about four feet high, carved from red sandstone, and standing at one of the four corners of St Andrew's churchyard. One appears to be sleeping. Another is waking. A third stands upright, and the fourth holds something in its paws. They are medieval, and nobody knows what they are for. The guesses run to heraldry, boundary markers, or religion, and none of them has settled the matter. They are among the most enigmatic monuments in the Lake District, which is a way of saying that people have looked at them for centuries and come away none the wiser.
The church behind them is worth the same slow look. St Andrew's is Grade I listed, Norman in its bones, and built on the site of a seventh-century Saxon monastery. There were additions in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but the older story is the one that matters here. The Venerable Bede recorded a miraculous healing at Dacre in 698, which is the sort of thing that only gets written down about places that mattered.
Dacre mattered more than its size suggests. In 934, King Athelstan convened a great assembly here — the Congress of Dacre, one of the more significant political gatherings in early medieval Britain. It is a quiet hamlet now, five miles west of Penrith, and you would not guess that kings once met in it.
A few hundred yards off stands Dacre Castle, a quadrangular pele tower with four turrets, built around 1360. It is the kind of fortified tower house the Anglo-Scottish border zone produced in quantity, when a defensible home was a sensible investment. It's privately owned and closed to the public, but visible from the road, which is enough to give you the shape of it.
The village has one pub, the Horse & Farrier Inn — a traditional village inn that has long served the agricultural community of the Eden Valley. There are no shops. This is a place you come to for the walking and the quiet, not for the provisioning, so bring what you need.
The walking rewards the trip. A circular route around the village takes in the castle, the church and Dacre Beck, which runs through the middle of everything on its way toward Ullswater. The Ullswater Way passes through the surrounding countryside, and the whole village sits on rolling agricultural land at the foot of the eastern fells. A mile west is Dalemain House, a Grade I listed mansion that is medieval, Tudor and Georgian by turns, with gardens that are open to visitors — a short walk from the village, and an easy afternoon.
Getting here means driving. There is no railway and no regular bus; you reach Dacre on the B5320 from Penrith, or from Ullswater by way of Pooley Bridge.
The beck keeps running through it, past the church and the four bears that no one has ever explained, on toward the lake.
