The Devil of the North? – The Giant Cor & the Celtic Mythology of the Tyne Valley

Last updated on March 19, 2023

   I’ve spent a great deal of time writing about Northumberland recently. I’ve been working since Christmas time on a long, photo-laden post covering the Cheviot Moors and some of the legends there that connect to Celtic mythology; tales covered in greater detail in my book, “The Ghosts of the Forest” (for more on that, click here). Whilst chatting online to some people from Northumberland, however, another little story presented itself to me – and it’s one so intriguing that I’ve put this post together at short notice to try and generate a wider discussion. It’s a tale that appears to have endured for many centuries in the northeast of England, and which bears all the hallmarks of a survival of ancient mythology. It is possible, in fact, that it preserves the memory of the original Celtic god of the Tyne valley.

   The discovery came about by blind luck. I was leafing through the pages of the 16^th century text of “The Itinerary of John Leland”, looking for some further information on certain places in the Bewcastle Fells covered in my book, when I happened to glance at a page describing the little town of Corbridge. One particular sentence caught my attention, which read as follows (language updated into modern English);

“By this brook as among the ruins of the old town is a place called Colecester, where has been a fortress or castle. The people there say that there dwelled in it one Yoton, whom they fable to have been a giant.” (pg 57, “Leland’s Itinerary”, Part IX, ed. Lucy Toulmin Smith, 1910, G. Bell and Sons, London)

   ‘Yoton’ is a Northumbrian term meaning ‘giant’; it derived ultimately from the Scandinavian term “Jotun”, and likely arrived with the early Anglo-Saxons. It is present too in Old Scots, where it is rendered ‘Etin’. Rather than being a personal name ‘Yoton’ was in fact most likely a descriptor. The tale caught my attention, since I knew that Corbridge had been an important place in ancient times; the site of the Romano-British town of Coria. This place was an important one; one of two main urban centres along Hadrian’s Wall (along with Carlisle in the west), and for a great many years the northernmost town in the whole of the Roman empire. The association of a giant with some ruins here could conceivably present a link to some of the deeper portions of British history; the Romano-British era, perhaps, or even before. There was no certainty this would be so – but it was worth a little investigation. I set to work.

   Some quick research showed that the site in question was indeed an ancient one. ‘Colecester’ was more recently called Corchester, and is now termed “Corbridge Roman Town”; the site is that of th Romano-British settlement that preceded Corbridge. ‘Chester’ is a widespread term in England and Scotland, deriving from the Latin ‘castra’, and signifying ‘fortress’. ‘Cor’ obviously had some connection to the original name of the place, Coria – though I did not at this stage know what that connection may have been.

   I began to ask around online, and to hunt through some old texts with the aid of Google. With a little assistance, I swiftly tracked down some further detail that gave flesh to the bones of the story. The most intriguing addition came from the pages of a copy of the “History of Corbridge and Its Antiquities” by Robert Forster (1881), held in the collection of the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. In this one copy of the book alone are contained hand-written notes inserted by the author giving further details that came to his attention after the publication of the text. The Society are kind enough to make the whole of these available online, here. In one of these notes is written the following, apparently copied from a letter appearing in a local newspaper;       

“From Newcastle Chronicle

I beg leave to supplement Mr Forster’s note on the above subject by the following extract from

“Nesham’s History of West Durham”. “Tradition says that Corbridge, Benfieldside, and Consett,

were founded by three Brother Giants, Cor Ben, and Con, who are stated to have had a huge

hammer in common, which each could throw nine miles. Mr Nesham then gives the following

extract from Dr Carr’s Ode to the Derwent”;-

In elder times giants upreared

Their heads and affronted the skies,

Cor, Ben, Con, terrific appeared,

With names of anomalous size,

A hammer in common they had,

And use of it easy to all,

Each whistled, each brother was glad

To throw it three leagues at his call,

When Cor was approaching his end,

Deaf, blind, and beginning to rave,

With a ploughman he begged as a friend

To converse at the mouth of his cave;

This ploughman as prudent men do,

Held his ploughshares himself to escape *

Blind Cor pinched his ploughshare in two,

And pronounced it the arm of an ape.”

Corbridge in Northumberland and Conset and Benfieldside in Durham were places where the

brothers resided.

* This encounter took place betwixt Dilston & Corbridge on a lonely part of the road.”

(full text available here)

   The poem quoted was published in 1834, in a text called the “Bishoprick Garland”. It was apparently written before this date, though, as the author died in 1807; the date of composition therefore likely lay in the 1700s. He was a native of the village of Muggleswick on the edge of the hills south of Corbridge, just southwest of Consett; the terrain described in the story was his native ground, and so its traditions surely well-known to him.

   This note follows another, in which there is given a description of the discovery of skeletal remains of unusual size beside a stream that flows to the north of the ruins of Roman Coria – a stream called the Cor Burn. These remains were identified by their discoverers as the bones of the giant Cor, and one of the ribs exhibited in the museum at Keswick labelled as such. This took place in 1660. Though the remains themselves presumably represent those of some prehistoric beast rather than an actual giant – an Ice Age bear or mammoth perhaps – what the tale does make clear is that legend of the giant called Cor was strong enough in Corbridge in the 17^th century for the bones to be immediately connected to him.

   To these early accounts I was able to add one later one, drawn from the 1894 text of John Robinson’s “Illustrated Handbook to the Rivers Tyne, Blyth & Wansbeck”. Page 9 of this text gives the following story;

“At the foot of the rocks on which the Life Brigade House and the Monument stands, are the dangerous reef of rocks known as the Black Middens. Concerning the origin of the Black Middens, there is an old legend which is interesting from the fact itis the first historical struggle for supremacy between the old presiding deity of the River Tyne and its present acknowledged patron. The Giant Cor, who claimed the Tyne as his own special property, and who dwelt on its banks where his name is now associated with the village— once took it into his head to shut the tide out of the river. In order to do this effectually, he brought lapfuls of stones from Newbiggin, Hartley, and Whitley points and threw them into the entrance to the Tyne, just within the Bar. But King Neptune, riding upon the tide twice a day to wanton with his Dolphins upon the fresh water, swept these stones out of the main channel, leaving the entrance clear, but left them in a heap near the shore on the north side; when from the earliest records we have of the Roman and Danish invasions until the present century, they have been the scenes of wrecks, and hundreds of valuable lives lost upon them… The erection of the two magnificent piers at the mouth  of the river have, however, entirely removed the danger of these dreaded Black Middens; the spell of the Old Giant Cor has been broken, and the safety of the Tyne as a harbour of refuge is now universally acknowledged.”

   These various tales all connect a giant with the ruins of Coria, and do so over the span of four centuries. This was evidently a legend with some longevity, and one connected to the deepest layers of the history of the place; Cor is named as the founder of Corbridge, and its name taken to derive from his. This is the origin legend of the Tyne valley landscape.

   The final tale, that of the Black Middens, takes the natural next step. In this story Cor is made not simply a giant, but also a deity; the tutelary god of the River Tyne, whose home was at Corbridge. As the founder of its ancient capital, and the ruler of its principal physical feature, this is an obvious designation; such a being encountered in a pagan culture would certainly be viewed as a god.

   For me, as a writer with an interest in uncovering the Celtic mythology of the lost Old North – the Brythonic Celtic land that once occupied most of northern Britain – the discovery of these tales was something very exciting indeed. The association of Cor with both the physical remains of the ancient settlement of Coria, and with its pre-Anglian, pre-Roman name, suggested that this character might conceivably stem directly from the original Celtic mythology of the Tyne valley.

   The name of Coria appears in the 2^nd century AD “Geography” of Ptolemy, which records a description of the island of Britain as it was before the Roman conquest, tribal territories and all. In that text, Coria appears as one of the towns of the Votadini tribe; a people whose name later evolved into Godothin, and whose territories extended all the way north to the Forth. The city of Edinburgh in which I reside lies in the northern portions of their territory, and was in later years their capital; it would appear that, in ancient times the southern portions of their domain encompassed the valley of the Tyne too. Once the Romans arrived and erected Hadrian’s Wall the connection between the independent northern tribes and those in the south now subject to Rome was presumably severed; this may account for the Roman-era appearance in the region of three otherwise unknown tribes, the Textoverdi, Corionotatae and Lopocares. The latter are known only from a version of the name of the town of Coria recorded in the late-Roman Ravenna Cosmography, in which it is referred to a Corielopocarium – Coria of the Lopocares. These tribes are traditionally viewed as sub-clans of the Brigantes, but may perhaps more likely have originated as septs of the Votadini who were separated politically from the original tribal state by the creation of the frontier at Hadrian’s Wall.  

   There is circumstantial evidence within the tales to connect them to Celtic tradition. The legends of the Celtic Britons (Welsh, Cornish and Bretons) are full of giants, and the syllable ‘Cor’ is included in the name of one of the most famous of their number, Cormoran of Cornwall. The number three is likewise a number that occurs again and again in Celtic legend; that Cor and his two brothers should form a trinity is suggestive of Celtic belief. The story of the brothers hurling their great hammer across the landscape recalls a tale from Aberdeenshire, in which giants who inhabited the hillforts of the region hurled rocks at one another – and likewise parallels the antics of Cormoran, hurling rocks from his home on St. Michael’s Mount to a neighbouring giant on Trencrom Hill.

   If any of this should be so we might, of course, expect to find some trace of it in the archaeological remains recovered from Corbridge. A great many inscriptions, engravings and sculptures have been recovered from the ruins of Coria, and if there were some regional Celtic deity who figures highly in the pantheon of the place, we might expect some evidence of him to have been recovered. Tantalisingly, there is a possible candidate.

   I was put onto this lead by, unexpectedly, the Twitter account @VisitCorbridge. The team behind this account had previously asked the local historian David Waugh for some detail on the legend of Cor, and he had written the following;

“…I have come across two legends of a Corbridge giant. One was Yoton and described on page 13 of Craster’s History of Northumberland, Vol X Corbridge. It was based on the discovery of a huge skeleton during the time of Henry VIII. The second was the giant ‘smith’ god Cor (lived at Corbridge) and who had two brothers Ben (lived at Benfieldside) and Con (lived at Consett) – conveniently 19 miles apart. They had one hammer between them but they had only to whistle and the hammer came flying to them through the sky. In time Con grew old and blind and lost his skill in hammer throwing. Corbridge was an important place for iron making (Smithygate) in the 12^th and 13^th centuries. It has been suggested that Corbridge had a local cult of a smith god.”

   The connection to a smith god seemed as if it might provide the missing link between folklore and archaeology. I looked into the matter further, and found a paper entitled “The Smith God in Roman Britain” by John Leach, published in 1962 in Archaeologia Aeliana. This paper described a group of 6 relief carvings on pottery recovered from Corbridge, depicting a divine smith dressed in Romano-British style, with iconography mixing Roman and Celtic elements. The author suggested that the most likely explanation for the carvings was that they represented a Celtic smith-god identified with the Roman Vulcan. In support of this, he pointed out that the carvings were found in association with similar images of the god Taranis, the Celtic god of the sky and thunder – a combination of Jupiter and Thor – who was elsewhere in the Romano-Celtic world also associated with a god of smithying.

   As the images are all of Roman date, it is possible that this deity was imported to Coria during the Roman era. It is equally possible, however, that the cult antedates the Roman arrival; the Celtic peoples introduced iron-working – and iron weapons – to Europe, and blacksmiths held an important place in their society. The uplands of County Durham, just south of Corbridge, contain iron ore deposits that were among the few sources of iron in Britain worked in Roman times; if these deposits were known to the Celts before them, the presence of such resources might easily have helped stimulate the development of Coria as an important settlement, and a god of smithying have become associated with the foundation of the place.

   None of the images of the smith-god from Roman Coria bear a certain name. The word “Alletio” appears on one, but not apparently as a label for the image of the god; it is therefore unclear what this term represents. It may be the name of the potter who made the images, that of a dedicant making offerings to the god, or something else entirely. In later times, the smith-god of Brythonic Celtic mythology was called Gofannon; in Gaulish, this name was rendered Gobannos or Cobanos. Neither of these precisely resembles Cor – though interestingly, the creation of the Roman road running from Corbridge towards Berwick was in later legend attributed to a ‘devil’ named Cobb. Were the god worshipped as part of a trinity, as is common elsewhere in Celtic religion, it is possible that the name ‘Cobannos’ might have applied to only one member of such a trinity, and other names to the other two – though we are now straying far into the realms of conjecture.

   What is clear from all this, however, is that it is certainly possible the legends of the giant Cor do have very ancient origins indeed. I would like to go further in the pursuit of this legend; to see if it is possible to trace the legends any further, and to hold this theory up to informed scrutiny and see if it can survive the experience. I would be curious to see if there are any credible grounds for believing that Antiquarian inventiveness might have exaggerated the tale, or added elements to it; or if perhaps it might be explained by the relocation of some legend during medieval times, unconnected to the early history of the Tyne.     

   It appears that there are strands of this tradition beyond those I have quoted here. Some online excerpts suggest that Cor’s brother Con dwelt in a valley near Consett carved out by the brothers’ hammer; another names an alternative giant as part of the trinity of brothers, one ‘Mug’. There is also the tantalizing presence in Corbridge of a well called the Cor Well; springs were often sacred places in Celtic religion, and any association between the giant and this well would prove telling. None of the sources of these additional details quote references – but source texts for them there must be. I am keen to track them down, and to collect any other available versions of the tale too. If anyone out there would like to get involved in this search, or provide any help, I would dearly love to connect with you! I have a young family, and am ill-placed to go trudging around the Tyne valley (much as I would love to do so); if anyone in the region might be willing to help, it would be my considerable pleasure to make your acquaintance.

   The prize on offer is substantial – in Antiquarian terms, at least. There is the credible prospect here of reawakening the memory of a very ancient spirit; the personification of a landscape and the first stirrings of industry within it. There is something very appealing about the notion that the very first god of the Tyne, a valley so full of industry and iron in later centuries, wielded a hammer, and pulled iron from the flames. If this is indeed the Cor who raised Coria, he seems a fitting spirit – and to return him to the land, and the descendants of those first smiths, seems a fitting pursuit. It is one to which I would willingly lend a hand…

© William Young and Inter-Celtic, 2023. Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to William Young and Inter-Celtic with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.