The Bellas Sisters

Before emigrating to Australia in 1927, my uncle Michael Samuelson (1898-1975) lived for about a year in Rosgill and made a living taking farmers' eggs to market. On leaving England, he was given a photo of the Bellas sisters standing in the steep lane that runs down through the village towards Bampton. Behind them, on the left, stood Rose Cottage, where he lived at the time. When I first visited Rosgill in the late 1980s I saw the same smoke rising from the same cottage chimney as in that old sepia photo. Mrs Florence Gowling, the then owner of Rosgill Head Farm, took me to Penrith to see an elderly gentleman who had dwelt in Rosgill in the 1920s. I showed him a 60-year-old photo of my uncle, he said: "It's the egg man. I'd know him anywhere." My uncle was staying in Rosgill because of his love of the fells. He then lived in Australia for 25 years before settling in Vancouver, Canada. By sheer coincidence, on a subsequent visit to Rosgill, my wife and I found ourselves staying in the same Rose Cottage where my uncle had lived all those many years before.