Park to get listed status to mark Battle of Passchendaele centenary

The memorial in Rickerby Park Credit: David Liddle

A Cumbrian park is among 13 war memorials across England to be listed or upgraded ahead of commemorations marking 100 years since the Battle of Passchendaele.

Rickerby Park in Carlisle has been given Grade II Listed status as part of a national programme announced by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport today.

Rickerby Park in Carlisle, Cumbria, which has been listed at Grade II, was transformed in 1920-22 as a memorial to the city's war dead, with unemployed ex-servicemen employed to carry out the work.

Prime Minister Theresa May, the Prince of Wales and the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall will join the descendants of 4,000 soldiers at events in Belgium next week to mark 100 years since the bloody conflict started.

The British and Commonwealth attacks were fought near the Belgian city of Ypres between July 31 and November 10 1917, in battlefields that turned to liquid mud and summed up in poet Siegfried Sassoon’s line “I died in hell, they called it Passchendaele”.

Roger Bowdler, director of listing at Historic England, said: "Passchendaele was a truly grim affair, waged over three muddy, bloody months.

"It succeeded in wearing down the Germans and taking pressure off the French, but at a high cost in lives.

"These newly listed and upgraded memorials are just some of the tributes to the losses of so many."

More than half a million troops - 325,000 Allied troops and 260,000 Germans - died in the battle, officially known as the Third Battle of Ypres, in the West Flanders region of northern Belgium in 1917.

Rickerby Park was part of a landed estate in the late 18th century which was broken up in 1914 and the 87 acres (35 hectares) which is now Rickerby Park were bought in 1920 by the Citizens League, which had been founded to look after soldiers and sailors passing through Carlisle during the Great War.

The League and Carlisle Corporation joined forces to provide the suspension bridge from St Aidan's Road and to erect the cenotaph of Shap granite, which is a central feature of the park. The groundworks employed many jobless ex-servicemen. Rickerby Park was dedicated as a memorial to the 10,000 local men and women — 6,000 of them serving in the Border Regiment — who lost their lives in World War I.