Put some graphite in your pencil

Once used for daubing sheep, graphite went on to become as valuable as gold and wrote Keswick's place in history. Harry Pearson inhales that freshly sharpened-pencil smell

- Harry Pearson

KESWICK'S historic place at the heart of global pencil-making began in Borrowdale in the 1500s, when a Cumbrian shepherd discovered clumps of a soft, black substance in the roots of an upturned tree. He began using it to mark his sheep and the practice caught on. With characteristic lack of pomposity, the Lakeland farmers called this handy stuff 'wad'. Sixteenth-century scientists concluded that wad was some form of lead and dubbed it plumbago (Latin for lead ore).

It wasn't until nearly 200 years later that a German geologist, Abraham Gottlob Werner, determined that wad had nothing whatsoever to do with lead and gave it the modern name of graphite (from the Ancient Greek graphein, meaning to write, draw or record).

By that time, the first Cumbrian graphite mine had been operating near the hamlet of Seathwaite for some 150 years. At first, nobody was quite sure what to do with graphite, beyond daubing sheep and rust-proofing cast-iron stoves. Quack doctors tried to help by mixing wad with wine and claiming it cured colic and gallstones (it didn't-in fact, if ingested, graphite can cause severe gastrointestinal irritation, which is why your teacher told you not to lick the tip of your pencil).