The Great Mare

Epona is the Celtic goddess of fertility and protector of horses, donkeys and ponies. The name Epona derives from the Proto-Celtic Epos – ‘Horse’, and images of her can be found across the Celtic continent from Britain to the Balkans. She ensured the fertility of the breeding stock, nurturing and protecting the mares, stallions and foals.

Epona was a Celtic, specifically a Gallic and British Goddess, associated with a cult of horses that may have itself been derived from a horse-totem cult of the remote past. In the old stone age there are rock paintings of mares in advanced pregnancy which seem to have a religious significance. To the Iron Age Celts the horse was the embodiment of majesty and nobility.

The Celtic tribes were excellent fighters on horseback and were recruited to the Roman army as auxiliary cavalry. As more non-Romans joined the cavalry, this section of the military embraced Epona as their own. In Rome, on 18 December, a special festival was held in honour of Epona and her image was decorated with roses.

The earliest evidence for the worship of Epona comes from a small inscribed cult relief, discovered in the Sofia area of western Bulgaria. Dated to the late 4th/ 3rd c. BC

The Romans were active in Cumbria in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. Alongside the old Roman road in Tebay Gorge sits Low Borrowbridge Fort, built during the Roman occupation at the junction of Borrowdale and the Upper Lune Valley. In 1991 during an excavation in the Roman cemetery south of the fort, a tombstone was discovered for a cavalryman named Aelia Sentica.