CARTMEL FELL CHURCH: AN UNREFORMED GEM

Photograph by Bill Birkett

A more quiet and unassuming building, or a more perfect country church, it would be difficult to find. But perhaps, despite its acres of low-pitched slate roof and squat saddleback tower, it does not want to be found. In summer it is half buried under a tide of wildflowers and in winter it slouches long and low between the rocky outcrops. On the east side of Cartmel Fell, it sits within a lovely confusion of rambling lanes and hedgerows, woods and tiny streams that reach towards the cliffs of Whitbarrow. The ‘Browhead Chapel’ of Mrs Humphry Ward’s novel ‘Helbeck of Bannisdale’, nowhere in the Parish of Cartmel is more secluded than this.

This little woodland church was built at the dawn of the 16th century as a chapel of ease for the scattered community of Cartmel Fell. A community which had evolved from the early farmstead sites of the 10th century into the ‘estates’ of Burblethwaite, Cowmire, Throphinsty, Hodgehill and Ludderburn, a few centuries later. By the 17th century Burblethwaite had its own corn mill, iron forge and drying kilns, as well as orchards, arable land and pasture on the fell. Yet despite this prosperity, the community was required to make the arduous trek to Cartmell Priory to attend church and yet more laborious was the conveyance of the bodies of their dead on the heavy oak bier. The church was built through a bequest by Anthony Knipe of Burblethwaite. In 1520 Robert Briggs of Cowmire left an annual sum for life to the priest John Holme on condition that he took no wages of the hamlet but prayed for the souls of his benefactor and others. The dedication is rare and well-chosen for a place so remote and abundantly wooded. St Anthony was one of the first Christian hermits and patron saint of swineherds, basketmakers and charcoal burners.

That new ideas were slow to take root in so inaccessible a spot is unsurprising. Written during the period of the Commonwealth, the diary of John Shaw who visited the parish in 1644 describes the people of the Furness Fells as ‘exceedingly ignorant and blind as to religion’. On visiting Cartmel Fell, he found a ‘very large spacious church with scarce any seats in it’. Significantly this harks back to pre- Reformation days when there were no seats of any kind in parochial churches. Six years later the Commonwealth Survey refers to the minister John Brooke, as ‘an old malignant, not reconciled’. Despite his recusant tendencies he remained in post, proof perhaps of the relative poverty and insignificance of the living. It is interesting however that when the Quaker George Fox preached at nearby Pool Bank he was reported to have been well received in the valley. Further down the road at Lindale he was thrown in a horse trough.

Other, more tangible fragments of this ‘unreformed’ past survive to the present day, shadows of painted saints and mediaeval stained glass, but there is one object that epitomises it, a remarkable carved oak figure of the crucified Christ, dated to the 15th century. Only two other pre-Reformation crucifixes such as this are known to exist, both from remote corners of Wales. Rediscovered in 1875 during a visit by members of the local antiquarian society, they described it as ‘in the vestry ... standing up in a corner like an old umbrella… which has evidently been used as the vestry poker, for the feet are burnt off’. In its original state it would have been painted in vibrant colours to mimic blood, flesh and the green of the crown of thorns, in its present unadorned and injured form it has particular poignancy. It is currently on display in the Treasury of Carlisle Cathedral.

The interior of the church with its white-washed walls and ancient forest of exposed roof trusses is as Pevsner commented ‘perfect in its way’. The windows are low, deep-set and irregular so the light rakes in at odd angles. A rare three decker pulpit was installed in 1697 but most remarkable are the screened box pews. On the north side the Cowmire Hall pew, may have been reconstructed from the rood screen although it is more likely to have originated as a pre-Reformation chantry chapel with its shadows of saints on a green background. It also bears the emblem of the wool trade, a wool hook and the letter M for the Mercer's Guild. What first appears to be historic graffiti, incised grids on the seats were most probably aids for teaching fractions and multiplication, since a school was held here, around an oak table, until the 19th century. The little pew beside it with the initials WH 1696 has an old door for a seat so is known as the Key-hole pew and belonged to the Hutton family of Thorphinsty Hall.

On the south side is the more elaborate Burblethwaite Pew where the Knipe family maintained some privacy and sheltered from the worst of the draughts. It was in a ruinous state by 1707, at much the same time as the whole church was described as ‘out of repair and unfurnished’. Four years later a stone font, communion table with rail were supplied. In 1727 the floor was flagged with stone brought down the lake from Brathay to Bowness and from there hauled by road. In 1735 a new bell was brought from the foundry in the north west corner of Kendal Parish Churchyard and in the last quarter of the 18th century painted boards with the Kings Arms, the Creed, Lord’s Prayer and Ten Commandments (with elaborately coiffured angels) were also brought from Kendal. New glazing was installed in 1802, and in 1840 much of the roof was re-slated ‘from Mr Webster's quarry at Kirby’. The Burblethwaite Pew was not rebuilt until 1811.

A century later architect and local antiquarian John Curwen visited the church and described it as in ‘a galloping state of decay’. The roof water fell directly upon the walls causing excessive dampness and alongside the north wall ‘a spring runs of such volume that coffins have been known to float in the graves before the mourners had finished the burial service’. The programme of repairs, in addition to curing these ills, revealed the foundations of the original nave, indicating that the two small transepts were later editions. In the north transept a thin casing wall was demolished to reveal two small windows, suggesting a small room for a visiting priest. The plaster ceiling was removed to expose the original roof trusses.

What is however most astonishing about this small country church is the contents of its five lancet east windows. Here fragments of stained glass have survived both the Reformation and the Civil War, pre-dating the church itself with artwork typical of the early 15th century. It is believed to have been created by the stained-glass masters of York and may have come from Cartmel Priory after its dissolution in 1536. The windows were sympathetically reset and restored 1911 using fragments of old glass which had previously been kept in the vestry for ‘running repairs’.

A curious inscription handwritten in ink on one of the panes and now sadly lost, reads: ‘Will’s Brigg goeth to London upon Tusday xiith day of Aprill god fend hym.’ It serves to remind us of how precarious travel could be in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Outside in the churchyard many footpaths converge from all directions, worn over the centuries by parishioners. At its centre is a mounting block where the parish clerk read out the notices and the owners of Cowmire, Burblethwaite, Thorphinsty, Hodge Hill, and Swallowmire gathered up the reins and mounted their steeds after attending divine service. Later the central stake formed the shaft for a sun-dial, as the churchwardens' accounts in the middle of the 18th century give, ‘To dial post making and setting 4d.’ Along the south wall of the church is a stone bench, allegedly for spectators to idle upon during archery practice.

So finally to death and a singular headstone, once in the graveyard now mounted on the wall within the church. The inscription reads:

‘Betty Poole daughter of John & Margery Poole who departed her life Nov. 21st Inter’d 24th 1779 Aged 3 years one Month & 5 Days.

Underneath this stone a mould'ring Virgin lies, Who was the pleasure once of Human Eyes. Her blaze of charms Virtue well aprov'd,

The Gay admired, much the parents lov'd

Transitory life, death untimely came

Adiue, Farewell, I only leave my name.’

The sense of loss is powerful and unsettling and yet, as the sunlight rakes across the chancel, animating the ancient oak and those arcane and impenetrable mediaeval faces in the east window, there is sense also of completeness and peace, of a church so embedded in the earth and the woods and rocks, that perhaps nothing here is ever entirely lost or forgotten.

First published in ‘Cumbria’ magazine March 2023.