NINEKIRKS: WHAT’S IN A NAME?

 

Like a mediaeval pilgrim, the last mile to the church of Ninekirks is travelled on foot; there is no road. At your back the insistent rumble of the A66, a route that has dominated this landscape for over two thousand years, and before you Cross Fell and the impregnable wall of the north Pennines. This isolated church has long been the parish church of Brougham. It is one of very few churches to be built during the Commonwealth and has fixed itself stubbornly in its own island of time, nestled inside a walled enclosure on a low river terrace within the broad floodplain of the River Eamont. The ghosts of paleochannels that centuries of ploughing have not quite erased weave around it and the river cuts deep in a tight curve scouring the red sandstone cliffs to the north. But here there is a deeper mystery, lying largely undisturbed, in these rich alluvial soils.

Mediaeval records indicate that a church was located here in 1393, serving as a chapel-of-ease for St Wilfred’s chapel in Brougham. By the mid-17th century it was derelict and consequently demolished, and the present church built on the same site by Lady Anne Clifford. This redoubtable lady styled herself as a ‘repairer of breaches’ and spent her final years restoring her long fought for inheritance, the castles and churches of her northern estates.

A curious footnote to her story is a passion for elaborate locksmithery, manifest in her habit of giving away extravagant locks and keys made by George Dent of Appleby. George Sedgwick her secretary received one at Colinfield near Kendal and the one gifted to Rose Castle is still in daily use. Since keys have always been symbolic of authority, power and status, these gifts were no doubt intended to carry a fairly unequivocal subtext.

Clearly, her resources were limitless and as with much else in old Westmoreland she managed to prolong the spirit of mediaeval times into the 17th century with, according to Pevsner, her ‘architectural taste was not just conservative but positively mediaevalising’. The church at Ninekirks bears witness to this. The exterior is both typical of its time and unconsciously old-fashioned, only the symmetry of the whole and the two windows, east and west, betray the century. Internally however, it is remarkable. Beyond the heavy chancel door is a forest of mellow oak, canopied box pews, alter rail, three decker pulpit, alter table and roof with collar beams on long arched braces, all dating to Lady Anne’s time. It is a wide, white, well-lit space with small, round-arched single light windows. A triumph of robust simplicity where nothing is jarring, no Victorian sentimentality or over elaboration. Even the original coat hooks survive along with the beautifully wrought door catches. All that is wanting is a suitably arranged congregation of the Commonwealth period.

A few elements predate the building itself. The vast parish chest with its three locks, braced with iron and otherwise not too far removed from a tree trunk. Within the porch a reset medieval corbel in the form of a man’s head, the features decidedly anguished, no doubt originated in the previous church and the plain alter table rests on a pre-Reformation altar slab recovered from the churchyard.

Also there is an elaborate and rather incongruous section of oak panelling which surrounds the priest’s door on the south east wall. Clearly dating from a century before the rebuilding of Ninekirks, with its fabulous ‘new world’ motifs, it has been suggested that this has been constructed from an old Elizabethan vestment chest.

Work on the church in the 1840s revealed a pair of earlier tombs, now protected under a heavy wooden trap door. These were ‘excavated’ in 1846 by William Brougham of Brougham Hall. His assertion that these were the graves of his 12th century crusader ancestors inspired heated debate and indeed ridicule in the pages of the Gentleman’s Magazine the following year. A hundred years later the Rev. C. L. Bouch who was then Rector of Ninekirks as well as a noted local historian, more accurately dated them to the thirteenth-century. He suggested that they had been ‘appropriated by the Brougham family’ and ‘to make it more realistic, they have added a skull to the collection, claiming it to be that of Odard de Burgham (who flourished circa 1175)’. All this he claimed, ‘seems to savour more of Wardour Street (then the centre of the British film industry) than of fact’.

Despite the repair work, the church was still poorly maintained when Dr Markham visited in 1848. He commented on the ‘musty, mouldy smell of decay so usual in such out-of-the-way churches… it has a solemn gloom, from the smallness of its round-headed windows, filled with dim old dingy and smudged green glass.’

Further reminders of Ninekirks distant past lie in the churchyard where the sandstone base of the medieval high cross survives to the south of the church. And most intriguingly, during the digging of a grave in the churchyard in 1914 a hoard of 23 Roman coins was discovered and examination of these suggests they were deposited between 276 and 286 AD.

Despite its mediaeval origins the first surviving reference to the name Ninekirks does not appear until 1583, with the first known explanation of the name appearing in the writings of Thomas Machell, Rector of Kirkby Thore, Chaplain to Charles II and noted antiquarian. In around 1690 he notes `The parish church . . . called Nine Church concerning which name there are several conjectures …. But the most probable is from Ninianus.’ He goes on to suggest the alternative, ‘that church being eight times demolished and rebuilt the nineth time’, but sensibly concluded that most people would consider the former more probable. Ninian was Romano-British and a Christian, brought up somewhere on the shores of the Solway at the end of the fourth century. A tradition connecting him with the evangelization of the district is preserved in the words of the twelfth- century rhyming chronicler, Geoffrey Gaimar.

Despite this there is clear evidence in early documents to show that its medieval dedication was actually to one of the most noteworthy of Northumbrian saints, the 7th century St. Wilfrid. Most conclusive is the inscription on a chalice, given to the church by Jacob Bird c. 1713 which includes the words ‘ecclesia Sancti Wilfridi vulgariter appellata Ninekirkes’ (The church of St Wilfred commonly known as Ninekirks).

The local tradition which claimed that a monastic site was founded here by Ninian at the end of the fourth century was given credence when in the late 1960s, through aerial photography, a possible pre-Conquest monastic site lying immediately to the east of the St Ninian's Church, was discovered. The form of settlement typified by the circular enclosure is arguably of early medieval Irish influence and perhaps therefore a Celtic community at the very dawn of Christianity in Britain. However without further evidence for date and function it remains uncertain.

Also identified through aerial photography were the buried remains of a deserted, nucleated, medieval settlement, with infilled ditches, enclosures, pits, field boundaries and structural foundations ranging on all sides of the present church. Documentary sources and place-name evidence indicate that in the mid-13th century the `town' of Brougham was probably sited here. However by the end of the century written sources mention only `the walled church of Brougham'. It seems that the settlement had been removed and its lands incorporated within the forest of Whinfell. The village may have been re-established near Brougham Hall, as mapped by Machell in around 1680 with its green and cross but was also swept away shortly afterwards to enlarge Brougham Park.

Ninekirks represents one of the finest examples of a 17th century Cumbrian church, particularly rare in being constructed during a period of massive social, political and religious upheaval; and remaining much as Lady Anne Clifford left it. When Dr Markham visited the church in 1848, he was struck by a stillness ‘so solemn that the opening of the rusty-hinged heavy chancel door is quite startling, and the harsh grating of the trap-doors sounds enough to awaken the sleepers of the six and eight centuries below’. This, you will find, is still true today.

But time here is much deeper than this, with echoes of a past still remembered in a name from seventeen hundred years ago. Perhaps a Celtic monastic settlement, by tradition founded by St Ninian, flourished here in the dying days of the Roman garrisons and from it a village grew and thrived for 800 years, before disappearing almost entirely from sight at the end of the 13th century. Some elements break through and persist while others imperceptibly recede, leaving a deeper mystery. What remains to us is a perfect Commonwealth period church, and with it a fragmentary and elusive pattern of early settlement on a site of huge significance to the early mediaeval history of Cumbria.

In 1977 St. Ninian’s Church was declared redundant and is now a Grade I listed building under the care of the Churches Conservation Trust.

First published in ‘Cumbria’ magazine November 2023.


 
Deborah Walsh