Dovenby – a rural village past and present
Coming to its little church on a lonely hilltop we are rewarded by a splendid view of this fascinating countryside. Far in the valley below a mountain stream chatters under a tiny bridge, and here and there among the hills the farms are dotted. Over the lowlands we-look to the sea, and inland rise Black Combe and the rocky crags that guard the lakes and dales.
The church, refashioned last century, has two 17th-century bells in the bellcot, but it has little to show of its Norman predecessor founded by Lord Corney and given to the Priory of St Bees. Yet its people must be proud of their length of days, for we saw here on a gravestone that Richard Pullin was 97 when he died, and we have heard that John Noble, who was buried here in 1772, reached the great age of 114, his life stretching from the end of Cromwell’s to the beginning of Napoleon’s.
He would be only about 95 when there was born at Wellcome Nook near here Edward Troughton, famous for the scientific instruments he invented and made in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Many were astronomical instruments for observatories, but it seemed that everything Edward Troughton touched he improved, from telescopes to sextants and barometers. He invented a new and far better way of marking the graduations on the circles so vital in many instruments; he made telescopes for the most accurate work at Greenwich Observatory; he supplied the precision instruments for several famous surv8ying expeditions; he made compasses and theodolites and pendulums; and altogether his beautiful workmanship and clever ideas found the\r way into half the countries in the world.
Though colour-blind and deaf, he let no misfortune deter him, and one of his proudest days was when the Royal Society gave him its coveted Copley Medal. At the end of his life he would sit in his dingy parlour in Fleet Street with a huge ear-trumpet waiting by, wearing his old snuff-stained clothes and a dirty wig. They laid him to rest in 1835 in Kensal Green cemetery, and Sir Francis Chantrey made a sculpture of him for Greenwich Observatory; but the fame of his firm (Troughton and Simms) has lasted on into our own time.
Half a mile from the coast of Allonby Bay, it has a little church built by the Normans. who used Roman stones in some of the walls. The 13th-century builders added an aisle, opening from an arch which has a carved face each side and cuts through a Norman window at the top.
Most interesting are the stones which were standing as memorials before the Normans came, One is a hogback gravestone (shaped to imitate a little house of the dead). Of the others the best is a stone carved with a tall cross and a very crude human figure. thought to be St Lawrence. from the gridiron above his head. Among some fragments is part of a carved cross-shaft of red sandstone.
The Norman font has a square bowl strikingly sculptured with curling leaves and stems, and stands on pillars. There is fine old woodcarving in some of the new seats, and a collection of old tablets to the Senhouses who lived in Maryport, where their house NetherhaIl treasures a great collection of Roman things found close by.
The little windows of an aged farmhouse overlook the churchyard seeing among the graves a family stone full of human sadness. Though her name is not the most prominent, the tragic story of this grave centres round a mother who lived to be 80 and died in 1827. She was married to a ship’s captain. Their little son died three weeks after he was born. Sixteen years later. in the prime of his life, the husband vanished at sea, with all his crew. Another 19 years, and a daughter died at 26. Then. as if she had not borne enough, this old lady at 72 had to bear the news that her son of 37, called after his father and a ship’s captain too had also perished with his men.
A village in the Cumberland coalfield, it bears the mark of industry and attracts us only to the church where it has rare treasures. Here is Roman, Saxon, and Norman.
The church has Roman material in the walls, including part of a Roman altar in the vestry. Its nave is the size and shape of the church the Normans built; its chancel is 13th century; and its massive tower was raised over 600 years ago as a place of protection for men and beasts when the raiders came over the border. Built into the walls of the porch and the modem aisle are a number of medieval coffin stones and memorials, many carved with elaborate crosses.
There is a Norman doorway, and a fascinating Norman font carved with patterns on two sides and with imaginary creatures on the other two. One defies description; the other is a flying dragon. In the first,. the vicar suggested, we see the devil coming in before baptism, and 10 the second he has grown wings to fly away.
The special treasures of Dearham are older than anything the Normans built in England, and one at least was used by them as building material. It is called the Adam Stone, and stands about four feet high in the window where it is mounted for us to see. Its carving is a piece of symbolism supposed to refer to the fall and restoration of man. Three little figures seem to be Christ and Adam and Eve standing hand in hand above two serpents. Below are many symbols, including tongues of flame, thunderbolts, and the endless twining band of Eternity. At one end of the stone is the word Adam, and at the other is an inscription in runes thought to mean, “May Christ his soul save.”
A second stone is part of a cross apparently illustrating the legend of St Kenith, a 6th-century hermit brought up by seagulls. We can make out among the patterns a bird and a figure on horseback.
Finest of all is the great complete cross now in the church, though it stood outside for centuries. Rather higher than a man. it is in splendid condition, and its carved pattern is said to be an illustration of Yggdrasil, the great world tree in Norse mythology.
These three rare pieces of carving are all at least 900 years old, the Adam stone being perhaps the oldest. Each would be part of a memorial to someone who died before the Normans came; and it would seem as if Dearham were a favourite burying-place for those who could afford a rich monument to their memory. When the church was restored in 1882 several of the actual graves were found. In all of them were hazel wands, and the oldest are thought to have been dug for people who died at the beginning of the 9th century.
Here in 1866 was born John White, founder of a college in Africa.
A White Man Beloved in Africa.
John White was only 26 when he went out to the Transvaal to follow in the steps of those who fought for justice for the natives, sometimes in the face of strong opposition from white men.
Twice he journeyed 500 miles through tropical valleys and swamps and across unbridged rivers to a village in Northern Rhodesia, once in response to a call for a missionary, and again to accompany James Loveless, who started a centre there.
Back in Southern Rhodesia John White gathered a few Africans round him in a mud hut and taught them so that they might become missionaries to their own people. So began the Waddilove Training Institution, of which he was the head for 14 years. He translated the New Testament into the language of the tribes around.
He was never too busy to help whoever came. The Africans loved him so much that they begged him never to leave them, and it is difficult to say who was most distressed when he fell ill after 40 years of work and the doctors insisted on sending him to England. He died at Birmingham in 1933. Courteous to every man without thought of race or colour, he was a hero of whom Dearham and England may be proud.
It has one long street in a countryside of coal and iron, but it is redeemed by its place between the sea and the Lakeland mountains, and by its fine 19th-century church above the village.
Built in 13th-century style, it has a fine chancel arch, splendid lancets. and lovely arcades with shining granite pillars whose capitals have foliage. The oak: altar has four angels under canopies; the low chancel screen is of wrought iron with the signs of the twelve disciples on brass shields; and the oak pulpit is richly carved. with scenes of the Baptism of Our Lord, His preaching in a boat by the sea, Peter sinking. the c:a.lming of the stOll1l, and the miraculous draught of fishes.
It is thought that this church stands on one of the places where St Cuthbert stood preaching 1300 years ago, and that it is the fourth shrine to be raised on the site. The first would be a wooden structure built by the early converts, and it is thrilling to think that the parts of the broken Saxon cross now treasured here may have stood beside it. They are crudely carved, one piece having a three-legged cross. The second church was a Norman one which lasted until the 17th century, and some of the things it treasured are still to be seen. There are ancient gravestones, a piscina found in the rectory garden, an Elizabethan silver chalice, two bells known to have been here before 1552, and fragments of stones, one carved with a monk’s head. A similar stone is in one of the farm walls at Hayes Castle, the ruined home of the old lords of Distington. and other ancient stones are in old houses in the village.
Of the third church. built in the 17th century, there is one relic in the chancel arch standing solitary in the churchyard. Another is the font of 1662 now in the Mission Church two miles away at Pica. It was in this third church that Henry Lowther was rector for no less than 63 years last century. His only memorial is the memory of his good works, especially what he did for the Sunday school here, which has a little fame all its own. It was started before his day, as long ago as 1787, and was one of the earliest in all England, in one of our remotest villages. Robert Raikes had started a few years before at Gloucester.
Two miles away at Gilgarran we saw in a farm wall by the roadside a stone to a 17th-century man said to have been buried in his own orchard. The inscription tells us that, having cast his trade from port to port, he at last reached the haven.
Lying between the mountains and the sea, it has given to the world three men whose names live on. Here, six centuries ago, was born Robert Eaglesfield, who as a priest heard the confessions of an English queen. Going to Oxford, he bought a few buildings and founded Queen’s College, beginning with 12 fellows and 70 poor boys. and finding his own rest at last in the college chapel.
Very different is the story of Fletcher Christian, who was born about 1753 in the house called Moorland Close. Here he passed his first years, going to school not far away at Cockermouth. The sea called him, and Fletcher Christian is for ever remembered as the leader of the mutineers in that amazing drama of the ocean, the Mutiny of the Bounty.
These two men went from here into the world, one to add some… thing to a university, the other to stir England with a story. But the third and greatest son of Eaglesfield made no such stir, and even here as a boy his adventures were those of the mind. We think of him as we see his humble cottage, proud of the tablet which records his birth; we think of him as we see the Quaker meeting-house where as a boy he ran his own little school; and we think of him in the church, which is called after him and has a memorial put here by the Royal Society of London. He was John Dalton, immortal in science and the founder of the Atomic Theory.
Destined to make Chemistry a science, John Dalton was born in 1766, of Quaker parents who eked out the profits of a tiny farm by weaving. The boy left school at ten, but was helped in later years by John Gough, the blind philosopher, to a knowledge of mathematics and languages.
While still a boy Dalton noted that the colours of military uniforms at a review did not differ in his sight from the colour of the grass. He pondered the problem, and in early manhood was able to reveal to science a physical disability not guessed at till then colour- blindness, a subject of immense importance where signals are controlled by light.
He became a schoolmaster at 12, with a barn for a school and babies for scholars, and in due course equipped himself so well as to be appointed Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at New College, Manchester.
He made important discoveries in relation to gases, the force of steam, and the elasticity of vapours, and was only 37 when he communicated to the Manchester Philosophical Society the first results of his inquiry into “the relative weights of the ultimate particles.” A year later he startled the world with his famous theory of Atomic Weights.
Taking hydrogen as the unit, he gave 21 atomic weights, each expressed in atoms of hydrogen. When at last appreciated and accepted, the discovery was declared to be the greatest scientific advance of the age. Dalton and the great chemists who followed him went to the grave believing they had found in the atom the ultimate and indivisible form of matter, though in our own day their successors have split it into electrons, whose mass and velocity they have recorded. John Dalton discovered a new realm for scientific research, a universe teeming with lesser worlds.
The philosopher’s experiments were carried out with the most primitive instruments, and even of these he was not complete master, but such was his unwearying application, his unfailing memory. and his careful systematising. that he triumphed over all difficulties.
He died at Manchester in 1844, and in four days over 40,000 persons filed past his coffin.
Text taken from The Lake Counties Edited by Arthur Mee 1937. Please write your own observations and descriptions of the villages in present times and email to the editor of this website.