Dovenby – a rural village past and present
[Written in 1945] The pathetic fragments of its lost splendour are scattered far and wide; long before we reach it we see them, odd-looking stones in houses, bits of carving built into barns. They are all over this countryside, dominated for centuries past by the great and wealthy abbey of Holme Cultram.
The old church left standing in Abbey Town is but a part of the nave of the abbey church, and strange is the feeling it. gives of a splendid thing brought low. Its walls are the noble 13th-century arches of the nave, blocked up and pierced again with windows that would better suit a puritan chapel; at the east it ends abruptly with a wall and goes on as ruined foundations outside; and it only stands at all because the people begged the destroying Thomas Cromwell to leave it as a great aid and defence against the Scots.
Within a century of the dissolution of the monasteries Abbey Town had proved itself unworthy of the great church left in its care. They let the tower fall and built it up again; then somebody set the whole place burning, and it became a ruin.
The 18th century saved what could be saved, the 19th restored it, and the great Tudor porch is now a little museum of old things rescued. The museum itself has one of the finest pieces of Norman architecture in Cumberland. the magnificent west doorway, with its five moulded arches and its eight pillars with carved capitals. It is 16 feet high and stands in a wall 8 feet thick.
The porch was built by Robert Chambers. an abbot who did much for his abbey not long before it was dissolved. In it are the remains of his tomb carved with a variety of figures and with the chained bear that he used as a pun on his name. He is carved in his robes, with praying monks on either side.
Near by is a stone to the kinsman of a 13th-century abbot; another to his wife; and another to a 14th-century abbot. Finely cut with a cross is the tombstone of Ro-bert Bruce’s father, the lord of Annan-dale; and carved with a staff under a canopy is that of Abbot Rydekar, who died in 1434. Dating from the years after the monks had gone are two other tombstones, one to a lady murdered by a pistol shot in her own house and the other to a 17th-century man who “Gave almes freely to the poore,”
One of the bells was here with the monks, and in addition to many old pieces of carving are a few patterned tiles of 600 years ago, and two old chests. Outside in the wall is a richly decorated niche for a statue.
There is a modern inscription to the man who was the last abbot and then the first rector. and another to Joseph Mann, who on his farm here did a great service to farmers when in 1826 he invented a crude reaping-machine, one of the primitive forerunners of the first reaper invented by Cyrus McCormick a year or two later.
One of the windows has a beautiful figure of St Mary, in memory of Sister Martha Mark, who was more than worthy of her name. She was nursing in the Boer War, and again through the Great War.
We can stand here in a quiet country lane and look across the Solway Firth but it is not the sight of Scotland that thrills us: it is the great grass-grown mounds by a wayside farm in the hamlet of Downfall.
Downfall it has been since its Hall was burned down by the Scots, and the grass-grown mounds are all that is left of that great place. They bring to us an echo of the tragedy of Thomas Becket, for here lived Joan de Morville. whose rather was one of Becket’s murderers, and in the shelter of the church porch is a richly carved stone believed to have been on the coffin of her father, Hugh de Morville.
The little church among the elms at the top of a lane has something from its Norman days, for, though its chancel arch has lost its pillars the scalloped capitals are as the Normans left them, and the crudely carved bowl of the font is probably theirs. The nave arcade is 14th century and the little piscina with the flower-shaped drain would be the work of the same masons.
The black-and-white roof has four stout rough-hewn beams where they have been for centuries, and in the turret hangs a bell which was ringing before the Reformation, though we found it cracked, and ringing, alas, no more.
Four roads run away through fields and woods, leaving at the crossways some white farm dwellings and the church on the hill where John Vesty preached for 57 years. After two miles the road stops by an 18th-century farmhouse known as the Nunnery, tucked away in a glen where the Croglin and Eden meet.
Eight centuries ago a convent was founded m this green refuge. One of its walls can still be seen; from the well sunk in the foundations of the house the nuns perhaps drew their water. Near the farms, on the roadside rises a mysterious, solitary square pillar about ten feet high bearing a panel set in newer masonry with the astonishing date 1088.
We leave its riddle unexplained, and come back to the church, first built about the same time as the convent. What it was like when faithful John Vesty came in 1680 we can only guess from fragments the rebuilders saved, such as the Norman pillar piscina; John Denton’s gravestone cut with a crested helmet, sword, and four shields, in the 14th century; a headless sandstone figure 36 inches high, holding a shield; an old gravestone with a cross: and a bird with spread wings-perhaps St John’s eagle.
By the altar lies a beautiful red-sandstone lady in a long gown and winged headdress, who has been smiling at a secret thought for 500 years. She was the wife of John Aglionby, who lies armour-clad on the other side of the altar, his bearded head resting on-a helmet. He is wearing gauntlets and his dagger hangs from his belt. There are marble inscriptions to the Aglionbys of the 18th and 19th centuries. In the old church John Leake was baptised in 1729. He became a famous doctor, founded a hospital for women in Westminster, and was buried in the Abbey.
Lying where the hills of Lakeland die away into Solway Plain, it has two churches old and new. The new one has a good window showing the Ascension; the old one goes back to Norman times and was seldom used when we called.
It stands locked and alone, treasuring the memory of a good man sleeping within its walls, and no one who fetches the key from the vicarage will regret it, for the monument of George Moore is worthy of the man. In white marble his head and shoulders are carved, portraying his fine face and very human personality, and of him this is written:
He served his generation according to
the will of God, and fell on sleep.
George Moore was born at Allhallows soon after Trafalgar, and from working as a boy at Wigton he went to conquer London with half-a-crown in his pocket. He may be said to have done so, for he was soon employed by a firm of lace sellers, and from that time fortune continued to smile upon him. As a traveller on the road he was so successful that they called him the Napoleon of Watling Street.
Enormously rich, he was equally generous. He helped to found schools and hospitals, homes and missions; he tried the experiment of running a Reformatory for thieves at Brixton; he did a great deal for his own county; and his humility was such that he chose to pay the fine of £500 rather than hold the high office of Sheriff of London to which he was elected.
In his prosperity his thoughts turned back to this place, and he came to live at the great house Whitehall close to the old church. Death came to him tragically in 1876. He had started his march to prosperity on the roads, and the roads, in that age of rural tranquillity, were to bring him to his doom, for the Napoleon of Watling Street was travelling to speak at a meeting in Carlisle when he was knocked down by a runaway horse. He died at the inn where, half a century earlier, he had slept as an unknown boy going to London; and he lies in the little mortuary chapel of this church. with the monuments of his two wives close to his own.
It has the sea and fine sands to enjoy, a long line of Scottish hills to look at across the water, a certain quaintness of plain old houses, and one thing to see in the very plainest of early Victorian churches. It is a marble monument carved with the head of Joseph Huddart, who was born here in 1741 and lived to win a place for himself in the story of navigation.
As a boy he went to the vicar’s school and built model ships; as a man he built a real one and sailed in it far and wide. For two things he is remembered: his charting and surveying of the coasts and ports he visited in the East, and his invention, after seeing a mishap caused by a broken cable, of a new way of making cables so that the strain fell equally on the different strands of yarn. Going into business with his idea he grew rich and died in London, being burled at St Martin in- the-Fields; but it is right that he should have: a memorial in this church by the sea, for he did much, as the inscription tells us, to point out a more secure path in the trackless deep.
Set in a wide and green hollow nearly 1000 feet above the sea, it looks out towards bare mountains looped by roads which climb 2000 feet on their way to the town. The highest point is Hartside Cross. Mounds and ramparts at Hall Hill tell of a Roman settlement; mounds below Tyne bridge tell of a vanished fortress.
From the main street, rising sheer from the river bank, open steep lanes and yards which thread the grey mass of the old town. Some of the houses perched on the slopes have outside staircases clinging to the walls. One, near the church, built in 1691, has a narrow veranda above the pavement. Below the little slanting marketplace with its 19th-century market cross rises a building Alston is proud of, the town hall set up in 1857 with a clock tower like a church tower, its canopied buttresses and oak sprays carved in niches.
The tall spire of the modem church is a landmark for miles. It has a weathercock and pennon from 1770. Fragments of Alston’s medieval church are in the porch, small gravestones with shears, pieces of stone carved with flowers. Inside the church there is little of interest except the oak reredos, with its paintings of bishops and saints and the holy lamb.
From the churchyard we have a superb view of the valley, where the South Tyne, shaded with trees, makes its course over rapids and waterfalls. The most interesting spot is Nent Force, a pretty waterfall where, ten years before he built the Eddystone Lighthouse, John Smeaton began an underground canal about five miles long called Nent Force Level. A hundred years passed before it was finished, but it is navigable for three miles still.
The trees by the river shade Randal Holme, a rambling farmhouse of 1746, built round a 14th-century keep with walls six feet thick, and a stone stairway to the roof of which traces can be seen. In the vaulted cellar is a tiny window of which one bar of the medieval grating remains. The oak rafters in many of the old rooms still beat the mark of the adze.
Fifty years ‘after the building of Randal farm there was born in Allston Hugh Lee Pattinson, who became a distinguished chemist. After some years in Newcastle he returned to Alston as assay master in the lead mines, and patented his method of extracting silver from lead ore. Six years before he died (in 1858) he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Its one possession is its lonely church among the n hills, with 19th-century walls, a 20th-century tower, and two ancient monuments: the 14th-century font, and the chancel arch. The arch remains from the old church, with a crude head on one side of it; the font has come home after having been astray, (or it was discovered early this century lying about in the neighbourhood. There is a fragment of an ancient coffin stone, and we found also bits of carved stone on a windowsill, so old that they may be part of a Saxon cross.
The chancel has fine carving in its stalls, the stone pulpit has elegant tracery, and the beautiful stone reredos has the Evangelists under canopies, with three oil paintings with Gabriel bringing the good news to Mary. the scene at Bethlehem, and Our Lord at supper with the two at Emmaus when the day was far spent. On each side of the chancel arch are paintings of Michael with his flaming sword and St Kentigern with his staff.
We noticed that in this lonely place Thomas Baxter was the shepherd of his flock for 62 years of the 18th century.
It is in the valley of the Eden, and it seemed n to us that it might be the garden of Eden itself as we stood on the fine bridge looking up at the steep hills shaded with the green and brown of bracken and beeches, oaks and conifers. and then down again at the stalwart line of beeches in the shining mirror of the river.
The few buildings gather round the bridge, the oldest a farm called Nunclose, the tiniest a miniature chapel rebuilt 300 years ago after being used for generations as a cattle-shed.
All around this solitude are the everlasting hills, and down by the river is the Castle, a striking house, mainly modem, but with a wall five feet thick and many stones from a Norman castle. A richly carved oak overmantel of 1640 is in one of the rooms, with three quaint heads and a shield of the Skelton family, who lived here till the beginning of the 18th century. From another branch of the family came John Skelton, the satirical poet who sought refuge from the anger of Cardinal Wolsey by taking Sanctuary at Westminster, where he died.
It has a peep of Scotland across the Solway Firth, a church with Norman stones in its walls, carving older still, and the grave of one of the humorous men in the public life of a serious generation, Sir Wilfrid Lawson.
He was a great teetotaller, and no man in his day made more people laugh at temperance meetings. He lived in the big park of Brayton Hall, and many plots for the downfall of the drink traffic were hatched under the trees by its lovely lake. Here Sir Wilfrid Lawson lived out his long life, dying early in this century, mourned by any who knew him, for he was one of the friendliest and happiest men who ever sat in Parliament. He stands in bronze in the Embankment Gardens looking out on the Thames. His house was burnt down at the end of the war.
There is a fine fountain to his memory at the cross-roads, on which St George is slaying the dragon with his lance; the bronze plaques set in the stone show his portrait with scenes of Temperance and Peace, and the inscription tells us that “he championed the cause of temperance with gay wisdom and perseverance.” He lies in a simple grave outside the chancel.
He would see the church made new with its turret and pinnacle tower, its nave of six arches, and its fine chancel arch guarded by kings. On the gates of the chancel screen are the names of the vicars from 1292. In the chancel is a canopied sedilia with a king at one end and a bishop at the other. On each side of the east window are oil paintings given by Sir Wilfrid Lawson in memory of his sister, one showing Our Lord rising from the tomb, the other showing Pentecost in the upper room. In the window itself Christ stands in a red robe on an island amid streams with a great company of prophets, martyrs, disciples, kings, and queens about him. In seven other windows given by the seven children of Lady Lawson, Daniel is with the lions and David is playing his harp, and there is a fine Te Deum with saints and angels.
In a church where so much is new it is surprising to find so much that is very old. The original chancel arch is now the entrance to the tower, refashioned so that it looks like a copy of itself, and a fine doorway through which the Normans passed is now the entrance to the vestry. There is also a Norman font on five pillars, its square bowl richly carved with undercut leaves and with an extraordinary grotesque which has heads at the ends of two tails, both heads busy eating the leaves and branches of a tree, while the proper head is biting at the root. It is a very queer joke 800 years old.
Here also we found stones older still, a Viking hogback four feet high carved with knotwork, a fine example of a Northumbrian cross, and remains of 10th-century stones and crosses carved with spirals and rings, and one carved with a swastika.
Outside are stone coffin lids and a coffin, and in the churchyard is a magnificent memorial carved by the man who lies in a grave close by it. He was the well-known archaeologist W. S. Calverley, who was vicar here. and the memorial they have set up to him is a copy of the Gosforth Cross, one of the best surviving anywhere.