Dovenby – a rural village past and present
A charming village of grey houses lining a busy road, it lies in the delightful valley where the River Calder comes down from the fells. Its 19th-century church, standing on the bank by the old bridge, is more pleasing outside than in. It is in 13th-ceotuty style, and has in the churchyard a tall peace cross, with horses and ,wining serpents among its decoration.
But it is for another and far older shrine that the pilgrim comes to Calderbridge, the fine ruins of Calder Abbey, founded 800 years ago. Along the valley and through a stately beech avenue we come to it, sheltering in its hollow under the fells. A place of much fascination and beauty it is, an almost roofless ruin of ivied walls, doorways and windows, and lovely arches rising from velvet lawns. It was colonised by Furness Abbey monks, and nearly destroyed a few years later by the Scots. Its monks fled back to Furness, were refused admission, and eventually founded the abbey of Byland in Yorkshire. Some years after it was colonised again, its endowments being greatly enriched, and by 1180 Calder Abbey had completed the building of a proud stone church.
All that is left of this 12th-century church, beyond a few loose fragments, is its fine west doorway with a round arch of three rich mouldings; it has foliage capitals, but has lost the shafts each side. Nearly all the ruins we see belong to the 13th-century abbey built by Thomas de Multon of Egremont: a square cloister court with the church on the north, the chapter house on the east, a convent on the south, and a house for lay brethren on the west which has quite disappeared.
The most striking remains are of the abbey church, the five lofty bays of its north arcade, the splendid tower arches on their clustered piers and the tower itself which is still 64 feet high and was once half as high again. The transepts have fine arches opening into vanished aisles, and the north transept has a beautiful doorway with deeply cut mouldings, through which the monks carried their dead to the cemetery on the east. The south transept has at one corner a spiral stairway leading to a passage high up in the thickness of the wall. It has openings in the window splays, and along this passage the monks would pass to the tower, where another stairway led up to the belfry.
Part of the chancel is here still, with three sedilia, and with an arched entrance to a side chapel where there are fine arches and lovely double lancet windows. The chancel has also the interest of three old figures lying on tombs not so old as themselves, battered stone knights of the 13th century in chain mail with their shields; one of them, with his hands clasped and his legs crossed, is said to be Sir John Ie Fleming, lord of Carnarvon Castle at Beckermet, who may have been buried in the abbey as one of its benefactors. A head carved on a big fragment of another stone is thought to be the
portrait of his son and heir Sir Richard Ie Fleming.
The ‘chapter house contains fragments of carving and parts of ancient coffin stones, and high up in its west wall are fine lancets. Below them are two beautiful arches between the chapter house and the cloister court. The library is a corner of the chapter house. and contains among its many old fragments some heads of saints and two inscribed stones. Between the library and the court is a lovely double portal.
Two houses hereabouts have their connection with the old days of the monks. The first, standing on part of the abbey site. has the dining room foundations belonging to the old refectory. The second, SelIa Park, on the other side of the village from the abbey, is a modernised Jacobean house standing in what was once an abbey deer park. Close to the road. it is picturesque with many mullioned windows; and still in it, from the house Darcy Curwen built in the 17th century, are fine fireplaces, a newel stair, and a broad staircase with old oak balusters.
Black Tom lies in the little church.
King Coal rules in the village –
and the River Derwent bends and doubles between them in its swift course from lake to sea. The church is deep in the lovely valley, as far from the village as it could get, with only rough roads and field paths leading to it, and the racing stream looping round it; but it cannot hide from the mountainous tip of the pit-head, reaching higher than its leaning tower and spire of the 19th century.
Through centuries of rebuilding it has grown into a plain little church of neat panelled pews with bobbin ends. but still it clings to its Elizabethan silver chalice and the knight in black armour on his red stone tomb.
Black Tom of the North, as Thomas Curwen was called, belonged to a family powerful in these parts in medieval days. This statue of him came here about 1500, but it is said that he himself was buried in Shap Abbey. He makes a bold figure in his black armour, with his long hair resting on a crested helmet, and holding one of the biggest double-handed swords we have seen, nearly five feet long.
It is Clifton Great and Little, with a church between them on a steep ridge above the road. In its new walls is the arch of the Norman doorway of the vanished church and a coffin alone engraved with a cross, and the vestry treasures an old carved cross-shaft.
The sanctuary has fine oak carving in the rich1y~traceried panelling and the reredos where four angels watch over bronze panels of the Nativity, the Shepherds, and the Wise Men. In the windows are the Good Samaritan and the Good Shepherd, and there are modern pictures by the chancel arch of St Kentigem and St Bega. But the artistic treasure of the church is a Crucifixion believed to be the work of Guido Reni. and there is also a copy of Correggio’s Descent from the Cross.
This little building has its pathetic memory of our own time in seven wooden crosses from Flanders set along the churchyard path but it lifts up its eyes to distant snow-capped hills across the deep valley with its rippling stream.