Dovenby – a rural village past and present
From the map its seems as though this bit of England north of the Esk should be Scotland and the Scots were of that opinion for centuries.
To the north is the long straight Scots Dyke made to stop their invasions; in the meadows by the church is the massive square tower of the defenders; and a mile or so away is all that remains of a border fortress of 700 years ago. But the Dyke is overgrown with trees; only the earthworks known as Liddel Strength are left of the old fortress; and cottagers have made the old tower their home, passing through an imposing gateway into the courtyard.
Close to Liddel Strength is a road from which the Romans had a tempting view of Scotland. A view is all that the church of Kirkandrews has, for it is an uninspired building looking out on to meadows shaded by stalwart oaks and across the Esk to the beautiful woods of Netherby Park.
Four years of war changed more than the views in this neighbourhood for suddenly there arrived here thousands of people working day and night, first to build vast munition works, then to start on the munitions themselves. The Government ruled from Annan to Longtown, running the farms, the inns, and the shops with its officials, and turning this quiet stretch of country to a hive of industry. The mark of those war years was still showing when we passed through.
Between the Esk and the Sark lies Solway Moss. Here is a description of it by William Gilpin, an 18th-century Cumberland writer.
Solway Moss is a flat area about seven miles in circumference. The substance of it is a gross fluid, composed of mud and the putrid fibres of heath, diluted by internal springs, which arise in every part. The surface is a dry crust, covered with moss and rushes; offering a fair appearance over an unsound bottom-shaking under the least pressure. Cattle by instinct know, and avoid it. Where rushes grow the bottom is soundest. The adventurous passenger. therefore, who sometimes, in dry seasons, traverses this perilous waste to save a few miles, picks his cautious way over the rushy tussocks, as they appear before him. If his foot slip, or if he venture to desert this mark of security, it is possible he may never more be heard of.
Solway Moss is bounded on the south by a cultivated plain which declines gently, through the space of a mile, to the River Esk. This plain is rather lower than the Moss itself, being separated from it by a breastwork formed by digging peat, which makes an irregular. though perpendicular, line of low black boundary.
It was the bursting of the Moss through this peat breastwork, over the plain between it and the Esk, which occasioned that dreadful ruin the effects of which we came hither to explore. The more remarkable circumstances, relating to this calamitous event, as we had them on the best authority, were these.
On the 16th of November 1771, in a dark tempestuous night, the inhabitants of the plain were alarmed with a dreadful crash which they could in no way account for. Many of them were then abroad in the fields watching their cattle lest the Esk, which was rising violently in the storm, would carry them off. None of those miserable people could conceive the noise they had heard to proceed from any cause but the overflowing of the river in some shape, though to them unaccountable. Such indeed as lived nearer the source of the eruption were sensible that the noise came in a different direction, but were equally at a loss for the cause.
In the meantime the enormous mass of fluid substance moved slowly on, spreading itself more and more as it got possession of the plain. Some of the inhabitants, through the terror of the night, could plainly discover it advancing like a moving hill. This was in fact the . case, for the gush of mud carried before it through the first two or three hundred yards of its course a part of the breastwork which, though low, was yet several feet in perpendicular height. But it soon deposited this solid mass and became a heavy fluid. One house after another it spread round. filled, and crushed into ruin, just giving time to the terrified inhabitants to escape. Scarce anything was saved except their lives; nothing of their furniture, few of their cattle.
‘Some people were even surprised in their beds and had the additional distress of flying naked from the ruin.’
The morning light explained the cause of this amazing scene of horror and showed the calamity in its full extent, and yet among all the conjectures of that dreadful night the mischief which really happened had never been supposed. Who could have imagined that a breastwork which had stood for ages should at length give way, or that those subterranean floods which had been bedded in darkness since the memory of man should ever burst from their black abode? This dreadful inundation, though the first shock of it was the most tremendous, continued spreading for many weeks till it covered the whole plain, an area of five hundred acres, and, like molten metal poured into a mould, filled all the hollows of it, lying in some parts thirty or forty feet deep, reducing the whole to one level surface. The overplus found its way into the Esk where its quantity was such as to annoy the fish; no salmon. during that season, venturing into the river.
We were assured also that many lumps of earth which had Boated out to sea were taken up some months later at the Isle of Man.”
End of description of it by William Gilpin, an 18th-century Cumberland writer.
It is within three miles of the sea and within six of Scotland, a trim and far-spread village with a little wayside church proud of its fine Norman craftsmanship, and with something twice as old, for in the chancel wall is an inscribed Roman stone.
All about are remains of defensive work which protected the English against the Scots, one acre field with a double ditch and a double rampart. In the churchyard lies a Scottish raider of those days, his gravestone fixed to the south wall, though it was perishing when we called. He is said to have been found asleep in a field by a villager who took up the sword at his side and slew him. It is the fine Norman doorway that is the proud possession of Kirkbampton. and rare in this countryside. It has columns with carved capitals, a rich and lofty arch, and a tympanum in which a figure with a pastoral staff is wearing away. The finest possession indoors is the massive arch between the white-walled nave and the dim and narrow chancel. The arch rests on scalloped capitals, and is splendid in its simple Norman strength.
There is a fine Norman lancet, one with a modem portrait of Peter, and a 700-year-old trinity of windows with Our Lord and minstrel angels.
A church of fine possessions it is, and yet one thing we remember here above all others, the tragic tale of Thomas Story. He held the living here for 60 years from 1679 to 1739 and he has no memorial, but one thing everybody in Kirkbampton knows is that before he died himself he had buried every man and woman and child who was living in his parish when he came.
It lies in the great marshlands at the mouth or the River Wampool, a tiny old church crowning its lonely hiU. We found the rooks holding parliament in the elms which shelf« the church the Normans built. They used much material from the Roman fort once on this site, and though the church has been restored there is much old work in its rough stone walls: a simple Norman doorway, two deep Norman lancets, and a sturdy Norman chancel arch of a very rare kind, for it has an altar recess at each side. The recesses are as old as the arch; their sills were used as altars. In the east window of the dim chancel are three figures of St Columba, St Patrick, and St Bridget, Bridget being the patron saint; she was the renowned abbess of Kildare, who in her youth wove St Patrick’s shroud.
An ancient sculpture of the Entombment hangs on the wall of the chancel arch, and in the sanctuary is a holy-water trough carved with the lamb; it was found in the rector’s garden. The font is about 600 years old.
A small brass on the outside wall carved with cherubs tells of a curate’s tragedy. He was Lancelot Thompson, who in the 18th century lost his wife and six children in three weeks during an outbreak of smallpox.
A very small village and a lonely one, it has a few houses in a hollow. and a hillside mound with a stone arch about as high as a man. Perhaps this arch was part of the old church; we do not know, but we do know that the little 19th-century church has a doorway made of stones from a predecessor 600 years before, and that built into the south wall is an old inscription with a flowered cross between a chalice and a book.
The doorway of the porch gives Kirkcambeck its touch of romance, for over it is a stone carving of a fish, reminding us of the story of St Kentigern to whom the church is dedicated. It is the legend of King Roderick’s wife and how she gave her ring to a knight; how the king . stole it back and threw it into the River Clyde; and how the queen was condemned to death if she could not produce the ring within ~ days. She appealed to St Kentigern for help, and after he had prayed a salmon was caught and the ring found inside it.
About a mile from the village is Askerton Castle, thought to have ‘been built in the 16th century, a forbidding place with two massive embattled towers and an array of little windows. There are yews in the garden, and a bam close by is adorned with a quaint weathervane of a man holding a hound in leash.
With a church and a few houses and a small stone bridge over a rushing stream, it lies in distant solitude at the end of two miles of lonely road, the way to the foot of Cross Fell from which there is a magnificent view over six shires.
The church has mountains immediately behind it, and is a very simple place refashioned last century. In its bellcot are two bells rung by chains from bell-ringers standing in the porch. In the nave is a plain oak chest several centuries old; but it is in the chancel that we come upon the chief human delights of Kirkland.
Here is a battered stone figure of a 13th century warrior in a long tunic and with a sword, his hair curling over his ears, and his face seeming to smile though he holds in his hands a broken heart. And here on the floor are brass inscriptions to three charming 17th-century folk. Daniel Fleming, of whom we read that he never failed in courtesy, his wife Isabel, whose epitaph says Let her own works praise her in the gates, and their son, who was just in his ways and faithful to his friend. A most delightful family they are to find in this remote spot among some of England’s greatest mountains.
The churchyard has a slender sandstone cross, leaning considerably. with a hole in the head not unlike an eye; and two or three fields away are the three terraces known hereabouts, for no reason we could discover as the Walls of Mark Anthony, long green mounds thought to have been made long ago for growing cereals. They are perhaps associated with the Roman road called Maiden Way which runs northward from Kirkland.
At Bank Hall, now a farm, are fragments of stables and other buildings still left from the old home of the Crackenthorpes.
From its church between the hamlets of Arkleby Green and Parsonby is a grand view of Cumberland’s mountains and those of Scotland beyond the sea; and under the ancient yew in the churchyard is a stone which has been here 1000 years. It is one of those known as hogbacks from their shape, a style of gravestone the Norsemen brought from Scandinavia, only found in England in the north. This one was carved with knotwork some time in the 10th century, shortly before the kings of Denmark became the kings of England. It has cracked, and at one end is some later carving as if for a corbel.
Then came the Normans, and this church, though it was made new last century, has kept a chance1 arch of their time with rich chevron mouldings and three shafts clustered each side; and a narrow Norman doorway under the tower, which has in its walls a fragment with a crude chevron which may have been carved in Saxon England. The trefoiled piscina with beautiful mouldings is 13th century.
The church is dedicated to Cuthbert, the hermit prior of Fame Island, and he is here in the windows with Bede and John the Baptist, while George of England and St Martin, carrying the fleur-de-lys of France, are here in memory of men who fought in Flanders.
Below them are little scenes of the fight with the dragon and the cutting of the cloak outside the castle gates. A modern knight with shield and sword also has his portrait in the windows. He is Edward Stanley Curwen of Workington Hall, who died in 1878. A brass engraved with figures of Mercury and St Andrew is to a rector who died when all the world was at war.
In a field by the church is a little stone building which once housed the pigeons of a medieval manor house.
By two cottages a mile away is the shapely old mulberry tree up which Thomas Dykes, an ardent Royalist, hid after the battle of Marston Moor, his wife and daughter bringing him food from Ward Hall, the home no longer here. The old tree hid him safely, but later he was captured, and died a prisoner in Cockermouth Castle. On Ward Hill are the remains of a camp from the warlike days before history. In later days watch was kept here and a beacon lighted in time of danger.
It is believed that Plumbland was the birthplace in 1655 of William Nicholson, the antiquarian bishop who aroused much controversy in his day but whom we remember with gratitude for his zeal in preserving manuscripts and records.