Waberthwaite

If you read these pages carefully you will have noted my predilection for churches that are tiny, forgotten, unloved or any combination thereof. I also freely admit that Cumbria, a county not exactly famous for the quality of its churches is perhaps over-represented. In part this is because I love the backwaters of our country and Cumbria is full of those once you are away from the tourist trails of the Lakeland area. You can see some of these described in my “Saunter by the Solway”. It also helps a lot that Diana and I have a holiday lodge in Cumbria.

Waberthwaite is a backwater indeed. It is off the A595 just before it reaches Ravenglass, home of the delightful Ravenglass & Eskdale miniature railway. That probably makes Waberthwaite not sound much like a backwater, but that only goes to show the difference a mile can make! After you have negotiated the mile-long narrow road you reach what seems like and arguably is the end of England. The latest edition of Pevsner memorably describes it thus: “two farms, a mucky green, a spreading conker tree and the primitive church on the brink of the tidal sands of the River Esk where there was a ford”. It really doesn’t even justify the epithet “hamlet”. So why come here? Why write about it?

The answer is a book called “Northumbrian Crosses of the Pre-Norman Age” by one WG Collingwood. It was published in 1927 but the admirable Llanerch Press has produced a reprint. Collingwood sketched and described

all of the churchyard crosses and preserved fragments in the old kingdom of Northumberland. One of these is found at Waberthwaite. Collingwood believed it to be ninth century and he usefully reminds us all that this part of the world was settled by the Angles, not the Saxons, and that this is therefore an Anglian cross. More of that anon.

The church itself is a single room. Improbably, it seems it has been here since the twelfth century. That there was an even earlier church seems very likely given the the presence of the churchyard cross. There is also an very unusual sandstone font that seems to be very ancient. The proportions of the church - it is inordinately long - suggest that it has been extended eastwards at some stage, but this is just my own speculation. (Note: Since I wrote this Catherine Winzor has told me in 2020 that the west end timbers were felled around 1537 and the east end in 1675-1700 so it appears I was right). The windows are rectangular and must surely have replaced much smaller Norman round-headed ones appropriate to this exposed spot. The church has box pews. They were installed in 1809 along with a ceiling. The wooden pulpit is a nice little piece and dates from 1630.

So to the churchyard cross. It is Anglo-Norse in design, and Collingwood, who studied the Northumbrian crosses in remarkable detail, puts it at mid tenth century. The Vikings were by now settlers rather than raiders and several crosses in this area have clear Scandinavian influence - see, in particular the cross preserved n Dearham Church which rather endearingly juxtaposes a wheel cross with the Tree of Yggdrasil - the Viking representation of the world. He was able to discern its decorative designs much better than we are today after another century of weathering. The Church Guide suggests that unspecified “archaeological” evidence suggest the cross to be eighth century and, therefore, “one of the earliest in West Cumbria”.

I am conscious that I haven’t made much of a fist of selling this church to you as a place worth visiting. If you are in the area, however, and you have a keen awareness of spirituality on what was once of the edges of first millennium, and which is pretty “marginal” even today, then you will enjoy this place. Just think of it: Norwegian settlers and Anglian “residents (who has only been here for five hundred years themselves) getting together under the banner of a shared religious faith. Awesome - as my daughter would say! I would avoid it on a wet day, mind you!






	Left: The simple rectangular interior looking towards the east end where two tablets recite the Lord’s prayer, the Apostles’ Creed and the Ten Commandments. The Church Guide believes them to be late sixteenth century. Right: Looking towards the west. This is one of those very few churches that have as yet been denied the supply of electricity, as the oil lamps attest.

Left: Your entry is through the south door with its enormous granite lintel. The Heath Robinson-like device is to prevent sheep getting in. It’s that kind of church. Anywhere else it is birds they worry about! It’s really easy. You just turn the piece of wood from the horizontal to the vertical, pick up the gate when it falls on you, dust down your trousers and in you go. Centre: It’s a homespun kind of place and even the nice little pulpit looks like it has been picked up at an Antiques Fair and just plonked down where there’s a bit of space. Since I wrote those words I was told by Catherine Winzor, a resident, via my Guestbook that it is a rarity and that it was originally a triple decker. Right: The font -surely Norman - is a real curiosity. It is carved from a single block of sandstone and has little chamfered corners.

Left: The pulpit is inscribed: “The gift of Abraham Chambers’ gent“ and then, in Latin, “Woe is me if I preach not the truth. SR 1630”. Catherine Winzor informed me that it a rarity in having an attributed maker. Right: Just in case you thought the north side might be more pleasing aesthetically, you can see that it’s nothing of the sort! If anything, being in shadow most of the time, it’s rather worse. The windows on this side are a kind of faux Norman.

Left: The cross looks rather a jumble until your eyes focus in. This is the east face. Easiest to discern is the bottom panel. This is a stylised decoration described by Collingwood as “four Staffordshire knots linked on a ring”. There is then a narrow band that Collingwood believed to have been blank (that is, not simply erased by weathering). The most exciting part is the next panel which you can just about make out as a horse entangled by tendrils. The head is top left and the hindquarters bottom right. Above that were two addorsed (back-to-back) birds. The right hand one has all but disappeared but the left hand one is, again, just about discernible. Right: The southern face - and as we shall see the northern face - has a knotwork design accurately described by Collingwood as the “Carrick Bend”. If you Google it you will see that is a real knot used for joining together two pieces of rope.




	Left: The west side has survived well considering there is little between it and Ireland! This is an altogether less regular interlaced design - we might say freelance - and the left and the right sides differ from each other. Right: The north side, again, has Carrick Bend knotwork.

Left: The interlace work on the lowest panel of the west face. Right: The horse panel. Close up makes it harder than easier to make out the design. Most of the right hand side is the rear end of the animal. If you follow the leg almost on the far right you can see the carving curve to the left to form the back and body. The neck then stretches up to the left and above with the head almost indistinguishable at the top left.




		Left: The top panel of the east side. The bird design starts from about halfway up the picture (the horse’s head is lower left). The lower part of the top panel is an intertwined design. It is not really visible now but those designs were elaborate continuations of the tails of the two birds. The centre of the column marks the dividing line of the two. The upper part of the right hand bird has been completely lost with the cross head. Above: Looking across the Esk estuary at the west end of the church. A bridge carries the coastal rail service between Barrow-in-Furness to the south and Carlisle in the north. It leaves the coast at the old port of Maryport and the journey end-to-end is eighty-five miles with the quickest service taking one hundred and forty minutes. It is an obscure route along a really little-frequented part of England and is famously scenic.