Built in 1788, the church is a triumph of painting inside. The work of the Rev. John Ford in the 1950s, it is a study in grey, gold and strawberry-pink. There is a handsome pulpit with swags. Nothing of the church it replaced remains, except traces of original stonework used in nearby buildings.
WREAY: ST MARY – a unique work of the mid-19th century by Sara Losh, who designed and crafted the church as a memorial to her sister
WITHERSLACK † St Paul
6m/10km S.W. of Kendal
OS SD431841 GPS 54.2502N, 2.8736W
The church was built and endowed in 1669 by John Berwick, a Royalist who became Dean of St Paul’s, and his brother, who was physician to Charles ll. The roof was raised in 1768. Pews, rails and other fittings were added in the 19th century. The marble figure of a baby, Geoffrey Stanley, who died as an infant in 1871, sleeps on one window sill. There are good hatchments with angles at the corners, and a fine Royal Arms of Queen Anne with a jolly lion. The canopied pulpit was once a three-decker, and the altar table is 17th-century. The plain white Classical interior is a perfect foil to the romantic setting of hanging woods and limestone outcrop.
WREAY † St Mary
5m/8km S.E. of Carlisle
OS NY435489 GPS 54.8319N, 2.8807W
Pevsner called Wreay the best in church architecture during the years of Queen Victoria. It was designed by talented amateur Sara Losh as a memorial to her sister Katherine, d. 1835. The church was consecrated in 1842 and is of unique design, drawing on Losh’s European travels and unusually extensive education. The result is what Jenkins calls a ‘Lombardic’ church, rich in Italian Romanesque and early Christian ideas. Local masons were employed, and there is abundant exotic sculpture. Excellent details include the W. doorway, enriched with flowers, birds and beetles, the green marble altar table, supported by brass eagles, and the alabaster font, mostly carved by Sara herself. All here prefigures the Arts and Crafts movement by almost 50 years. In the churchyard is the cyclopean mausoleum for Katherine.
MELBOURNE: ST MICHAEL AND ST MARY – outstanding Norman arcades, enlivened by zigzags, with rough carved cushion capitals
Derbyshire is a microcosm of England except that it has no sea. In the south it has pastoral country which merges into Leicestershire across the Trent, and here the older cottages and farms are of a dark red brick and the churches are of pale limestone. In the northern half of the county, stone never seems far from the surface, and stone of such variety of colour and quality as is found nowhere else in England.
There is the silvery white stone of the White Peak, where the drystone walls seem to take up more room than the grass in the little fields, and where the windswept farms are of a blue-grey limestone with mullions and transoms of a darker stone. There are limestones and ironstones of pale yellow, orange and brown, and great rock formations suddenly intruding into landscaped gardens such as at Chatsworth. The Saxons delighted to carve the stone into crosses, and build it into their churches, the crypt at Repton being the most perfect survival. The Normans used it for churches as at Steetley and Melbourne. And north of a line between Buxton and Chesterfield is the darker millstone grit of the High Peak.
With all this stone goes the remarkable scenery of the Peaks and Dales and of the moors of Derbyshire, a wild and windswept landscape generous enough to absorb the numerous holidaymakers and day trippers to the region. Derbyshire has been mined for lead and alabaster and Blue John and coal, and quarried for monumental stone as at Hopton Wood. It is still mined and quarried for its pure limestone, though thankfully the landscape is ample enough to accommodate the massive scars of quarries such as that at Wirksworth.
Derbyshire also has its industrial districts – the earliest are Georgian and associated with the spinning-mills of Crompton and Belper and the names of Arkwright and Strutt. On the eastern borders are the former coal districts, sooty, wire-strung and upheaved with excavations, and pitted with those sudden semi-towns one finds in neighbouring Nottinghamshire. It still has railway works at Derby and, although the iron industry is no longer, there is a major foreign presence in the car industry.
After its wonderful natural scenery and its less wonderful industrial districts, Derbyshire is chiefly a place of great houses. Chatsworth, a palace set in magnificent landscaped park and gardens, Hardwick Hall (‘more glass than wall’) and the dramatically sited castle at Bolsover are all associated with the Cavendishes. Haddon Hall, ancient and intimate, and Sudbury Hall, mellow and friendly, both belonged to the Vernons. Kedleston is the 18th-century ancestral home of the Curzons. There is also Calke, curious and remote, and the more modest hall at Melbourne in the south.
Here and there on hill-slopes are the Gothic Revival castles and abbeys of the Georgian and later industrialists, mostly now converted into institutions. In the north, too, it is a county of wells, dressed with pictures made of flowers at Whitsun and summer festivals. There are mineral springs and the hydros that go with them, the boarding-houses, conferences, conventions, kiosks, souvenirs and car parks of holidaymakers.
DETHICK: ST JOHN THE BAPTIST – a 13th-century church with later tower in a splendid setting
© Michael Ellis
© Richard Surman
Churches are lower on the list of the county’s attractions than scenery and houses. Those least spoiled by Victorian restoration are private chapels – that at Haddon, with its wall-paintings, monuments and old woodwork and glass, like an untouched country church; and that at Chatsworth, sumptuous Renaissance of 1694 with marble and wood carving and a painted ceiling by Verrio. The parish churches, besides the Saxon and Norman work mentioned, are mostly small and severely restored, because there was plenty of money here in Victorian times, and the churches were generally stripped of their plaster and had their windows filled with greenish-tinted glass.
Large, cruciform 13th-century churches are at Ashbourne, Bakewell and Wirksworth. Grand 14th-century work is at Chesterfield, Tideswell, Norbury, Sandiacre and Whitwell. Spires are not typical of Derbyshire; the best is at Breadsall. Perpendicular 15th-century architecture, so common in the rest of England, is rare here, and the tower of Derby All Saints is its noblest expression. Several churches were built in the troubled century following the Reformation, still Gothic in style, at Risley and Foremark.
The 18th century produced much good wrought-iron work, particularly that of Robert Bakewell. Gibbs’ design for All Saints, Derby, 1723–6, now the Cathedral, is the most distinguished Classical church in the county, and there are a few unrestored chapels of great charm. The 19th-century churches of Derbyshire are not of first rank; the best are Sir George Gilbert Scott’s work at Edensor, the more individual and un-Derbyshire church at Bamford by Butterfield and, by the local Derby firm of Stevens and Robinson, the grand estate church at Osmaston and the more individual St Luke’s, Derby.
In the last century, another Derby firm, Currey and Thompson, are worth looking out for, especially at St Mary the Virgin, Buxton.
ASHBOURNE: ST OSWALD – partially mutilated figures on the sides of the Bradbournes’ tomb in the north transept’s Boothby Chapel
ASHBOURNE