Jenny Uglow - The Pinecone: The Story of Sarah Losh, Forgotten Romantic Heroine--Antiquarian, Architect, and Visionary

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For Clara

Contents

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I preferred the Gothic pine cones I would stroke the pine cones. They would bristle. They were attempting to persuade me to do something. In the tenderness of their shells, in their geometric giddiness, I sensed the rudiments of architecture whose demon has accompanied me all my life.

OSIP MANDELSTAM , Journey to Armenia , 1933

The Petteril and Eden valleys, with the Lake District to the west and the Pennines to the east.

Prologue

The village of Wreay, or Rhea, as the locals say, to rhyme with near, lies five miles south of Carlisle. Four country roads meet at the village green, shaded by trees, and across the way is the church. It looks like a small Romanesque chapel from northern Italy, a long oblong with an apse. What is it doing in this northern village, with the mountains of the Lake District to the west, and the Pennines to the east? The closer you get, the odder it seems. The gargoyles are turtles and dragons. Instead of saints and prophets, the window embrasures are carved with ammonites and coral, poppies and wheat, caterpillar and butterfly. Inside, the light is filtered through strange stained glass, bright leaves on black backgrounds, kaleidoscopic mosaics, alabaster cut-outs of fossils. The pulpit is a hollow tree trunk made from black oak, dug from the bog. An eagle and stork of ferocious energy hold up the lectern and reading desk and on the altar table, instead of a cross, are two candlesticks in the shape of the lotus, immortal flower of the East.

This exuberant building was created in 1842 by a local woman, Sarah Losh. Around it she fashioned a whole landscape of memory, equally personal: a Celtic cross and a mausoleum a Cell in the druidical fashion one contemporary gazetteer called it and a chapel copied from ruins centuries old, uncovered among Cornish dunes. Around the village she built wells, cottages and schools, all of them in her own highly individual style. Architectural critics from Rossetti, who hailed her as a genius, to Simon Jenkins, who called her a Charlotte Bronte in wood and stone, have described her work as unique, personal, unorthodox. When Nikolaus Pevsner visited Wreay in the 1960 s, touring the county for his monumental Buildings of Britain , he was dumbfounded at her originality. Asking which was the finest Victorian church in Cumberland, he wrote, aware of the oddity of the claim, The first building to call out, one introduces with hesitation; for it is a crazy building without any doubt, even if it is a most impressive and in some ways amazingly forward-pointing building: the church at Wreay.

Sarah who signed herself Sara when young and her sister Katharine often called Catherine, or Katherine came from an old Cumbrian family, but her father and uncles set out across the country to make their fortunes in the new industries on the Tyne, like many men from these parts. They were radicals and freethinkers, scientific experimenters, friends of the Lake poets, campaigners against slavery and for toleration and reform. Heir to all this, Sarah was unusual in many ways as a woman intellectual, antiquarian and architect yet she was also typical of her age in combining a concern for the present with an equally strong preoccupation with the past. She destroyed many of her papers and others have been lost, although the Carlisle doctor Henry Lonsdale included extracts from her travel journals in his Worthies of Cumberland in 1873 and the vicar of Wreay, Richard Jackson, copied her forthright notes on the school and the church into his parish notebook. Here and in the manuscript diaries of her uncle James Losh, Sarahs presence is strong. But it is in her buildings that we have to look for her: she left stones and wood, not letters, for us to read.

She foreshadowed Ruskin and Morris in her use of local materials and appreciation of local craftsmen, while her style anticipated the Arts and Crafts movement by half a century. If the structure of her church is simple, the symbolic language is rich, drawing on a wealth of sources and cultures. And everywhere among those symbols there are pinecones, carved on the walls, on the roof beams and even the graves in the churchyard. The pinecone is an ancient symbol of regeneration, fertility and inner enlightenment: pinecones, carved in stone, decorated a Roman tombstone found at Gallows Hill near Carlisle in Sarahs day. But the pinecone was also a graphic embodiment of what Sarah, a fine mathematician, would have called the Sacred Geometry of nature. The cones bracts swirl in opposing directions from the base, following the spiralling Fibonacci sequence, a mathematical wonder since the thirteenth century, a simple sequence that comes from adding to each number the one that came before it , , , , , which achieves a unique ratio, the Golden Mean. The pattern is found throughout nature from the seeds of a sunflower to the whirls on a snail shell, and although Sarah Losh would not have known this it is there in the twists of DNA and the wheels of galaxies. It is the geometry of life.

As I pieced together Sarahs story, I found that it too spiralled outwards, in overlapping curves. It is the tale of a pioneering, imaginative woman, but also of a colourful extended family and of the changing life of a village. It tells of ancient stones and Celtic crosses but also of the struggle of Carlisle weavers, the growth of Tyneside industries, the coming of the railways and the long fight for reform, and the fate of a soldier in the passes of Afghanistan. It shows how the industrial revolution made some women independent and how they burned to make their mark. Her story is intensely local but it opens on to many aspects of late Georgian and early Victorian England, driven by the energy and ideas that flowed through the age. Sarah Loshs buildings are Romantic in their powerful expression of sympathy between the human and natural world, yet Victorian in embodying the layers of history beneath the present, the findings of geology that shook conventional faith, and the concern with death, mutability and transience. Her favourite symbol, the pinecone, with its promise of rebirth, is also the way into her life and her work as you enter the church and close the oak door behind you, the door-latch is two overlapping cones, carved in wood, touching and swinging apart.