Lancashire: Brief Historical and Descriptive Notes

by Leo H. Grindon

Sits on his throne of ruins hoar,

And winds and tempests sweep his various lyre."

"Peel," a term unknown in the south of England, was anciently, in the north, a common appellation for castellets built as refuges in times of peril. They were often no more than single towers, square, with turrets at the angles, and having the door at a considerable height above the ground. The word is variously spelt. Pele, pile, pylle, and two or three other forms, occur in old writers, the whole resolving, apparently, into a mediæval pelum, which would seem to be in turn the Latin pila, a mole or jetty, as in the fine simile in Virgil, where the Trojan falls smitten by a dart:

"Qualis in Euboico Baiarum litore quondam

Saxea pila cadit," etc.—Æneid, ix. 710, 711.

Fouldrey itself is not assured of immortality, for there can be no doubt that much of the present sea in this part of Morecambe Bay covers, as at Norbreck, surface that aforetime was dry, and where fir-trees grew and hazel-nuts. Stagnant water had converted the ground into moss, even before the invasion of the sea; for peat is found by digging deep enough into the sands, with roots of trees and trunks that lie with their heads eastwards. Walney, Fouldrey, and the adjacent islets, were themselves probably formed by ancient inrush of the water. The beach hereabouts, as said by Camden, certainly "once lay out a great way westward into the ocean, which the sea ceased not to slash and mangle ... until it swallowed up the shore at some boisterous tide, and thereby made three huge bays." Sand and pebbles still perseveringly accumulate in various parts. Relentless in its rejection of the soft and perishable, these are the things which old ocean loves to amass.

The castle was dismantled by its own builders at the commencement of the fifteenth century, probably because too expensive to maintain. From that time forwards it has been slowly breaking up, though gaining perhaps in pictorial interest; and seen, as it is, many miles across the water, never fails to excite the liveliest sentiments of curiosity. One of the abbots of Furness was probably the builder also of the curious old square tower still standing in the market-place of Dalton, and locally called the "Castle." The architecture is of the fourteenth century.

Furness Abbey, seven miles south-west of Ulverston, once the most extensive and beautiful of the English Cistercian houses,—which held charters from twelve successive kings, and whose abbots had jurisdiction, not only ecclesiastical but civil, over the whole of the great peninsula formed by the Duddon, the Leven, Windermere, and the sea,—still attests in the variety and the stateliness of the remains that the "pomp and circumstance" of monastic authority must here have been played forth to the utmost limit. In its day the building must have been perfect alike in design and commodiousness. The outermost walls enclosed no less than sixty-five acres of ground, including the portion used as a garden. This great area was traversed by a clear and swiftly flowing stream, which still runs on its ancient way; and the slopes of the sequestered glen chosen with so much sagacity as the site, were covered with trees. To-day their descendants mingle also with the broken arches; these last receiving comfort again from the faithful campanula, which in its season decks every ledge and crumbling corbel, flowering, after its manner, luxuriantly—a reflex of the "heavens' own tinct," smiling, as Nature always does, upon the devastation she so loves to adorn. The contrast of the lively hues of the vegetation with the gray-red tint of the native sandstone employed by the builders, now softened and subdued by the touch of centuries, the painter alone can portray. When sunbeams glance through, falling on the shattered arcades with the subtle tenderness which makes sunshine, when it creeps into such places, seem, like our own footsteps, conscious and reverent, the effects are chaste and animating beyond expression. Even when the skies are clouded, the long perspectives, the boldness with which the venerable walls rise out of the sod, the infinite diversity of the parts,—to say nothing of the associations,—render this glorious ruin one of the most fascinating in our country.

Furness Abbey was founded in the year 1127, the twenty-sixth of Henry I., and sixty-first after the Norman Conquest. The original patron was the above-named Stephen, Earl of Boulogne, afterwards King of England, a crowned likeness of whom, with a corresponding one of his queen, Matilda, still exists upon the outer mouldings of the east window. The carving is very slightly abraded, probably through the sculptor's selection of a harder material than that of the edifice, which presents, in its worn condition, a strong contrast to the solid, though simple, masonry. The Furness monks were seated, in the first instance, on the Ribble, near Preston, coming from Normandy as early as 1124, then as Benedictines. On removal to the retired and fertile "Valley of Nightshade," a choice consonant with their custom, they assumed the dress of the Cistercian Order, changing their gray habiliments for white ones, and from that day forwards (7th July 1127) they never ceased to grow steadily in wealth and power. The dedication of the abbey, as usual with the Cistercians, was to Our Lady, the Virgin Mary. The building, however, was not completed for many years, transition work being abundant, and the lofty belfry tower at the extreme west plainly not older than the early part of the fifteenth century, by which time the primitive objection with the Cistercians to aspiring towers had become lax, if not surrendered altogether. The oldest portions in all likelihood are the nave and transepts of the conventual church, the whole of which was completed perhaps by the year 1200. Eight pillars upon each side, alternately clustered and circular, their bases still conspicuous above the turf, divided the nave from the aisles, the wall of the southern one still standing. Beneath the window of the north transept the original Early Norman doorway (the principal entrance) is intact, a rich and delectable arch retiring circle within circle. Upon the eastern side of the grand cloister quadrangle (338 feet by 102) there are five other deeply-recessed round arches, the middle one leading into the vestibule of the Chapterhouse—the fretted roof of which, supported by six pillars, fell in only about a hundred years ago. The great east window, 47 feet in height, 23-1/2 in width, and rising nearly from the ground, retains little of its original detail, but is imposing in general effect.