Monastic gem remains a place of calm

It’s good to take stock of the way familiar sites were seen in the past. It’s the best form of time travel there is.

What I find in old guidebooks doesn’t always agree with me, mind you.

Sometimes, I’m astounded by what they leave out; other times, I’m surprised by what they get wrong.

The other day, for instance, I was thumbing through a Victorian guide to the Lake District, and I came across a sentence that stopped me in my tracks: “Westmoreland and Cumberland cannot vie with some counties in the magnificence of their ecclesiastical edifices.”

An astonishing assertion, isn’t it? Astonishing, because it’s patently untrue. Astonishing, because it comes from no lesser authority than that otherwise trusty travelling companion, Murray’s Hand-book for Westmoreland, Cumberland, and the Lakes.

By 1866, when this book first hit the shelves, Murray’s Hand-books were ranked among the most reliable guides in Britain.

This makes this erroneous claim about the churches of Cumberland and Westmorland all the more surprising.

But when you read these comments in context it becomes clear that Murray is tarring the whole of Cumbria, including the South Lakes, with the same brush – and that’s just nonsense.

From Cartmel to Carlisle and from St Bees to Shap, the county is crisscrossed by an array of ancient abbeys and priories.

Who, having visited Lanercost Priory, could honestly claim that Cumbria’s "ecclesiastical edifices" aren’t among the most magnificent in the UK?

But of all the county’s ancient monastic remains the most magnificent by far are the ruins of Furness Abbey.

Set between Barrow and Dalton, the old abbey of St Mary’s of Furness is a place rich in antiquity: a place where one comes into contact with Cumbria’s medieval past.

It’s also a place where key moments in the county’s history intersect. The history of Furness Abbey begins some 900 years ago, when a colony of monks left their native Normandy for the wilds of northern England.

Today, when flights and ferries to northern France are fairly swift and safe, it’s all too easy to overlook the dangers and discomforts that medieval travellers faced in crossing the Channel.

For the pious men who made this voyage, the journey must have felt like an act of penance.

Having survived the crossing, the men of this little monastic community initially settled near Preston, on lands gifted to them by William the Conqueror’s grandson Stephen, later King of England.

Just three years later, however, they upped sticks again – this time for Furness, where Stephen granted them lordship of the land between the River Duddon and the eastern shore of Windermere.

For more than four centuries this would be their secluded domain. It’s unclear whether the monks wished for this move, or if it was imposed on them.

Whatever the case was, the remote wilderness of Furness was certainly an apt place to achieve the monastic ideal of living "far from the habitations of man".

But the monks of Furness were not merely penitents seeking repose far from the cares of this world. They were also industrious land developers who quickly set about increasing the productivity of their property.

The community’s eventual conversion to the Cistercian order didn’t hinder this in the least; Cistercians placed special emphasis on the importance of manual labour.

It’s not for nothing that monasteries have been called the factories of the Middle Ages.

Monasteries were not just spiritual settlements; they were also instruments for land management.

They had a vested interest in their own prosperity, to be certain. But they were also a key part of the process through which England’s Norman kings, including Stephen, consolidated their realm.

The effects of this consolidation remain with us even today. They’re in our landscape and our language. Notably, the word herdwick – the name of Lakeland’s iconic sheep – is the same word the monks of Furness used to describe their stock farms - herdwyks.

The abbey’s material remains, however, are really its most impressive effects.

It’s difficult to imagine the impact that this massive sandstone structure would have had on the medieval mind. It must have seemed overawing.

Had you paid a visit to the abbey in the late 14th century, you would have beheld a truly grand and powerful monastic complex – complete with church and chapterhouse, cloisters and dormitories, a kitchen and an infirmary.

Beyond the fabric of the abbey itself, one catches glimpses of this grandeur and power in the artefacts on display at the site.

Not least among these are the gilded crozier and jewelled ring discovered in a burial in the abbey’s presbytery.

The ring is an especially striking symbol of medieval monasticism. It is an opulent ornament, true, but it was also an instrument of penance.

The inside of the ring is shaped to a point, which would have dug into the wearer’s finger. Beauty here is silently entwined with bodily mortification.

The English Reformation brought this chapter in the abbey’s history to an abrupt close. Other nearby monasteries, including those at Cartmel and St Bees, survived as parish churches.

But Furness Abbey was doomed. Dalton, its nearest neighbour, already had a parish church, and the area around the abbey was too sparsely peopled to warrant its own place of worship.

So, in the words of one of Henry VIII’s commissioners, the abbey was unceremoniously “pluckyed downe”. The abbey’s assets – its lands, goods, and livestock – were seized.

Everything from which profit could be squeezed was claimed by the crown. Even the abbey’s lead-sheeted roof was stripped off and melted down. The monks were each given 40 shillings and shown the door.

Left unguarded and exposed to the elements, the abbey’s buildings fell into ruin.

One imagines that at least one Elizabethan passer-by must have paused to moralise on these remains, which were, as Shakespeare put it, "by Time’s fell hand defac’d".

But most local people were more practically minded and used the monastery as a source for quarried stone. It’s largely these depredations, and the effects of the weather, that have created the ruin we know today.

Buildings, like books, have their own destinies, and it’s been Furness Abbey’s destiny to enjoy a long afterlife.

It’s been a ruin for almost 480 years (70 years longer than it was a monastery), and in that time it’s become one of Cumbria’s most described and depicted monuments.

Drawings of the abbey begin to appear during the 1720s in the works of engravers like George Vertue and Samuel and Nathanial Buck.

These men were serious draughtsmen who set out to record the abbey’s ruins in detail.

Their prints give a sense of how Furness Abbey fared during the first 200 years of its dereliction. They show how much of the structure still remained, and how much of it had fallen or become overgrown.

Like any picture, though, topographical engravings are susceptible to artistic licence, and it is telling that Vertue’s and the Bucks brothers’ visual "records" both depict the abbey as a place of ruined grandeur: a place where ivy accents the wall’s jagged contours and broken arches tower over the tops of trees.

These illustrations, when viewed in this way, reveal themselves to be works of their time.

This was, after all, the dawning of the great age of antiquarianism, when gentleman and amateur scholars alike flocked to sites like Furness Abbey in pursuit of historical evidence and aesthetic experiences.

Before long Furness Abbey became a bona fide tourist attraction, complete with a railway station and a fashionable hotel.

Wordsworth’s anger at these developments, which threatened the “repose and quietness” of the abbey’s ruins, is well known.

John Ruskin, who was equally outraged by the railway’s destructive influence, proved even more outspoken, and he bitterly lamented the way his “own sweet Furness Abbey” was “shaken”by passing trains.

But neither the trains nor the times ceased rolling on, and while the Furness Railway continued to convey tourists to the abbey, it also began carrying even larger crowds of workers to the burgeoning town of Barrow just a bit farther down the tracks.

Barrow proved to be one of Victorian Britain’s biggest boomtowns, and with its rapid growth the ruins of Furness Abbey obtained a wholly new importance.

They became a much-needed space for calm contemplation on the outskirts of a busy industrial town.

The words Charlotte Mason used to describe the abbey in 1881 speak to this point: “Just beyond the din and bustle of Barrow, in a narrow, fertile vale, are the grand and peaceful ruins of Furness Abbey; the roof is gone, but there are still walls, and windows and glorious arches, lofty and wide, to fill the beholder with awe.”

These words come to us from a different time, but they speak to a function that Furness Abbey still fulfils today.

Much about the site has changed, of course. The railway station and hotel have closed, for a start.

But for all these changes, the abbey remains a place of calm “just beyond the din and bustle” of a busy world.

It remains, moreover, the grandest of Cumbria’s monastic gems, and a place where you can read successive chapters in the county’s past, especially if you bring an old guidebook or two along with you.

Furness Abbey, one of more than 400 historic monuments, buildings and sites cared for by English Heritage, is open daily, April 1 to September 30, 10am-6pm.