Church of St Anthony, Cartmel Fell

The Church of St Anthony at Cartmel Fell is dedicated to the right saint. Anthony the Great was a ‘Desert Father’ who left civilisation behind in order to live and die in the wilderness. Locating the Church of St Anthony at Cartmel Fell gives the modern traveller a similar feeling. Once located in Lancashire but now in Cumbria, one must travel narrow lanes and steep hills to get there; its website even provides Ordnance Survey coordinates (OS 416880).

It was built in 1502 to save the remote fellside folk the trouble of travelling 7 miles each way to Cartmel Priory. So here is an externally ugly but internally superb, early Tudor church which has preserved much of its original feel on account of its remoteness from the changing tastes and styles of the world beyond (information sheets within disingenuously claim it was saved from ‘the worst excesses of Cromwell’, as though the Lord Protector micromanaged the furnishings of every parish church).

Part of the building’s internal charm is its plain, dark woodwork, from the old pews and exposed roof beams to its three-decker pulpit. In addition, there are some private pews, which are more like little wooden rooms, where the ‘better sort’ of congregant could sit in relative ease and privacy, while being shielded from the inevitable wintry drafts to which Cartmel Fell would be too familiar. These belonged to the more prosperous yeoman or gentry families, such as the Knipes of Burblethwite Hall and the Briggs of Cowmire Hall (two superb Lancastrian place names). These private pews were likely recycled from the redundant rood screen which the Reformation swept away.

St Anthony’s was a parish church, and all who lived close by were expected to attend and play their part, unlike a 'gathered church' made up of confessed believers. We need not be surprised, therefore, to learn that some of the occupants of the canopied seating looked across at their parish rivals with disdain and dislike. There is a record of a petition sent to Queen Elizabeth I describing an attack on Mistress Briggs of Cowmire by the Knipes’ henchmen, which left her unconscious in the churchyard. Bickering, squabbling and even outright violence stemming from worldly rivalry and competition for prestige only bemires the church of God and shames its members. ‘Gathered churches’ are sometimes little better than parish churches in this regard; even those claiming to have been born-again, filled with the Spirit and renewed of the mind, can prove as grasping, selfish and proud as any big Elizabethan fish in a small parish pool.

Let nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit, but in lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than himself. Philippians 2:3, NKJV