Arthuret Church

Submitted by Alan Marsden on Thu, 01/05/2025 - 00:00

St Michael and All Angels' Church at Arthuret in Cumberland I found difficult to date. Not getting inside didn't help, but its strange combination of gothic and Elizabethan puzzled me. It could almost have been a weathered, early Victorian affair, but then I found Georgian graffiti on its walls which scotched that idea. Its construction was actually ordered by King James I/VI who judged the borderlands between his two kingdoms too lawless and godless, and thought some additional churches were what the reiving heathen needed; that, and a good number of hangings and exiles to Ireland. The construction date of 1607 would therefore render St Michael’s to be ‘gothic survival’ which accounts for its sixteenth-century style of window.

I have never thought of King James as a church builder, and his own personal morals were highly suspect; a recent biography of him has just been published called Queen James: enough said. Nevertheless, he was Calvinist in his theology and Protestant in his principles, and understood that preaching the Bible results in moral reformation, and hopefully something even better than that - personal salvation.

Although St Michael's was closed to visitors that day on which we called, it still appears to meet for worship. Sadly, each week in the United Kingdom, churches close. Some are sold for mosques, others for shops, while others just sit there, slowly rotting and decaying...and so, too, the people around them, as old King James might vouch.