Reeth Congregational Chapel

I visited Reeth Congregational Chapel this summer. A guest at a wedding there, and arriving in plenty of time, I was able to admire and inspect its features at leisure. Reeth is a beautiful village set among the dramatic hills of Swaledale. Its chapel is pretty, too, but it is built in the neo-gothic style, which I consider inappropriate for a dissenting place of worship, which should be classical, like the nearby Wesleyan (now closed) or, better still, plain vernacular. Indeed, there has been a chapel on the site since 1783 (which may itself have been built atop the site of a medieval ‘oratory’), and I think I should have preferred its predecessor. Yet Whitehead in his History of the Dales Congregational Churches records a minute from the year book of 1866 which reported:

‘The old chapel, plain and unattractive outside, hideous and revolting within, threatens speedily to intimate, by self-immolation, that it has lived its day, and done its work. With dry rot in its timbers, and the want of uprightness in its walls, it is either a question of speedy removal, or natural collapse’.

The chapel secretary’s eloquence is a credit to him, though I wonder if he is attempting to persuade future generations who might, like me, question why an eighteenth-century chapel was bulldozed to make way for a Victorian neo-gothic affair, designed by Pritchett of Darlington.

Whatever we think of buildings and whatever our sentimental attachments thereto, we must remember that they are essentially to serve a purpose and fulfil a function. The grandest cathedral which fails to sound the gospel is a waste of quarried stone, and an ancient chapel which cannot keep dry, or safe, its occupants, demands ‘speedy removal’.

I cannot see our leaving behind Salem Chapel on my watch, but the church assembling on Newby Hill is a body of redeemed people, not a collection of sacred stones and holy bricks.