Yorkshire (Day3): The (Almost) Deserted Medieval Village

Wharram Percy - St Martin's Church, overlooking the churchyard

Note to self - if a GPS gives you directions to a medieval village that's been abandoned for 600 years, be skeptical.

The Wold country of North Yorkshire rolls and heaves like a fat, napping giant after a great feast; we found ourselves buzzing up a lengthy and narrow dirt track in search of Wharram Percy, up and down and up again, chasing the little blip on our dash-mounted GPS, until we came to a fork at an overlook. The directions pointed us right, but there was a roadside sign saying it was private property (and oddly, you don't see very many private property signs in the English countryside.) We pulled over.

A white Jaguar was parked at the fork, to the right, and to our left we saw a lady setting a large video camera on a tripod. Sharon rummaged through the paperwork - said I, "c'mon, this is a Heritage site, they can't keep us out, let's go to the right" and Sharon was all "it says Private Property, we can't go that way", and I was all "but the GPS says...", and it was like that for about 10 minutes before a well dressed gentleman in his sixties, presumably the camerawoman's husband, came over to the car.

"You're looking for the old village?" he asked, pointing out the painfully obvious with devastating politeness. Afraid so, I replied sheepishly.

"Well, it took us some doing to find it ourselves, but here's how you go," and he pointed us left, down the road, through the dale, up to the village, make a right and go up the hill and watch out for a tiny sign on the left, which points you to the right. Watch for the sign, it's easy to miss.

GPS fail. I smiled and thanked the gentleman. We'd probably still be there.

Of course the village was abandoned. It's damn near impossible to find. (There - been carrying that one around for three months.)

The guidebook (which we picked up from the Heritage concessionaire in a lonely little car-park booth) says that the dirt path leading to the village - the guide says it's a three quarters of a mile, but I would have guessed somewhat longer - dates from the Iron Age.

Go that way. 

Through a cow pasture, over a tiny, barely-running creek, and up a hillside.

It is said that Wharram Percy is the most extensively studied of all the 3000 known abandoned medieval villages in England. Of course, most of the populated villages in England have their roots dating to medieval times, or even further back than that, but presumably you can learn more about medieval society from places that don't have modern people living inconveniently atop the medieval bits.

It's important to note that Wharram Percy is, at its heart, an archaeological site. The village itself exists as a series of topological scars and mounds on the otherwise graze-worthy pasture, the outlines of some houses and the village longhouse are neatly described with chalk, and barely-distinguishable mounds trace the outlines of others. There's little sign of the extensive excavations conducted here between the 1940's and 1990's, and for that matter, were it not for the chalk-stone outlines laying out some building foundations and a few interpretative Heritage signs, you'd hardly know there had ever been anything here at all.

Wharram-Percy townsite

Down the hillside, though, lay the remains of St Martin's Church, the only building still standing that dates to the Middle Ages. A classic pre-Norman church (excavations revealed the remains of a timber church dating to the 11th century beneath current structure), the place is a skeletal ruin now, with half its bell tower collapsed, it's glass-less windows keeping silent sentinel over the churchyard.

St Martin's Church and churchyard

Oddly, though, the church door was still intact, heavy and ponderous and a little bit pointless, the portal between outside the church  and outside-inside-the-church.

Come right in. Church door, St Martin's Church  - Wharram Percy

Although the village itself was finally deserted for good in the early sixteenth century, the church was still in use as late as the 1870's, and a wedding was celebrated there in 1928, although it had long ceased to be a parish church for anyone by then. The nearest village had built a church of its own in the 19th century, no one saw the point to keeping St Martin's maintained, and the place became effectively a roofless ruin by the 1970's, falling apart slowly (with some help from periodic vandalism), as old and unloved churches do in England.

St Martin's - Wharram-Percy

Ruined churches are a special treat for us, but the experience was mitigated a bit by a few "lightly supervised" 8 year olds chasing each other around the ruin and shrieking periodically with ear-splitting, non-contagious glee. Having studied a bit of the early 19th century English Romantic poets, who frequently drew their floridly constructed poetic inspiration from places like this, I am involuntarily compelled toward some kind of contemplative epiphany in the presence of mute vestiges of the long-dead.

Nice idea, but it clearly wasn't going to happen today in this deep Yorkshire dale.

We shot the graveyard and its 18th century stones

Churchyard beside St Martin's Church- - Wharram Percy

(the churchyard actually dates to the 12th century, but the older graves aren't marked) and went inside.






17th century grave stone. St Martin's Church - Wharram Percy

A pleasant couple, unrelated to the shrieking kids, were eating lunch in an alcove beneath the church tower. They offered to move to allow us some photo-angle leeway, but we waved them off. Sit, enjoy...you were here first.

The lady, a Yorkshire local, told us about the various spirits that inhabited the church and grounds.



Spirits...up there...

St Martin's Church - Wharram Percy

Late-fortyish, she said she lived a vigorously off-the-grid life a few miles away. No TV, no internet, no radio, no car (I guess her lunch companion was her ride that day), and said she came here often for solitude and inspiration, even if lunch was probably all she was going to get today. She expounded at great length on the various legends about the place, and especially about the spirits that lingered sullen and malevolent around the 19th century labourers' cottage, nearby the church itself.

Labourers' Cottage - Wharram Percy. Bad mojo here. 

Maybe they were upset at the state of their church, or the fact that archaeologists had disturbed their land and resting places.

She shrugged. Maybe, she said. But they were around - she'd seen them.

She offered us some of her lunch; we declined with a smile. We liked them both.

We said goodbye, she wished us well on our holiday through Britain, and we headed back to the car. We still had a priory and some churches on the day's schedule.

St Martin's Church - Wharram Percy

So...why was Wharram Percy abandoned? The village had actually survived the Great Plague of 1348-1349, no small accomplishment as many villages in Europe did not, but the population had begun to dwindle by the early part of the sixteenth century, and the remaining villagers were moved off the land by the local lord (William, the 7th Baron of Hilton, specifically), who wanted the site to graze his sheep. There weren't many people there by then anyway - maybe four or five households.

By the time we had gotten there, it seemed even the sheep had given up on the place.