Anchor Church Foremark: An 18th-century picnic by the Anchor Church

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The Anchor Church, near Foremark, remains a mystical place to visit even today. The above picture shows the Burdett family picnicking by the church in the 18th century. The scene was painted by Derby artist Thomas Smith

Foremark Hall by Thomas Smith

Anchor Chapel or Church is supposedly an ancient site, although, like the Hermitage at Dale Abbey, it has undergone subsequent modification to enable it to meet the demands of the 18th-century nobleman’s family that owned it.

William Woolley, writing around 1715, said of it: “About half a mile eastward (from Foremark Hall), upon the side of the Trent, is a large cave dug out of a rock in the form of a chapel, still called Anker church. It has been, as tradition informs us, an anchorite’s cell and it really is a most solitary, pleasant place.”

D P Davies, in 1811, described its “several excavations, or cells, which communicate with each other and give a probability to the tradition of its having been the residence of an anchorite; whence it has derived the name of Anchor Church.”

He also added that human bones had been dug up there and that “faint traces of a figure, somewhat sepulchral, are yet left beneath the rock.”

Tradition has, indeed, been eloquent, giving us this cave, originally eroded by water through the Keuper sandstone, as the hermitage of St Hardulph in the 7th century and as that of the monk Bernard at some unspecified point in the Middle Ages.

St Hardulph, in fact, is one of those saints about whom nothing whatsoever is known beyond the fact that the church (and presumably the very early Saxon monastic chapel which preceded it and served the Saxon Priory) was dedicated to him.

His only other appearance is in a medieval hagiography of St Modwen, in which he is described as a hermit of Breedon, not Ingleby. His name is, however, Anglian.

The earliest reference to the place name is in 1648. If we had a medieval mention, we might be able to say something more positive about it.

Clearly there was a tradition of an anchorite, but Anchor as a place name is also significant and the use of the place as an hermitage could be a coincidence and a red herring.

Anchor as a place name is analogous to Ancholme, the Lincolnshire river, which was derived from the pre-Saxon ‘an’, meaning marsh, combined with the Norse ‘holma’, an island.

In the case of Anchora, ‘an’ is combined with a derivative of the modern Colne, also a river name.

Colne comes from Latin ‘calare’, to call, and crops up as the first element in the earliest post-Roman forms of Colchester.

Essentially, ‘an’ used with Colne means ‘roaring water’.

Thus ‘an’ plus ‘chor’ means ‘marshy land by the roaring water’, an apt description of the Anchor church area when the Trent is in spate.

Remember, the Saxons tended to replace settlement names, but not those of geographical features.

The land round about came to the Franceys family of Foremark at the dissolution of Repton Priory.

From them, by marriage, it passed to the Burdetts early in the 17th century. Now the Burdetts seem to have revelled in creating eccentric and romantic places on their estate.

Early in the 18th century, for instance, one of the Burdetts remodelled the site of the ancient Franceys house at Knowle Hill to create an eccentric dwelling poised on the edge of a wooded ravine.

While Sir Robert Burdett was having a new hall built at Foremark in 1757-60, the family lived at Knowle Hill. On moving back, William Emes, Derbyshire’s follower of Capability Brown, was hired to landscape the grounds and I strongly suspect that he also enlarged the hermit’s cave, giving it its Gothic door, enlarging it from one cell to something like three rooms and making it adaptable for picnics.

I suspect Thomas Smith was commissioned by the family to paint the first family picnic to be held at Anchor Church after the landscaping.

The family can be seen gathered in front of the cave, while a couple stand in its new door, looking out. I imagine, in the original painting, which hung at Foremark, the individuals would have been recognisable.

Two men are fishing in the Black Pool, formed from a remnant left over from a long forgotten shift in the river’s course and massaged into a picturesque element by Emes, who always had a weakness for water features.

Two servants can be seen bringing the picnic, slung from a pole, right, and a farm worker, pitchfork over his shoulder, makes his way past some cattle towards the main course of the Trent en route to a new task, in the foreground.

Emes had created for the Burdetts an idyll from an ancient and possibly hallowed place.

Today, despite its subsequent decay, it is still possible for any of us to enjoy a scene similar to the one captured by Thomas Smith to order in 1762, from which this print was made and published a year later.

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