Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

Big Black Squire, had been among the last to take part in the cross-border raids that
terrorised the countryside until 1745. That turbulent past was still easily discernible, as
Scott described in his Border Antiquities, in the ‘numerous castles left to moulder in
massive ruins’ amid ‘fields where the memory of ancient battles still lives among the
descendants of those by whom they were fought or witnessed’. 180 Losh was one such. In
her musings on the origins of the paving slabs she writes in the self-referential style of
Edward Willson, E H Langlois and Jonathan Oldbuck, thinking as she goes, interrogating
each piece of evidence, making connections with other information, raising and
answering possible objections and refining her conclusions on the page. Her
antiquarianism fed directly into her architecture and St Mary’s was built, literally, on the
foundations of the past for the old flag stones were reburied at greater depth, with the
exception of one small piece which was taken ‘as a specimen of the rest’ and set at the
gate of the local schoolmaster’s house which she had designed. 181 It was a compromise
between preservation and the propagation of knowledge, both of pre-eminent concern to
the antiquarian enterprise, with economic use of materials, for which Losh was also an
enthusiast.
Antiquarianism was essential, too, to the design of the new building. The
decoration and the furnishings of the church mark, in a very different form, that fusion of
personal experience and historical knowledge that Willson invoked at Melton Mowbray.
Unlike Willson, however, who was seeking to make a new argument in an old language,
Losh was creating her own, individual, idiom drawn from the full range of imagery that
her travels and her remarkably extensive education placed at her disposal. She also had
the advantage of complete independence. More widely read and travelled than Milner,
Britton or Willson, Losh was nevertheless perhaps closer to them in her sources as well
as her methods than might at first appear. The surviving extracts from the journal, (the
original is lost), that she kept of her travels in Italy suggests that she had a dislike and,
probably, a doctrinal mistrust of religious imagery.
180
Scott, Border Antiquities, pp. iv-v.
181
Document in the Jackson Collection, Carlisle Library.
86