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

The iconography of the east end of St Mary’s is the most powerful and original in
the church and is surely intended to represent in every sense the architect’s conclusion. In
the apse are the seven lamps that stand before the throne of God in the Book of
Revelations, the culmination of the Christian gospel. Below them thirteen niches stand
for Christ and the apostles while above, depicted in stained glass, are fossils. These are
not generalised images but representations of specific fossilised ferns found in the coal-
measures of Northumberland, the mines from which the Losh family fortune derived.
They include, according to Losh’s friend and biographer Henry Lonsdale (who was
himself a doctor and a man of science) Neuropteris, Pecopteris heterophylla, Spheopteris
and Sphenophyllum Schlotheimii. Lonsdale’s interpretation of their significance is that
the culmination of the church in natural rather than explicitly Christian imagery makes it
‘a kind of pantheistic temple’ in which ‘the light passing through the ante-diluvian forest’
strikes the marble lotus flower Losh designed to place on the altar. 190
Figure 42 St Mary’s Wreay, apse, (with later wall paintings)
There are many more symbols inside and outside the church at Wreay and there is
neither space nor time to consider them all, however, a few examples are worth noting.
190 Londsdale, The Worthies of Cumbria, p. 231.
89