Knowlton Church By Gordon Hall - Sept 2005

September 2005

Knowlton Church, Dorset, photograph by Gordon Hall

SITUATED some two miles south of Cranborne and six miles north of Wimborne stands the ruin of a twelfth century church. It was built at the centre of a 2500 BC neolithic embankment and ditch, now called the Church Circle, which forms part of a Bronze Age complex of henge monuments or ditch enclosed earthworks, known as the Knowlton Rings. Close by is the Great Barrow, the largest round barrow or ancient burial ground in Dorset, nearly twenty feet high. Repeated burials have raised substantially the level of earth above that of the adjacent land. That the whole area was a religious site is indicated by the large number of other nearby barrows and the proximity of yew trees.

There is little doubt that long before Christianity reached Britain, burial places were used for communal and secular, as well as religious purposes. The notion of spiritual regeneration by association with the dead persisted for many centuries and the simple agricultural people, very much concerned with rebirth, would have used the sites at Knowlton as religious meeting places as well as for their seasonal activities.

The value of religious and cultural continuity was recognised by Pope Gregory when, in 601, he instructed Abbot Mellitus (later Bishop of London) that pagan shrines should not be destroyed ‘but rather that they should be purified with holy water so that in time they would become temples of the true God’. This would ensure that the powerful religious associations of a site would be sustained in the minds of the people. For this reason, numerous ancient burial sites were adopted by missionary priests as centres of worship and, once established, they were used as Christian burial grounds and eventually acquired permanent churches. It is most likely that this is how Knowlton Church came to be built. The henge in which it is situated almost certainly once featured a stone circle. At least two large stones are built into the base of the church, and the altar could well have been cut from a third. The stone fabric of the church has replaced the circle and one of the buttresses clearly has the energy spiral normally associated with standing stones running up it.

It was once the parish church of the medieval settlement of Knowlton, located in a river valley a mile to the south-west. In Norman times it was an important village and was named as a royal manor in the Domesday Book. During the early part of the fourteenth century, extensions and alterations were carried out to the church which tends to suggest that the village was growing. Immediately afterwards, however, the village fell victim to the Black Death and was totally wiped out.

There is little information about the church over the next few hundred years but it seems that it largely fell into disuse. There is evidence that some repair work was carried out in the eighteenth century. It was not fully restored, however, and in the same century the roof collapsed, the church was abandoned for good and, sadly, allowed to fall into ruin.

Legend has it that, at some stage when the church was disused but not yet ruined, its bells were stolen by the people of Sturminster Marshall who needed them for their own church. The theft was soon discovered by the people of Knowlton who set off in pursuit of the thieves. As the bell-thieves reached their

own village they heard the Knowltonians gaining ground behind them and, in panic, dropped the bells into the river near White Mill Bridge, which spans the Stour near Sturminster Marshall. They tried several times to recover them later but their efforts were in vain as the bells always slipped back. According to the legend the bells can still be heard ringing today.

Knowlton Church remains an abandoned ruin and although much of its tower and walls of flint are still intact, it is without a roof. It is the only surviving memory of a once thriving village and its setting is quite magical, though sometimes moody and oppressive. Conservationists have now cleared the centuries of bramble growth which once made entry into the ruin almost impossible. Before this, many people who visited it described it as a dank and evil-smelling place with a sinister atmosphere.

In fact, relatively little is known about the church, which adds to the mystery, and over the years it has certainly succeeded in firing the imagination. Visitors cannot fail to be filled with curiosity about its history, especially when they discover that it has been listed as one of the most haunted places in Dorset. Story by Gordon Hall