Birness Chapel : The Antiquarian Records
John Hodgson (1827, 148) was adamant that there was no tradition of a chapel having stood at Byrness and 'there certainly never had been any building in the burial ground before the erection of the present chapel'. For once, however, we must disagree with the great Northumbrian scholar, in part at least.
The antiquarian and cartographer, John Warburton, who visited the area around 1715, noted the existence of a ruined chapel of ease at Byrness, which was by then only used as a burial ground (cf. Hodgson 1916, 8). He marked the chapel (using a cross symbol), albeit rather inaccurately, on his map of Northumberland in 1716.
The ruined chapel was still standing half a century later when it was again mentioned by Wallis (1769, 2, 61) and the site was depicted by Armstrong on his map of Northumberland, which was engraved in the same year. Armstrong positions the ruins on the north side of a small rectangular enclosure (presumably the graveyard) and to the west of the farmstead, which he depicts using two black rectangular dots, his conventional symbol for substantial farmstead or hamlet. The farmstead was presumably the same site as that now occupied by the Byrness Hotel.
Although only schematic, the layout recorded by Armstrong tallies remarkably well with the details provided by Hodgson nearly 60 years later. The historian was informed that the 'ruins and foundations of a rude building' had stood a little to the north of the present chapel, but had been demolished some years previously and the remains used to construct a nearby sheep stell. Hodgson was therefore probably correct in stating that this earlier structure was not located inside the graveyard, although it could conceivably have stood immediately to the north. However his reasons for rejecting the identification of the 'rude building' as a chapel appear less convincing.
As Warburton's comments reveal, the ancient chapel had certainly been out of use for more than a 100 years before Hodgson's time - well beyond living memory. Furthermore, since the farmstead at Byrness was probably no older than the 18th or late 17th century, the chapel was almost certainly already ruined and long out of use when the site was reoccupied, and probably had been ever since the medieval period. It is therefore not surprising that there was no local tradition of the building being a chapel.
Warburton, who unlike Hodgson was able to view the remains himself, was probably able to recognise its true function. Certainly ruined chapels were common enough in the 16th-18th centuries. Warburton mentions examples at Falstone in North Tynedale, Elishaw in Redesdale, Kilham and Akeld in Glendale and many others besides.
An Ordnance Survey Archaeology Division field inspection in 1956 noted that a sheep stell adjacent to the graveyard contained a large quantity of worked stones which appeared to be reused building material. Curiously, Hodgson recorded that none of the stones incorporated in the stell he observed appeared to be hewn.
As Hodgson was normally a careful observer, it is possible that these represent two entirely different structures, but the existence of a sheepfold built out of reused masonry is nevertheless very significant in this context since it is difficult to envisage where the material could have derived from other than the ruined chapel.