Carved into the soft sandstone of a cliff overlooking a tributary of the Trent in south Derbyshire, the Anchor Church cave once provided a fashionable venue for aristocratic parties, hosting the local great and good for dining, drinking, and musical entertainments put on by the 18th-century Baronets of Bramcote. Such grottoes were much admired by enthusiasts of the picturesque movement that was popular at this time, and the 4th Baronet, Sir Robert Burdett (1716-1797), was a particularly keen visitor to the site, which lay close to (though outside the grounds of) his Palladian mansion, Foremark Hall. A painting by Thomas Smith of Derby, completed in 1745, shows one such gathering, with well-dressed ladies and gentlemen enjoying the cave while a man plays the flute. In his 1899 account Repton and Its Neighbourhood, F C Hipkins also describes the site as Sir Robert’s ‘favourite retreat’, noting that he ‘had it fitted up so that he and his friends could dine within its cool and romantic cells’. Traces of these modifications can still be seen today – but recently published research by Wessex Archaeology and the Royal Agricultural University’s newly formed Cultural Heritage Institute suggests that the space’s origins may be as much as 1,000 years earlier.
The cave, which lies between Foremark and Ingleby, was examined as part of a wider project by RAU research fellow Edmund Simons, who is exploring rock-cut sites across the country in order to develop a typology and methodology for analysing these sometimes enigmatic spaces. Work at Anchor Church included taking detailed measurements, drone surveys, and studying its architectural details, and Simons’ findings have recently been published as a case study in the Proceedings of the University of Bristol Spelaeological Society. His conclusions place the cave’s creation in the early medieval period, and link its use to another elite individual in the form of an exiled king.
In his paper, Simons notes that rock-cut dwellings can be tricky to analyse, as they represent negative features cut into negative features, with little in the way of conventional stratigraphy – but they can also represent treasure troves of early architectural detail. It takes rather more effort to modify a cave than a conventional house, meaning that early features are not so easily swept away by changes of use or taste, and these sites also tend to be abandoned rather than demolished at the end of their occupation.
Excavating Suffolk