An unassuming red-brick building, its fenestration entirely bricked up, overlooks the road known as South End in the small market town of Bedale in North Yorkshire. This is the Beresford Peirse Lodge 2610. Erected by public subscription in 1896, it is in fact Bedale’s masonic lodge.
The name derives from the local Peirse family, who have been established in the town since the 16th century and went on to inhabit Bedale Hall. In the Victorian era, Henry William De La Poer Beresford, the eldest son of Admiral Sir John Beresford and Harriet-Elizabeth Peirse, assumed the additional surname and arms of Peirse upon succeeding to the manors of Bedale and Hutton Bonville. Hence the lodge was later named in honour of this prominent local dynasty.
The red-brick building is decorated on its principal elevation with string courses and architraves picked out in buff brick, each window blind to ensure strict privacy.
Masonic lodges and their freemasons are often cloaked in intrigue. Yet this fraternal organisation is rather a male social club movement (there is a separate women’s branch) whose members are renowned for charitable work. The organisation’s origins go back centuries, to the medieval stonemasonry guilds as the name suggests.
The grand cathedral building crusade of the Middle Ages drew itinerant masons from far and wide. At each construction site, a masons’ lodge would be erected as soon as work commenced and therefore acted as a centre of fraternity. But as the age of cathedral building waned, some groups would admit honorary or ‘speculative’ members from other professions in a bid to boost numbers.
It is no surprise that architecture always played an important role, these buildings packed with meaning, influenced and built in the image of biblical structures and incorporating proportions with symbolic meaning.
Address: South End, Bedale DL8 2BN
Books by Dr Emma Wells
