If you’ve ever driven along the twisting bucolic road that is the A684 and runs between Swinithwaite and Aysgarth in Wensleydale, you will likely have no idea that, lying within a rolling field to the southern side of the dale, is a little known series of rare ruins that once comprised a chapel for the Knights Templar, the devout military order who protected European travellers visiting the Holy Land during the 12th-century Crusades.
Little of the surrounding preceptory or monastery dedicated to Our Lady and St Catherine here survives, though such institutions were founded to raise revenues to fund the Crusades to Jerusalem and even housed barracks for the training knights.
It is believed that Roger Mowbray founded the preceptory at Penhill in the mid 12th century though, by 1307, the Templar order had been suppressed on the grounds of heresy and their property confiscated by the Crown. Much was then acquired by the Knights Hospitallers (also known as the Knights of St John of Jerusalem), who clearly decided not to develop the site in Wensleydale and instead recorded it as worthless and ruinous by 1338, when the estate was held by Geoffrey Le Scrope, founder of the Yorkshire house of Scrope of Masham.
The remains of the site were then partly excavated in 1840, and the small chapel uncovered which once served many adjoining residential buildings that have not yet been exposed though earthworks indicate the position of these in the surrounding fields. What remains visible, however, are the external chapel walls measuring 17.5m east to west and 6.8m internally, the stone base of the altar in the chancel and three stone sarcophagi. This is a significant portion of the former complex as the most unusual feature of Templar sites is that their major churches featured round naves, inspired by the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
The legacy of this important site still endures in the name of nearby Temple Farm, whilst the ruins are now protected as a scheduled monument.
Books by Dr Emma Wells
