Church of the Holy Cross

The Church of the Holy Cross is the Church of England parish church of Ilam, a small and exceptionally beautiful village in the Staffordshire Peak District, set within the grounds of Ilam Park beside the River Manifold. A Grade I listed building, the church is far older and more remarkable than its quiet setting suggests, for it is one of the great pilgrimage churches of the Midlands — the home of the shrine of St Bertram, an Anglo-Saxon saint whose tomb still draws pilgrims today, and a place where Anglo-Saxon stone crosses, a Romanesque font and a celebrated Regency monument gather more than a thousand years of history in one small building among the hills.

There was almost certainly both a settlement and a church at Ilam in the eleventh century, though neither was recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086. The church itself probably dates from the eleventh century, was partly rebuilt in the thirteenth, and was extended in 1618 and again in 1831 before being restored in 1855–56 by Sir George Gilbert Scott, the most prolific church architect of the Victorian age. But the church's true antiquity reaches back further still, to the age of the Anglo-Saxon saints, and it is the cult of one such saint that has shaped Holy Cross above all.

St Bertram — also called Beorhthelm of Stafford, or St Bertelin — was an eighth-century holy man whose legend made him a hermit and a worker of miracles. After his death a shrine was established at his grave at Ilam, and it became a popular place of pilgrimage in the Middle Ages. The site of the shrine is now marked by an altar tomb of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, and the tomb has a feature that vividly preserves the practice of medieval pilgrimage: special openings in its sides, known as foramina, through which pilgrims could reach to touch or kiss a relic. People in search of healing would put injured limbs through these openings in the hope of a cure — a practice the worn stone still records. The chapel that houses the shrine was built in 1618, and pilgrims still come to St Bertram's tomb to this day, so that Ilam remains a living place of pilgrimage as it has been for more than a thousand years.

The relics of the saint's age are scattered through the church and churchyard. Two Anglo-Saxon cross shafts stand in the churchyard, carved stones from the early centuries of English Christianity that testify to the antiquity of the Christian site at Ilam. The font, which depicts episodes from the life of St Bertram, is Romanesque in style, but it may in fact date from the Anglo-Saxon period — a carved chronicle of the saint's life that the faithful would have seen at every baptism. And near the church lies St Bertram's Well, a holy well also known as St Bertram's Pool, whose water is thought to have supplied Ilam with clean water since Anglo-Saxon times; the stone structure surrounding it today is post-medieval, but the spring itself belongs to the deep past, one of the holy wells so often associated with the early Celtic and Saxon saints.

The church's later history is dominated by the family that owned Ilam Hall. The large octagonal north chapel houses a carved memorial to David Pike Watts, a wealthy London brewer who bought the Ilam estate in 1809. The monument, completed in 1831, is the work of Sir Francis Chantrey, the foremost English sculptor of his day, and shows the dying Watts attended by his daughter and her three children — a tender Regency tableau of family grief, and one of the finest things of its kind in Staffordshire. It was the same family — Watts's grandson Jesse Watts-Russell — who rebuilt Ilam Hall and largely created the picturesque model village of Ilam that survives today, with its Gothic estate cottages and the elaborate Eleanor-cross-style memorial in the village, giving the whole place its distinctive romantic character.

The setting is among the loveliest in the Peak District. Ilam lies at the southern edge of the Peak District National Park, where the River Manifold emerges from its underground course at the foot of the dramatic limestone hills of Dovedale, one of the most famous and beautiful valleys in England. Ilam Park, in whose grounds the church stands, is owned by the National Trust, and the parkland, the river and the surrounding fells draw walkers and visitors throughout the year; the great gorge of Dovedale, with its stepping-stones and pinnacles, is a short walk away. The church sits among all this beauty as it has for a millennium, its tower rising above the trees beside the Manifold.

From an Anglo-Saxon Christian site with its carved crosses and holy well, through the medieval shrine of St Bertram with its pilgrims' foramina, to Chantrey's Regency monument and Gilbert Scott's Victorian restoration, the Church of the Holy Cross holds an extraordinary depth of history within its walls. It remains a living Church of England parish church — and a place of pilgrimage to a saint of the eighth century — in one of the most beautiful corners of the Staffordshire Peak.