In May 2023 I published my photozine Lidwell Chapel – Images from Two Seasons. It took a long time to put this together and I’m rather proud of it. (You can still buy it from Etsy here.) Soon after launching this into an inexplicably underwhelmed market I found myself re-reading it and reminding myself that I hadn’t attempted to find Chapel La Wallen – where (so it is said) the story of Robert de Middlecote’s appalling behaviour really began.
I refer any reader unfamiliar with the crimes of the 14th century priest Robert de Middlecote to my two earlier blog pieces about Lidwell Chapel, near Little Haldon. [The 2018 summer blog piece is here and the winter 2023 piece here.]
Anyway, for perhaps the last 5 years I’ve wondered if I could find Chapel La Wallen, and eventually decided to do something about it. La Wallen was a tiny chapel near Gidleigh, Dartmoor, where de Middlecote was a priest, and where he is said to have carried out an appalling act of assault on Agnes, the miller’s daughter, leading to the loss of her unborn child. From this remote chapel de Middlecote fled off the moor and to the Haldon Hills, settling (at least from the most quoted accounts) at Lidwell Chapel.
I unearthed an invaluable article, ‘A Tale of Two Chapels’, from the Dartmoor Magazine (issue 115, summer 2014) by Mary Tavy, with a couple of photographs by Ossie Palmer, and I’d refer anyone who wants further information on either chapel to the same excellent article. Having read and digested the clues to the location of the chapel’s remains I lost no time heading toward Gidleigh and parked near Scorhill farm.
From the same car park everyone uses to get to the Scorhill stone circle, I walked back down the hill I’d just driven up, then turned left along the minor lane to Moortown. The day (12th June 2023) was baking hot and some distance along the lane, out of the tree cover, there was a clearance. I gazed north eastward to a haze of fields, hedges and soft hills, knowing that somewhere over there lay the chapel I’d wanted to see for so long, and just might finally find.
On my Dartmoor OS map the location I’d identified was shown as a tiny brown square in a field just above Moortown brook, and to find it I had to head east along a lane from Moortown, then south-south-east down what seemed to be a public footpath, at which point I had to figure out how to get across the brook and closer to the chapel’s remains.
I soon reached Moortown, turned right and set off down the lane that leads to Chapple, looking for access to the footpath; that was easily found.
In a short distance through woodland the footpath meets the brook and I was about to cross it when I realised a small herd of very large cows was staring at me from the other side. They regarded me for a while and after a bit of a face-off evidently decided I was no threat but also had no food, so was of no interest to them. They moved on and I was able to cross the brook and make my way very slowly behind them.
From the brook, I knew the remains of the chapel would not be far away, but wasn’t convinced I’d be able to see it, never mind get to photograph it. The cows were totally disinterested now but had stopped a couple of hundred yards below me, so I stopped too, and while I waited for them to move again I looked over in the opposite direction and saw a small granite block gable wall through the trees.
I edged closer and from the right hand corner of the field where the wall was sited, I noticed a small group of ponies. I fitted my longer lens to record another photograph (I couldn’t not!) and at this point still didn’t know how close to the remains I would be able to get.
I realised the cows had now disappeared from view and I could explore further down the path. There was an access point to the field across the brook, but no bridge to cross it – it was very shallow. Just before going down to it, I noticed a sign further along the footpath pointing in the direction of the brook, marked ‘chapel remains’, which reassured me that crossing to the field was part of a permissive path. As I reached the field I saw just two of the ponies were still there: a beautiful white mare had embraced her foal with her head to protect it. I was no threat at all, but she didn’t know that; I stood quite still and took one more photograph. Again, how could I not?
This clearly matched the image shown in the Dartmoor Magazine article from 9 years earlier, and I have to conclude it almost certainly is the remains of Chapel La Wallen. It felt a bit of an anti-climax, but at least I was able to get closer to it.
The chapel was much smaller than I had expected, but then I recalled that it had been desecrated in the mid 14th century by the locals, outraged by de Middlecote’s behaviour in a house of God, and that it had later been rebuilt as a cow byre. Bracken and ferns were growing everywhere around it and even more so inside it; its length was considerable shorter than it once presumably was.
I reached the end gable and was taken aback when the herd of cows suddenly thundered past behind me and into the same field. I don’t know where they’d been, but they must have crossed the brook a few minutes after me. They didn’t notice me, so I recorded one more photograph before leaving.
This, despite the gable walls’ similarities, was nothing like Lidwell Chapel. There was nothing threatening, dark, grotesque, sinister about this building. The field was broad, open and green, the ground stable and not cursed with ghastly wet mud or buzzing with flies. Desecration had somehow helped relieve the old chapel of its unsavoury historical identity, and what remains is, well, just a crumbled old granite building. I left the site, retraced my steps up the footpath and returned to the hamlet of Chapple and then Gidleigh along the lane from Moortown. The hedges behind the walls at the side of the lane were hugely overgrown, but I was able to stand on a couple of stones to look to the south and record another view of the chapel with a long lens. I think it shows the extent that the land has begun to swallow the memory of this place. Few will care very much when it can no longer be seen.
I took one final photograph: the reverse of the second image I posted above, showing just where this little building was hiding close to these big old hills of Dartmoor. Thanks for reading!
Terry Hurt Photography 
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