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Wreay is but a small village five miles south of Carlisle. The name is thought to be derived from a Norse word meaning a bend in the river...the river Petterial is just a half mile away.
Though records of the village date back to 1319, it doesn't have a great deal of historical interest. However, they do have what is locally known as 'The Twelve men'. This refers to meetings which have been held by a self-electing body of men responsible for the welfare of the villagers. Today, theTwelve Men still meet once a year, at the Plough Inn, smoking their clay pipes and conducting what little business they still have to discuss. Minutes of their meetings go back 250 years, and no doubt the olden days would make interesting reading.
The church here is of unusual design, and is the only one of its kind in Cumbria. It was consecrated in 1842 (though there had been a chapel here for 400 years before that) with funds provided by a Miss Sarah Losh of Woodside. Miss Losh actually sent a local stone-mason to Rome to gain first hand knowledge before building the church in an Italian style. Besides this church the good lady also built the school along with the schoolmaster's house. She was truly a lover of art as will be seen by the birds, fir-cones, butterflies, water lillies, snakes and alligators incorporated into the interior decorations of the church. Much ingenuity and loving labour was put into this remarkable church, as well as the fine craftmanship. In some of the windows of the nave are fragments of old glass picked up in the ruins of an Archibishop's palace in Paris, or collected as odds and ends from various places, and many of the small windows are unique in having thin alabaster instead of glass, the light coming through flowers and leaves cut out like fretwork. The chancel alone has thirteen of these, making a fine little gallery of fossil pictures showing some of the first forms of life.
Here also there is something which is older than any church standing on earth. It surely must be thrilling for the preacher here to remember that he is ina pulpit made from a tree that was growing before the world had heard of bethlehem. The pulpit was fashioned from the hollow trunk of a single piece of bog oak, rescued from a submerged forest in such a fine condition that it was possible to transform it into this beautiful rostrum and to shape it after its natiral form and decorate it with fossils. A small branch at one side is carved with leaves to make a candle holder.
Scaleseugh Hall of 1684 stands near by, it was enlarged early in this century and is now a home for spastics. Exotic and unusual trees from many countries flourish in the grounds close to the A6 highway.
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