Dacre Quaker Meeting House and Burial Ground

A meeting house was built on the site in 1696 on the north side of the surviving burial ground. It was pulled down in about 1860 and, according to William Grainge, the stone sold to Sir William Ingleby. Grainge estimates its size to have been 11 yards by 8 yards, with a stable adding 3 yards to the length

The first burial was in 1688 and the last in 1842, over 140 burials in all, before being superceded by the Darley burial ground. Only two gravestones have survived. In the summer of 2004, following the sale for development of the Darley site, nine gravestones have been moved from Darley and errected at Dacre.

The burial ground, a walled enclosure, is entered by a door in a stone arch - the lintel of which bears the date, 1682. In the summer of 2004, The Dacre Pasture Project local archaeology group refurbished the walls and cleared the site. A new door was fitted to the entrance to replace the farm gate shown above.

The two original gravestones are in one corner, and were indecipherable to Whitehead seventy years ago, but Grainge, writing in 1863 gave the inscriptions as follows:

The refurbishment of the burial ground took place after the above photographs were taken, but the site was re-visited in November 2004, when the following photographs were taken:

The gravestones transferred from Darley burial ground have been arranged neatly along the southern wall of the site.

The inscriptions on the gravestones reflect the quakers adherence to simplicity. They eschewed the names of the months, referring simply, as in the example below, to the number of the month.

This photograph, taken from the north shows the view over the burial ground to Darley.

Whitehead comments that "Before the the building of Hartwith Church (1751), more than half a century later, people of all denominations attended this little Meeting House. Truely this is hallowed ground!"

References

Thomas Whitehead, "Illustrated Guide to Nidderdale and a History of its Congregational Churches", 1932.

William Grainge, Nidderdale; An Historical, Topographical and Descriptive Sketch of the Valley of the Nidd", 1863.