In the broad green country of the Eden Valley, between Penrith and Appleby, a quiet village green and a sandstone house among the trees mark one of the very few places in our Province where the Knights Templar genuinely held the land. The village is Temple Sowerby, and the house, Acorn Bank, stands on the manor the Templars once owned. It is the clearest Templar site in Cumbria, and a rewarding day out for anyone drawn to the history our Order keeps alive.
A manor of the Knights Templar
The manor of Sowerby was granted to the Knights Templar in 1228, and it is from them that the village took the prefix ‘Temple’, a distinction recorded in documents by 1279. The older part of the name is Norse in origin, from words meaning sour or muddy ground and a farmstead, so Temple Sowerby is in effect the Templars’ farm on the sour ground. Holdings of just this kind, scattered manors and estates rather than great castles, were how the Order raised the revenue that funded its work in the Holy Land.
From Templar to Hospitaller
When the Order of the Temple was suppressed in 1312, the manor did not simply vanish from history. It passed first to Robert de Clifford and then, in 1323, into the hands of the Knights Hospitaller, the Order of St John of Jerusalem, who held it until the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII. In 1543 it was sold to Thomas Dalston, and his family held the estate for the best part of four centuries. Readers of our earlier piece on Stydd will recognise the pattern at once: the same passage from Templar to Hospitaller, and the same eventual dispersal under the Tudors, played out here in the Eden Valley.
Acorn Bank today
The heart of the old manor survives as Acorn Bank, a National Trust property just north of the village, given to the Trust in 1950. Behind walls some four hundred years old lie gardens that now shelter the National Trust’s largest collection of herbs, several hundred varieties in all, medicinal and culinary, alongside orchards of old northern apple sorts and an Italianate sunken garden that dates back to the 1600s. Beyond the walls stretch some 180 acres of woodland and parkland, with paths leading down through the trees along Crowdundle Beck to a watermill that still grinds flour at weekends, and on to the remains of a gypsum mine that recalls the estate’s later industrial life. Red squirrels and other wildlife make their home in the woods, and from the house there are fine views across the valley to the Lakeland fells.
A fitting echo
There is a pleasing resonance in all of this. The crusading orders were famed as healers as much as fighting men, a tradition we touched upon at Stydd, where the brethren of St John were remembered as skilled herbalists. It is no medieval survival, for the herb garden at Acorn Bank is the creation of the twentieth-century National Trust rather than a relic of the Knights, but there is something fitting in finding one of the country’s great medicinal gardens flourishing on ground the Templars and Hospitallers once held.
Visiting Temple Sowerby and Acorn Bank
Acorn Bank is signed from the A66 near Temple Sowerby, a few miles east of Penrith. The garden, estate, watermill and tea-room are open through the main season, broadly spring to autumn, with the watermill running at weekends and on bank holidays. Admission charges apply, although entry is free to National Trust members. Opening dates change a little from year to year, so it is worth confirming on the National Trust website before setting out. The village itself, set around its green and one of the few in old Westmorland still to keep a maypole, is well worth a pause on the way.
For those of us in Lancashire, Cumberland and Westmorland who treasure the heritage our Order carries forward, Acorn Bank is a quiet treasure: a true Templar manor, held afterwards by the Knights of St John, set in some of the loveliest country in the north, and open for all to enjoy.