The Mystery of Sarah Losh

In the village of Wreay in Cumbria, five miles from the city of Carlisle, stands the curious and beautiful St. Mary's Church, which since its construction in the mid-19th century has aroused much commentary and a good deal of wonderment. The pre-Raphaelite poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti called it "a church in the Byzantine style, full of beauty and imaginative detail, though extremely severe and simple" and by any measure "much more original than the things done by the young architects now." But he could not find words to describe the church well and wished for others to see this "most beautiful thing." A century later the great architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner had his own descriptive struggles: he dubbed the building's style "Byzantino-Naturalistic," and said it was "a crazy building without any doubt."