Exploring a Filming Location: Alan Garner’s Red Shift – St Mary the Virgin

Alan Garner’s writing is famously bound to the land. One of his best-known novels, Red Shift (1973) is set in Cheshire, Garner’s native county in north west England. Indeed, the novel features specific places and events in Cheshire: Mow Cop Castle, a folly built in 1754 in the village of Mow Cop, split between the counties of Cheshire and Staffordshire, and St. Bertoline’s Church in Barthomley, Cheshire, the site of a Royalist massacre of twelve suspected Parliamentarian supporters in 1643. When the novel was adapted (by Garner himself) for television for the BBC’s Play for Today series, directed by John Mackenzie and airing on January 17, 1978, the adaptation was filmed on Mow Cop, with the folly featuring prominently.

Even though St. Bertoline’s in Barthomley also features in the novel and the adaptation, it did not appear in the film. Instead, the crew traveled 140 miles north and east to film the church scenes in North Yorkshire. I discovered this fact after listening to a brief interview that accompanied the BFI’s DVD release of Red Shift  in 2014, in which assistant director Bob Jacobs describes his search for the perfect church – and that he found it in the “North Ridings of Yorkshire.”

I could find no indication, at first, of which church was used in these crucial scenes of Red Shift – scenes that feature in two of the three principal segments of the film. The church not only serves as the sole location for the Civil War narrative, but, in the present, as the location of critical scenes between protagonists Tom and Jan.

In an effort to find out where the scenes were shot, I posted screenshots from the film in two Facebook groups – Nostalgic North Riding and Historic Churches UK – and, in very short order, consensus emerged that the church used in the filming of Red Shift was St. Mary the Virgin in Levisham, located in the valley between Levisham and Lockton, in the parish of Pickering, North Yorkshire. A couple of people in the Nostalgic North Riding group even remembered local children being employed as extras when Red Shift was filmed.

I decided to find out for myself if St. Mary’s was indeed the church used in Red Shift by going there (on May 8, 2024) – a not-necessarily easy endeavor since the church has not been used for worship since the 1950s and was declared redundant in 1976[i] – a year or so before the filming of Red Shift took place in the summer of 1977.

There are actually two ways to walk down to the valley in which St. Mary’s is nestled. I’ll post directly in the notes the most direct, along with the webpage where I found it (a direct route which, of course, I did not take at first – only discovering it on the way back).[ii] There are also good directions on another website on how to access the valley and the church from the other side (the longer, more circuitous walk I did take). This website includes an invaluable portion of an ordnance survey map that shows the church in the valley. (I’ve circled the church in blue, on the left.)[iii] If you take this second route down to the valley, which includes portions on Mill Bank Road, the only road through the valley (which runs from Lockton to Levisham), you may have to walk further, but you do have good views of the church as you descend.

It’s hard for me to describe the beauty of the scene as you approach St. Mary’s. It was a beautifully sunny day when I visited, late in the afternoon, and the valley was startlingly green. The church with its graveyard (which is still in use) stands alone and uninterrupted, with the tree-lined sides of the valley rising up around it. I’ve been to some other wonderful churches, including the ruined church at Bix Bottom in Oxfordshire where The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) was filmed, the small ruined church at Anwoth, in Kirkcudbrightshire in Scotland, which featured in The Wicker Man (1973), and the beautiful St. Mary and St. David Church at Kilpeck in Herefordshire, adorned with amazing carvings (including Green Men). St. Mary’s is now part of that handful of the most hauntingly beautiful churches I’ve had the good fortune to be able to visit.

The church is relatively small, with a tower, a nave, and a chancel. As you approach the entrance down a small, dirt track, there stands a series of old information placards, smeared with rust and dirt and illegible in a couple of places. They contain some invaluable facts, though. They tell that the current church is almost entirely of nineteenth-century construction, having fallen into ruin and then been rebuilt in 1802. The tower was added in 1897 for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. Parts of the current church, however, do represent a survival of an older medieval church that stood on the site in the twelfth century – specifically, the chancel arch and a tombstone, still in the chancel, engraved with a sword.[iv] There is archaeological evidence that a church stood on the site even earlier, from at least the tenth century, if not before: carved stone crosses and a gravestone inscribed with a dragon are fragmentary evidence of that still earlier church.[v]

Evidence of a vastly earlier time remains, then, not only in stone remnants but in the very building itself, which, even in the bright late afternoon sunshine in which I encountered it, is profoundly eerie – eerie in the sense that it doesn’t seem like it should be here. As Mark Fisher defines the eerie in his wonderful book, The Weird and the Eerie (Repeater Books, 2016), the eerie is found “more readily in landscapes partially emptied of the human” (p. 11). An “abandoned village or a stone circle” provokes a “sense of the eerie,” raising, as they do, the twin questions of both absence and presence: “Why is there something here when there should be nothing? Why is there nothing here when there should be something?” (p. 12). Why does this church – and this church alone – disturb the isolated, green steep-sloped valley? Where are the homes of its congregants?

St. Mary’s does indeed seem eerily out of place – and time. Granted, my map reading skills are not what they should be, so finding the church was more difficult than it should have been, but St. Mary’s is pretty inaccessible. Even if you do try to drive down the very small Mill Bank Road (access to which seems to be restricted to those driving between Lockton and Levisham), at some point you have to get out of the car and traverse at least part of the steep valley in which St. Mary’s lies. Indeed, one of the reasons the church’s congregation dwindled and the church was finally made redundant was that people in Lockton and Levisham found easier places at which to worship. Importantly, though, the church wasn’t always so far removed from the local population: it was once at the heart of a village down in the valley. Evidence has been found of pottery; the nearby Rowl Spring (just in front of the church) was a good source of water; and, according to the placard by the church, “the site was at the point where several ancient tracks converge.” This now-eerie valley was once, the evidence suggests, home to a significant population – at a crossroads, in fact.

Traces remain, then – in fragmentary archaeological evidence and in the church and the very land on which it sits – of an earlier church, a village, and a community. But even though the cemetery is still in use and well-maintained, nature is claiming the place back – as it does – working inexorably to erase those traces. One end of the church is completely covered by trees, growing over the church and obscuring several older gravestones, one of which has fallen over and broken. A shot from Red Shift of Tom and Jan entering the church ground would now be impossible as a massive tree with multiple low branches has grown over the area. And the front of the church is completely obscured from view once you get beyond it and up the path a bit: it looks like a copse of trees – no church in sight.

Alan Garner himself graciously responded to my questions about this church – and, while he said it was the only Red Shift filming location he did not visit, and he affirmed that the assistant director identified the site, he did say that this church was chosen because it had been deconsecrated and the production crew could do what they liked inside and out. He added that they could not use St. Bertoline’s in Barthomley for the film “because of the violence inflicted on the church fabric in the film.” (In one of the Civil War scenes, for instance, the windows are broken.) Garner added the interesting details that they filmed the scenes with Tom and Jan first – with the pews and “cultural objects” still in the church – and then they filmed the seventeenth-century scenes after they had stripped out the pews and everything else.

There’s a lot to be done, still, I think, in terms of uncovering the history of the church and the details of the production of Red Shift here, in this beautiful location. There’s also a lot to be done with thinking about what this choice – this church, this land – adds to meaning of the adaptation. I intend to pursue both of these projects. Because place – landscape – is as meaningful as a character, an actor. Its history speaks.

Not least, St. Mary’s contains multiple layers of history, striking vestiges of past centuries all inhabiting the same space. It exudes an eerie sense of containing multiple times at once, evoking people now absent, embodying presence out of time. Because it has not been used in decades, the modernizing project has left St. Mary’s alone – has left some of its remnants of the long past alone, in place, not refurbished or removed to a museum. This coexistence in place of multiple moments in history is exactly what Alan Garner represented in Red Shift. However unwittingly, then, the choice of this church was a brilliant one.

You can stream Red Shift on Internet Archive.

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NOTES

[i] See the informational placard that still stands outside the church. There is, as the church’s website indicates, an annual outdoor service held at the church.

[ii] Here are directions for the best way to get to St Mary’s, taken from this site, and with my own emendations (in bold) to help make things clearer.

–Start from the Youth Hostel [in Lockton] and walk towards Levisham, when the road bears right.

–Go straight ahead to continue walking through the village until the road ends.

–Take the footpath ahead of you over a stone squeeze stile onto a narrow path between houses which leads to a wood. [The squeeze stile is just to the right of a house called The Rectory]

–Enter the wood, keeping straight ahead down the hill. Take care on the steps as you start a steep descent, the path can be slippery if wet.

–At the road go left, then immediately left again onto a wide public footpath. Pass through a large gate and keep straight ahead. You soon have good views into the valley and behind you are glimpses of St Mary’s Church. [Incredibly, you actually can barely see St. Mary’s any more since – from this side – it is virtually entirely obscured by the trees that have been left to grow wildly around it; you can get one brief glimpse of the part of the top of the tower. To get to the church itself, you should cut right off this footpath and go across the bridge over the beck (which features in the film at around 20 minutes)]

[iii]  https://www.yorkshirewalks.org/diary15/diary581.html

Map: https://www.yorkshirewalks.org/diary15/maps/map581.html

[iv] See the placard that stands outside the church.

[v] See the placard that stands outside the church.