History of the Hermitage and Oratory
This unique historical artefact consists of two chambers, side by side, chiselled out of the sandstone hillside by medieval hermits. The entrances would have originally overlooked the Friarwood Valley towards St Richards Dominican Friary, but in 1880 Pontefract Dispensary was built over the site and it is now hidden in the building’s Victorian basement. The Hermitage entrance leads to a remarkable spiral staircase of 63 steps, cut into the rock and descending through 4 complete turns to a shallow basin of fresh spring water 51 feet below the centre of Southgate, immediately below the central reservation with the lamp post. The hermits’ chisel marks are clearly visible in the walls of the barrel-vaulted passage which has 4 alcoves for candles that would have been the only form of lighting. Near the bottom of the staircase is a bas-relief carving of a skeleton in the wall, probably medieval, but the graffiti scratched around the basin are certainly much later.
The first hermit recorded in Pontefract was Peter of Pomfret, immortalised by Shakespeare in King John:
And here a prophet, that I brought with me From forth the streets of Pomfret, whom I found With many hundreds treading on his heels; To whom he sung, in rude harsh-sounding rhymes, That, ere the next Ascension-day at noon, Your highness should deliver up your crown.
He was executed by King John in 1213, but there is no record of Peter’s association with the Hermitage. The earliest documentation is from 1386: it is recorded that Robert de Laythorpe granted the Hermitage and accompanying land to his brother Adam for life and he was followed by his son Robert. The Oratory was founded in 1432 by the 28th Canon of Nostell Priory, John de Huddyfield. It was a roadside chapel next to the Hermitage, with a domed 8-foot ceiling, containing an altar with cross, fireplace and rock-hewn flue. There were hermits in residence until Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1538/39 when St Richard’s Friary and St John’s Priory, as well as Nostell Priory were all closed. The Oratory was sealed and lost to memory until rediscovered in 1854 when a workman digging a new drain in Southgate fell through the roof.
After the Reformation, the Hermitage and its garden were in private ownership, the last owner was Dr William Wright, surgeon to the Dispensary, who died on 17th November 1877. In his will read out on 3rd August 1878, he gave the Hermitage Garden as a legacy for the building of a new Dispensary. He specified that provision be made to allow access to the Hermitage and Oratory, and the entrances were constructed in the basement of the building. The entrance chamber of the Hermitage, the hermits’ living area, was sealed off by the building’s foundations and to support the road above. The hole through which the workman fell in 1854 is still visible in the ceiling of the Oratory, but the centre of the chamber is occupied by a large 19th century brick pillar, supporting the roadway above.
From the 1970s, Pontefract and District Archaeological Society conducted occasional tours of the site with the permission of Pontefract General Infirmary until the building was closed in 2011, and it has been inaccessible since. Because it was in the basement of a working hospital the Hermitage was never open to the public as a heritage visitor site, and this is the main reason that Pontefract Heritage Partnership was formed.