Sara Losh

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Sara Losh (1785–1853) was an English architect and designer. She is known as an antiquarian, an architect, and a visionary. Her main work is St Mary's Church in Wreay, Cumberland (now Cumbria), a building that shows ideas that would influence the Arts and Crafts Movement.

Sara was born at Woodside in Wreay near Carlisle in late 1785 and baptized on 6 January 1786. She was the oldest of four children of John Losh and Isabella Bonner. Her father owned land and helped run an alkali factory. Because one brother died young and another had mental problems, Sara and her sister Katherine inherited most of their father’s estate. Sara never married, and she later inherited Katherine’s share when Katherine died in 1835.

Her uncle James Losh was a barrister in Newcastle and a friend of famous poets. Sara was well educated, studying in Wreay, London, and Bath, and she traveled in France, Italy, and Germany in 1814 and 1817. She spoke French and Italian and could translate Latin. Some compared her mind to the writer George Eliot. She never married, and there may have been a romance with a school friend who died in 1842.

Sara Losh died on 29 March 1853 at Woodside and was buried in the Wreay churchyard beside her sister Katherine.

From the late 1820s she designed, funded, and built several projects around Wreay. One example is a replica of Bewcastle Cross, made in 1835 as a memorial to her parents. She also built a schoolteacher’s house based on a Pompeian villa and helped with wells and village schools.

In 1841 she was given permission to rebuild the old chapel at Wreay. She designed it in a simple early Christian style she called "early Saxon or modified Lombard." The apse was small, with space for 13 seats. The altar was a slab of Italian marble on brass eagles. The walls and outside were decorated with natural carvings of fossils, plants, and animals, some carved by William Hindson. Sara and her cousin William carved the font from alabaster. The church has no explicit Christian symbol like a cross, but some see the decoration as a celebration of creation. It cost about £1,200 and was completed and dedicated in December 1842. Today it is a Grade II* listed building.

The churchyard also contains a Grade II listed mausoleum, built in 1850 by Losh in memory of her sister Katherine. Sara also helped restore St John the Evangelist's Church in Newton Arlosh.

Much of Sara Losh’s private papers were destroyed, so few of her journals or drawings survive. Her life is described in Henry Lonsdale’s The Worthies of Cumberland, published in the 1860s.