The Light Beneath the Water

The Lost Window of West End

By Mark Anthony | Nidd Films

Saint Saviour's Church Thornthwaite

When we filmed at St Saviour’s Church, Thornthwaite, one detail quietly drew my attention, a pelican feeding her young, set high in the stained glass above the altar.

At first glance, it’s easy to miss. Yet the image carries centuries of meaning and connects to a part of Nidderdale that no longer exists.

The pelican in her piety, wounding herself to feed her chicks with her own blood, has symbolised self-sacrifice since early Christian times. The legend, first recorded in Physiologus in second-century Alexandria, was later adopted by medieval artists and writers as an emblem of Christ’s love and redemption. Dante called Christ “our Pelican,” and Shakespeare echoed the same image in Hamlet:

“Like the kind, life-rendering pelican,

Repast them with my blood.”

— Hamlet, Act IV, Scene V

The same symbol once appeared in the window of New Hall, Fewston, the home of the Pulleyne family, whose crest depicted a pelican feeding her young. When the Washburn valley was flooded to create Swinsty Reservoir in 1867, the house was demolished and its glass removed.

According to William Grainge’s (1861) History and Topography of the Parish of Fewston and the Forest of Knaresborough, the window was saved and later held by Bramley B. Kent of Menwith Hill, just a few miles from where we filmed.

Standing in St Saviour’s, I couldn’t help but think of that lost valley, the old chapel at West End, the homes and farms that now lie beneath the water, and the lives displaced when the reservoirs were made. The light that shines through Thornthwaite’s window seems to carry a memory of all those places, refracted and renewed.

These stories of faith, loss, and endurance lie at the heart of everything I’m working on now.

Through Sweetheart: Angel of the Moor, I’ve begun exploring how real lives and forgotten voices survive in landscape and legend. The next chapter, my developing feature Those Who Belong to the Deer, will reach further back, into the medieval forest that once surrounded these same hills, tracing how belief and bloodline shaped the people who lived here.

For me, that pelican in the window has become a symbol of continuity, of what we pass on, and what the land remembers even after we’re gone.

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Image Credit:

Image courtesy of Nidd Films (2025). Photographer Angus Chau. All rights reserved.

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References (Harvard Style)

Grainge, W. (1861) The History and Topography of the Parish of Fewston and the Forest of Knaresborough. Internet Archive. Available at: https://archive.org (Accessed: 8 October 2025).

Shakespeare, W. (1600) Hamlet. London: Nicholas Ling and John Trundell.