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Brigflatts Meeting House

Quaker meeting house in Sedbergh, South Lakeland, England, UK

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJul 19, 2025
Entity authorityQ4967239 ↗
Source-derived summary

Brigflatts Meeting House or Briggflatts Meeting House is a Friends Meeting House of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), near Sedbergh, Cumbria, in north-western England. Built in 1675, it is the second oldest Friends Meeting House in England. It has been listed Grade I on the National Heritage List for England since March 1954.

It is the subject of a twelve-line poem titled "At Briggflatts meetinghouse" by British modernist poet Basil Bunting. Bunting's poem was written in 1975 for the 300th anniversary of the meeting house's construction.

Throughout its history, the spelling has varied from Brigflatts, Brigflats, Briggflats, or Briggflatts, for both the village and the Quaker Meeting. Currently, the Quaker Meeting uses the spelling "Brigflatts". The variant spelling with two g's and two t's was used by Bunting for his two poems, "At Briggflatts Meetinghouse" (1975) and the earlier autobiographical long poem Briggflatts (1965).

The Meeting House "Howgills" in Letchworth Garden City in Hertfordshire is based on Brigflatts.

References

External links

VisitCumbria.com "Brigflatts Meeting House" page with several good photos.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Brigflatts Meeting House” as quaker meeting house in Sedbergh, South Lakeland, England, UK. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Brigflatts, Meeting and House.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1675, 1954, 1975, 1965—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1675. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Brigflatts, Meeting and House providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Brigflatts Meeting House”, the useful work is to connect “quaker meeting house in Sedbergh, South Lakeland, England, UK” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 19, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q4967239. Authority coordinates are 54.315, -2.554. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1675, 1954, 1975 and 1965.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Brigflatts Meeting House” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.