Robin Longbottom looks at the growth of the baptist movement across Keighley and South Craven

AT the top of High Street in Sutton-in-Craven the road forks and a signpost indicates left to Laycock and Braithwaite and right to Slippery Ford and Aden.

The right turn leads up West Lane and rises steeply onto the uplands above the village. Once on the tops the road levels out and within 300 yards a track leads off to the left to two former farms, Clough Head and Wood Top. Just beyond this junction is a bridge – it is barely noticeable and crosses a small beck that runs into Sutton Clough. Here on the left, at the end of the parapet, is a small stoop with a cross incised into it.

The stoop and cross are said to mark the site where those joining the baptist church were baptised during the early 18th century. The baptist church is one of the few Christian denominations that practices full immersion in their baptismal ceremony. For a baptism to take place the person had to be old enough to declare their faith and therefore they had to be approaching adolescence, or older. Although the beck at this bridge is now quite shallow it has the benefit of narrow, steep banks and could have been easily dammed to make it deep enough for immersion to take place.

The baptist movement emerged at the beginning of the 17th century, but its members suffered persecution until the Act of Tolerance in 1689 granted freedom of religion to all faiths (apart from Roman Catholicism, which had to wait another hundred years).

This new freedom saw an expansion in the church and Sutton-in-Craven became an early centre. Meetings are said to have first taken place in an outlying barn in 1711, but were eventually moved into the village. The church then met in a building that once stood in Chapel Fold, now called Harper Square. Eventually the congregation raised sufficient money to buy a piece of land off Holme Lane and build a small chapel. Baptisms were then undertaken across the road in Lumb Beck. Here too a temporary dam must have been erected to facilitate full immersion. Today the baptistry is marked by a blue plaque on the wall opposite the present chapel.

The baptist movement also gathered momentum in Keighley and here members are also said to have met in a barn before building their own church, named Bethel Chapel. This was built in about 1818 in what later became known as Baptist Square. It stood in the area below the present Brown Cow tavern at the bottom of Oakworth Road. A breakaway group moved to Oakworth and they built their own chapel in 1819 – it still stands just outside the village on the road to Goose Eye. The building, which was named the Zion Chapel, is one of the oldest remaining baptist chapels in the district.

The members of Zion Chapel also built a ‘baptismal font’, a short distance down the road, opposite the junction with the road from Fell Lane. It was fed from springs that emerged as a small sike and was dammed to create a pool, probably about three feet deep. The dam wall and outlet can still be seen today, and here, as at Sutton-in-Craven, the congregation gathered in the open air to witness the believer’s admission into the church.

As congregations grew larger, the tradition of baptism in open air was replaced by more private ceremonies in fonts sunk into the floor of chapels. Eventually most of the old chapels were replaced by bigger buildings. However, the Zion Chapel at Oakworth survived because it was later used as a Sunday school by its replacement, Slack Lane Chapel, a few hundred yards up the road.