Digital twin of the Anchor Church, Derbyshire

Anchor Church is the name given to a series of caves in a Keuper Sandstone (Triassic conglomerate) outcrop, close to the village of Ingleby, Derbyshire, England. The caves have been extended by human intervention to form a crude dwelling place, complete with door and window holes.

The name Anchor Church is derived from the term anchorite (from the Greek ἀναχωρέω anachōreō, “to withdraw” or “to depart into the countryside”) because it is thought to have been the cell of an Anchorite hermit, St Hardulph, who lived and prayed here in the 8th and 9th century. St Hardulph was not just a saintly hermit but the exiled Anglo-Saxon King Eardwulf.

Eardwulf was deposed from the Northumbrian throne in 806, and lived the remainder of his life as a hermit in the caves of Anchor Church with a group of followers, before his death and burial 5 miles away at Breedon on the Hill in 830. This discovery would make it the oldest intact domestic interior found in Britain.