Sara Losh

Sara or Sarah Losh (1785–29 March 1853) was an English architect and designer. Her biographer describes her as antiquarian, architect and visionary. She was a landowner from Wreay, Cumbria, where her main work is to be found, St Mary's Church. It anticipates the Arts and Crafts Movement and forms part of a group with various associated buildings and monuments which Losh constructed.

Losh's papers were destroyed, and none of her journals or drawings survives, but her life was described in The Worthies of Cumberland, first published by Henry Lonsdale in 1867.

Losh was born at Woodside in Wreay, near Carlisle. Her birth date is not known, but surmised to be in late 1785 as she was baptised on 6 January 1786. She was the oldest of four children of John Losh (1756–1814) and his wife Isabella (née Bonner). Her father owned land in Woodside, and was a partner in an alkali factory at Walker on Tyneside, part of Losh, Wilson and Bell, with his brother William Losh. One brother died young, and another had a mental disability, so Sara and her sister Katherine were joint heirs of their father's estate. Neither married, so Sara inherited Katherine's share on her death in 1835. Her uncle James Losh was a barrister in Newcastle. He was an influential member of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne, and a friend of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey.

According to Lonsdale, Losh was well read and well educated, attending schools in Wreay, London, and Bath, and travelling to France, Italy, and Germany in 1814 and 1817. She spoke fluent French and Italian, and could translate Latin easily. Lonsdale compared her intelligence to George Eliot. Although she never married, she may have had a romantic attachment to a school friend, Major Thain, who was killed at the Khyber Pass in 1842.

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