Sara Losh

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

She was born at Woodside in Wreay, near Carlisle, at an unknown date probably in late 1785, as she was baptised on 6 January 1786. She was the eldest of four children of John Losh (1756–1814) and his wife Isabella (née Bonner). Her father owned land in Woodside and was a partner with his brother William Losh in an alkali factory at Walker on Tyneside, part of Losh, Wilson and Bell.

One of her brothers died young and another had mental disabilities, so that Sara and her sister Katherine became joint heirs of their father's estate. Neither married and Sara inherited Katherine's share on her death in 1835. Her uncle, James Losh, was a barrister in Newcastle, a prominent member of the city's Literary and Philosophical Society, and friends with the poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey.

Lonsdale calls Losh well read and educated. She had been to schools in Wreay, London and Bath, and travelled in France, Italy and Germany in 1814 and 1817. She spoke fluent French and Italian and could translate Latin with ease. Lonsdale compared her mind to that of George Eliot. Although she never married, she may have been romantically attached to a schoolfriend, Major Thain, who was killed at the Khyber Pass in 1842.

Losh also worked on restoring St John the Evangelist's Church, Newton Arlosh.