Marske
Runswick Bay
Hayburn Wyke
There are reports of Shap Granite boulders on the seabed of the Tees Bay. These boulders were transported by a glacier during the Late Devensian glaciation about 30,000 years ago. They originate from a granite outcrop on the fells just south of the village of Shap in Cumbria.
Driving through Dalehouse today I spotted this lovely Shap Granite erratic. I got talking to the man whose land it is on and he told me that he had brought it up from the valley bottom. He also told me of a neighbour who had dragged an even larger boulder of the same rock type into his garden and was using it as a healing stone, apparently he sits on it for a period of time and it eases his aches and pains. I asked the man whether he had any similar experiences with his stone, he said that he hadn’t, the only thing he had noticed was that passing dogs enjoyed cocking their legs against it.
Light & Dark Shap Granite kerbstones. Leeds
Nikolaus Pevsner describes All Saints Church, Helmsley as ‘big and self confident, in the C13 style’.
It is always a good sign when the church entrance looks like this.
Stepping into the church is a joy, there are beautiful, bright, colourful murals everywhere.
The Victorian restorers of the church not only retained elements of the earlier church, they also added to them. The beakheads and outer order of the chancel arch are modern as are many other ‘romanesque’ features both within and on the exterior of the church, Rita Wood calls them ‘Heavy handed Victorian additions’, I quite like them.
The capital on the left side of the chancel arch has three heads carved on it, one creature emitting foliage and two small human heads, one wearing a pointy cap. The capital on the right side of the arch has a tiny head carved between the angle of the volutes.
This 10th century Hogback is a bit knocked about, the motif on the top is quite a rare design to find on a Hogback, it is known as a Key Pattern.
There are two chapels within the church, the south chapel is dedicated to Columba and has an altar made of what looks like Swaledale Fossil Limestone and may have come from the quarries at Barton. The North Chapel is dedicated to Aelred and has an altar made with Frosterley Marble from Weardale.
This striking painting is in the north chapel, it’s by Gabriel Max and is called St. Veronica’s Handkerchief. When I first saw the painting, the image was of Christ with his eyes closed, when I looked again his eyes were open. I found this rather disturbing, I was raised in a strict catholic household but have been an atheist, with the odd lapse into heathendom, for the past 45yrs. Was this to be my moment of conversion? was the shepherd calling me back to the fold?…then I read the notice beside the painting … ‘was painted in the middle of the 19th century, it is a form of art with a little trick, where the eyes of christ can be seen either open or closed‘…I laughed, relieved but also feeling slightly unnerved by the experience.
On reflection, I quite like the painting, it was inspired by a miraculous handkerchief that contained a perfect image of the face of Christ. As usual with these sort of Medieval relics, there were three in existence, all claiming to be the original. I suppose most religions have to rely on some form of smoke and mirrors when it comes to dealing with the supernatural.
All Saints is a wonderful church and well worth a visit if you are in the area. The history of the district is written all over its walls often in bold bright mural form. Architecturally it has embraced and built upon its past and is currently undergoing further exterior renovations. The church is open for visitors from 9-5 daily.
Postscript
Driving home I remembered that in her book, Romanesque Yorkshire, Rita Wood compared the tiny carving of a man in a pointy cap to a carving in the church at Hawnby. Hawnby wasn’t too far from Helmsley so I decided to seek it out.
The Church at Hawnby, All Saints, can be found to the west of the village on the Kepwick road. The little church sits in an overgrown churchyard down by the River Rye, the setting is beautiful. The church is picturesque but architecturally fairly unremarkable, Pevsner describes it as ‘basically Norman‘. I found the carving located just inside the church door, it is lovely. Rita Wood thinks that it probably came from the chancel arch, who knows?
Sources
The Buildings of England. Yorkshire, The North Riding. Nikolaus Pevsner. Penguin Books. 1973
Romanesque Yorkshire. Rita Wood. Yorkshire Archaeological Society. Occasional Paper No.9. 2012
Yorkshire A Gazetteer of Anglo-Saxon & Viking Sites. Guy Points. Rihtspell Publishing. 2007
I picked up these two lovely fossils fragments yesterday from the beach at Marske.
This is a fragment of a large ammonite. The chambers within the ammonite have been mineralised, the sea has eroded the fossil along its suture lines.
This piece of limestone contains the fossilised remains of corals that lived on the bed of a warm sea during the Carboniferous period 325 million years ago.
This is the cloud that decided to shed its load on to us.
There are a number of plaques built into the path of the promenade along Redcar seafront. Each plaque is comprised of smaller plaques, which presumably represent different aspects of the town and coast.
This lovely plaque shows Ammonites, a fairly common fossil which occurs in the Jurassic rocks of the coast and are often found on the beaches from Staithes to Robin Hood’s Bay.
If I were to chose a fossil to represent Redcar, it would be Gryphea, known locally as Devil’s Toenails. Gryphea are the fossil remains of a member of the oyster family and are commonly found on the beaches from Redcar to Marske. Large fossil oyster beds can be easily seen at low tide on the mudstone scars that run from Redcar beach into the sea.
There are also ammonites to be found at Redcar, they are nowhere near as common as the Devil’s Toenails and they don’t frequently weather-out of the rocks as they do further down the coast. The specimens that I have seen in the oyster beds at Redcar are generally quite large, typically between 20-50 cm across.
Fossilised fragments of large Ammonites do occasionally wash up onto the Beach. I found the one below on Marske beach.
Redcar Rocks have official protection, the scars have been designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest. Please do not try and cut any fossils out of the rocks, it’s possible to walk along the beach from Redcar to Marske and collect a pocketful of fossils, especially Devil’s Toenails, from the foreshore.
Dark Shap Granite. Albert Road, Middlesbrough.
Seated Woman: Thin Neck by Henry Moore. Laing Art Galley, Newcastle.
Stanhope DU [Stanhopa 1183 BoB, -hop 1228 Ep]. ‘Stony HOH or ridge and HOP or valley.’
Graham and I drove up into the Wear Valley to Stanhope to have a look at the wonderful fossilised tree in the churchyard of St. Thomas’s church.
The 320 million year old fossil was found by quarrymen at a sandstone quarry at Edmundbyers Cross in 1915. It was originally taken to Newcastle and was brought to Stanhope in the 1960s and placed in the churchyard.
This is a superb relic of one of the trees that grew in the Carboniferous forest. It is a species known as Sigillaria, an early ancestor of modern club mosses. Today clubmosses are small mountain plants, only a few centimetres high, but in the tropical swamps of the Carboniferous Period they grew into 30-metre high giants!
Another fossil tree recovered from the sandstone quarry can be seen in the Hancock Great Northern Museum in Newcastle.
While here we thought we’d take a look inside the church. This was a very different building to the previous church we had visited at Escomb. St. Thomas’s is a very well endowed church and reflects the fortunes that have been made from farming and mineral extraction in the district.
The first thing you notice when you enter the church is the Victorian baptismal font. Beautifully carved in Frosterley marble with an extremely ornate cover complete with an over-engineered lifting mechanism.
Frosterley Marble has been used on the chancel floor.
Frosterley marble isn’t a true marble. Marble is a metamorphic rock, i.e. a rock that has been altered from its original state by temperature and pressure. Frosterley marble is merely a highly fossiliferous limestone, that when cut and polished forms a highly decorative stone.
Fossil – Laing Art Gallery Newcastle
This sculpture is a carved block of Frosterley Limestone inset with cast bronze interpretations of the fossils found within it. The fossil installation is displayed on an oak plinth among the Frosterley floor tiles and oak doors and display cabinets in the Marble Hall of the Laing Art Gallery. The sculpture is finished on one side to reflect the smoothness of the floor tiles and the central section shows and explains the unusual shapes seen in the tiles with carved and truncated fossils. The third section is a representation of a carboniferous sea floor with ‘living’ dibunophyllum bipartitum cast in bronze. The Department of Coelenterates at the Natural History Museum in London offered invaluable advice in establishing the most accurate representation of ‘dibunophyllum’.
This ancient stone coffin in the grounds of the church was carved from a single block of Frosterley marble.
The only true marble in the district is to be found in Upper Teesdale. A limestone which was subjected to heat and pressure from contact with the igneous rock that forms the Whin Sill. The resultant rock is known as Sugar Limestone. It is quite crumbly in nature and therefore pretty much useless as a decorative stone.
It was nice to see this Roman altar displayed inside the church. A translation of the inscription is provided, it reads..
To Silvanus, the invincible, sacred
Caius Tetius Venturius Mecia
Prefect of the Sebosian Cavalry
On account of a boar of enormous
size taken which
many of his predecessors
were not able to destroy, erected (this
altar) willigly in discharge of a vow
The town of Stanhope is surrounded by quarries and the valley has a long history of lead mining and smelting. Spoil heaps from the quarries encroach onto the margins of the town but I can find very little evidence in the church of the people who worked in the quarries and mines of Weardale. We left Stanhope and drove up the dale to visit the Rookhope Arch.
The arch is all that remains of a two mile long horizontal chimney or flue. The flue carried the toxic gases and fumes from the lead smelt mill to the moortop. Mill workers were periodically sent into the flue to dig out the deposits. The average life span of a lead miner in 1860 was 45 years. Perhaps this ruin is a more fitting memorial to their lives than some mossy obelisk in a churchyard
Sources
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names. 4th Edition. Eilert Ekwall. 1974
North Pennines AONB Geoparks Leaflet
Laing Art Gallery – Topografik
The Redcar Memorial Clock tower was designed by John Dobson and erected in 1913 in memory of King Edward VII. It is built of red engineering brick and concrete. The plinth is made of Whinstone, making it one of the few buildings in the area that utilises this local stone.
Grey Towers in Nunthorpe, built for William Hopkins, and the former home of Arthur Dorman, is also faced with Whinstone.
The Smell of Water 