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You should arrive at Escomb church on foot. It is such a marvellous thing – one of three complete Anglo-Saxon churches surviving – that it repays experiencing in its setting. (The other two churches are at Brixworth and Bradford-on-Avon.)
I grew hungry to see it while eagerly sampling the 900-page new volume, County Durham, in the Pevsner Buildings of England series, revised and amplified by Martin Roberts. It’s a strong invitation to a holiday in the county.
So, when the law and opportunity allow, walk over from Bishop Auckland, less than two miles away. The village of Escomb is on a dead-end beside the River Wear. You can plan a route around the bend in the river, or else the approach is from the south, downhill. The church stands behind lime and sycamore trees in an oval walled enclosure, once perhaps a peninsula amid marshes. The going still gets boggy at this time of year.
Escomb was for a few generations a mining village. (William Hodgson, vicar during the lockout of 1926, was a miner’s son and won a seat on Durham county council for Labour in 1928.) Its church was built in 675 or a bit later. For centuries it looked to Auckland for its clergy. It is dedicated to St John the Evangelist, but might not always have been. You’d think people would remember such things, but they don’t, and written records get lost.
What have we come to see? The Royal Mail van has emptied the pillar box at Saxon Green beside the churchyard and a coach with a school sign is parked by the gate. The church, a box of stone (brown on the north side, blackish where lichen grows on the south), is locked. The churchwarden’s email address is on the church website for anyone who wants to arrange a visit.
Inside, the church is restful. The proportions are lovely: the height one and a half times the width. Looking toward the altar, the opening into the chancel is narrow and the wall, 2ft 4in thick, is arched with voussoirs, wedge-shaped stones, in a classical manner. These arch stones are said to have been brought as a piece from Binchester Roman fort, a little along the Wear. There is no evidence for this, but they do possess a finish unlike that of the Saxon work. (This is billed locally as “Escomb Saxon church”, but historically the kingdom of Northumbria was Anglian, its English settlers seeing their origin as the Angle in modern Schleswig-Holstein.)
A small Anglo-Saxon window high in the wall looks round-headed as though arched, but the opening is in fact spanned by a single slab with a semicircle cut out of its underside. The interior of the church would have looked even more tranquil with the light limited to the original high, small windows. Lancets were added in the high Middle Ages and two large windows in the early 19th century.
Inside, the church is whitewashed, since its restoration in 1965. The masonry was broached or chipped as a key for plaster, but that has come off. That restoration also brought some ugly light fittings.
The walling relies on squared stone from Roman ruins. One has an inscription of the VI Legion, another is inscribed Bono rei publicae nato. This form of words was used in the 4th century on statues of emperors.
