Pre-Norman Stone Crosses in the British Isles

There are several churches in or near the valley of the River Lune which are custodian to the remains of Saxon-age monuments. St. Wilfrid's church in Melling is one of them.

The cross fragment is less than a foot in every direction, and when I visited St. Wilfrid's, it was to be found on display on a window-sill inside the church, at the west end of the north aisle.

There is something of a mystery here. W G Collingwood's book, Northumbrian Crosses of the Pre-Norman Age, which is usually extremely reliable, depicts a cross fragment at Melling, but the one shown in the book has very little at all in common with this fragment. Collingwood's drawing and reconstruction (below) of the Melling fragment shows it to have been rather similar to the cross-shaft which is extant at Aspatria in Cumbria: that fragment is two to three times as high as it is wide, and it is covered with random knot patterns springing from a Scandinavian-style ring-knot, whereas the fragment illustrated above is clearly a regular plait made of a doubled strand. Not only is the fragment in the church not what Collingwood drew, it seems most unlikely that it could even be a part of the same cross.

So, what's the explanation? Did Collingwood see an entirely different stone at Melling when he visited that place around the turn of the twentieth century - and if so, what has become of it? Or, alternatively, did he make a (rare) mistake when captioning the drawing in his book, and if so, where is the stone that he drew? I don't know the answer.

The guide book in the church says that according to old manuscripts there was formerly a Saxon cross in the churchyard, but that no trace of it remains. It also mentions the fragment pictured above, but noticeably it stops short of suggesting that the fragment in the church is a piece of the cross that used to stand in the churchyard. Perhaps the answer to the puzzles is to be found in the old manuscripts mentioned in the guide...

St. Wilfrid's Church, Melling is one of several in the area with old cross remains.
Take care when parking at the gate - it is on a blind bend, and the A683 is periodically very busy.
(The "A92" in the map above is evidence of a bug in Microsoft AutoRoute Express 2000 and can be disregarded.)
You can click at the relevant places on the map to see the pages at this site for Gressingham and Hornby.

* The Ordnance Survey National Grid Reference (and corresponding Latitude/Longitude) given at the top of the pages describing individual sites usually refer to the location of the closest or most prominent entrance to the site where the monument is to be found - e.g. a gate into a churchyard. For monuments located in open country, or at a significant distance from the site entrance as just defined, the co-ordinates usually refer to the exact location of the monument.
Please allow for a small error in the co-ordinates of up to a couple of dozen metres.

Thanks to the people at streetmap.co.uk, if you click on the Grid References in the magenta boxes on the site pages,
you'll see an extract from the relevant Ordnance Survey 1:50000 Landranger map!

As the official mapping agency of the United Kingdom Government, the Ordnance Survey produces the definitive maps of the country. They contain a wealth of information.
For more details, visit www,ordnancesurvey.co.uk/leisure

Click here if you need an explanation of the terminology on these pages

Click here if you would like to see a bibliography

Click here if you would like to download the freeware "Mordred" font (in True-type for Windows)
so that the headings used on these pages will then look like the following:

Click to go to Pre-Norman crosses in:	England	the island of Ireland	the Isle of Man	Scotland	Wales	Read about the Saints
Click to go to Mediaeval crosses in:	England	the island of Ireland	the Isle of Man	Scotland	Wales

Locality maps at this web-site have been developed using Microsoft AutoRoute Express 2000 (and later editions).

This page is a part of Chris Tolley's web-site. Latest update: Wednesday, February 19, 2003 12:03
Links on my pages can point to other web-sites. If you find that the administrators of those web-sites have made changes which mean you can't access them, please let me know, so I can update or remove the links. As far as I know, none of my links point to sites likely to contain offensive material - but if you discover otherwise, please let me know, as I would like to remove such links from my pages.
return to my home page.	Frequently asked Questions	send me an e-mail
©1996 to 2003: Christopher J. Tolley