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May 2001
Parish History Episode 1
THE STONES OF MYSTERYThis is the first of what it is hoped will be a series of articles on the history of the parish - that is, the community - of Houghton-le-Spring. It will only incidentally, if at all, deal with such topics as church architecture, “stately homes”, local “characters”, the development of coal mining, electric tramways, and those other matters with which local histories usually concern themselves. It will instead be an attempt to understand the parish (which is, of course, and always has been, primarily an ecclesiastical unit of human society) as a worshipping collection of people, joined together to enable the community better to respond to God.
As most of our ancestors tended to take their relationship to God for granted, and did not write down any thoughts they might have on how to give worship and praise to the Almighty, there must inevitably be a considerable element of speculation in this parish history: and none more so than in this opening article, which deals with matters so remote that we are not at all sure of what actually was revealed during the excavations that took place here at the very end of the Second Millennium.
In November, 1999, trenches were dug through Houghton churchyard, in order to lay drainage pipes, which would feed waste from the facilities - a toilet and a servery - which were then being installed at the West end of the church, so that the waste would flow into existing sewers under the Broadway. It was assumed that this would inevitably disturb old graves, and the Diocesan Advisory Committee very properly insisted that an archaeologist should attend the excavations and observe and record whatever was uncovered by the workmen. Peter Ryder was the man whom they appointed to undertake this task.
Although ancient burial vaults were disturbed within the church, beneath the floors of what are now the toilet and servery, surprisingly little evidence of burials was found outside the church building, below the great West Window (the Gilpin Window), within the raised earthen bank beside the Broadway: only two or three stray fragments of human bones were found, presumably dragged from other graves in the churchyard by burrowing rodents. Little else of significance was found, at any rate within the soil closer to the surface: just a few small pieces of pottery, fragments of bricks, traces of mortar and lime, and small lumps of coal, and of course the natural life-forms that exist in any reasonably fertile earth - the roots of surface plants, together with fungi, worms, and small arthropods.
However, something of apparently much greater significance was unearthed at a depth of 1•6 metres (5 feet, 4 inches), at a point due West of the Northern side of the Gilpin Window, but some way back from it, close to the retaining wall which holds the churchyard soil back from the Broadway pavement. A large patch of carbon, resulting probably from combustion of wood, was found, and the clay immediately beneath it was reddened, indicating that there had been a fire on this site (a burning hut, or an open-air bonfire) many, many centuries ago - this was not just the remains of burnt and charred wood which had been dragged to this site after some property elsewhere had been destroyed in a blaze.
Even more interestingly, a series of large whinstone boulders were found immediately below the burnt soil. Whinstone is a basaltic rock, the result of ancient volcanic activity. It does not occur naturally in our neighbourhood, and the nearest source of it is in Upper Teesdale, where a number of bands of this ancient and very hard rock lie athwart the course of the River Tees. Because the whinstone is eroded by water at a much slower rate than the limestone in which it lies embedded, the result is that the Tees in its upper levels tends to descend in a stairway of steps, each step consisting of a whinstone sill over which cascades a waterfall, such as High Force or Cauldron Snout.
How then did the boulders reach Houghton? The only sensible explanation is that they were scraped away by ice during an ice age, carried downslope on the back of a glacier towards the North Sea, but they never reached it, as the glacier thawed, and deposited its load, including these boulders, well-rounded and smoothen by the agency of the ice, somewhere in the neighbourhood of Houghton-le-Spring.
Of course, no human eye would have observed this event. The nearest men would then have lived hundreds of miles to the South. But as global warming continued, little bands of hunters would have pressed Northwards, and would have found their way to these parts.
But the glacier didn’t simply deposit the boulders in front of the church. They almost certainly got there by some human agency. Men must, at some distant epoch, have noticed these “erratics”, these stones out of place, and gathered them up, and dragged them to this site, and piled them up here.
But why ? Considering the burnt earth and wood above the site, the most obvious reason is for the construction of a tomb for some great personage. A similar rock tomb (“the Fairy Stones”) was to be seen on the surface at Hetton until the early Nineteenth Century, while others are to be found under mounds of earth at Copt Hill and Warden Law. But no trace was found of any human remains below the stones. That however is not in my view absolutely conclusive. First, the hole was filled in with haste, because of the need to get on with the work and complete it before the toilet and servery were ready, and perhaps the evidence was there but was not found. Also, the layer of carbon and burnt earth suggests a massive funeral pyre in which the body may have been just about totally consumed, as in a modern cremation.
A second possibility is that these stones were part of some boundary wall. This could be proved or disproved by digging trenches from the site in various directions, to see if they did form part of some larger structure. If such a wall existed, at a date of more than a thousand years ago, it would suggest an enclosure around some early Christian church or monastery; if of more than two thousand years, then perhaps a pre-Christian sacred site.
If these stones were erected as some sort of monument unconnected to any other construction - if they were “standing stones”, features commonly connected with Neolithic settlements - this would of course almost certainly indicate a pagan origin.
That would suggest that the churchyard in Houghton-le-Spring has been “a sacred site” for, literally, thousands of years - from long before a Christian place of worship was erected here: perhaps from a time before Moses left Egypt, or Abraham left Ur. Peter Ryder spoke cautiously of Houghton churchyard having been holy for two, perhaps even three, millennia.
Before the trench was filled in again, the larger boulders were, with the help of heavy lifting tackle, raised to the surface. Photographs were taken, and the story was featured in the “Signpost” (the parish magazine) of January, 2000. The photograph reproduced below shows the author standing beside the stones on the day of their discovery.
What were we going to do with these stones which had unexpectedly emerged from the ground beneath our feet? The Rector, myself (as churchwarden), and my colleague, Jean Henderson, all had our ideas - I was considering a rock garden somewhere in the churchyard, into which these stones, together perhaps with some later funereal monuments, could be placed - but, before we got together, the stones had vanished again!
No, it was nothing to do with flying saucers! The men of “Glendale”, the firm which has contracted with the City Council to maintain our churchyard, had, pursuant to their lawful duties, and with great and laudable effort, tidied the site up after the pipe-layers and ditch-diggers had completed their tasks, and gathered up sundry untidy items, including the great whinstone boulders, and taken the lot for landfill. So these boulders, ripped from their Teesdale home by the ice many thousands of years ago, had suffered the final indignity of being thrown into the quarry.
All that remains of evidence of this discovery is a copy of Peter Ryder’s report, which has been deposited in the church library. That library is unlikely to be consulted by later scholars, so it would be desirable to arrange for Peter Ryder to edit his report for inclusion in some archaeological journal of wider circulation, so that future scholars can assess the evidence uncovered in 1999, and combine it with whatever evidence might possibly be uncovered at a later date.
Caution This article does not intend to claim that the site of the church of Saint Michael and All Angels in Houghton-le-Spring must have been a holy site, “sanctified ground”, for perhaps five thousand years. Certainly it would seem, from evidence gathered from recent excavations on Copt Hill, that human beings were living in the Houghton area more than five thousand years ago. But the suggestion that there might have been some sort of sacred temple on the same site as the present Church is by no means proved, or even credibly demonstrated. The evidence unearthed by Peter Ryder and the contractors working in the churchyard has been destroyed, and, until such time as fresh evidence is discovered, it must remain no more than a speculation.
Dick Toy
