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Dug Out

Well, the diggers have dug their last hole (for now) and the work of raising the floor has started. What have we found under the floor? those of you who have followed the story will have seen the photograhs and heard the different theories as the work progressed. Although I am not an archaeologist, this is what I understood to be the final conclusions drawn from the dig.

There are strong suggestions that the presence of numerous large whinstone boulders on the site, some of them set in what appear to be a boundary line, mean that the land the church sits on has been a sacred site since stone age times. It was probably a megalithic site, but any speculations of the rituals that took place here are at best, fantasy.

There is little doubt that there has been a significant (and previously unknown) Roman building on the site at some point between 55BC and 410AD. Re-using an existing sacred site was common practice for the Romans, the foundations discovered appear to be of a very substantial building, but because much of it appears to be under our chancel which isn't being excavated, we shall have to leave that discovery for future generations. We know the current archaeological team are very keen to do this work, but at the minute the cost is beyond us. If you are reading this with about £500,000 looking for a worthwhile project to fund we would LOVE to hear from you.

There is concrete evidence for a substantial Saxon church under the floor of our building. The originally discovered narrow nave was found to have been flanked by porticos on either side, meaning the Saxon church was as wide as the current nave and would have been one of the most important buildings in the North of England at the time. This building was longer and wider than the more famous Saxon buildings at Monkwearmouth and Jarrow, and possibly contemporaneous with their most famous inhabitant the Venerable Bede. Were this to be the case it is certain Bede would have known of, and visited Houghton, this being an ideal stop - off point on a walking trip from Monkwearmouth to Durham. Bede has been called the 'Father of English History' and died on May 25, 735AD. Local legend has it he was travelling in the area of Houghton and stopped for a drink at a local well, this well then became know as the 'holy well' and there is certainly still a spring of water at the end of Haliwell street in Houghton, from whence the street got its name.
Although we cannot be certain, mainly due to the archaeological vandalism of the victorians putting in earlier heating ducts, the outline in blue, shown below would have been similar to the Saxon building.

When the Norman invaders arrived in Houghton shortly after 1066, they would have found a substantial stone church in situ which they started to modify soon after. The existing Norman window in the chancel as well as the 'Houghton Beasts' adjacent to it point to significant building work within 20 - 30 years of the Norman invasion; in all likelihood the tower at the west end of the Saxon building happened during this period. The tower is shown in purple on the drawing above.

At some stage between this tower being added and 1315 the two transepts would have been added to give the church a cruciform shape, (shown in red above) the outer Saxon walls forming the porticos may have been taken down at this point, we cannot know at this stage. This would have been the building that was supposed to have been burned down by the Black Douglas on his way to raid Hartlepool in 1315. Evidence of burning was found on some of the earliest floor levels.

Some time shortly after the building was burned down, the church was rebuilt in much the same outline as we see it today (outline shown in black above) but with a significantly different roofline. The tower supports appear to be 30 - 50 years later, so possibly the first central tower either collapsed or became unstable and was replaced by the current pillar supports around 1350.

Although there were many other smaller rebuilding phases between 1350 and the present the church has kept it's basic layout since 1350 as far as we can tell. A chantry was added onto the outside in the late 1400's, the spire was replaced with a tower in the early 1800's, a carbuncle of an organ loft was added at the same period destroying much of the most ancient part of the existing chancel and of course the interior was brought to the stage it was at until the latest re-ordering in 1857-58. The roofline was returned to it's earlier level at this time too; history will tell what future generations think of our re-ordering.

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