The Church of St John the Baptist, Stanwick

by Allen Clifford

After ten years spent pottering around the site, haunting the libraries and record offices of Durham and the Riding, sitting at the feet of experts on the many periods which formed the site, and talking to the local people with long memories and with them, a love of Stanwick, I do feel that it's time to set something down about this lovely and fascinating corner of Yorkshire.
So, how far can we go back? The Tofts Field, across the Mary Wilde Beck from the church, housed, archaeologists now believe, sometime about the middle of the first century AD, the palace' of the Romanophile Cartimandua, Queen of the federation of Iron Age tribes known as the Brigantes. No local chieftain this, she ruled over Britain from the Humber to the Clyde for a few years before her loyalty to Rome and her disloyalty to her husband plunged the area into bitter conflict in the 50's and left the Legions with a problem. To Tacitus we owe this fascinating insight into Stanwick' s ten minutes of fame on the international scene! A feature of many high-status Bronze and Iron Age sites is that they had a 'ceremonial way' leading from their centre to a nearby 'sacred' site, often a riparian one. Sometimes these ways were marked by monoliths. Examination of the Thomas Bradley map of 1816 (Figure 1) shows that at that time the Tofts included only that part which was south and east of the demarcation between the differently orientated 'rig and furrow' lines on the cover photograph. That demarcation line still forms the boundary between the Parishes of Forcett and Stanwick - some indication of how old many Parish boundaries are. It can be seen on Bradley's map that a narrow neck of land runs towards the centre of the southern boundary of the churchyard, which until, probably, the building of the present bridge as part of the carriageway to the 17th century Stanwick Hall, was a complete oval. Extensive dowsing of this vanished third of the churchyard by Austin Scott, Bryan Armstrong and myself has established its former symmetry, whilst there was last summer confirmation of burials under what is now a grass margin behind Kirkbridge House when a contractor used a JCB to lay electric cables. Before the carriageway and the stone bridge were built in the 1600's , it seemed very likely that an earlier bridge existed which, of course, gave the manor house its name. Sure enough, examination of the banks of the beck near the stone bridge shows a pair of abutments from which an earlier (probably) timber bridge was sprung.