Category: sacred sites

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I first visited St Michael’s-on-Wyre over forty-five years ago. I was around eight or nine years old at the time and we called in on the way back from a day on Beacon Fell. Something about the memory of the visit, at the end of a long, enjoyable but, very tiring day, stayed with me and twelve or so years later, on a bike ride to Garstang, this time alone, I called in again. The feeling was the same and I remembered it distinctly but I still didn’t know what it was. It certainly was not coming from the structure or fabric of the church itself, which though pleasant and atmospheric, seemed unconnected to the distinctive feeling all around. It was a good many years before I read about earth energies and finally made the connection. St Michael’s-on-Wyre, like many such dedicated churches, although not built on a ‘high place’, is situated on a ley!

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Presumably, an artist’s impression showing the ‘Anglo Saxon Cross ‘.

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The Venerable Bede recorded in his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, a copy of the letter written in 601AD which Pope Gregory sent to Abbot Mellitus, who was part of the papal mission to Britain. The instructions were clear… not to overthrow but to gently replace the indigenous faith:

“…that the temples of the idols in that nation ought not to be destroyed; but let the idols that are in them be destroyed; let water be consecrated and sprinkled in the said temples, let altars be erected, and relics placed there. For if those temples are well built, it is requisite that they be converted from the worship of devils to the service of the true God; that the nation, seeing that their temples are not destroyed, may remove error from their hearts, and knowing and adoring the true God, may the more freely resort to the places to which they have been accustomed. And because they are used to slaughter many oxen in sacrifice to devils, some solemnity must be given them in exchange for this, as that on the day of the dedication, or the nativities of the holy martyrs, whose relics are there deposited, they should build themselves huts of the boughs of trees about those churches which have been turned to that use from being temples, and celebrate the solemnity with religious feasting, and no more offer animals to the Devil, but kill cattle and glorify God in their feast, and return thanks to the Giver of all things for their abundance; to the end that, whilst some outward gratifications are retained, they may the more easily consent to the inward joys. For there is no doubt that it is impossible to cut off every thing at once from their rude natures…”

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A church was first built here in Anglo Saxon times around 640 AD and there is every chance that an Anglo Saxon Cross, of which only the stone base now remains, supporting a later Sun Dial, in the churchyard, was here a long time before the church.

In the Domesday survey of 1086 the church was called MICHELESCHERCE and was one of only three to be mentioned as within the ‘Hundred of Amounderness’.

A settlement existed on the banks of the river Wyre for many centuries before the church was built. The combination of church and river names for the settlement was first used in the Twelfth Century when the patronage belonged to King John of Robin Hood infamy.

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After a Nineteenth Century engraving showing the Sun Dial.

It was here that a number of us chose to gather, our ‘rude nature’s’ very much still intact, to mark this year’s summer solstice…

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