Sockburn
Sockburn parish occupies a pendulous loop of the River Tees which carries a part of the historic county of Durham southwards, deep into Yorkshire’s old North Riding. The tip of the loop is an intriguing place, almost an island, made all the more mysterious by the presence of an exceptional number of Viking-age sculpted stones gathered together in the ruined church which stands in the grounds of the 19th-century Sockburn Hall. This was also the location of an earlier manor: that of the powerful Conyers family, whose remote ancestor is said to have rid the district of the famous Sockburn ‘worm, dragon or fiery flying serpent’ 
Fiery worms are not so much of a concern at Sockburn these days, but decay and collapse most certainly are. All Saints’ Church, the one roofed section of which contains the Viking stones, has been reclaimed from the undergrowth by local volunteers from the Middleton St George Society, allowing the ruins to be consolidated through a programme of works led by English Heritage and the Durham Diocese. This work was much needed, but so too was fresh research to better understand and appreciate the church’s wider archaeological setting. So, in 2007, English Heritage undertook a detailed survey of the earthworks which extend throughout the parkland surrounding All Saints’ and commissioned a geophysical survey of the area from GSB Prospection Ltd. The results of this work and the accompanying documentary and contextual study have now been published, throwing new light on the long history of settlement associated with the church and the early relics which it contains.
This long history begins in the period AD 780-796 when, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the chronicles of Symeon of Durham, a church at Sockburn (Soccabyrig or Sochasburg) played host to the consecration of bishop Higbald of Lindisfarne and the ordination of Archbishop Eanbald of York. At this time, in the closing years of the 8th century, such an important church would have been monastic in character. We can speculate that the community of priests and laymen at Sockburn operated within a scattered complex of religious and domestic buildings bounded by the river, perhaps focused on the site of the present church and the adjacent ‘wath’ (or ford) across the Tees.
Sockburn disappears from the written record during the turbulent 9th and 10th century when both North Yorkshire and Durham were beset by Viking raids and colonisation. The sculptured stones – fragments of cross shafts and ‘hogback’ tombs carved with a curious fusion of pagan and Christian imagery – do, however, throw considerable light on this period. Recent research suggests that these memorial stones point not only to the survival of the church at the centre of a new Viking estate, but also hint at the presence of a more mobile aristocracy – elite Irish-Norse traders - who may have established a market on the river’s edge, near to the ancient ford.
Around AD 1000 Sockburn was granted to the monks of Durham by Snaculf, clearly a man of Scandinavian descent, and it probably remained under Durham’s control until the Norman Conquest. After the Conquest Sockburn was granted to Roger de Conyers, and it became the seat of the great Conyers barony. Whereas the physical traces of earlier Anglian and Viking settlement have proved extremely difficult to detect by the archaeological methods employed so far, the earthworks south and west of the church speak volumes about a succession of Conyers houses, culminating in an elaborate 16th-century mansion and a geometric pattern of formal gardens. In 1682 this last house was sold to Sir William Blackett of Newcastle, a wealthy coal magnate and newly created baronet. The Blackett family’s estates mainly lay elsewhere, however, and over time they found little use for a crumbling and outdated mansion at Sockburn. When the historian Surtees described the place in 1823 the old hall had long since vanished. The only substantial houses on the peninsula were a rather meagre (and short-lived) farmstead built for a younger son of the Blacketts, and a rather more fine Georgian farmhouse (which still stands to the north of the survey area) which was home to the Hutchinson family, and the place where William Wordsworth courted his future wife, Mary Hutchinson, in 1799-1800.
In the 1830s Henry Collingwood Blackett and his wife Theophania took a renewed interest in Sockburn, both in the workings of the estate and in the traditions and customs of lordship passed down from the ancient Conyers. The present Sockburn Hall, a grand neo-Jacobean building echoing the style of the long-lost Conyers’ mansion, was built alongside the river north of the church in 1834, and the land to the south was converted to parkland thus preserving the earthworks as we see them today. In 1838 the Blacketts severed a long tradition of Christian worship at Sockburn, perhaps stretching back for over 1000 years, when the old church was selectively demolished to create a romantic parkland ruin.
The complete report on the archaeological investigations at Sockburn is available to order online now. For further information, contact Dave Went in the York office: dave.went@english-heritage.org.uk or 01904 601927
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