Winwick church, where stories sleep, piled high like the bodies buried there

What ghosts might walk through Winwick? Perhaps the grey figures of an insubstantial procession of druids heading towards the raised mound ringed by standing stones. Or the fallen warriors of two mighty Saxon armies, the echoes of their clanging swords ringing as they die again and again.

Maybe the three giants said to be buried here, yawning and stretching and rising from their crypt. The phantom of a mischievous pig that legend has it shaped the very topography of this place and gave the village its name.

The soldiers of the Twentieth Legion marching in perfect unison along the nearby Roman road, or the trio of Cromwellian snipers stationed on the church tower, picking off the approaching Royalists until felled by musket balls and plunging to the ground below.

Any of these ghosts, and probably more. But why Winwick, this place that sits near Warrington, once old Lancashire, now at the nexus of three modern metropolitan areas, Cheshire, Greater Manchester and Merseyside? Why this tiny village you’ve probably never heard of? Well, why not?

Winwick is the place where stories sleep.

We are all familiar with the well-known ancient sites that pepper the British Isles. Stonehenge, of course. Avebury. Glastonbury Tor. Castlerigg, Oswestry, the Rollright Stones. Evidence of our Roman, Celtic, pagan and prehistoric past lives is all around us, and far more visible in those places than it is in Winwick. And yet, there’s something almost substantial about the sense of history and mystery at Winwick, as though it’s almost a microcosm of Britain’s distant past, layered in strata, millennia after millennia on top of each other, forming the risen mound that dominates the Cheshire countryside and on which is perched, like a capstone on a well of magic, the church of St Oswald.

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So why am I here, on this warm, summer afternoon, the amber sunshine painting the sandstone walls of the Gothic church? I could have gone anywhere to taste the almost schizophrenic flavours of Britain’s spiritual past, the many, many places where Christianity coopted existing pagan worship grounds. But for some reason I am drawn to here, just twenty or so minutes by car from where I grew up near Wigan. Once again, why Winwick?

“As a sacred site, this probably goes back to 10,000BC. Maybe further,” says Mark Olly when I meet him in the shadowed lee of the church. “Among the archaeological community this is an enormous site. But it’s a lost treasure. People don’t realise what they’ve got here any more.”

Olly is an archaeologist and historian from nearby Warrington, with a mane of silver hair and a positively Arthurian beard for which he unnecessarily apologises and puts down to lockdown, adding that if he’d known I would be taking photos of him he’d have dressed up a bit. A little later I see what he means by that when I watch an episode of a show he did for Granada, the ITV network in the North West, called Lost Treasures, the first episode of which dealt with Winwick. In the show he stalks across the Cheshire fields in a long leather coat and wide-brimmed hat, looking every inch the post-apocalyptic prophet. His attire today is “prophet-lite”, perhaps – a black T-shirt adorned with pagan symbols.

“Actually, I walk in two worlds,” says Olly portentously, then grins mischievously. He is indeed a pagan, but it also turns out he’s an ordained Christian vicar as well. It’s a dichotomy, a dualism, that suits Winwick. The church of St Oswald is not exactly a recent development; it’s mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086, which makes it one of the oldest Christian sites still active today. But the mound on which it is built, overlooking the busy A49 road beyond its raised graveyard of barely legible weathered gravestones (as an aside, there is one to an Elvis Aaron Presley; it’s hard to find and “keeps moving about”, I’m told) is much more venerable as both a place of worship and as a necropolis.

“So about 10,000 years ago this would have started out as burial mounds,” says Olly. “The first thing we’ve got in any records is Caer Gwentquick, which means hill or fort of the white church. But, as far as we can tell, this was eventually fortified. It was a fort with Celts – Welsh Britons – living here, and we’re looking at a couple of thousand years BC, coming out of the late Bronze Age into the Iron Age. You’ve got a settlement here, and this is where it gets interesting. You didn’t necessarily normally get burial mounds inside settlements, but that’s what we have here, and the thinking is that the burials go back well into prehistoric times.”

So Winwick has always been a place where the living and the dead cohabitate, where spirituality, religion and older beliefs rub up against each other and settle dustily like the groaning foundations of old buildings.

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What’s lacking in Winwick is the evidence we can see before our eyes, like the standing stones of Avebury or the long barrows of West Kennet. All that’s long gone here, because Winwick is in the heart of the industrial north, where preserving the long-forgotten past was a secondary concern, if even a concern at all, to the dirty, noisy progress of building motorways (the M6 whispers not too far away over the horizon), farming the land and digging into the Earth not for knowledge, but for coal.

Still, all it takes is a little detective work and imagination. Olly takes a position at the corner of the church and points far to the east. “If you were standing here thousands of years ago, then right in front of you the midsummer solstice sun would be rising, so you’d put a mound on the skyline to mark that point.” He squints into the bright daylight. “And guess what? There is one over there. It had a standing stone on it, so that’s your needle stone, your reference point. And then what you do is get into your sacred geometry and you start looking where things are around you and you mark them.”

Olly talks me through the things lost and found over the years. A stone buried on a farm over here, a mound over there. All have been ploughed flat or used as hardcore for roads or building developments over the centuries. All have gone, except for tantalising bits of evidence. But that’s not the whole of it.

Olly has a crudely drawn map with the church of St Oswald at its centre and rings marking the sites of smaller burial mounds and places where stones were thought to stand around them like satellites. “This is the interesting bit,” he says with his twinkling smile, and shows me a map of Avebury centred on the famous stone circle with its own barrows and mounds and outlying stones marked.

It’s precisely the same formation. “The positions of the church, the roads and the outlying mounds are all identical to Avebury,” says Olly with unalloyed joy. “So the same mentality that went into building Avebury was applied to Winwick. To sites like this everywhere, right up into Scotland. So you can see that they had a plan, a design.”

The day before I meet Olly I am given a tour of the church by the churchwarden, Christine Melia, and Peter Beck, the treasurer and also a local historian and writer. The church that was mentioned in the Domesday Book is not the grandly impressive building that dominates the skyline today. The oldest bits of the present church date back to 1350, and of course it has been added to and rebuilt and damaged and restored over the centuries. It has also borne witness to history. To a lot of history.

It might be that the name Winwick is a corruption of the settlement’s original name, Caer Gwentquick. Or it might be that the rough carving of a pig on the stone wall of the church tower offers a different version.

It is said that when the church was being built it was originally planned to be in a slightly different location. However, after the first day’s work, a pig was seen to be running between the planned site and the top of the mound where the church now stands, working through the night to remove the laid stones and pile them up in the new spot. It screamed “Wee-ee-wick! Wee-ee-wick!” as it ran, giving rise to the hamlet’s name that built up around the church, which the builders decided to continue with in accordance with the pig’s wishes.

The story is part of the fabric of the church both literally, with the carving, and figuratively. Because myth and religion dwell in a rare and happy concordance in St Oswald’s. It is as though while the house of God supplanted the older religions that used this place before it, there was a tacit understanding that Christianity was not replacing and wiping away what went before, it was merely sharing this sacred space.

“That’s where the giants are buried,” says Christine Melia matter-of-factly, pointing at the flagstones beneath my feet after letting us into the cool, still air of the chancel. Beyond is the altar, draped in an ornate cloth, hiding its gold-leaf opulence that burns like fire when the sun lances through the windows.

In 1828, while digging a vault under the chancel, workmen discovered three skeletons about eight or 10 feet down. They were said to be around seven feet tall, covered with a heap of sandstone blocks.

“I suppose we could be giants to people back when these were buried,” muses Christine. Mark Olly, the next day, also surmises the skeletons could have deteriorated and separated to make them look taller than they were. But the fact is, less than 200 years ago, giants were discovered beneath the church. I am already enamoured enough with the magic of Winwick to believe it, surrounded by the ornate woodwork created by the architect Augustus Pugin, who designed the Houses of Parliament.

The tower of the church is around 600 years old, and the south aisle was rebuilt in 1530 (and restored again 300 years later), while the north aisle was rebuilt in 1580. It is probable that before the Normans built the church a wooden structure stood on the mound, dominated by a huge stone cross.

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The ornate cross’s head was discovered in the grounds and is preserved on the windowsill of the Gerard Chapel, to the left of the chancel. It dates back to the Anglo Saxon 10th century, and is likely to have been some 30ft tall. On its ends it depicts the death of Oswald, for whom the church is named.

Oswald was a king of Northumbria, and is often associated with the Shropshire town of Oswestry, close to the Welsh border. It has long been thought that Oswald, who was a Christian king and keen to spread the gospel, died in battle near Oswestry and was hung by his feet from a tree, disembowelled and quartered – literally, Oswald’s Tree, Oswestry.

The pagan King Penda, angered at Oswald’s Christian faith, engaged him in battle in 642 at a place variously called Maserfelth, or Macerfield. The exact location of the battle is shrouded in mystery and lost to the mists of time, but Mark Olly is convinced it happened here, in Winwick. Many of the surrounding towns and parishes – including the one where I grew up – have the suffix “in-Makerfield”, and why else would this ancient church be dedicated to him?

Not far from the church is a place called Hermitage Green, where the battle is thought to have taken place. It was once the site of a huge burial mound, which ties in with the idea of a battle with a lot of casualties. And there is a well, too, which is in accord with the Oswald legend. It is said that as Penda delivered the fatal blow, Oswald clawed for his sword and a well sprang up where his dying fingers sunk into the earth.

Mark Olly has done his own investigations into the cross head, getting help from the archaeological community to date it to around AD700-800, within a century of the death of Oswald.

“Effectively, it is what’s left of Oswald’s memorial,” he tells me. “This is the crucial piece of support that says the battle of Makerfield was here, and not in Oswestry. When Penda won the battle he chopped up Oswald’s body, which is depicted on the cross head. Wherever his arms fell wells sprung up, which is why we have the well here. His body was taken to Oswestry and stuck on stakes and displayed in the old pagan way, which is why they’ve got the well down there. There is no doubt in my mind that the battle of Makerfield was here.”

It has long been rumoured in Winwick that tunnels criss-cross the area, going right under the church and the adjacent A49. “There were tunnels, definitely,” says Peter Beck. “They’ve probably long been filled in. All of the higher Catholic churches used to have tunnels as escape routes for the priests.”

“Whether they’re there now because of the roads, I doubt it,” says Christine. “One of these days we’ll find them.”

The tunnels could also have been used by Oliver Cromwell. The former Post Office across the road from the church used to be an inn, where Cromwell stayed while he commandeered the church as a garrison for his men and animals during the English Civil War. This was a Parliamentarian area, says Beck, adding, “In 1648 there was a big battle here, Red Bank, and we are right on the edge of the battlefield. Cromwell put his troops and horses in here. The church was absolutely trashed. All the lead was stripped out and used for musket balls.”

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On the tower wall exterior you can see the holes chipped out by those musket balls. Three Parliamentarian snipers were stationed on top of the tower, taking pot shots at the approaching Royalist troops.

“Cromwell captured about 1,000 Royalists, held them in here, stripped all their weapons off them and their money, and sent them off into Warrington, marched them off,” says Beck. “On that particular day in August it was wet and muddy, it was torrential rain and all the fields were flooded and the streams were overflowing and they fought in those conditions. There were 5,000 Parliamentarians and 3,000 Royalists, who’d marched from Preston via Bolton and Wigan for the battle.”

The more you get under the skin of Winwick, the more it gets under yours. The church itself is a repository of stories. Edward John Smith, the captain of the Titanic, was married here in 1887 to local girl Sarah Eleanor Pennington. His marriage certificate hangs on the wall. On display is the Vinegar Bible, a huge tome printed in 1717 replete with errors, including the one that gives it its name: miswriting The Parable of the Vineyard as The Parable of the Vinegar. There is said to be hidden treasure here, the donations of gold and silver going back a millennium to what was once considered one of the richest churches in England.

On the way up the tight, vertiginous spiral staircase that leads to the bell tower, Peter Beck points out an alcove where it was thought a hidden room might lay containing the riches accumulated by the church over the centuries. A camera was inserted into the wall but nothing could be found.

It’s a shame, because the church today could perhaps do with the money. They haven’t had a vicar since November, and are still waiting. “There’s usually a gap of a year between incumbents,” says Christine. “But things are a little difficult right now. We don’t have a huge amount of money.”

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The church, with its 70-strong congregation, has a warden, Christine, a treasurer, Peter, and one council. St Oswald’s pays what is called a Parish Share to the Church of England diocese, which is based on church attendance and the socio-economic make up of the area. It amounts to £52,000 a year. Out of that the vicar’s wages are paid, but any upkeep and maintenance is done and paid for by the parish. Money is tight in the Church of England, it seems. Will they get a new vicar soon, as they’re still paying the Parish Share?

“It was always a big honour to get this church. It still is,” says Christine. “But I don’t think we’ll get…” She pauses and stops herself. “We live in hope and pray we will get someone. We will get someone,” she adds decisively “We will.”

It seems almost inconceivable that a church as ancient as St Oswald’s could go long without a vicar, that a place of worship mentioned in the Domesday Book, that has been active for more than a thousand years, could face such uncertainty.

But perhaps that is the thing with stories. At some point, they end. Or maybe they become part of a bigger story, an episode in a longer running saga. Winwick is the place where stories sleep, piled high upon each other like the bodies that form the ancient mound on which the venerable church stands proud. Those stories are not really over, just entwining themselves like DNA into the geography of the place, strands of the never-ending narrative that makes Winwick, in a way, all of England.

“Winwick is a site of national importance,” Mark Olly says to me as we part in the car park of St Oswald’s. “It always has been and it always will be.” He looks up at the church, grand and Gothic and awe-inspiring in the summer sun, seemingly immovable and immutable. Or perhaps not. He says: “The church here now… perhaps it’s just the latest version of this site. Who knows what there is to come?”