Stow Minster

St Mary’s Minster in Stow stands on a quiet lane in Lincolnshire, a few metres from the village green. The building is one of England’s oldest parish churches, partly built by Anglo-Saxon masons and partly by Normans. Its massive arches rise higher than any others of their age in Britain. Inside, a rough Viking ship scratched into the stone records the earliest known Viking graffiti in the country. A font from the Early English period stands on nine carved supports, and fragments of a medieval wall painting show the murder of Thomas Becket. The church’s past reaches back to the 7th-century diocese of Lindsey, when it may have served as the cathedral for the whole county. Bishops, Danes, and abbots all left their mark: the Danes burned the first church in 870, Bishop Eadnoth II built an abbey in 1040, and Remigius of Fécamp refounded it as a Benedictine house in 1091. John Loughborough Pearson added the outside stair turret in 1865 while repairing the roof and windows. A mile west lie the grassy banks of the bishops’ medieval palace with its moat and fish-ponds. Visitors step into a wide nave where the tall arches frame the light. The Viking ship graffiti hides in a corner of the north aisle, worn but still clear. The font’s nine supports carry simple leaf and scroll carvings. Faded reds and blues trace Becket’s death on a side wall, and a small glass case holds the broken 13th-century limestone cross found during the 1990s work. Outside, the village green slopes down to quiet lanes and the line of the old Roman road to York.