St Aidan's Church, Bamburgh

St Aidan's Parish Church, where Grace Darling is buried, is often referred to as one of the most beautiful churches in the country. It stands in an ideal setting surrounded by the countryside travelled by St Aidan and St Oswald on missionary journeys, with the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, 'the cradle of English Christianity', visible to the north. Unfortunately, the church was largely covered in scaffolding during our visit, but it was still a lovely building.

St Aidan built the original Saxon mission church on this site in AD 635 when he came here from the monastery on Iona. This was most certainly a wooden structure.

The church we see today was constructed between 1121 and 1230.

I was fascinated to visit the church's crypt, which holds the remains of 110 individuals who died in the 7th and 8th centuries. They had originally been buried in Bamburgh Castle's Bowl Hole graveyard. The remains were found during a project between 1998 and 2007. In 2016, they were moved into the crypt.Read more