Finchale Priory

Godric was born about 1070. After years of travel as a merchant, sailor, and pilgrim, he felt called to change his life. Initially he lived in caves and woods before settling with an elderly hermit at Wolsingham in upper Weardale. Around 1112 Godric was living in Durham, serving as doorkeeper at the hospital church of St Giles. He persuaded the Bishop of Durham, Ranulf Flambard, who had befriended him, to grant him a place to live as a hermit at Finchale, by the River Wear. There Godric created a hermitage dedicated to St John the Baptist. Godric's biographers recorded that he lived an ascetic life on this site for 50 years, living and sleeping outside and rejecting expensive cloth and…

There are some remains of the early 12th-century stone chapel of St John the Baptist, the site of Godric of Finchale's burial, built some time around the end of Godric's life. Some of the temporary buildings, erected for the first prior and his monks sent to establish the Priory some twenty years after Godric's death, still exist. The monastic complex was built in the latter half of the 13th century, with alterations and additions continuing for the following three hundred years. There are many excellent examples of heavily decorated capitals on the original arcade columns, tracery in the filled-in nave arches of the church, and on the south wall is a double piscina and two carved seats of…