I was wandering around York a few weeks ago; my friends were back at the hotel and I was just having a little saunter on my own, when I passed this lovely old church. sadly I couldn’t go in as it was now locked because of problems with vandals and thieves. It’s dedicated to St Denys, and I had a vague idea that he was the patron saint of France, and when I checked later, I was right. I found out that he was the Bishop of Paris and was beheaded in the third century and supposedly buried in what is now Montmartre.
The church, one of the oldest in the city, was founded here nearly nine hundred years old, built on the site of a Saxon church which in turn was on the site of a Roman building probably a temple. The might Percy family of Northumberland were closely associated with what now seems just a little church. The building which I was looking at was mostly rebuilt in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and was originally much bigger. It had a series of unfortunate events in its history; part of it collapsed through subsidence when the King’s Fishpool was drained, there was further collapse when a sewer was dug too close to it, it was damaged during the English Civil War, it was struck by lightning and the long nave and the transepts were demolished two hundred years ago and the tower built in the 1840’s.
The doorway is just beautiful; there are five arches above it, the outside one is decorated with foliage and apparently used to have masks on it, the second has ‘beak-heads’, then chevrons, flowers and leaves with a figure-of-eight design, and then lozenges with four-petalled flowers. The tops of the columns on either side were decorated too, but its difficult to make out scrolls, grotesque masks and scallops.
Lois Elsden 