Qualla: Hexham Abbey

Hexham Abbey: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit matthew Hunt, CC BY 2.0. Climb down the narrow stairs into the Saxon crypt and you are walking into the seventh century. The chambers are small, barrel-vaulted, plain. The stones around you are older still: they came from Roman buildings nearby, almost certainly Corbridge, and some still carry chiselled Latin inscriptions. Saint Wilfrid built this crypt in around 674 to house holy relics, and improbably it has survived everything that the next thirteen hundred years could throw at it. The abbey above has been burned, plundered, half-rebuilt, dissolved, restored. The crypt below has not moved.

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Image: matthew Hunt | CC BY 2.0

Hexham Abbey: Wilfrid and the Saxon Crypt

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike Quinn, CC BY-SA 2.0. Queen Etheldreda of Northumbria granted the lands at Hexham to Saint Wilfrid, then Bishop of York, in around 674. Wilfrid was an ambitious, well-travelled churchman with Roman tastes, and he built his Benedictine abbey almost entirely from material salvaged from nearby Roman ruin...

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Image: Mike Quinn | CC BY-SA 2.0

Hexham Abbey: Norman Rebuild, Medieval Glory

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dickpenn, Public domain. Around 1050, the treasurer of Durham named Eilaf was put in charge of Hexham, though he probably never actually visited. His son Eilaf II finished what his father did not start, rebuilding the church in the Norman style. The structure standing today is mostly the Augustinian prio...

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Image: Dickpenn | Public domain

Hexham Abbey: The Hexham Hoard and the Modern Abbey

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike Quinn, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1833, gravediggers working in the Campey Hill area near the north transept turned up a buried hoard of around 8,000 stycas, the small copper coins of late Anglo-Saxon Northumbria. The Hexham Hoard had been concealed around 850, perhaps in advance of the same Viking raids that ...

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Image: Mike Quinn | CC BY-SA 2.0

Hexham Abbey: Flying Over Hexham Abbey

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bob Castle, CC BY-SA 3.0. Coordinates 54.972 N, 2.103 W, geohash gcy88. Cruise at 2,000 to 3,500 ft AGL for a clear view of the abbey and its market square setting. The abbey dominates the western end of the Hexham marketplace, a substantial Early English Gothic mass with a square central tower. From the ...

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Image: Bob Castle | CC BY-SA 3.0