Where can you see some of England’s rarest medieval church wall paintings? Step inside the St Peter and St Paul’s church in the market town of Pickering and you’ll be faced with the incredible sight of these paintings, which were first painted in 1470.
It’s the scale of the paintings and their details that stop you in your tracks. Depicting stories of the saints – from St Christopher, the patron saint of travellers wading through a fish-filled river through to St George defeating a dragon; as well as events leading up to the Crucifixion of Jesus, the paintings offer a glimpse into how churches were regarded before the Reformation (and how images such as this were so important when the population was largely illiterate particularly as the Bible was still written in Latin).
They’re thought to be only one of five remaining sets of medieval church wall paintings in England. It’s amazing they’ve survived when you think they were covered by whitewash and plaster at various points in history. Firstly during the Reformation, not many years after they’d first been painted, when the Catholic teachings were challenged by the Protestants, the wall paintings were covered up. Then in the 1850s they were rediscovered by workers carrying out repair work only to be painted over again after vicar John Ponsonby saw them and was horrified by the Catholic imagery and considered the paintings to be a distraction for the congregation.
In the 1880s there were efforts to protect them but conservation methods were a lot more basic back then, including the use of turpentine and beeswax, which unfortunately didn’t allow the paintings to breathe and only served to attract dust and dirt.
Fortunately there’s now a funding bid underway to carefully restore and preserve the paintings.
Words and photo by Amanda Brown