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This former mining town straggles along the A596 for about a mile.
In the market square is an ornate memorial fountain to 'Watery Wilfred' as his political opponents called Sir Wilfred Lawson, a local landowner who spent his forty years as an MP, crusading for the temperance movement together with international peace. Medallions on either side of the monument symbolise these causes...a bronze relief portrait of Sir Wilfred is on the front, and above them stands a fine statue of St George slaying the dragon. The inscription says Sir Wilfred believed in the brotherwood of man and defended his somewhat unpopular ideas with 'gay wisdom and perseverance'. He was, of course, a great teetotaller, and no man in his day made more people laugh at temperance meetings. He lived in the big park of Brayton Hall, later burned down... Here Sir Wilfred Lawson lived out his long life, dying early in this century.
The church here only dates from 1846, but incorporates two Norman arches of an earlier building. There are also some tenth and eleventh century carved stones, including a wheel-head cross, a hog-back stone, and a grave cover with a swastika on it. In the churchyard is a holy well probably indicating that St Kentigern, to whom the church is dedicated, baptised his converts there. It is now known as the Bishops Well. Also in the churchyard is a magnificent memorial carved by the man who lies in the grave close by it. He was the well known archaeologist W S Calverley, who was vicar here, and the memorial they have set up to him is a copy of the Gosforth Cross, one of the best surviving anywhere.
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