Dragons of Long Marton

The church of St Margaret and St James at Long Marton, Westmorland, is a veritable gem. It contains features from the Saxon and Norman periods, as well as all the others since. Aficionados like me get all excited and enjoy wandering about trying to date the various walls and windows. The church is one of a group of ten known collectively as the Heart of Eden, referring of course to the local river rather than the promised paradise, though that part of the world is a good advert for the latter.

The church has several tympana which are carved pictures or patterns over ancient doorways. Two of the three show dragons, which most would dismiss as fanciful legends, and some of the creatures depicted certainly look strange. Yet I believe that the artist(s) may well have beheld terrible lizards which still stalked that wild part of our island in the three or so millennia after Noah’s great flood. The ‘dragons’ referred to in the Authorised Version, from which modern translations embarrassingly re-word, are surely the dinosaurs. It is rather ironic that so old a church should prove so young an earth, or at least to offer support for the great Flood from which two of every kind of land animal was rescued. We can dismiss the ancient witnesses and medieval artists as overly imaginative and fanciful, which many of them surely were, yet a wise judge will not lightly discard so vast an array of testimony. People from the past were not as ignorant as we sometimes like to think; people in the present are not as smart as they assume.