St Agatha, Easby

St Agatha’s is a Grade I medieval parish church on Love Lane, Easby, immediately south of Easby Abbey beside the River Swale near Richmond, North Yorkshire, in the Diocese of Leeds.

Overview

Historic England dates the church to the twelfth century, about 1200, the thirteenth century and the late fourteenth century, restored in 1869 by Sir G. G. Scott. Wikipedia places the west nave and south chancel in the 1150s, the south nave and doorway about 1200, later thirteenth-century work on the chancel, an early-fourteenth-century north transept, and a late-fourteenth-century south aisle and two-storey porch. The fabric is rubble with roofs of artificial slate, stone slate and lead. A Romanesque lead-lined font has delicate arcading on twisted colonettes.

The church is known for a mid-thirteenth-century wall-painting cycle, limewashed at the Reformation and rediscovered in Scott’s restoration. The parish records conservation in 1994 by Perry Lithgow with an English Heritage grant. North-nave scenes include the Garden of Eden and labours of the months; the south side has Nativity and Passion scenes. A plaster cast of the Easby Cross (original in the Victoria and Albert Museum) stands in the church. The adjoining Premonstratensian abbey of St Agatha was founded in the 1150s.

Further Information

• Easby parish: wall paintings
• Historic England list entry 1131607
• Wikipedia