- The Guardian,
- Tuesday August 29 2000
He was carved from sandstone and was given a huge head, flowing hair, curly beard and bits of carved string above the knees of his baggy trousers. Fish swim over his big feet as he carries his divine burden across an unseen stream.
St Christopher has spent some time in the open air (which did not agree with him) and settled in Liverpool for a short spell.
Now he is back home in a gallery specially constructed in his honour last year with the help of lottery money. Once he would have been brightly painted; now, even in his natural geological state, jaws drop before him.
This large example of medieval statuary is to be found at the end of a lengthy pilgrimage round Runcorn's traffic roundabouts, along dual carriageways and past newish office blocks.
But the Augustinian canons were here before Runcorn and even before St Christopher and certainly long before the nearby Manchester ship canal. The canons, never knowing their peaceful site would become surrounded by an expanding industrial town, came in 1134, built their church, cloister, chapter house, calefactory and latrine block and flourished for 400 years until Henry VIII did for them in 1536.
Some of the priory buildings were converted into a Tudor house which was demolished in 1750 to make way for a Georgian mansion, which itself was flattened in 1928.
Archaeologists investigated the site in 1971 and a full-scale dig uncovered a site whose scale had been obliterated from memory and overgrown with weeds.
Only an undercroft, with a transplanted Norman door, remains intact. But almost all the low remaining walls of the priory have been laid bare to reveal its size: the 25 canons thought to have lived at Norton must have rattled around in the chancel, though the long narrow nave was probably thronged with the peasants and tenants who worked the priory's estates.
The nearby museum, opened in 1982 and housed in the kind of building the old Runcorn Development Corporation might have built for use as a razor blade factory, tells clearly the story of the canons, the construction of the priory, its destruction and rediscovery.
Visitors are then free to wander around the priory site and imagine for themselves the contemplatives who lived, prayed and observed the canonical hours here. They can see too the graves in which the rich paid to be buried, a fashionable practice which contributed to Norton's wealth.
But the £41,000 cut in this year's budget is making life difficult for Margaret Warhurst, Norton's Priory's director, said: "The trust cannot continue to present the range and quality of services now offered beyond the current financial year."
Income 1999-2000 £331,000, 72 per cent of which was a grant from Halton borough council. The grant for 2000-01 has been cut by 20 per cent, leaving a deficit of 40 per cent
Number of staff 17
Prized exhibit Medieval statue of St Christopher
Annual visitor numbers 44,000.
Admission £3.30, concessions £2. Family day ticket (two adults, up to three children) £8.80
Opening hours April-Oct 12 noon to 5pm (6pm at weekends); Nov-Mar 12 noon to 4pm
