north stoke

Whilst wandering through my photos, this photo of North Stoke church came up, I must have snapped it quickly without thinking.  But  looking at it now and the crozier seems rather significant.  It is a bishop's crozier, representing a shepherd's crook of course the bishop shepherding his flock, but why is it on this church.  Under the crozier is a book, and above a small simple cross, all balanced on a small block of stone, which seems decorated.  If you read the blurb below, you will see that this church was probably built on a Roman villa,  with Saxon overtones ,which intrigued me all those years ago and in actual fact why it became my blog's name.
It was also the time when I fell in love with the word palimpsest, the idea that something gets written over something else, history reminded me of a book, turning the pages and finding something different on the same spot.

North Stoke is a village and civil parish in the Bath and North East Somerset unitary authority within the historic county of Somerset and close to the border with South Gloucestershire. People have been visiting St Martin's Church, North Stoke for over 1,700 years. It had a Roman villa situated just below the church and in fact the church might have the foundations of a Roman building. One of the church's treasures is a very rare, rectangular font. An earlier historian noted that the church was slightly askew from the east / west angle, the church being made to fit pre-existing stones. The church has traces of reused Saxon stone in the tower and porch and it could well have been that this was a small Saxon settlement. There is a water spout that emerges beside the church, runs down by the wall of the graveyard and cascades down as a small waterfall into a pool next to the gate of the church, providing a ready source of water for both Romans and Saxons, making North Stoke an ideal place to settle. The water is so full of calcium that anything, including twigs and pieces of metal left in it for some time, will get a coating of what appears to be stone. A yew tree in the churchyard is thought to be between 800 and 1,000 years old.

http://www.englishcombe.net/pdf/RobinDownes.pdf