England & Wales Hardwicke Marriage Index
Marriages 1754 - 1837
Ebchester St Ebba

The Parish

The chapelry of Ebchester, its mother parish being Lanchester, lies in the extreme north of County Durham forming a stretch of the county's border with neighbouring Northumberland. Ebchester is located about 12 miles southwest of the town of Gateshead and 2 miles north of the mining town of Consett. Ebchester sits on the A694 road which links Consett with Blaydon. Ebchester is a rather linear settlement sitting upon the southeastern banks of the River Derwent, which forms the county border, most properties line the A694 or the B6309 which heads off southeast. Ebchester, as its chester suffix suggests, was a major Roman settlement known as Vindomora from the Antonine period of their occupation, a station on their Dere Street road which crossed the Derwent here. Ebchester had a varies economy, the extractive industries employed many with a coal-mine and stone quarries whereas the farming was weighted roughly 2:1 in favour of arable methods. Modern developments have come and largely gone from the chapelry, a railway line paralleling the Derwent valley has closed and been re-purposed as a cycleway. Ebchester is drained northeastwards by the Derwent which meets the Tyne at Blaydon with water flowing between Newcastle upon Tyne and Gateshead to the North Sea. Ebchester is sited at around 90 metres above the sea in its valley setting, land rises markedly to both east and west of the river reaching 237 metres at Medomsley and 285 metres to the west at Greymare Hill. Ebchester was a rather small chapelry for its area covering merely 961 acres and supporting a population of close to 350 parishioners. Like most of England north of the River Tees Ebchester is not mentioned in Domesday Book which did not cover this area.

The Church

St Ebba's church sits at the junction of the A694, Front Street, with Shaw Lane and just north of the main route of Dere Street. The church is a curious confection of the earliest periods and extensive later changes with almost nothing in between the 122th century and the 19th. Some Roman stonework has been re-used within the nave but both the nave and the large chancel are 12th century Norman Romanesque in age, Pevsner hints at a possible pre-Conquest date but eventually settles for a late 12th century c1180 dating consistent with documentary evidence. It took until the 1870s for any significant change to be made to this early structure. In 1877 the nave was extended westwards by a further bay and reinstated a former southern porch, in 1893 that work was removed and the nave extended even further westwards and the large vestry added to the north, in 1907 a further vestry was added to the south, in 1911 the northern porch was replaced by today's tower-porch.  Shaw Lane is of adequate width to permit on-street parking outside the churchyard, sadly for the photographer the churchyard is very busy with trees making for a difficult choice of angles to adequately record this complex church.