Emerald, brown and golden fields

Stitched together by hawthorn hedges

Compose a patchwork quilt

Enwrapping the village of Rudston

Tucked in East Riding's upland wolds

Six miles from the wild North Sea.

Aloof on its ancient burial mound

At the settlement's northern edge

All Saints Church with its salt-pot tower

Has watched over the lives below

For nearly a thousand years.

***

A thousand years before the Christians built their church

Roman soldiers laid a road.

That now is known as Woldgate,

Across the land from Bridlington to York.

This open tract delighted some so much

They built two villas

Where they linked mosaics into pictures,

Among them, Venus, bathing her beauteous body.

All these lay abandoned when the invaders left,

With the patterned pavements discovered centuries later,

Then shut in sheds enclosed in a farmer's field

But now displayed for all to view

In Hull's Museums Quarter.

A thousand years before the Romans settled here

Celtic men dragged a mass of pointed gritstone

From ten miles up the coast

To set it at the east end of the mound

In honour of their sun god.

When Christians brought their faith

They crowned the idol with a cross, now lost,

And called the village ROODSTONE.

***

These relics are not signposts of the dead

But evidence of the living:

People who sought food, raised families and prayed,

Loved and mourned, quarrelled, fought and hoped:

At heart, the same as us. So, as they passed

They left these traces of their passage

Of which we are the rich inheritors.

David Sewell Hawkins, Vicar to Rudston 1962 - 68