The parish church at Chester-le-Street sits where St Cuthbert’s monks settled for over a century after fleeing Lindisfarne, before carrying his coffin on to Durham in 995. Two things inside repay a look: a rare walled anchorage built onto the church wall, where hermits lived shut away from 1383 into the 1500s, and the Lumley line — a row of stone knights an Elizabethan lord assembled to parade his ancestry. Free to enter, and the station is right beside it.
Full name: Church of St Mary and St Cuthbert, Chester-le-Street
