Crosses-for the Easter season: Historian Roger Bingham, who is also a Church of England lay reader, reflects on Cumbria's ancient symbol of Christianity.

ON GOOD Friday, Christian worship focuses on the cross on which Jesus was 'Crucified under Pontius Pilate'.

Ironically, when, in c 330AD, Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, the cross which had formerly been seen as an instrument of degradation, was adopted as a symbol of faith.

By then Christianity had already been trundled into Cumbria by Roman soldiers and traders.

They probably used an engraving of a fish as their emblem, as it was not for another 300 years that Cumbria's Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Christians took up crosses to proclaim their beliefs.

That they also put them up is reflected in many place names like two Crosthwaites (respectively near Keswick and Kendal), Crosby Ravensworth, Crosby-on-Eden and also, Crosscrake, where, in 2000 a new cross was installed to commemorate the second millennium.

From the first millennium one of England's oldest crosses, dating from c.680AD, is at Bewcastle in North Cumbria. At 14ft it was also one of the tallest.

Other high crosses have survived in west Cumbria at Irton and Gosforth.

In South Lakeland a reputedly lofty cross at Beetham was torn down during the civil wars in the 1640s by a Puritan mob, which believed it to be a graven image as forbidden by the second commandment.

Similar iconoclastic urges led Kendal's ultra-Protestant Corporation to prise off metal crosses from its municipal maces. Likewise, because crosses smacked of Roman Catholic displays, Milnthorpe's market 'cross' is surmounted by a ball and not by a cross.

Fragments of other crosses are preserved at Burton, Kirkby Stephen, Kendal and Lowther.

But, according to The Royal Commission on Ancient Monuments of 1936, 'the cross shaft at Heversham is the finest in the county'.

In the 1950s the Rev Cleghorn fancifully told school pupils that its depiction of animals and vines illustrated Aesop's pre-Christian fable of the Fox and the Grapes. More probably, the carvings represented Jesus' analogy that he was the 'Christ Vine' bringing spiritual sustenance to humanity and, also, in view of the sculpted beasts, to 'all creatures of our God and King'.

Similar carvings can be found at other churches around Morecambe Bay, where Heversham's cross, which is formed from Heysham sandstone, might have been created. Notionally, it could then have been rafted on a high tide up the Bay to be landed on the Kent Estuary shore less than a mile from the church.

No one knows when Heversham's cross was re-discovered, but a damaged side indicates it might have been re-used as a door lintel. For 200 years the shaft has stood in the porch, where, unfortunately it is hidden when the huge medieval door is open.

Happily, it is soon to be re-located to a more conspicuous place inside the church.

Even so, a modern custom of displaying in the porch, a wooden cross adorned with daffodils will continue to provide throughout Easter week, a cheerful acclamation of Jesus' resurrection from the death which he suffered 'far away on an old rugged cross' - without a city wall.