St Giles, Great Orton

St Giles’ Church at Great Orton in Cumberland, goes back to 1098, with a couple of seemingly original Norman windows with their rounded tops. The stones with which this Norman church was built, however, are a thousand years older, for they were pilfered from Hadrian’s Wall. That which the Romans constructed to exclude barbarians from their lands was recycled to keep out draughts and rains from the worship of a God whom those wall-builders despised. Although so old a church will have witnessed and hosted many questionable practices and expressions of Christianity, it is still clear that God takes advantage of godless, human endeavour for His own ends and purposes. Those legionaries' grandparents were employed to crucify Christ; now their masonry efforts were used to construct His churches.