This is the lower part of the porch and tower of St Peter's Church which was built in AD 674. I chose this photo because it shows some Anglo Saxon stonework put there by Anglo Saxon hands over 1300 years ago.

The Venerable Bede (AD 672-735) was sent here as a 7 year old boy to train to be a monk and in AD 794 the monastery was attacked and set on fire by Viking raiders.

All that history and it's right on my doorstep.

It's still a fully functional church and a lot of my ancestors were baptised, married or buried from there.

Sunderland Parish Church

This is a photograph of Holy Trinity also known as Sunderland Parish Church. It is situated in what is now the East End of Sunderland. The East End itself covers an area which used to be the tiny village of Sunderland. The church itself is now redundant due to a declining congregation.

The East End didn't have a very good reputation and has undergone major regeneration work in the last 20 or so years. The area around the church has been sympathetically restored and the street lighting has been carefully designed to add to the atmosphere. I stood outside the church after dark tonight and the old-fashioned street lamps cast a subdued, gentle glow over the old building. I could easily have been taken back to Victorian times; there were no cars and no modern-day noises to break the magic.

It is a well-documented fact that 'resurrectionists' Burke and Hare lodged in Sunderland for a while and robbed the graveyard of this church to provide corpses for Edinburgh surgeons.