Let's start this week by making some reasonable assumptions about our old Barlickers at Townhead, their beliefs and practices when the new religion arrived. They were small farmers and hunter-gatherers and so relied completely on the weather and seasons. They had domestic and local gods and made the appropriate offerings to them as custom demanded. They almost certainly venerated the spring at what is now Calf Hall and had similar beliefs about all watercourses. Every part of the earth and the natural world they saw around them had spiritual significance. We have evidence from other cultures that trees were particularly important.
As well as respecting their household gods they joined in with the community around for collective ritual connected to the spring and possibly other objects. There is a strong possibility that they had special places for ritual and in view of the climate this could well have included a small building, a temple, where votive objects were kept and venerated collectively. All this is speculation, we have absolutely no evidence for any of it beyond what we have tried to learn from evidence of other communities.
As I have said previously, I have no doubt that rumours of Christianity would have reached them long before, either from the Romans or the grapevine of the trade routes. We also know that the Romans had no problem incorporating Christian objects of worship with the existing Pagan ones and there is no reason to suppose that our old Barlickers were any different. Adopting a Christian symbol or icon could have been seen as a sensible insurance policy. Indeed, in very early days they may not have recognised such objects as 'Christian', rather they were a new deity and what was the harm in one more?
It is almost certain that this began to change when the first missionary or evangelist reached them. We know that Columba had been active in the North East from around 563 onwards. Barlick came under the See of York and the first recorded church on that site was a wooden structure built in 627 for the baptism of Edwin, King of Northumbria, who had his court there. It was soon replaced by a stone structure but by 670 had fallen into disrepair and was rebuilt by Wilfrid when he became the bishop. In 672 he built a stone church at Ripon. Wilfrid had trained as a priest in Rome and so we can assume that his version of the gospel was orthodox but we shouldn't exclude the possibility that any Columban initiative that had spread earlier might have been less acceptable. Then as now, Rome was sure it was right and was intent on imposing its version of the gospel universally in Western Europe.
So we have the possibility that our old Barlickers were moving towards Christianity before the Augustinian Conversion and this might explain some of the problems which arose in later years. Perhaps the old Barlickers were as individualistic as the modern ones?
The 672 crypt at Ripon Cathedral