SOME fascinating old stones have found a glorious new home in Durham Cathedral’s Open Treasure, the £10.9m exhibition which opened last weekend.

The exhibition begins with an artful arrangement of carved stones from the Viking era more than 1,000 years ago, and they sit in a stunning space in the 14th Century Monks’ Dormitory, beneath the largest oak-beamed ceiling outside Westminster Hall.

Many of the stars of this show are local stones which are practically the only surviving connections with a lost time.

For example, there is the deeply carved base of a 9th Century Saxon stone cross, which comes from Hurworth. The oldest part of Hurworth is the crossroads by the village shop, where more than 1,000 years ago, people first settled.

Opposite the shop is an old school, now private houses, which was built in 1829 on “Chapel Green”. Behind the school is the Old Parsonage which has the date “1450” over its door – and what a door it is, heavily studded with nails. This door is said to be from the old Saxon chapel that once stood near Chapel Green.

A lane opposite the shop climbs up Cross Bank Hill before dropping through the Ring Field to the River Tees. Somewhere on Cross Bank, the carving now in the cathedral was found.

Carved stone crosses were a common feature of Durham villages in Saxon times, but Hurworth’s fragment is unique – it is the only section of a base to survive.

It was presumably discarded when the old chapel was demolished and All Saints church was built in the 11th Century further along the green.

There are other treasures in the exhibition from Gainford, Ingleby Arncliffe and especially Brompton, near Northallerton, which had one of the finest collections of “hogback” stones in all Yorkshire.

Hogbacks get their name because usually at either end they have carvings of hogs’ heads. The heads face each other and they appear to be chewing on a plait which stretches between them along the top of the stone. Intricate carved patterns then tumble down the sides.

These stones seem to have been houses for the dead and they were probably gravemarkers. The shape appears to have been a pagan Scandinavian tradition which the Vikings brought to North Yorkshire where it met the local Christian tradition of stone carving. In fact the hogs may be a symbol of a pagan god, Frey.

However, Brompton’s hogbacks, from the early 10th Century, are highly unusual because they don’t have hogs’ heads – they have muzzled bears’ heads.

No one knows why.

The Brompton hogbacks were found in 1867 in the foundations of St Thomas’ Church, which overlooks the village green, when it was being restored. There were ten of them: five remain in Brompton, but the best five were spirited away to Durham Cathedral.

The other fine local collection of hogbacks is at Sockburn, seven miles from Brompton, and there are such similarities between the works that some of them may have been done by the same hand. There is speculation that Brompton and Sockburn may have worked together as a school, or even factory, knocking out carvings for other, less talented villages.

The final stone in the Monks’ Dormitory is the Neasham Cross.

It is about 5ft tall, dates from the 13th Century, and is all that is left of Neasham Priory.

The priory was first mentioned in February 1156 by Pope Adrian IV, when he called it “well established” and allowed the eight Benedictine nuns who lived there to grind their corn in a mill powered by the Kent beck.

At times, the nuns of Neasham could be naughty nuns – during the 1430s, they were admonished for their bad behaviour, and on another occasion, they were told off by their Benedictine bosses for pawning their altar cloths.

In 1534, Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries. The family of the last prioress, Jane Lawson, was allowed to buy the site, including a church, bell-tower and cemetery, for £277 5s, and her descendants lived there for several centuries. At the end of the 19th Century, the site, which is on the western edge of the village on the riverbank, was bought by the Wrightsons, the Teesside engineers, and they built a house called Neasham Abbey, which still stands.

The impressive cross somehow escaped all of this change and now is the last exhibit before you leave the dormitory and move into the Great Kitchen – another stunning space with a majestic octagonal stone roof.