AS you enter Richmond from Scotch Corner, there is a startling culture clash. A modern petrol filling station, thrown up cheaply, sits cheek-by-jowl with a medieval churchy building. The garage’s garish digital lights flash on a large red plastic display to show the price per litre of petrol. Behind, in contrast, are the graceful curves of the churchy building’s blocked up windows and the gentle tones of its honeyed, weathered stones.

On Wednesday morning, as I drove down into town for a breakfast meeting, I noticed that scaffolding had gone up around the old building and someone was at last shoring up its tumbledown eaves.

It was built in the mid 12th Century as a chapel dedicated to St Edmund, but it later became a hospital. It sits on Anchorage Hill, which has always struck me as an odd name for a landlocked place like Richmond.

But the name, I discover, refers to an anchorite, or an anchoress, who allowed herself to be bricked up in an anchorhold – a small cell next to the chapel.

An anchorite was a woman for whom a nunnery was too sociable. She wanted to devote her life to Christ but wanted to experience his sufferings alone. So she withdrew from the world and entered her anchorhold. As she went inside, a funeral-style service was held – she was now dead to the world but reborn in a spiritual life – and the door was nailed shut behind her.

She wasn’t totally cut off, though. A small window, or squint, allowed parcels of food and perhaps time-consuming embroidery to be passed into her, and another small window looked into the adjoining chapel so she could receive communion.

The first Richmond anchorite entered her cell in 1274, and there she spent the rest of her days, immured – surrounded by walls – and praying.

Today, there are no signs of her cell, but the chapel still stands, surrounded by scaffolding. Early in the 17th Century, it was converted into an almshouse for three poor widows by Eleanor Bowes. The arms of Eleanor, and her late husband Robert who was Queen Elizabeth’s ambassador to Scotland, can still be seen in the old stonework looking down on Anchorage Hill.

Of course, today, there isn’t even time to pause for a second on the spot where the anchorite stopped to spend her whole life in solitude – even though it was breakfast time, I was already running late.

BREAKFAST, when I got there, was a bargain. It was in the Ralph Fitzrandal Wetherspoons pub (I’ve often puzzled over Ralph, but he turns out to be the lord of Middleham who in 1258 founded the friary which was over the road) and cost £2.99. The fried egg was rubber hard and the bacon a bit leathery – although quite tasty. But for £2.99, it was impossible to complain.

I was still quite pleased with my breakfast bargain when I got home later on Wednesday evening, but my wife trumped me in the bargain stakes. She had just bought a pair of sunglasses from TK Maxx in Darlington for £14.99. They are perfectly pleasant pieces of plastic, but nothing flash, and no fancy lenses, but according to the ticket, their Recommended Retail Price was £195.

A phenomenal bargain – or has someone, somewhere been phenomenally ripped off?