Heysham was an important ChristianChristian Name originally given to disciples of Jesus by outsiders and gradually adopted by the Early Church to designate all members of the church. site from the 8th century consisting of a church and nearby chapel (now ruined). The west doorway and much of the west wall of the church dates from the late 8th or early 9th century, as does a fragment of a highly-carved cross in the churchyard, and excavations have revealed that the chapel was painted and decorated with textual inscriptions. There is no documentary evidence for the site but it may have been a monasteryMonastery The house of a religious community and high-status cemetery for Christians. A lavishly decorated Viking ‘hogback’ grave-cover depicts scenes that have been suggested to be a mixture of Christian and paganPagan Derived from Latin paganus, the Roman term for a rural dweller, this word came to be applied to those who were not Christian, particularly the followers of the classical religion of Greece and Rome and those who followed the pre-Christian religions of Europe Norse images, indicating that Heysham was a place of importance to the newly-converted Vikings who settled here in the tenth century.
References: Taylor and Taylor, Anglo-Saxon Architecture, vol. 1, pp. 315-6; Hartwell and Pevsner, The Buildings of England. Lancashire: North, pp. 332-5.