Country diary: ancient associations surface in church by the Wharfe

Ilkley, Wharfedale, West Yorkshire It is tempting to see the outward beauty and lethal potential of the river in the oversized eyes of a weathered stone relic

On this darkening evening, the sky above Wharfedale is wild and oceanic, and the river Wharfe is its turbulent likeness, swollen with rain and surging urgently eastwards. An excoriating wind, the kind that makes you grimace, whips brass, bronze, and copper foliage into the water for the current to swallow, hastening winter's approach with every gust.

The sound and fury is suddenly muffled as I enter the centuries-brewed silence of Ilkley's All Saints church. In the church's collection of Anglo-Saxon crosses is an altar stone on which a figure is carved out of rough millstone grit. She wears a pleated robe and holds what appear to be two snakes in her hands. Her oversized eyes may have looked out on the world for almost two millennia.