28/01/2026
In hindsight, I should have taken a close-up, but this is the door to the tower stair in the Church of St Mary in Acton, near Nantwich in Cheshire. The door is clearly old, though - judging by the stones at the top - perhaps younger than the wall it's set into. What caught my attention is that in places the wooden planks have what appears to be a surface layer. It's incomplete, cracked and flaking and impossible to identify by eye (at least by this layman's eye), but I did wonder if it might be leather, as I recalled reading somewhere that old church doors were sometimes leather-clad.
I've found no corroboration of a hidebound door at Acton, though I'll keep looking. But my brief research did confirm that I hadn't imagined it - some churches really did have leather on their doors. And I also discovered the fascinating, if gruesome, myth of the "Flayed Dane".
The popular story - associated with at least six churches including Rochester Cathedral - goes along these lines: some heathen (typically a "Viking pirate") tried to steal from a church but was caught red-handed, and by way of example was flayed alive by the outraged parishioners and the "daneskin" nailed to the church door as a warning.
The Reverend George Tyack claimed in an 1898 book that four such coverings had undergone "microscopical examination by experts" and were "unquestionably human skin". I suspect Rev. Tyack would have been disappointed to learn that recent forensic tests on two of his "fully substantiated" cases revealed that at the first (Hadstock, Essex) the hide "ancient though it was, had once belonged to a cow" and at another (Copford, also in Essex) it was from "a horse or donkey".
