A thunderbolt from heaven had struck the village church half a century earlier. After it toppled the tower, the parish plugged the gap with a tiny turret. The pitifully crowned building looked oddly bereft – a stag without antlers, a unicorn without its lance. Odd enough in appearance to entice me off the high street – the only street – down a grass track, where an elderly man in a loose orange T-shirt was strimming back the vegetation, “makin’ it better for tomorrow’s funeral”.
A few steps inside the sparsely populated churchyard, four overlapping planks formed a rectangle. So small a space, the neatly mown turf within no different to that without. Three ancient gravestones overlooked their soon-to-be neighbour, the names of a bygone middle class of parishioners weathered into illegibility.
The tomb of the local worthy, a judge who had tried Mary, Queen of Scots, was cloistered from the elements inside the chancel, but I doubt many people get to see it. A noticeboard offered intermittent Sunday services led by a minister who rotated between three churches. A handwritten note said: “The service on Sunday 8th July is cancelled.” I lifted and turned the gunmetal-grey door handle and it resisted with a dull thunk that echoed down the nave.
The locked door sent me on a tour of the exterior. Cobblestoned walls around the tower stump had endured the centuries, but puritanical winds and rain had stripped the limestone walls further back of their medieval ornamentation. Heraldic shields and swirls left crumbling traces, leaded lights were cracked or missing, buttresses chipped.
On the dank, lime-tree-shaded south side of the church, I found the iron-studded priest’s door, unopened in ages, its iron handle in the shape of an upside-down heart rusted so thin it might snap with a single pull. A hammock of spiders’ webs specked with bat droppings was suspended between the keyhole and the doorway.
There is no need or desire today for a stage entrance to separate the clergy from the laity, but dwindling congregations make minimal use of hundreds if not thousands of churches such as this. When the next metaphorical thunderbolt strikes, who will pay to prevent this building sinking into ruin?
