Welcome to another instalment in my #churchproject that I’m sharing across multiple Hive communities and my own blog. This #churchproject post is going out on the brilliant #wednesdaywalk community run by
Heckfield Church, Hampshire
Quite often churches may be found in the grounds of farms, estates or in this case a Hotel; which happens to be on part of the Wellington Estate, that incorporated the villages of Heckfield and Stratfield Saye.
There are two hotels that are quite close together, Heckfield Place and Highfield Park, which is where St Michael’s church is located.
You can see it from the main road and part of its churchyard is in the other side of the road. It’s tricky knowing how to get to the church but once you know that you can turn into the hotel’s long driveway, park in the main gravel carpark, which is fine if you’re visiting the church as we were the other other evening.
I’ve selected less photos for this post because the light was a bit poor on the day and may retrospectively update this post at a later date with more photos perhaps in the winter. The reason being, getting a good photo of the church itself was really hard and I feel that a different time of day or year makes it worth a revisit. Plus if I can go inside too.
How old is the church? The current building is dating back to the 16th Century but there has been a church here since earlier times, the 12th century, Saxon - the page on its history is very interesting, take a look at https://www.heckfieldparishcouncil.gov.uk/community/parish-of-heckfield-7940/parish-church/
I’m debating whether to summarise these external links in some way, as they might change or vanish completely. Thoughts on a postcard please!!!
The Church Project
There are some 16,000 churches spread across the UK and all have some interesting stories to tell. Whilst I’ve never been a church goer at any point in my lifetime, apart from a short period of time when Tina and I would take Alice (my step-daughter) to our local church where we lived at the time, as she wanted to learn more about Christianity; I think we all got more than we bargained for, then moved house and haven’t been back since. Religion perhaps isn’t for us but churches are, they’re for everyone. I think this is because for the two of us, we’ve both grown up with an immense gratitude towards churches, we got dragged around them as kids by parents who had some fascination with these ancient places. Ok I used to hate the national trust, garden centres, churches, scones and jazz. Now I love those things and churches too. Then of course Tina and I got married in a Methodist church, North Camp, Farnborough where Alice went to her youth club as a young girl some years before.
This project is very much a husband and wife thing, it gets us out, we explore and discover places we wouldn’t have known existed otherwise