Welcome to another post in my #churchproject series. I have been fitting some of these in to the longer evenings after work. We had visited this one before but on a very murky winters day back in December.
This church is an interesting one because in order to get to it, you need to drive through the entrance to Padworth College, a boarding school and is part of the Mortimer benefice https://www.mortimerbenefice.org.uk/.
I coudn't find any great articles on this church, other than this very dry piece of information at https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1155386?section=official-list-entry
The church dates back to 1130, some of the windows were replaced in the 16th century. I would love to go inside but that might be a tricky one, as it's only really open for services. This document reveals that it has no aisle, which is fairly unusual. It is a small church though.
The Church Project
There are some 160000 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.