Church Crawler

Church Crawler

Menu Church Crawler

Church Crawler

This project was started in June 2023.

It is an attempt to use this website to present some of the Churches that we have visited in slideshow and descriptive form.

The list of Churches featured on this website are listed below and can also be accessed by clicking on the displayed image in the slideshow.

While this is not a blog it is pretty much a resource for our own use and is a record of churches that we have visited and the photographs (or a selection of) made in to a slideshow. The purpose of these pages is not to compete with the "Great" Simon Knott, in fact that would be impossible and I have taken the liberty of quoting him in many profiles of the churches we have visited.

Whenever possible church guides are purchased and they maybe scanned and uploaded. In some cases, as in the case with the majority of the CCT churches, the guides are avaiable on-line (I have downloaded these and uploaded them to my server so that I can view them when I don't have an Internet connection). I will try and make it clear that the texts here are quoted and not my own work.

In many cases I have attempted to link the histories in the church guides and the names and heraldry found in the churches back to my own historical research. It is interesting the some of the churches, Pebmash particularly, have a study by Peter Rushbrook. The Rushbrook studies can be found in the Suffolk Archives and Pebmarsh was the only church that I had seen a copy of his work, although they curiously didn't have a church guide.

The Churches

In no particular order

St Mary the Virgin, Belchamp Walter.

The format

The pages are formatted with general information from each place visited followed by a slideshow of photographs taken on the visit. Information is taken from Church Guides were available and links to PDFs of these guides are to be posted when available.

Top

Slideshow

Previous Next

1 Little Maplestead

2 Stoneham Parva

3 Claydon

4 Kettlebaston

5 Great Finborough

6 Thornham Parva

7 Kesale

The Slideshow development

Having been inspired by Simon Knott who is a great resource for this website, I am not happy with the presentation of photos using Flicker. Simon does a great job with his individual wwebsites, Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk Churches, but the combination of a "traditional" website that calls Flicker I find is less than ideal.

As a web developer my approach is different to Simon and my site design is pretty much all my own. It has developed over a number of years and is completely funded by the sole author of tempusfugit.me.uk. The development of a slideshow has been a labour of love for a while now and it is finally developing into a usable interface (I think) but is likely to be developed further as time goes on.

The development of a template for these pages was/is an evolutional process. Currently the template is one with an automatic slideshow that allows pausing and then stepping through a slide at a time. The speed of the slideshow came be changed and currently defaults to 4 seconds. The desktop menu will have a link back to this page ans will have a pause button on the left overlay menu.

Server Space

Having started to upload quite a few church images I am at a risk of running out of server space sometime in the future.

6 July 2023 - 2127.8 Used (I have this somewhere else but I can't remember where) - bw_2015.html 1991.7 but no date, probably 27th June 2023.

John Vigar

30 June 2023, John Vigar presented his vision of "Churches in Retirement" in Borley Church,Essex.

What happens to Anglican churches when they are no longer needed for their original purpose? Some are demolished; others are converted to houses, offices or shops. Yet there are a few that are so precious that none of these solutions is deemed suitable.

Simon Knott

As stated above (I think) I have no intention in completing with Simon. However, reading his small print and seeing what he wrote about Belchamp Walter St. Mary, I have to make a comment.

This relates to the Botetourt Chantry Chapel and the reference to Dr James Bettley in respect of the tomb chest and the brickwork.

There are some interesting other survivals. When the nave was constructed an elaborate tomb chest and canopy were built into the north wall as a memorial for Sir John Boutetourt who had died in the 1320s. There is no effigy, but as James Bettley notes it must once have opened into a structure beyond the north wall, for you can see the brickwork used to fill the opening in the wall outside. Circular Norman fonts are unusual in East Anglia, so that at Belchamp Walter may come as a surprise, its upper part carved with flowers and foliage. There are some good early 19th Century pre-ecclesiological glass panels including St Peter and St Michael, and some rather less good decorative glass from a few decades later. All in all a church full of quirky interest, so don't be put off by the rather austere exterior.

I admit that I have only been documenting the church of St. Mary Belchamp Walter in any great depth since 2021, but my research seems to contradict the information above.

Simon says that individual parishes can quote him without restriction for any purpose in his "small print". The quote above is from his pages/websites. the URL is http://www.simonknott.co.uk/essexchurches/belchampwalter.htm

and from one of his Flicker pages:

Here we are in the heart of Lovejoy country. Entirely a Suffolk church I suppose (we are less than a mile from the border), and not terribly attractive perhaps with its low chancel and blockish tower. But the setting makes up for all that, of course, with the Hall, and the woods, and the sheep, and the cottages. I thought this church was very interesting, particularly the wall paintings. It was almost entirely dark inside, and so it was only when I got home that I could really see what they were - very fine indeed. I loved the stone flags as well, shame about the carpets over them.

...

Church Crawler

Links