She hasn’t got the heaves, but if Miss Opsimath’s cough isn’t better by next
Saturday, I’d better take my bike. So my cousin told me, when the
possibility of my borrowing the mare was discussed. I’ll probably be more
comfortable on the bike, because, although this is Dorset, which can be
lumpy, the route is fairly flat, eastwards down the river Frome from
Dorchester for six or seven miles and back.
The idea is to drop in on five churches, and I know they’ll be open, along
with 300 others in the county, because it’s Ride & Stride day. Last year,
183 Dorset parishes took part, to raise money for the Dorset Historic
Churches Trust, which in 2013 helped 27 churches in need of repair. To me,
visiting old churches makes more sense as a fundraiser than a bucket of cold
water thrown over my head.
So I hope the morning is fine as we ride out of Dorchester, with the sun on
the right side of our faces. Tim Connor, one of the charity’s trustees, has
scouted out the route and told me what to look out for. Here’s how I picture
it.
Once into the open country and across the railway that runs to Wool and
Wareham, there’s a glimpse of the thatched roof of the Wise Man pub. A bit
early for that, but bang in the middle of the villlage of West Stafford is
the church of St Andrew, with its tower, pretty stone roof and little Tudor
windows.
They aren’t in fact Tudor, it turns out, but from the reign of Charles I,
1640, perilously close to Civil War and dark Cromwellian days. Inside, we
stand under a whitewashed wagon-roof, the shape of a Nissen hut. A lovely
wooden screen with thin columns is carved like the frontispiece of a volume
of sermons by Donne. It’s a delight and quite unexpected.
But it’s time to trot off, or pedal if Miss Opsimath isn’t up to it,
down-river, to the watercress beds. Tim is keen to point out a famously ugly
house designed by Thomas Hardy, an architect as well as a writer.
“Indecisively asymmetrical fenestration,” says Pevsner sniffily, “starved
west bay window.”
At Woodsford, I like the look of St John the Baptist. It has old tiles
encrusted with lichen on the nave and a saddle-roofed tower, which is
attractive partly because not many churches in England have one. The whole
thing was much rebuilt in 1861, but, inside, the small nave is paved with
stone, the walls between the arches are whitewashed and someone has arranged
some flowers.
Three more churches to go, and time for a sandwich. At Moreton, a surprise! St
Nicholas is a Georgian Gothick church. The outside is grey stone with a grey
stone roof, and the west door stands under an ogee arch. Inside, it is
crazy. The altar sits within a wide apse, the shape of a great bow window of
the kind you find in Georgian Weymouth, but here the five wide windows on
the bow look medieval, with cusped intersecting tracery. All is light, for
the glass is not stained. As a considerable bonus these windows are engraved
by Laurence Whistler and others (pictured here). I’d have pedalled just for
this.
At Owermoigne on the way back, St Michael’s has a square tower, with nave and
smaller chancel roofed in old tiles. Tim likes a chest-tomb in the
churchyard from 1625, inscribed: “I was as thou art and thou shalt be as I
am.”
A mile on, through trees among the little waterways (avoiding the caravans at
Sandyholme), appears the squat square tower of Holy Trinity, Warmwell. The
low stone-tiled nave ends in a chancel notably taller and roofed in slate.
It was literally built by the Rev Edward Pickard-Cambridge in 1881, with the
help of his gardener, Charles Bushrod, and two masons.
Ride & Stride is on all over the country, from Northumberland (with the name
Steeplechase) to Cornwall (where it is also Cornwall Churches Day). The
historic churches trusts, county by county, carry some of the impossible
burden of preserving an unequalled part of the nation’s cultural legacy.
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(via Telegraph)
