One book I carry aboard and often consult the day before any cruising is England's Thousand Best Churches. On seeing I was about to pass Lapworth Church yesterday, I took trouble to visit it.
And Lapworth Church deserves its inclusion in Simon Jenkins' book, for this church is a pocket treasure. The building was locked when I arrived, but I sought out the verger, a lady who lives above the village school (itself a cute Victorian building) and she told me that she always shut the church on Saturdays because ramblers are prone to passing with muddy boots, spoiling the carpets she'll have cleaned for the Sunday service. She showed me around willingly and kindly, and sure enough, just as we'd finished our tour, a group of walker in muddy boots appeared at the porch, asking to be let in.
The church is a quarter mile from the top lock of the Lapworth flight, and is hard to moor near, but it's well worth a visit (moor above the top lock, just before the lift bridge). It's an odd layout, with a tower to the north of the main building rather than on the east end as you'd expect, and there's a chantry chapel over a passageway, in the position where most churches have the tower. Once, it's said, the village road ran underneath this chapel.
'I was Monty's chapel'
Lapworth church is a distinctive pathwork of styles, but what struck me was the lovely blend of textures in the well-restored, well-kept interior. There's a wealth of detail inside and out, from the curiously misshapen western arch on the nave
to the scratched sundials on the southern wall outside - barely noticeable unless pointed out in advance. There's also some wonderful stained glass, both Victorian in the East window, and modern post-war in the Lady Chapel. This chapel is now dedicated to the Warwickshire regiment, whose colonel in chief was once Montgomery. Monty's standard now hangs nearby.
There are two interested scultures. The notable Eric Gill provided a Madonna and Child bas relief from the 1920s, a memorial for a local lady who died sadly young
- while a more recent memorial, of the same subject, was, I thought, rather more sensitively handled by a lesser-known modern artist from Evesham (John Paul? I wasn't listening hard enough to the verger)
I was intrigued to learn that Lapworth Church is historically interesting as the resting place of Robert Catesby, eminence grise behind The Gunpowder Plot; his table-topped tomb lies near the south porch. As you wander this country you keep stumbling on little bumps of history; there's so much history to go around in England, isn't there?
All worth a visit, if the church is open. If not, call at the village school for the key. But take your muddy boots off before you walk in.
Sadly this particular viewpoint is now history. Drawn in 1946, this picture was sketched from a site now occupied by a respectable, modern but dull, 'ranch-style' 1960s bungalow. Planners today would surely never grant such inappropriate planning permission.
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