All Saints Church in Alton Priors doesn't shout about its presence. It sits quietly in a backwater now in the care of the CCT with an uncluttered and simple white washed interior which exudes calm. There's no assault on your senses or any sense of overwhelm as you cross its threshold which has been my experience in some other places. I could feel my breathing immediately start to slow as I took a quiet look around.
You have to seek out Agnes Button's brass memorial under a rug, but she was the wife of William who was an MP and aide to Thomas Cromwell. He outlived both his spouse [d1528] and Henry's chief minister who was beheaded in 1540.
In the churchyard it blew my mind that the yew tree is at least 1400 years old and that it continues to grow despite the fact that the trunk is now in two separate halves. I was left wondering who the enigmatic TF was who has left their initials for us carved within the heart on the gravestone.
This stunning etched window is the work of Frank Grenier and upon it you can see Woodborough Hill and the Alton Barnes white horse which is visible on the path running up to the site.
This is a landscape of many neolithic wonders and this is truly what brought me to the church door. Set in the floor are two trap doors and beneath them lie sarsen stones. This one has a man made hole in it. There's no definitive proof as to why they are are there and one theory put forward is that they are the floor of an earlier building. The other suggestion is that the church is built upon a henge and that's the one I'm going with. To encourage people to move across to the new Christian religion it's believed that the sites for some churches were deliberately built over the places where folk were already venerating their deities. You can see this very clearly at Knowlton https://gnatbottomedtowers.blogspot.com/search?q=knowlton, but even within Sussex I've been to one church with a Bronze Age burial mound within its grounds and another one has been put within an Iron Age landscape feature. I find the whole business intriguing.
꩜Aril꩜
I remember reading once that the reason the enclosures of some very old churches are round(ish) is that they were built on the site of sacred groves, so it makes sense that some were built on the site of henges too. Don't you wish that you could just jump in a time machine and go back and see if that's the case with things like this? I know I do.
ReplyDeleteChristianity was, it seems, always adept at disguising itself in the cloak of whatever beliefs the population held, only throwing the cloak aside once it had inveigled, insinuated, grown its roots around and strangled out the old ways. I liken it to an epiphyte that starts in the crown of a tree then lets its roots go down to earth and grows bolder eventually smothering out the origin host.
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