Thread by @friendschurches

There’s about 40,300 churches in the UK. Chances are there’s one within walking distance of where you live. The doors to some might be closed, but with blocked doorways, empty niches, and fantastic beasts… sometimes the outside can be just as interesting.

#thread

Blocked up arches, doorways, windows show how the building has changed over time. Like the arches in the south wall of St Mary’s, Fordham, Norfolk which tell us this church once had an aisle. Now long lost.

2/

Grotesques, gargoyles, and carved heads peer down from windows, towers and roofs – like the giggling lions on the tower parapet at Papworth St Agnes, Cambridgeshire. Worn faces, that a sculptor crafted and put soft life into centuries ago, looking out from the past.

3/

Church walls can chart the history of time. Mass-dials scratched into the wall directed divine offices for medieval clergy from dawn to dusk. This device developed into the sundials we are familiar with, and eventually the mechanical clock. Some church walls have all three...

4/

The church porch was once an important place for secular community business, and some porches encompassed an altar where contracts could be sworn. Irregular stone benches, or a carved niche, might be evidence that an altar was once there.

5/

📸 @badger_beard

In the churchyard and on the walls, ponder past lives, faded and forgotten names. The inscriptions and symbols on the gravestones capture the pain of the surviving family, the hope of the deceased… and sometimes a warning to the living.

📸: St David’s, Manordeifi, Pembs

6/

Perhaps you'll find an ancient preaching cross or majestic spreading yew tree. Often, these pre-date the building itself, bringing you closest to the earliest community who established a church on that site.

📸: St Mary’s, Derwen, Denbighshire

7/