Across the road from St Mary's, Fordham, in Norfolk, this old milestone tells us that it's just 2 miles in one direction to Downham Market, and 16 miles the opposite way to Ely (Fordham's diocese). It's a relic from a bygone age of navigation and a remnant of a once busy road.
The milestone was located on what was once part of the A10 or 'Great Cambridge Road' — connecting London to Kings Lynn — before that road was diverted, leaving Fordham stranded and neglected for decades, until we took it into our care.
Once upon a time, travellers depended on milestones and guidestones (known in Yorkshire as 'stoops') to help them navigate unfamiliar routes and estimate travel times.
We spotted this grade II listed milestone at Stonehenge recently. Early sightseers to the mysterious stone circle were presumably well-versed in Roman Numerals, which convey the distances to London (70 miles) and Amesbury (2 miles).
Stone and wooden signs for directions and distances have been used in Britain since ancient times, and 117 Roman milestones — once placed every thousand double-steps along Roman roads — still survive in the UK.
After the Roman occupation, 1300 years went by until more official waymarkers were installed ... In 1697 an Act of Parliament required direction indicators to be erected at every crossroads.
When it comes to using old milestones, distances should be treated with caution. As @MaryAnnOchota points out in 'Hidden Histories', the measurement of a mile could vary widely between districts, sometimes up to double the distance!
In the 18th-19th centuries, turnpike trusts were instituted to manage and maintain roads by levying tolls; milestones were compulsory along turnpikes (toll roads) and helped to standardise stagecoach rates and journey times. By 1840, 20,000 miles of road were turnpikes.
The Milestone Society @storiesinstone has recorded 20k historic waymarkers, which can now be accessed via Geograph. Many that have survived, including Fordham's, were once on turnpikes. Its cast iron number plates show the distance of turnpike lying ahead.
The milestone at Fordham was erected by the Ely to Downham (North District) turnpike trust in the 19th century — when St Mary's was still on a major thoroughfare. It's now a lonely sentinel watching over our quiet, secluded church.

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More from @friendschurches

10 Dec
Hundreds of cars catch a glimpse of the white-washed chapel at Waddesdon every day as they whizz past.
Few stop.
If they did, they’d find an iron arc, a survivor from a time when the dead didn’t rest in peace. When fresh bodies had to be secured with mortsafes.

#thread
Mortsafes – complex metal cages of rods, plates and locks - began to appear around 1816, when grave-robbing was rife. This was a time of great advances in medicine and understanding of anatomy, but there was a limited supply of corpses to dissect and learn from. 

2/
Until this point, medical study was limited to the cadavers of executed criminals. The demand for bodies created an underground market. Under cover, resurrectionists (or resurrection men) dragged carcasses from their coffins and sold them to science.

3/
Read 6 tweets
9 Dec
On the bank of the river Ouse, close to its confluence with the Derwent, lies the village of Barmby on the Marsh. It seems remote, but was once bustling with millers, makers, traders, and boats transporting goods and people to nearby ports and across the North Sea to Europe.
A waterman could follow the snaking Ouse downriver for 9 miles to Goole — the most inland port in the UK.
At Goole, coal barges from south Yorkshire emerged from the 'Dutch River' — diverted by engineer Cornelius Vermuyden in the 1620s — and could be transferred to sea-going vessels.
Read 7 tweets
2 Dec
A Wellingtonia aka giant sequoia dominates the skyline at St Mary's church in Hardmead, Bucks. It's one of the oldest of its kind in the country. But how did it come to be there?

Put your feet up and enjoy a tall (but true) tale for #NationalTreeWeek ...
In the 1850s, California was in the grip of the Gold Rush. While thousands panned for gold, others made their fortune on plant discoveries. Cornishman William Lobb had brought Chile's monkey-puzzle tree to the UK (like this one here) and was looking for the next BIG thing …
The first European to document the giant sequoia was hunter Augustus Dowd, who stumbled into a grove of 96 huge trees at Calaveras Grove while pursuing a grizzly bear. Lobb heard his story in San Francisco and headed straight to the grove to collect seeds, cones and small trees.
Read 16 tweets
1 Dec
A recent tree survey of the churchyard at St Mary's, Hardmead reveals how this small, moated plot just northeast of Milton Keynes reflects the changing landscape of wild and cultivated Britain.
 
Herewith, a #thread for #NationalTreeWeek ...
After the last ice age, the warming climate made this land a welcoming home for yew, elder, holly, elm, and hawthorn. An Irish yew has joined its close cousin at Hardmead in more recent times, along with a Scottish pine.

2/

📸: Kristina D.C. Hoeppner
An ‘avenue’ of Sycamore grow along the path to the church — perhaps grown from saplings or seeds of much older sycamore trees at the rectory. We may think of the sycamore as a native species, but it only arrived on our island from central/eastern Europe in the Tudor period.

3/
Read 8 tweets
28 Nov
Some churches were deserted hundreds of years ago. Villages lost for generations. In others, people left less than 30 years ago. In these ancient places, over centuries, people come and go, use ebbs and flows. Sometimes they flourish, sometimes they’re fallow.

#thread
There are about 3,000 deserted medieval villages in England alone. One example is the diminutive St Mary Magdalene in Caldecote, Hertfordshire. The most common reason for desertion of medieval villages is death, depopulation and harvest failure as a result of the Black Death.

2/
The population of Caldecote declined heavily during the 14th century - by the end there were less than ten householders. The village limped on until the end of the 16th century when it was all but abandoned... Luckily, it now has a small group of steadfast friends.

3/
Read 9 tweets
27 Nov
In churches all across this island are traces of rood-screens. Sometimes just the rood-beam remains, sometimes high in a wall a door that leads to nowhere...

In Wales, we have eight rood-screens in our care, today’s #thread celebrates their craftsmanship and survival.
The majestic 15th-century roodscreen is the glory of Llananno church, Powys. The rood-beam trails with vines, pomegranates and wyverns. There are thirty-four carved coving panels. The rood-loft above carries twenty-five canopied niches framing Biblical figures.

2/
St Brothen’s, Gwynedd is a 13th-century church with awe-inspiring woodwork from the 15th century. The screen runs to nine bays with simple chamfered edges. Like many others it lost its rood loft and the rood itself, after the destruction of roods by government order in 1548.

3/
Read 10 tweets

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