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Aug 27

Time for some tasty before and afters!

The chapel at Milland nestles into a hollow in the woods. It’s entered via a flight of stone steps, and as you descend the air is hushed. The walls are bare. The floors are footworn flagstones. Four painted panels frame the east window.
#🧵

The black text, mostly in a sort of Times New Roman font, is painted on to a grey ground, and recites The Lord’s Prayer, The Creed, and the Ten Commandments. We think the boards are late 18th-century.

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What’s especially interesting is that on two of the boards – The Lord’s Prayer and Decalogue I-IV – you can see underlying text, so we know these boards were recycled from earlier prayer boards.

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Friendless Churches

@friendschurches

Aug 13

When we took Tuxlith Chapel, W Sussex into our care it had been derelict for decades. At the time we didn't have money to re-instate the lath and plaster ceiling, so we nailed painted boards over joists. This did the trick until last year, when the boards began to fail…

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…so earlier this year, we returned to restore the lath and plaster ceiling. The work was done by craftsman, Ian Holloway.

To begin, Ian carefully removed the old boards and set out the base for his plaster: carefully spaced riven oak laths. This is a work of art in itself!

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After this the first coat was applied. This was rough coat of lime plaster with lots of goat hair mixed in. The hair gives greater strength and helps to create a sound base for later layers. This first coat (also known as scratch or pricking up coat) squeezes through laths.

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Friendless Churches

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Aug 11

Wreathed in evergreens and wrapped in a moat, St Mary’s, Hardmead in Buckinghamshire is the quintessential English parish church.

It all started with a nave in the 1100. For the next three centuries followed the textbook pattern of English church enlargement.

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The tower was added in the 1200s. A few decades later, the south aisle was added to the nave. As the congregation grew and more space was needed, in the 14th century, the north aisle was added.

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Shortly after this, the chancel was built to its current design, incorporating a priest’s door with moulded arch terminated in a mitred head and head in a liripipe hood, and low side window to the north.

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Friendless Churches

@friendschurches

Jul 31

Rafters in floors. Doors cut into pews. Pews worked into screens. Screens becoming vestries. Churches have a long history of assimilating themselves.

At Llanfaglan, 14th-century cusped chancel roof timbers were cut out c.1800, shortened, and worked into a distinctive porch.

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Similarly, at Sutterby, Lincolnshire, the doorway to the porch is framed with some rather fancy mouchettes. While the porch dates to the 19th century, this carving is much earlier – fout hundred years earlier, in fact, and we believe was originally a window arch in the church.
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Llanbeulan church on Anglesey sits in a sea of bobbing gravestones. They’re everywhere. So many in fact, that they are built into the walls and thresholds of the church… and one has even become a step on the stone stile into the churchyard…

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Friendless Churches

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Jul 30

When a deathwatch beetle is in the mood for love, it bumps its head off the furniture. These beetles like to chomp through woodwork, and the bumping is their mating call through the tunnels in the woodwork. In the past, however, their tapping was thought to herald death.

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This belief developed from sick rooms, where, in the long hours and stillness, those watching the dying heard the beetles tap out their cry for companionship from the long and lonely tunnels within the furniture.

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When death hung in the air, it’s easy to understand how the watchers associated this sound with death knocking, or time ticking down… And hence, these tiny insects, earned the name, deathwatch beetle.

📸: Gilles San Martin, CC BY-SA 3.0 3/

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Friendless Churches

@friendschurches

Jul 28

Thank you with all our hearts for the outpouring of support following the vandalism at St Baglan's.

Given the foul nature of the attack, we don't wish to go into detail, but the interior was soiled, furnishings damaged, and items set alight.
Last night an arrest was made.

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We truly appreciate offers of help, but given the nature of the incident, the clean-up has to be undertaken professionally.

Anyone who has been to St Baglan's will know how special the place is. That people could go there and want to desecrate its sanctity is beyond us.

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We’re hopeful this ancient church can be restored quickly to a place of peace and beauty. We are so grateful for your donations and moral support. To know that so many of you love these old buildings as much as we do means a lot.

Diolch yn fawr iawn.
Thank you.

♥️

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