Nachos of Doom: March 2014

Drive day.

We knew it'd be a while before we'd be back in York (if ever), but we were also happy to wrap up a middling four-night stay at the Lady Anne and say goodbye to the Buzzard Sisters, who were faithfully holding court in the garden as we wheeled our luggage past them to the car.

York still holds an almost mystical grip on us both, but it was time to move on.

South, as the plan would have it, but like last year we started the route headed north. Sharon had pinned a couple of churches at Wigginton and Haxby, close-in York exurbs that seemed easy enough to fit into the schedule.

St Nicholas - Wigginton

Both villages are ancient, pre-dating the Domesday Book, but neither church was particularly historic. Wigginton's parish church (St Nicholas) was built in 1869, replacing an older structure from the fifteenth century, and Haxby's (St Mary) was built in 1878.

St Nicholas - Wigginton

Both pleasant and light churches with tidy Victorian churchyards.

St Mary - Haxby

Back on the road.

We'd had the next destination in our back pocket for a few days.

Chatting with Miss Jones at Kirkham Priory, we mentioned that we were really into old churches, and she recommended we make a stop at the Saxon-era St John the Baptist, in Kirk Hammerton.

St John the Baptist - Kirk Hammerton

Originally dedicated to St Quentin, rededicated (at some time unknown to historians) to St John the Baptist, the church is a really patchwork of Saxon, Norman and Victorian construction and remodeling, with the tower generally considered to be the oldest surviving (and unaltered) feature of the building, dating to about 950AD. This makes the place a little extraordinary - the Saxons didn't build many churches from stone, but researchers have found evidence of Roman tooling on some the churches oldest stonework, suggesting there may have been enough pilfer-able Roman stone laying about to build a church with, or at least some portion of a church tower.

St John the Baptist - Kirk Hammerton

Most of the churches we visited have a little guide book for the tourist, usually no more than a pamphlet commonly traded for a recommended donation of a pound or two. We donated gladly to every church, at least the ones we could gain access to; a little corner of our home office now hosts an irregularly stacked clutch of English parish church pamphleture, a pretty dire collection of arcana.

By contrast, Kirk Hammerton's guide is forty pages, detailing the history of the place (as much as is known, and a lot isn't), with grainy photos of long-dead benefactors and selected views of the building's features, as well as some commentary on the quality of various restorations and additions that the ancient church has endured. St John the Baptist escaped complete demolition at least once, in the 1780's, and some of the over-eager early Victorian restoration was subsequently and successfully reversed.

St John the Baptist - Kirk Hammerton

It's an interesting subject - well okay, a fairly obscure one, unless you're into the evolution of English churches, and we freely admit to suffering a mild dose of this affliction - regarding Victorian restoration. An awful lot of historic church restoration took place in the Victorian years, some estimates put that number as high as 80% of all the parish churches in England and Wales. Some of it was done gently and well, sensitive to the fragile and uniquely historic nature of some of these 11th and 12th century structures, and some of it heavy-handed and pitiless, boasting of the aesthetic tastes (and probably lofty egos) of the contracted architects involved.

Church attendance in the 19th century was dropping; maybe, somebody thought, it was in part due to expecting parishioners to sit on crude, creaky pews in drafty and crumbling Early English churches susceptible to catastrophic collapse at more or less any time. Maybe renewed and modernized ones would help bend that curve.

It didn't, of course, but at least on that level we can be assured that their intentions were virtuous. Or something.

And to be fair to the Victorians, some portion of their work was directed toward structures that were decaying toward irretrievable ruin. Some churches were saved from oblivion during the restoration frenzy. (And some weren't...here's one that wasn't, we'll get to this one in a few days.)

Not restored - St John, Stanton, Suffolk

So there's a bit of a box-of-chocolates effect with church crawling, at least the way we found ourselves doing it. In 2012, we used the Churches Conservation Trust website to point us to truly ancient places, but at some point we simply arrived at some realization that, at the risk of stating the obvious, England was a country brimming with villages and towns more than a millennium old, and virtually anywhere you go, you're going to find a church dating to the 12th or 13th century.

How much of that church had been once-overed by some bearded and furiously gesturing Victorian architect was usually not apparent until we creaked the door open and stepped inside. For a couple of antiquity-crazed American neophytes, we learned to savor that certain thrill in crossing the threshold into an ancient parish church, even if we knew that what awaited inside may not be a pristine time-capsule of medieval worship.

St John the Baptist, Kirk Hammerton

So we came to a leveling awareness that neither the Victorians of 150 years ago, nor the parish church councils of the early 21st century, necessarily subscribe to an over-arching priority of keeping The Old Stuff visible and accessible to tourists. A church needs to be a church, and sometimes that imperative collides with museum-grade antiquity.

But in reality, despite all the preceding blather about the Victorians and their re-costuming of ancient churches, Kirk Hammerton is a slightly different case study. In 1887, the place came under the benevolence of one Colonel EW Stanyforth, the grand-nephew son of the village's churchwardon. The church had already been enlarged twice, once in the twelfth century (it was already two hundred years old by then) and again in 1834, but in the 1890's Stanyfield commissioned much of what is visible today, especially the startlingly vibrant mural paintings.

St John the Baptist, Kirk Hammerton

Saxon chancel - St John the Baptist, Kirk Hammerton

The elegant and silently dignified Saxon chancel is the oldest portion of the church, and all there was to the place in the tenth century, but it's functionally a side chapel now.

The soaring artwork is the real star of the place, and that's barely a century and a quarter old. So a fair bit of the St John the Baptist is indeed Saxon, and the tower from the outside leaves little doubt as to its antiquity, but inside, the church beams and glows with its painted adornment. Stanyfield did this one right - the place is hypnotizing.

Saxon chancel, altar - St John the Baptist, Kirk Hammerton

We spent almost an hour inside, all by ourselves, almost speechless, the clicking of our camera shutters pinging meekly off the mute stone walls. It felt heavy, a somber and benevolent embrace.