Monnington on Wye, Herefordshire

Hidden England

I left the main road behind and turned down one of those narrow, high-hedged Herefordshire lanes. Behind the hedges were cider apple orchards and somewhere near a motor was quietly humming as an elevator loaded apples into a deep trailer ready to be taken to Hereford to be pressed. With a few more bends the lane petered to a halt by a sign saying "Private" and a drive leading to a big house. There was no sign of the church, and nowhere else to go, apparently, so I pulled up on a verge, got out, and took my bearings. Then I saw another sign, smaller, shaded by trees, pointing up a green lane between two hedges: "To the church". Off I went, past trickling water and buzzing insects, as the path got less green, more muddy, then more tree-enclosed.

And then there was the tiny timber-framed lychgate, with its four gables and the church beyond. The church was almost entirely built in the late-17th century. Inside, sunlight poured through the mullioned, domestic-looking windows, on to white walls, wooden benches, a screen with barley-sugar-twisted uprights, a communion table, and a font, carved with the initials of the couple, Uvedale and Mary Tomkyns, who paid for the building in 1680. Oil-lamps hung from the plastered ceiling and the brightly painted arms of Charles II (the only brightly coloured object in the place) were displayed on the nave wall. Apart from a gaggle of Calor gas heaters, c 1980, it could almost have been 1680. A bit of hidden England that I shared for half an hour.