Churches of the Borderlands

An armchair exploration of a selection of urban and rural churches of the Marches, the Borderlands of England and Wales

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Showing posts from January, 2024

Philip Pankhurst: Historic buildings have been an important part of my life since childhood. Passing St Michael’s churchyard wall on Watling Street in Sittingbourne, Kent aged very little, I'm told I pointed to the wall and said ‘Roman’, which was wildly inaccurate for a wall erected in the mid-nineteenth century, albeit with much reused material, some of it Roman. For my 12th birthday the star present was the Kent volume of Arthur Mee’s King’s England, followed soon after by a handsome racing bike. The bike is long gone, but the battered Mee volume survives, bearing the scars of having travelled from church to church along the highways and dusty byways of North Kent. Several decades on and after a career of ultimate variety, retirement sees me settled in Herefordshire, a blissful county of rolling hills in the Marches with more than its fair share of interesting churches, some of national importance.