Avenbury, Herefordshire

[Philip Wilkinson]

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The journey and the arrival

I read somewhere that there’s a ruined church in a field somewhere near the village of Avenbury in Herefordshire. Checking in Pevsner,* the church seems to have been abandoned in 1931 and left to the elements, with just the walls of the tower and chancel left above ground. This sounds sad, but I like ruins, and next time I’m in the area I find the rough location and drive up and down a lane, looking for signs of the tower in the loop of the River Frome that Pevsner mentions when describing the location. Seeing nothing, I find somewhere to pull in and get out a useful online map called mapy.com, a Czech enterprise that seems to have a lot of detail and has very clearly marked footpaths. There it is, St Mary’s church, marked with a ‘ruin’ symbol, about one field away from the lane.

I find a small gap in the hedge with a footpath sign and head into a barely discernible defile through foliage that’s almost as tall as me. In this fashion I pick my way through the leafage until I reach a corner of the field where the wild has more or less taken over. The most common plant here seems to be the stinging nettle, and they’re monsters, five feet tall. I feel them doing their worst at various points on my arms and legs. Through these aggressive herbs I find a way through to another area where there’s some barer ground among trees. I can see a tiny clearing with some evidence of human activity (Dumped rubbish? A kid’s den? who knows?) and nearby a fence beyond which a gravestone sticks up.

I must be near, then, but I can still see no sign of a building among all the undergrowth. Finding my way past the gravestone I finally spot the tower, rearing up amid dense underbush and practically covered in ivy. I can’t get any nearer, and what evidence there might be of either the tower’s appearance or approximate age escapes me. According to Pevsner, there are lancet windows somewhere, and an arch that linked tower and nave suggesting a date of the early-13th century.

Having taken the photograph above and one or two more equally uninformative but evocative perhaps of the atmosphere of the place, I retraced my steps to the field and the car. Reading further when I got home, I found that the church had been sold to an archaeologist in 2009 and that work was underway to conserve the ruin. This does not seem to have happened, however, and the structure is on the Buildings at Risk Register. It’s a category A priority building: ‘Immediate risk of further rapid deterioration or loss of fabric; no solution agreed’.† Something needs to be done before nature takes a further part in continuing the decline.

It’s said that sometimes the goal may be elusive, but the journey makes everything worthwhile. In this case, the journey was far from straightforward, the destination might have been more rewarding to a botanist than an architectural explorer, and the condition of the ruin was cause more for anxiety than pleasure. There was still a large part of me that enjoyed the effort of finding this hidden ruin. I am happy to confirm, too, that my skin still puts up a good resistance to nettle rash. The itching was gone by evening.

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* Alan Brooks and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Herefordshire (Yale University Press, 2012)

† The English Heritage description is here.