Pilgrimage to Lichfield Part 1 - Hamstall Ridware

Medieval art, architecture and Jane Austen

Introduction

Last weekend I went on a church crawl or mini-pilgrimage to the Lichfield area. I thought that today I would be showing you some of the wonderful things in Lichfield Cathedral but, as often happens, the trip turned out differently than I expected.

I have a “hit list” of churches to visit, which is always over-stuffed, on the basis that some won’t be open or won’t be incredibly interesting. I gather information from books, most of which, by necessity of space, are limited in what they mention. As a result, I never quite know whether what I find will match the billing, let alone whether the church is open.

These days, when we think of “pilgrimage”, we usually go straight to the big church we are aiming at, but in the days before the invention of the car, people wended their way along narrow roads through the countryside, visiting any churches which lay on the route. I live near old pilgrimage routes, most of which are not mapped in any meaningful way; they either lie under modern roads, unseen, or they are now small unpaved lanes or footpaths in the country, occasionally marked by the battered remnants of crosses, either physically or in a village name.

So in the approach to Lichfield, I scheduled a few churches to the north, some of which may have been on the local pilgrimage routes. It turned out that these were full of wonderful things and so, in these weekly posts, I will give you a church-by-church account of my mini pilgrimage until I get to the end. I don’t know how long this will take and I will try to give you a warts-and-all account as these trips are never easy or comfortable.

In this post we will discover how this church features in Jane Austen’s work, its medieval features and most importantly, the unique art it contains.

Part of the medieval painting at Hamstall Ridware

Into the Midlands

There is a general rule in church-crawling; the worse the road, the better the church at the end of it. As TC (Travelling Companion) and I turned into a narrow country lane - or “churching road” as we call it - we said exactly that. The road contained multiple potholes, mostly at the edges but occasionally in the middle, along with large pools of reddish brown water and varying quantities of mud spread across the road or lining the centre section. I’ve never seen roads like it; easily the worst I have ever driven on. TC, being of a nervous driving disposition, was grateful to be in the passenger seat, where he stayed all weekend, happy to give up the opportunity to hurtle down steep, narrow or muddy roads. It turns out that Staffordshire soil is a sandstone based loam, hence the reddish colour, its fine grain meaning that it is vulnerable to movement under excessive rain. We’ve had a lot of that lately.