The Church of St Laurence

Definitely spooky, this place. The eerie fragmented cross in the chancel bathed in dmj’s dusky light, the bare alter and stark metalwork certainly make you want to keep looking over your shoulder and checking where the exit is.
Look at the heavily warn stone steps and you don’t need the pamphlet to tell you this place has history, possibly dating back to 709. Even I can’t remember those days — they were dark. Look at this copied from an historical summary of 709:
‘709 — Kings Swaefred and Sigeheard of Essex share power with Offa, son of King Sigehere. King Coenred of Mercia abdicates the throne and journeys to Rome to become a monk. King Offa of Essex accompanies him. Ceolred, his cousin, succeeds to the Mercian throne. Dynastic rivalries lead to the banishment of their second cousin, Prince Aethelbald, who flees to the East Anglian controlled Crowland Fens. Bishop Wilfred of Hexham dies at Oundle and is buried at Ripon Abbey. He is later revered as a saint.‘
No Facebook, no Qype, no Tescos.
This church throbs ancientness and you feel drawn to its ancestral heritage — well worth the visit, don’t forget to come back into the 21^st century.

Bradford-​on-​Avon is a lovely historic town close to Bath, with a handsome mediaeval bridge, an impressive 14^th Century tithe barn and a lovely parish church of Norman foundation. But the most famous building in Bradford-​on-​Avon is undoubtedly the diminutive church of St Lawrence which, by an accident of history, is Britain’s most perfectly preserved Saxon church. A church was founded on the site in AD 705 by St Aldhelm, although most archaeologists agree that the present building dates from the reign of King Aethelred II (978‑1016). A charter granted Bradford to the nuns of Shaftesbury in 1001, and the church may date from this grant. It has been suggested that the richness of this small church implies that it was intended partly to house the relics of Aethelred’s brother, Edward The Martyr. Its subsequent history is rather obscure, but appears quite early on to have been converted into secular use, with other buildings growing up around it, and extra floors inserted into its nave and chancel. These were removed when it was rediscovered and restored in 1856, although the walls still show evidence of them. There are no remaining additions from later periods, so the building we now see is purely Saxon. The church is tiny the nave is just 25ft long and the chancel is 13ft long, although it feels larger as it considerably taller than it is wide. A north porticus is still intact, but the south has been lost, although it is clear from the exterior where it stood. The robust Victorian buttresses on the south side were erected when the school-master’s house, which had bee built on this side against the church, was demolished. Decoration is restrained: the exterior has Romanesque blind arcading, and the interior has simple mouldings around the narrow door arches, but the most interesting carvings are those of two bearded flying angels on the east wall of the nave. There are only a few, small windows, giving a dusky light. Although the interior is bare of furnishings, it is nevertheless an ancient and atmospheric space.