Tixover. CHURCH : ST LUKE

The church of St Luke at Tixover was visited fairly early on the first day of what was to be a six day and 56 church cycling churchcrawl of South Lincolnshire. I started off though with a sweep along the A43 and A47, taking in a few places that I had not managed to take in thus far. Tixover was the second church visited after Duddington, with Wakerley, Barrowden, Collyweston and Easton On The Hill all being photographed before I headed for Bourne.

  For pure picturesque beauty, from whatever angle you look at it, Tixover would take some beating. Some lovely churches and beautiful places were to follow over the next few days in South Lincolnshire but the beautiful rollong countryside in this area really is a bit special.

  Tixover is a vbery small village and the church is to be found several hundred yards away from the nearest house. My gut reaction on seeing anything like this is that the village was decimated with the plague and was demolished and then re-built. I was told by a very friendly and knowledgable local that this was not the case though. He told me that the village simply relocated a few hundred yards after the bridge that crossed the river Welland was rebuilt in a different position. Tixover's Wikipedia entry disagrres, and states that 95% of the village population was wiped out in the Bubonic Palgue. The entry goes on to say that there are a large number of graves of plague victims in the church grounds. My eyes may well need testing but I saw very little if anything in the church grounds from those days, so I am with the nice man with the dog on this one!

  So, anyway, it was a bit of a hike past a farm and through a field, with the castleated tower of St Luke nestling between some trees, and with bright yellow oilseed rape fields dotted around to all sides.

  The church was locked , but I later found out that the key is kept in a plastic box in the front garden of a house in the village. By the time that I found this out I was on my way back out of the village. With a frighteningly large number of miles to cycle that day I decided to press on and come back another day to shoot the interior.

  I did notice a very ancient looking carving on the porch, which I thought looked Saxon, which looked to have been repositioned at some point in time. Also worthy of note were two gargoyles. Sadly, these were worth noting only as they were probably the most weathered that I had ever come across. Even with full magnification on the camera, and whilst looking at them later on the computer, it was impossible to tell what they had been at one time!

  So, a lovely church in idyllic surroundings. Peace and quiet and a truly lovely place to spend some time in and chill out. Hard to imagine that the busy A47 and A43 were so close.

  However good the views of Tixover church were whilst approaching from the front, I have to say that the view from the back, across the fields, that I got an hour and a half later, were even better. I had photographed Barrowden and Wakerley and was heading back towards Collyweston when the view below stopped me in my tracks! Interesting to think that, hundreds of years ago, the grass fields would have been the old village of Tixover.