Upwood. CHURCH : ST PETER
A visit to the church of St Peter at Upwell, in late September 2008. Upwell is just over two miles from Ramsey and is therefore one of the further flung outposts in the catchment area of this site. It also provided the highlight in what was a mini three church tour of the Ramsey area.
I left Peterborough in dense fog. The Met Office suggested that this might have cleared by mid morning. No such luck though! Got off the bus at Ramsey and my first scheduled visit was to the church of St Thomas A Beckett in that town. The fog was still really bad at that time so I abandoned there and headed towards neighbouring Bury. This also proved to be worse than useless. I decided to walk to Upwood, a couple of miles away, in the hope that the sun might have come out by the time that I arrived. The fog cleared en route but it was still pretty dark and dismal so apologies for the standard of the exterior shot.
The fog had highlighted the spiders webs in the graveyard. Am constantly amazed at how big these can be. Wonderful works of construction. One photograph included bottom of the page on the left.
Very pleasant village this with the church being situated in the middle of the village. A large building opposite the church had several trees in the grounds and this housed possibly the loudest collection of crows that I have ever heard. The noise was incredible!
I found the church open due to cleaning. I was told though that this church is open every day during daylight hours. Some very pleasant people were doing the cleaning and a lady gave me an impromptu tour whilst her husband popped back home to get me a church history as they had run out in the church itself. Nice people who obviously loved their church..and so they should as it is a lovely building!
One very nice aspect of the interior was a lovingly kept volume of photographs, kept under glass, which features photographs of every First World War soldier from the village who fought in that conflict. Photographs were taken by the local vicar at the time and each soldier has his own page. Pages are turned over regularly. What a lovely idea.
The churchyard has been closed for burials for many years. What is left, to my mind, represents one of the best and most interesting churchyards that I have seen for a long time. The quality of some of the carvings on the gravestones is remarkable. A lot of these date from the mid 18th Century, but one grave, standing at a precarious angle and with the symbol of an hourglass on it denoting the passing of time, has the still legible date of 1687 on it.
When the man returned with the church history he showed me what is reputed to be a Seventeenth Century plague pit at the west end of the churchyard. The plague is reputed to have been brought to Upwell by a member of the Cromwell family, in a bale of cloth. The mass grave is said to have been dug just outside the original church wall. A subsequent wall now enclosed the reputed plague pit, with the area heavily covered in ivy.
There was mention of a church here in the Domesday Survey of 1086, and it is thought that a church has existed on this site since Saxon times. Inside, the chancel arch dates back to 1100 whilst two arches in the North Arcade date from 1150. The West window, pictured below right is 13th Century whilst the South door is known, confusingly, as the West door!! Named such after a charitable lady with the surname West. The Lady Chapel was restored in memory of those in the locality who lost their lives in the Two World Wars. There is also one name remembered who lost his life in the Korean war.
Lovely church and very pleasant people. A pleasure to meet them. A quick spot of lunch and then off back towards Bury. Still very dull when I left Upwood, but blazing sunshine twenty minutes later when reaching Bury!
