'Like the First Idea of a Church'

“The best thing I lit upon by accident was a small country church (by whom or when built unknown) standing bare and single in the midst of a grove, with no house or appearance of habitation within a quarter of a mile, only passages diverging from it thro’ beautiful woods to so many farm houses.”

Thirty years ago the newspaper I worked for launched a circulation push into Saratoga County, N.Y., bounded by the Hudson River on the east and the Mohawk River to the south. I was a features writer and given carte blanche to develop stories in the county. I’ve always felt a city-boy’s attraction to farms and small towns. Using old maps, gazetteers and the newspaper morgue I identified hamlets in the county that sometimes were unknown by name to locals -- Porter Corners, Coons Crossing, Quaker Springs, Kings Crossing. Each week I would visit a hamlet – often little more than an intersection of two country roads -- and talk to the people who lived there.

Historical continuity to the nineteenth century and sometimes earlier was supplied by two surviving institutions – churches and cemeteries. If the church was unlocked or if the caretaker would let me in, I would walk through the sanctuary and stand like Father Mapple behind the pulpit, where a Bible or hymnal was often lying open. The churches were invariably quiet, stark and dusty, with wood frames, plank floors and little decoration.

In the passage quoted at the top, Charles Lamb is writing to his Quaker friend Bernard Barton on this date, July 10, in 1823. During a recent visit to East Sussex, Lamb happened upon an old church in the borough of Hastings. He goes on:

“There it stands, like the first idea of a church, before parishioners were thought of, nothing but birds for its congregation, or like a Hermit’s oratory (the Hermit dead), or a mausoleum, its effect singularly impressive, like a church found in a desert isle to startle Crusoe with a home image; you must make out a vicar and a congregation from fancy, for surely none come there. Yet it wants not its pulpit, and its font, and all the seemly additaments of our worship.”

Known formally as St. Leonard's Church, it’s called Church in the Wood. A church seems to have existed on the site since 1090, not long after the Battle of Hastings. The man to consult on English country churches and their monuments is Nigel Andrew. See the book he published last year, The Mother of Beauty (Thorntree Press). Nige opens his book with the first two lines of Philip Larkin’s “Church Going,” the poem I always had on my mind when I entered those empty rural churches:

“Once I am sure there's nothing going on

I step inside, letting the door thud shut.”

[See Orson Welles as Father Mapple.]