Wybunbury Church :: 22 October 2018

Staying at the Red Lion in Wybunbury (pronounced Wimbry) to visit Ailsa at University. We had an early breakfast and decided on a stroll around the church opposite our pub/restaurant/hotel. Eilidh said the church bell had rung most of the night when she wasn't sleeping.

Numbers of great and blue tits fed in the trees around the church and as we rounded the corner we found that there was only a tower and the remainder of the church wasn't there ... The Domesday Book contains a reference to a priest in Wybunbury. The church was broken into in 1464, the cross was broken and valuables were stolen. The thieves were caught and hung. The tower was built in the 15th century on the site of the earlier church. By 1750 its foundations were observed to be settling and the tower was beginning to lean. In the early 1790s the church was repaired or rebuilt. In 1833 the body of the church was demolished; James Trubshaw then straightened the tower by removing soil from the higher side and soaking the ground so that the tower settled back straight; this is the earliest known application of the technique later used on the Leaning Tower of Pisa. He rebuilt the body of the church in a style loosely based on the previous building. This church was replaced in 1892–93 by a church designed by James Brooks, which in turn was demolished around 1976. The tower was saved from demolition by a group of villagers who formed the Wybunbury Tower Preservation Trust.

A handful of fieldfare were highly mobile on the tops of the trees and a single woodpecker drummed somewhere ahead. I dropped down to the graveyard lower down the slope. From here I could see over to Wybunbury Moss National Nature Reserve - I must schedule some time to visit when we come next. On a post to my right a jay sat in the shade of a tree. It was quite happy to sit as I watched and it was only when I walked a little closer that it took off and moved along a few posts, then onto a gravestone. Another jay appeared to the right. They soon moved on and were lost to sight. A promising little walk for the future.