Four Churches Walk - Part One (St Peter)

As you travel north on the train from Cambridge the landscape, to most people's eyes anyway, is dead flat. A true Fenman would be able to point out minor dips and rises, he'd also notice that as you go north the colour of the bare fields changes from black to light brown and he'd know the significance of that shift of colour. The black soil is peat, formed by decomposing plant matter, whereas further north the soil is silt brought down by the rivers and washed back in by high tides. And that has made all the difference.

The land up here in the Marshland was drained long before the peat fens, even the Romans had a go at it, and it proved to be very rich fertile agricultural land. It still flooded fairly frequently but by the Medieval period the agricultural economy was thriving. And a thriving economy at that time usually means big, impressive churches. And so it is here, unlikely as it seems in these wide acres dominated by modern agriculture and drainage schemes.

I was on a walk to discover four churches in four neighbouring villages: Wiggenhall St Mary Magdalen, Wiggenhall St Mary The Virgin, Wiggenhall St Germans and first off Wiggenhall St Peter. There's much to see so I'll give them a post apiece.

I walked along the high flood-bank along the River Great Ouse, overlooking the gaudy fields of oil-seed rape (canola) and could see the tower of St Peter's long before I arrived.

As you'll see the church of St Peter is now a ruin. It's a wonder that there are not more ruinous churches around here. The small scattered population of this rural area has a greater concentration of large medieval churches than anywhere else I know. And Wiggenhall St Peter has just a handful of houses.

While it is sad to see churches that have fallen into disrepair, it's also exciting - from a photographic point of view - to find "ruined church" marked on the map. Usually though this excitement is short lived as you normally arrive to find the remains vandalised, overgrown with nettles and fenced off from prying visitors. But not here.

Apart from some mesh panels erected to prevent you being brained by falling masonry from the tower arch, this is a ruin just as you might dream of it - accessible, unspoiled and full of interest and with just enough encroaching ivy to soften the lines of the red brick walls.

You can still make out most of the features you'd expect to find in a small rural church and there are even small carved faces looking down on you.

I could have spent a long time poking around here - in fact, I did spend a long time here! And ended up with more photographs than I can show you here.

Those columns revealed in the brickwork look as though this south wall was once an arcade with an aisle on this side. And, without the distraction of any glass in the windows, the stone tracery looks magnificent.

Rather reluctantly I turned to leave as there were three other churches to visit which were not ruins, though one of them is no longer used by a congregation. They promised to be even more interesting. There was only one disappointment and that was that I could find no trace of the pub that, a century ago, stood nearby; not because I was thinking about beer at this early hour of the morning, but because it used to be called "The Struggling Monkey" - a rare beast indeed among the many Red Lions, White Horses and Black Bulls that lend their names to so many English pubs

Take care.