Swallowfield, All Saints Church
Time to get back into writing little guides for the Pinmapple project and to share with you some interesting historical places around this county of Berkshire. There is so much to find around here and there are churches aplenty. One of those that is close to us, to be fair we could walk to it in around 30 minutes but we happened to be out in the car anyway, deciding to swing in for a little look around.
Some details taken from Historic England, summarised:
The Parish Church, dating back to the 12th century with later alterations, features a mix of architectural styles including C13 and C15 elements. The church underwent various restorations over the years. Notable features include a timber-framed bellcote, C19 windows, a C19-built bellcote with an octagonal spire, and intricate tracery work on windows. The interior boasts arched braced collar trusses, a plastered ceiling in the transept, and historical fittings like a late C17 chest and a C19 font. Monument highlights include C15 brasses in the chancel floor and C17 mural monuments in the Russell transept. Stained glass windows by renowned artists like Hardman and Holiday adorn the church. Situated in Swallowfield Park, the church is surrounded by trees and overlooks the River Blackwater to the west.
Isn't the gate glorious? Who was George Halpin? Well there was the famous Mr Halpin, designer of lighthouses and founder of Pharology? No, this is for a different George Halpin and I can't find any information, write in the comments if you know! Still a lovely gate and would have been much loved by those who knew the late George Halpin.
The Simmonds family, getting confused with Simonds? Who were the founders of the long since gone brewery and bank of Reading. I thought this tombstone might have been connected with their lineage at first but don't know. If anyone does, write a comment below!
Most of the churchyard is quite overgrown but it's very pretty and can hear the trickle of the Blackwater River nearby.
There is another one of those big imposing tombstones here surrounded by wrought iron fencing. I believe these were erected in order to protect the graves from robbery?!
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Old graveyards are fascinating. We need a project like the one for memorial benches that gives you the history of graves. That's something that could be done on Hive, but it needs some infrastructure.
I’m keen on doing something like that and at the same time something more solid for my sound project too.
I wonder how we could go about this?
Ideally we need something like Pinmapple that geo-tags posts and puts them on a map. It's a bit of a minority interest though. Just having specific tags would help. It would be neat if Hive had a dedicated way to set location. It's probably possible to store more metadata for posts, but I wouldn't know how to do that.
Hmmm can research it though, learn how it could be done