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| The Sowerby Flatts |
In most directions you take from Thirsk, all too soon you
leave it behind for open country. But if
you walk south from the parking lot in the city center, suddenly you find
yourself in a busy residential area, and an entirely different village.
From this vantage point, Sowerby seems to consist of nothing
but residential housing. We walked past
a crowded noisy playground along the Sowerby Flatts. In James Herriot’s Yorkshire, Alf Wight
(Herriot’s real name) describes the Flatts as “a gracious sweep of grass
preserved as an open place where people can walk with their children or their
dogs, safe from traffic, free to rove widely over the green acres or follow the
beaten path by the river’s edge.”
I can
certainly attest to its graciousness, as it was a hot afternoon that we walked
along it, and, having not expected such weather, we had not packed shorts for
our vacation. Nor did the seeming
unchanging nature of the brick houses to our right stir our curiosity. Several times we thought of turning
back. But then, sheltered behind a stand
of trees, we spotted our destination.
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| St. Oswald's on a hot, weekday afternoon. |
No one knows when St. Oswald’s was built. The first written reference to it dates back
to 1145 AD. For centuries, it was just a
tiny chapel. But with the rise of the
industrial revolution, Sowerby grew, and the congregation worked together in
the mid nineteenth century to expand the church. Then, at the beginning of the twentieth
century, the congregation again enlarged the church. Coming as we did during the week, we weren’t
able to attend a Sunday worship service.
But on our short visit there, just for a handful of minutes one hot afternoon,
it was obvious how much the locals loved their little church, and the way in
which it served the community.
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| Linda explores the "additions." |
As we headed back to Thirsk, we noticed a building larger
than the sanctuary, the church’s parochial hall, which was built during the
1930s. According to Alf Wight’s son Jim,
the rich, generous Mrs. Pumphreys, whose real name was Marjorie Warner, lived
in Sowerby (along with Tricky Woo, her beloved Pekinese). I wondered if she might have attended St.
Oswalds, and helped such a small church (even after its two additions) build
such a large parochial hall. Yet
according to Reverend Carnall, the vicar of St. Oswald’s, there exists no
record that Mrs. Warner ever attended the church or contributed to the
project.
Perhaps that’s just as
well. The congregation, acting together,
pooled their resources to fund both additions to their sanctuary, even if most of their gifts were
small. It’s nice to think that a
small group of people, acting together for a common cause, could have also
erected such a large building, to serve both their own needs, and that of the
community.
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| The remodeled, "original" altar area. |
Virtually all of the small Nazarene churches of my
experience are gone now. Each of the
congregations flourished for a time, but eventually dwindled and died. In most cases, the buildings remain, and
serve other congregations. But one has
been bulldozed, and the land covered with houses, leaving no trace of the
church that once sat there, or the people who worshipped there. It’s nice to think of a
church that started small and grew into something larger. It’s nice to have visited a church that was built nine hundred years ago, and still serves its
community.
So many of the churches we’ve
visited in England are large and grand.
It would have been easy to skip St. Oswald’s. But I’m glad we walked into Sowerby that hot
and humid afternoon, and visited a small church that has not only survived, but
also grown more vital with the passage of time.
Amazed,
Dragon Dave
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