I SERVED my title curacy at Boston Stump, the most counter-intuitively named church in England. Its assertive tower rises 267 feet above the flat fen, bristling with pinnacles, crowned with a lantern that lit the way for seafarers when Boston was one of the country’s busiest ports. It is a glory in a diocese full of glories: the spires at Louth and Grantham, the Easter sepulchre at Heckington, Saxo-Norman Stowe. Custodianship of these buildings is both a privilege and a burden, and, with so much of both, you sometimes want neither.
When that mood was upon me, I used to drive through the wolds to visit my favourite church in the diocese: St George’s, Goltho. It is tiny, all but unvisited, standing in a field with a scatter of crooked headstones screened by a few trees. It served a deserted medieval village — one of those Lincolnshire places that sounds as if it was made up by Tolkien. There was a castle and a manor house, but the name endures now because of Goltho Hall, a 19th-century rebuild of what was once the seat of the Puritan Granthams, near by. They built the church, and it shows.
Allan BartonInterior, looking east
Picture a little boxy red-brick barn, with a gable and bell turret at the west end. There are two plain windows on the south and north sides, and then a chancel shoved on the east end. It looks like nothing special at first — not worth the muddy trek from the A158 — but it sits in its setting in a way that makes you persevere. You will be glad you did when you look inside. It has the most perfect interior of its kind I can think of, from a tiny western gallery to a double-decker pulpit, to Laudian altar rails; oddments made coherent by the economy of the space they have to fit into. And to assist in that, it is painted in the pale, puttyish colours that make narrow spaces look wider, and Farrow & Ball ones sought-after.
I READ once of Sylvia Plath visiting the Matisse chapel at St Paul de Vence, in France, sitting quietly inside and weeping after a Sister had opened it for her (it has made others weep for different reasons). I feel weepy when I’m in St George’s, suddenly aware of peace, silence, the immense beyond, in a fractious, noisy, and narrow present.
But now, St George’s makes me properly cry. It was struck by lightning in 2013, and caught fire. The interior was destroyed, the roof fell in, and there’s no money to fix it. It is hard not to see in that a metaphor, although at least it was an act of God rather than an act of vandalism. When that mood’s upon me, I cycle the byways of Sussex and Norfolk looking for something like it, but never quite finding it. A metaphor in that, too.
The Revd Richard Coles is a writer and broadcaster.
Dr Allan Barton’s website is at theantiquary.online
St George’s, Goltho remains closed after the fire in 2013. The Churches Conservation Trust is exploring different options for the future of the site. visitchurches.org.uk