
After my talk at Evesham Library on Friday, as part of Evesham Festival of Words, I went for a walk around the town. I’d never visited Evesham before, and I became rather fond of its Georgian frontages along the main road. I took a side street and found myself surrounded by timber-framed buildings. By accident, I ended up walking through a Norman gatehouse and out into a space that contained not one but two very old churches, very close together.
I have never in all my days seen two churches standing that closely together before. Apparently, no one knows why St Lawrence’s and All Saints were built there, about fifty feet apart. All Saints still functions as a parish church, but St Lawrence’s is redundant, cared for by the Churches Preservation Trust.
I happily wandered round both churches, and in All Saints, I saw the plaques which are in every church around the country – to the locals who died in war. One of them records the death of a man in the First World War who had once been a chorister in the church, and another brass plaque commemorates a man who had been a Scout leader before being sent off to war.