The Northern Vicar Blog

On Friday 14 October we drove across to Ashbourne for Oxfam books and Waitrose, then came home via the village of Kniveton, and St Michael’s church SK211503. There is no parking on the road outside, so I used a corner of the school car park. Lovely milestone just opposite the church, and a nice welcoming notice on the gate itself. Apparently the road was the Alfreton to Ashbourne turnpike of 1759. The yew tree is probably a thousand years old. At Domesday Kniveton was referred to as the manor of Cheniveton, which was held by the Kniveton family for many...

Up on the borders of Ilkeston – part of Derbyshire that the tourists don’t visit. All Saints, Kirk Hallam is at SK458405, and next to the Vicarage. I should have called there for the key. The parish has a Grade I listed church, and has a website. The church is Norman in origin, but now mainly C14 and 15. The font is Norman, and the church was restored in 1859 by G.E. Street. Pevsner says there is good stained glass and some stylish monuments inside. That was the end of our tour, so we went on to The Bridge...

Not far from Risley is another of the benefice churches, St Michael with All Angels, Stanton-by-Dale. This is in the village at SK464382. There is a notice inviting me to collect a church key – I should have done, and will come back and do so. Stanton was one of the early possessions of Dale Abbey. The Abbey was a house of Premonstratensian Canons, founded about 1200 and completed about 1250. At the Dissolution in 1538 the Parliamentary Commissioners recorded “Stanton juxta Dale is a viccaridge really worth seven pounds per annum, the place is void, in a peculiar antiently...

I started Friday 7 October with an early morning trip to Sheffield to give an armful of platelets. Having had sons and wife who have received blood, I have been a blood donor for many years. Now I go about once a month to give platelets – they are the very small cells which work with the clotting factors in plasma to form a mesh “plug” to stop or prevent bleeding. For more details have a look at this website and, if you can donate blood or platelets, please go and do so. We had had all the children from Walter...

The parish church of Spondon, now just part of Derby, is dedicated to St Werburgh. It is just north of the A52, at SK398359 – website. There’s a good local history website too. There was a priest and church here at Doomsday, and in the reign of Henry I it was given to the Hospital of Burton Lazars in Leicester, the foremost and most wealthy leper hospital in England (you don’t think of leper hospitals being wealthy!). The Hospital was dissolved under Henry VIII, and the vicarage was valued at £30. I wonder how impressive a church it was...

The second church open for HODs was St Leonard’s, Scarcliffe – SK496687 – it is in the same benefice as Ault Hucknall. One 24 page guidebook and a 31 page book on The Legendary Lady Constantia of Scarcliffe. I will not write as much. In 1150 AD Ralph de Aincourt and his wife Matilda ordered the original building (plus a daughter chapel just down the road at Palterton), gave the advowson to Darley Abbey, and had their sons Robert and Peter installed as priests. There are no church records before the Restoration, perhaps because Cromwell’s men destroyed them in 1643...