tourism
Rural Roman Catholic Churches Harvington, Worcestershire
M
ost of the Catholic churches found in villages were originally built as private chapels for wealthy Catholic landowning families.
Harvington Hall in Worcestershire is an excellent example. A moated medieval / Elizabethan manor house, it became a thriving Mass centre from 1580, with two chapels within the house. By 1742 a separate chapel had been built in the church grounds, succeeded by the present St. Mary’s Church in 1825.
Harvington is now a place of Catholic pilgrimage, devoted to St. John Wall. John Wall joined the Franciscan order, serving in England from 1656, mainly in the West Midlands, including a spell at Harvington. Captured in 1678 at nearby Rushock Court, he was taken to Worcester Castle. There
he was sentenced to be hung drawn and quartered, simply for practising as a Catholic priest, one of the last to suffer such a fate under the Penal Laws. He was declared a saint by Pope Paul VI in 1978.
Inside
St.Mary’s Church is a bronze relief which celebrates John Wall’s Englishness and his Franciscan allegiance. With Harvington Hall is in the background he stands under a Worcester apple tree. The wheat and grapes on the columns of the surrounding arch symbolise the Eucharist that he celebrated secretly at the Hall. The anemones (lilies of the field) came to Harvington from the Holy Land.
The Harvington Festival is held over the first two weekends in July each year, with concerts, a Festival Mass and outdoor drama.
Jenny Carpenter
Bronze relief celebrating St. John Wall, hung, drawn and quartered for his faith.
Ministering to caravaners
Somebody at the Swanwick 20:20 Vision for Rural Britain conference mentioned producing a welcome pack for a local caravan site. Was this an idea for us, who have several local caravan sites?
Dulverton is a small town on the edge of Exmoor, heavily dependent on tourism, and has three churches, Anglican, Catholic and independent Congregational, which co-operate where possible. This year we have been invited to do a Songs of Praise at the town caravan site, to mark its 40th birthday. “What about an anniversary welcome pack?” we thought.
Our first hundred (for the idea caught our imagination) contained
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six Christian word-searches, and a souvenir pencil, which we thought might be useful on a wet afternoon. Church material included details of concerts at the parish church, our regular ecumenical bookmark listing all local churches with contact numbers, and our folded leaflet (produced for the local Information Centre) of a town map showing each church on a church trail. We added a town map, a Dulverton tourist leaflet, and a National Park 50th anniversary bookmark. The whole was packed in self-sealing plastic sleeves by patient parishioners, and it looked good.
Then came the surprise. The site manager gently explained that she has 2000 caravans a year!
www.arthurrankcentre.org.uk
Can we afford another 1900 packs? Unit costs, split three ways, diminish with quantity. The word- search software, the greatest expense but non-recurring, has other uses in the long-term. The pencils were non-essential and expensive. Plastic sleeves are cheap and bulk-bought, our printing is done in-house and the seasonal material is part of each church’s general publicity. Tourist leaflets are free. Decision: 500 more packs and then review the situation.
It won’t satisfy everyone, it will do nothing for our other caravan sites, but it is a start.
Father Robert Miller
Catholic Church of St Stanislaus Dulverton, Somerset
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