Detailed review by koshkha
koshkha
Northampton, United Kingdom95%
When I arrived at Canons Ashby village I had parked up near the church but on the house side and so I'd not actually passed the church itself. However, as I was wandering around the grounds of Canons Ashby House, I couldn't help but be drawn to the tower of the nearby church. Finding a path through the gardens which led to the church I set off to have a proper look.
My first instinct when I got closer was that something was wrong with the dimensions of the building. It simply didn't make sense for such a small village to have something quite so grand and the tower that stood at one corner seemed much too big for the building to which it was attached. The height of the church was too great for its rather limited depth and it definitely felt as if something was missing. Sure enough, my instincts were right. The church as it stands today is only a tiny part of what was originally on the site. Canons Ashby had been the site of a much larger Augustinian priory which had been home to a large community of monks.
The priory had been founded way back in the 12th Century and the church was added 100 years later in 1250. The whole lot was built in an orange-hued local ironstone that's now weathered to a duller shade of brown. A local village used it as their church during Medieval times but the Black Death wiped out most of that community in the 1300s. In 1536 Henry VIII fell out with the Catholic church and dissolved the monasteries. Canons Ashby priory was one of the first to fall under his rules and he merrily gave the priory to a good friend, Sir Francis Bryan, who set about destroying most of it leaving just the small church and the large bell tower standing. You might suppose it an ungracious way to treat a gift from the King but it his actions probably met with favour as Henry's men went round the country eradicating the Catholic faith.
Today St Mary's Church Canons Ashby is one of only four private parish churches in the whole of England. It's owned and managed by the National Trust who also have control of Canons Ashby House just up the road. Unlike the house which attracts an entrance fee, visitors can enter the church for free if they are lucky enough to find it open. A board at the entrance gives the times of services when it will of course be accessible but if you want to visit at other times, it's probably worth calling ahead to the National Trust office at the house to check for accessibility.
I entered the church through the wooden door which seems rather dwarfed by the height of the building. The interior is mostly very simply decorated with lots of whitewashed walls. The main splash of colour comes from the large stained glass window on the back of the church, above the altar with its rather odd looking pink cherub design on the walls above. The ceiling is also worth a look and craning my neck it seemed almost too plain and simple for a once-grand building, being made or large wooden beams supporting more wooden planks. There was a slightly unfinished look about it and I wondered if there had been a ceiling at an earlier time to hide the guts of the roof.
Standing in the tower, I found a model reconstructing how the Priory would have looked before Henry and his friends 'redesigned' the place. Sure enough with a square cloistered building attached to the church and tower, the whole balance of the construction made a lot more sense. There are pamphlets to read in the tower that helped me to understand more about why the place looked the way it did and sent me off to look at the ghoulish funeral armour of Robert Dryden which hangs on the wall in the main church.
St Mary's is a fascinating patchwork of past and present and though I would probably not suggest to anyone to go all the way to Canons Ashby just to see the church, in combination with a visit to Canon's Ashby House, it's a pretty good day out. Unfortunately I was on a mission to see several more heritage properties and needed to leave for my next visit on the other side of the county.
St Mary's Church Canons Ashby7
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