These days we leave a digital footprint and local historians routinely track through the formalities of our lives – headstones, memorials, dedications, parish records and legal documents. If they’re really lucky they might find a diary or journal.

Intriguingly, more personal traces can also be found – graffiti is a great example but also carvings were often based on real people – their likenesses (although sadly not their names) preserved for hundreds of years. Some of these may be self-portraits but others would have been villagers either loved, hated or ridiculed for posterity!

Photographs (below) include:

• Poppy Head pew carvings which can be seen on the old pews in the choir stalls and by the choir vestry
• graffiti on the church door and signatures scratched in to one of the East windows – these glass engravings seem to record craftsmen who worked on the Church and Church Officers including Churchwardens.

This year we plan to work on a detailed history of the Church and Churchyard – if you would like to help, please get in touch!

Photos credit: David Powell (Nov 2022)