The Wansdyke & District Forums

Following Gary's holloway and its Chapel Field, I have been thinking about our lost chapels, of which this county had a great many. Not parish churches, which leave a mark, but chapelries and chapels-of-ease, the small places where a scattered population could hear Mass without the walk to the mother church. When the population thinned, or the Reformation came, these were the first to go: unroofed, robbed, ploughed out. I know of one whose font ended its days as a cattle trough in a farmyard, and another whose only memorial is the field name. Does anyone have a Chapel Field, a Church Close, a Cross Furlong near them? The names are often all that is left, and they are worth collecting before the people who remember them are gone.

A lovely subject, Margaret. The field names are gold, and you are right that they are vanishing, because the people who knew them are. We have a Sanctuary Mead in our parish with no church within a mile, and a Paradise Piece that nobody can account for. The font-as-trough story is commoner than you would think; I have seen three. There is something bleak and rather wonderful about a thing made holy for one purpose serving cattle for four hundred years and outlasting the faith that shaped it.

There a place where you can save them i think here Key to English Place-Names https://kepn.nottingham.ac.uk/

There is a font like that at a farm near us; the family know exactly what it is and rather treasure it, the cows drink from it still. I always think the chapel would not mind. Better used than smashed. Margaret, if the society can help collect the field names do say, it would make a wonderful little project for the newsletter.

Thank you Janet, I think we shall. A list of the holy field-names of the hundred, before they go the way of the chapels themselves. I shall start a notebook. It is the sort of work that matters precisely because no one is paid to do it.