St Marys Church, Clophill
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The present St Mary's Church is located in the centre of the small village of
Clophill Clophill is a village and civil parish clustered on the north bank of the River Flit, Bedfordshire, England. It is recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 as ''Clopelle''. "Clop" likely means 'tree-stump' in Old English. However, it also has cogn ...
, between Bedford and Luton in the county of Bedfordshire in the South Midlands of England. The new church, built in 1848, replaced the old church by order of the
Church Commissioners The Church Commissioners is a body which administers the property assets of the Church of England. It was established in 1948 and combined the assets of Queen Anne's Bounty, a fund dating from 1704 for the relief of poor clergy, and of the Eccle ...
in 1850. The old church building, formally The Church of St Mary The Virgin (shortened to The Church of St Mary) and known colloquially as Old St Mary's or The Old Parish Church, is at the edge of the village, and is estimated to be around 650 years old. It sits at the crest of the Greensand Ridge, offering views over the surrounding countryside. Its graveyard is a haven for wild flowers and wildlife. After the church moved to the village centre, incorporating various items from the old church building, the old building was converted for use as a mortuary chapel, but in the 1950s it fell into ruin. The Church of England no longer has responsibility for the Old Parish Church, nor is it deemed to be
consecrated Consecration is the solemn dedication to a special purpose or service. The word ''consecration'' literally means "association with the sacred". Persons, places, or things can be consecrated, and the term is used in various ways by different grou ...
; legally it is the responsibility of Central Bedfordshire Council. It acquired first local, then more widespread, notoriety in the 1960s, as a result of the desecration of a number of the church's graves, with the attendant sensationalist suspicions of
Satanism Satanism is a group of ideological and philosophical beliefs based on Satan. Contemporary religious practice of Satanism began with the founding of the atheistic Church of Satan by Anton LaVey in the United States in 1966, although a few hi ...
and black masses. In 2010 Central Bedfordshire Council, prompted by local activists concerned with the condition of the church, announced it would attempt to restore the Old Church and adopt it for use as a
bothy A bothy is a basic shelter, usually left unlocked and available for anyone to use free of charge. It was also a term for basic accommodation, usually for gardeners or other workers on an estate. Bothies are found in remote mountainous areas of Sco ...
on a regional walking trail. Those plans proved too expensive for the council; instead, in 2012 a new project was announced, which included stabilising the existing ruin and providing a viewing platform on the top of the tower, besides building a heritage centre next to the church.


The Church of St Mary The Virgin

The ruined church at the village edge is a Grade II* listed building, first listed in 1961 and formerly called The Old Parish Church, but later re-listed under the name The Church of St Mary The Virgin. It was probably built c. 1350. It was built in the Perpendicular style, the fabric being mostly of coarse ironstone rubble with ashlar dressings.
William Henry Page William Page (4 September 1861 – 3 February 1934) was a British prolific and pioneering historian and editor. For the last three decades of his life he was general editor of the ''Victoria County History''. Life William Page was born at his ...
, writing in 1908, dated the two-light windows of the belfry, the two-light west window, and the tower arch to the 15th century, and noted that the nave walls are older than the tower. Improvements were made in the early 19th century, with a west gallery added in 1814 and a new east end to the chancel in 1819. By the 1820s the church's seating capacity had become insufficient. Plans to enlarge it came to naught partly as a consequence of the rector falling ill. He died in 1843, and a new rector was appointed, who wanted to relocate the church to the village centre. So instead, a new church was built (1848–1849) and the old one used, for a while, as a mortuary chapel for the graveyard, which remained in use. One of those uses, apparently, was extraordinary: according to the 1908 ''A History of the County of Bedford'', vol. 2, edited by Page, "The churchyard possessed the unenviable reputation of being a haunt of body snatchers, and many human bones have been dug up in the fields of Brickwall Farm". In 1854 the remains of the original church consisted of little more than the nave and tower. The chancel and the galleries had been removed in its conversion for use as a chapel, and several items (including the lych gate and two of the bells) had been transferred to the new building. Stephen Glynne in 1854 described it as "a poor, small church on top of a very high hill, having only a nave and tower, the chancel having been destroyed and the church is now wholly abandoned". In 1898, the church was described in Kelly's Directory for Bedfordshire, which said it "contains several interesting memorial tablets to the Rev. Charles Fletcher M.A., 1753, the Rev. William Pierce Nethersole, vicar of
Pulloxhill Pulloxhill is a small village and civil parish in Bedfordshire, England 342 ft above sea level with a population of 850 at the 2001 Census, increasing to 985 at the 2011 Census. Pulloxhill has a church, a school and one public house. The v ...
, 1799, and another to members of the family of the Rev. Ezekiel Rouse: the roof is of ancient oak. The register dates from the year 1568". Repairs were made in 1901, which ironically prevented Page (in 1908) from being able to date precisely the nave and tower. After the lead was stolen from the roof in 1956, however, the building fell into ruin.


1960s desecration

In the 1960s the church became a focus of media attention after a widely reported incident of graveyard desecration was followed by a series of similar incidents, both at Clophill and across Britain. On 16 March 1963, in a street in Clophill, a local couple saw two Luton youths playing with a human skull. The youths claimed that they had taken it from inside St Mary's, where they had discovered it stuck on a broken piece of window frame that had been jammed into a wall. On the floor were a
breastbone The sternum or breastbone is a long flat bone located in the central part of the chest. It connects to the ribs via cartilage and forms the front of the rib cage, thus helping to protect the heart, lungs, and major blood vessels from injury. Sh ...
,
pelvis The pelvis (plural pelves or pelvises) is the lower part of the trunk, between the abdomen and the thighs (sometimes also called pelvic region), together with its embedded skeleton (sometimes also called bony pelvis, or pelvic skeleton). The ...
and leg bones laid "in the pattern used for the Black Mass", as it was described in newspaper reports of police statements. Scattered cockerel feathers and tracings of two
Maltese cross The Maltese cross is a cross symbol, consisting of four " V" or arrowhead shaped concave quadrilaterals converging at a central vertex at right angles, two tips pointing outward symmetrically. It is a heraldic cross variant which developed f ...
es infilled in red, one newly done and the other somewhat weatherworn, were found inside the church. The
rector Rector (Latin for the member of a vessel's crew who steers) may refer to: Style or title *Rector (ecclesiastical), a cleric who functions as an administrative leader in some Christian denominations *Rector (academia), a senior official in an edu ...
at that time, Rev. Leslie Barker, reported that six graves of females had been tampered with before the stone slab above a seventh, that of Jenny Humberstone who had died in 1770 aged 22, had been dislodged and the coffin broken open. Barker, speaking to the press, stated that "Satan worshippers are known to always use a female at the centre of their ceremonies", and his churchwarden ascribed the damage to "some kind of devil worship". Similarly, police reportedly stated that, as animal sacrifice was commonly described in accounts of satanic rites, the cockerel was possibly "sacrificial", and the crosses were possibly painted with animal blood (although on this point Barker disagreed, thinking them more likely to be simply red paint). Author and researcher Bill Ellis, writing some years later, opined that the police's idea of a "sacrificial cockerel" had been derived from a scene in
Denis Wheatley Dennis Yeats Wheatley (8 January 1897 – 10 November 1977) was a British writer whose prolific output of thrillers and occult novels made him one of the world's best-selling authors from the 1930s through the 1960s. His Gregory Sallust series ...
's 1934 novel ''
The Devil Rides Out ''The Devil Rides Out'' is a 1934 novel by Dennis Wheatley telling a disturbing story of black magic and the occult. The four main characters, the Duke de Richleau, Rex van Ryn, Simon Aron and Richard Eaton, appear in a series of novels by Wh ...
'', where a black cock and white hen are sacrificed. The remains of Jenny Humberstone were reinterred on 23 March, but the incident was not to be an isolated one, thanks to the newspaper publicity. Her grave was desecrated again on two occasions before 2 April, and the church had become a night-time attraction for local teenagers. Humberstone's grave was resealed but was reopened on the night of the following full moon, and there was a run on books about magic at Luton Central Library. The discovery of the heads of six cows and a horse in Bluebell Wood, Caddington, south of Luton, on 9 April was linked to the desecration at St Mary's, fueling further interest. Around the time of the Bluebell Woods incident, a local newspaper interviewed a student from Silsoe Agricultural College who admitted to having visited the church in 1961 with a group of students, i.e. two years before the March 1963 incident at Clophill that saw the disinterment of Jenny Humberstone's bones. They had killed a cockerel, spread its feathers and blood around, and drawn a
Celtic cross The Celtic cross is a form of Christian cross featuring a nimbus or ring that emerged in Ireland, France and Great Britain in the Early Middle Ages. A type of ringed cross, it became widespread through its use in the stone high crosses er ...
as "a huge joke" that "doesn't seem so funny now". Notably, these particular students didn't admit to opening any graves or exhuming any human bones. Stories about St Mary's, and about Clophill in general, continued. The church and the reputation that it had gained from the incident were mentioned in a
coffee-table book A coffee table book, also known as a cocktail table book, is an oversized, usually hard-covered book whose purpose is for display on a table intended for use in an area in which one entertains guests and from which it can serve to inspire convers ...
on witchcraft by the folklorist
Eric Maple Eric Maple (1916–1994) was an English folklorist and author known for his studies of witchcraft and folk magic in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Essex, in particular his first-hand research into the folklore surrounding the cunning ...
, who described "desolate Clophill" with a "wilderness of desecrated and looted tombs, symbols of the revival of black magic in the twentieth century", and recommended that people visit it for a "truly Gothic experience". Leslie Barker retired in 1969, and reported that since the first incidents in 1963 there had been numerous instances of graves being broken into "and some sort of rite performed". The desecration of St Mary's in 1963 was followed by a spate of similar newspaper reports of "black magic rites" in churches in 1963 and 1964, including reports of a series of desecrations in Lancashire, symbols painted on the porch of a church in
Bramber Bramber is a former manor, village and civil parish in the Horsham District of West Sussex, England. It has a ruined mediaeval castle which was the ''caput'' of a large feudal barony. Bramber is located on the northern edge of the South Downs ...
, Sussex, and a pentagram and a sheep's heart pierced with thirteen thorns in St Clement's in Leigh-on-Sea. The incident was covered in the 2013 film '' The Paranormal Diaries: Clophill''.


Transfer to BCC and future use

Central Bedfordshire Council (then Bedfordshire County Council) acquired the old church in 1977. The site continued to suffer from vandalism, as well as
fly-tipping Illegal dumping, also called fly dumping or fly tipping ( UK), is the dumping of waste illegally instead of using an authorized method such as curbside collection or using an authorized rubbish dump. It is the illegal deposit of any waste onto l ...
, under Council ownership. In 2010, local activism led to plans for the church to acquire a new function. It was proposed to convert it into a
bothy A bothy is a basic shelter, usually left unlocked and available for anyone to use free of charge. It was also a term for basic accommodation, usually for gardeners or other workers on an estate. Bothies are found in remote mountainous areas of Sco ...
to provide overnight accommodation for walkers on the Bedfordshire Greensand Ridge walk, with a full-time warden on site. However, there were concerns that the Council would not be able to afford the £75,000 that it would have to spend on such a project. Instead, in 2012 English Heritage and Heritage at Risk agreed to fund restoration work on the church. The work, which was scheduled to start in 2013, has now been completed to include the stabilising of the ruin and putting in a gravel pathway inside the church; and restoring a spiral staircase and providing a viewing platform to allow visitors to climb to the top of the tower and observe the view. Currently the tower tours run daily at 10am and 2pm. Visitors may need to telephone ahead (there is a number to call at the site of the church) as the tours are run by volunteers. Further planned work will then include building a heritage centre next to the church building. The total cost of completing the project is stated to be £225,000, of which £75,000 is to be contributed by English Heritage and £100,000 by Heritage at Risk. The remaining balance of £50,000, to be used for the stabilisation and restoration, is to be funded by
Waste Recycling Environmental Limited Waste (or wastes) are unwanted or unusable materials. Waste is any substance discarded after primary use, or is worthless, defective and of no use. A by-product, by contrast is a joint product of relatively minor economic value. A waste prod ...
's Heritage Fund.


St Mary's Church

The replacement church in the village centre, the current St Mary's Church, was built over the period 1848–1849. The
lych gate A lychgate, also spelled lichgate, lycugate, lyke-gate or as two separate words lych gate, (from Old English ''lic'', corpse), also ''wych gate'', is a gateway covered with a roof found at the entrance to a traditional English or English-style ch ...
was transferred there from the old church, as were two of the church bells, one made in 1623 and the other, a treble, made by Emerton of Wootton in 1774. A third bell, bearing only the initials "R.C.", was left behind in the old building. The parish church was officially transferred to the new building from what was then named the Church of St Mary in September 1850. The architect in charge of building the new church was Thomas Smith of
Hertford Hertford ( ) is the county town of Hertfordshire, England, and is also a civil parish in the East Hertfordshire district of the county. The parish had a population of 26,783 at the 2011 census. The town grew around a ford on the River Lea, ne ...
, who had also built the church at
Silsoe Silsoe is a village and civil parish in Bedfordshire, England. The village used to be on the main A6 road but a bypass around the village was opened in 1981 at a cost of £1.6m. History Origin The village name is derived from the Danish word ...
. Built by Smith & Appleford of
Pimlico Pimlico () is an area of Central London in the City of Westminster, built as a southern extension to neighbouring Belgravia. It is known for its garden squares and distinctive Regency architecture. Pimlico is demarcated to the north by London V ...
, the Clophill church was constructed out of brown sandstone in rubble courses, with details in
Portland stone Portland stone is a limestone from the Tithonian stage of the Jurassic period quarried on the Isle of Portland, Dorset. The quarries are cut in beds of white-grey limestone separated by chert beds. It has been used extensively as a building sto ...
. The nave was exactly long and wide, with the aisle wide. It had a gallery at the west end, an open tower that allowed a view of the west end window, and open uniform pews in the nave and aisle to accommodate 530 people. In total, with the exception of the south aisle and the sandstone that were donated by the then parish rector J. Mendham and
Earl de Grey Earl de Grey, of Wrest Park, Wrest in the County of Bedford, was a title in the Peerage of the United Kingdom. History The title was created on 25 October 1816 (as Countess de Grey) for Amabel Hume-Campbell, 1st Countess de Grey, Amabell Hume- ...
respectively, the building cost £2,300 (). In May 1957, an additional bell was moved from the old church to the new by Whitechapel Bell Foundry, at a cost of £123. This was one of several removals from the old church that were performed as reaction to the theft of the lead from its roof the year before. The cross-beam from its roof, which Page in 1908 had described as "enriched with a vine pattern of sixteenth-century character" was moved to a new memorial Chapel of St Alban in the new building, which was consecrated on 17 June 1958 by the bishop who was then the Archbishop in Jerusalem (now the Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem). John Gedge, architect, of Bedford, drew up the plans for this new chapel, which involved reorienting the organ, as well as a new altar and
altar rail The altar rail (also known as a communion rail or chancel rail) is a low barrier, sometimes ornate and usually made of stone, wood or metal in some combination, delimiting the chancel or the sanctuary and altar in a church, from the nave and oth ...
, a new choir vestry, a new credence table, and a new prayer desk. The altar rail in the new chapel was made from new oak and an 18th-century staircase taken from old church. Some years later, in 1964, dry rot was discovered in the roof of the new church. Chrystal & West, another firm of Bedford architects, drew up plans to remove the existing roof and
clerestory In architecture, a clerestory ( ; , also clearstory, clearstorey, or overstorey) is a high section of wall that contains windows above eye level. Its purpose is to admit light, fresh air, or both. Historically, ''clerestory'' denoted an upper l ...
, and substitute the steep pitched roof that remains today. Kelly's Directory of 1898 noted that the church had been erected by public subscription and was "approached by a noble avenue of elms." Today the parish church is part of the
benefice A benefice () or living is a reward received in exchange for services rendered and as a retainer for future services. The Roman Empire used the Latin term as a benefit to an individual from the Empire for services rendered. Its use was adopted by ...
of Campton, Clophill and Haynes, in
deanery A deanery (or decanate) is an ecclesiastical entity in the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Anglican Communion, the Evangelical Church in Germany, and the Church of Norway. A deanery is either the jurisdiction or residenc ...
of Ampthill and Shefford, and the archdeaconry of Bedford."Clophill" at livinggodslove.org/
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References


Reference bibliography

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Further reading

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External links


"Clophill Church" at .bedfordshire.gov.ukclophill-lodge.co.ukClophill History - Old St Mary's Church pre-1848Clophill History - Old St Mary's Church post-1848
{{DEFAULTSORT:Clophill, Saint Mary Buildings and structures completed in 1350 14th-century church buildings in England Churches completed in 1848 19th-century Church of England church buildings Church of England church buildings in Bedfordshire Former Church of England church buildings Church ruins in England Tourist attractions in Bedfordshire Ruins in Bedfordshire Structures formerly on the Heritage at Risk register Grade II* listed churches in Bedfordshire