Last night on TV, I think it was the One Show I heard the term 'Champing', this apparently is the adopted name for spending a night in a church. A new initiative for churches to make money to help with their upkeep.
I took special note, because whilst I was dozing in the back pew some months ago, mulling ideas over in my mind and half listening to the usual pleas for money. It struck me that many of our country churches are ideally place to act as Bothy's for cross country routes. Then I thought, "Don't be daft, they would never stand for it".
And lo and behold, out of the blue, comes this suggestion on prime time TV, that churches should encourage people to spend a night in them and if my impaired hearing got it right, for very affordable prices.
Now the location of the church I was was enjoying my daytime reverie in, is supported by a landowner, who has bought the estate that originally built the Church. That estate has a front drive and a back drive, which the landowner is very against people walking along, even though the original house no longer exists. Now the piece of info that did jerk me out of my snooze, was the reason why, a member of the congregation contributed, the church was built. The then landowner built the church because he had fallen out with parish church, now this church is in a location that that would make those two sections of drive a route that many of the parishioners would have taken to the original place of worship.
A way lost around 1880, but this would have connected with another lost way, which crosses the neighboring estate, which guaranteed access to the town center for the community surrounding the new church, even perhaps the parish of the church, which had offended this landowner.
Now this estate sits on a sandstone buff that deflects the River Severn into the loop that creates the geography of Shrewsbury and is, to my mind, the natural final section of a Shropshire section of the Cheshire Sandstone Trail, which would follow the continuation of that routes geology.
I am pretty sure that this landowner is an adherent of the views of Harry Cotterell, author of the CLA's policy on access that does not recognize the economic contribution access makes to our rural communities.
Ironical init.