Welcome to another instalment in my #churchproject series and this time we find ourselves in the Northernmost corner of Hampshire, not far from both Newbury and Basingstoke.
The church of St Catherine’s is a Georgian building that was built in 1717 and is located on the edge of what is today, Wolverton Park, formerly known as Wolverton House until around 1945. There has been a church on the site since the 12th century
The land was originally part of the Wellington Estate, see my recent post on Heckfield church for some connected history here.
There are at least two Commonwealth war graves that we found during our blustery cold visit, the evening we stopped off here. There were a lot of other interesting military connections around the churchyard that we could see. Interested to learn more about this part of its story. I made a connection with nearby Brimpton airfield and perhaps more likely Greenham Common in my mind but a lot of the graves were for people who had died more recently, between 1980 and 2000. Lots of loose connections I’m keen to tie up and resolve in some way.
The more I think about it, the likelihood is that the people buried in this section of the graveyard probably were American officers based out of Greenham Common during it’s time as an airbase.
I’m not sure, this is all supposition and I’m a very amateur historian, but we all start somewhere and ultimately these posts will span a bit further from the churches; the heart and soul of many communities for centuries. Their stories often discovered through the snapshots that churches and other similar places can provide us.
Many of the sheep were happily chomping on the grass but one of them was distracted by myself clambering around the lovely old wall that encompassed the churchyard.
I would love to find out more about Major T. S. Hohler MC, who was responsible for restoring the church wall in 1989.
I did find the name Hohler in the following reference:
In 1959 it was acquired by T.S. Astell Hohler. The current owner is Isabelle Astell Countess of Errol.
Therefore this must be the same Major?
In any case this is probably in fact a memorial because he passed away that same year and is buried in nearby Kingsclere. Sadly the Countess of Errol, also passed away only a few years ago in 2020.
Therefore it’s unclear who owns the house today.
There are some 16,000 churches spread across the UK and all have some interesting stories to tell. Whilst I’ve never been a church goer at any point in my lifetime, apart from a short period of time when Tina and I would take Alice (my step-daughter) to our local church where we lived at the time, as she wanted to learn more about Christianity; I think we all got more than we bargained for, then moved house and haven’t been back since. Religion perhaps isn’t for us but churches are, they’re for everyone. I think this is because for the two of us, we’ve both grown up with an immense gratitude towards churches, we got dragged around them as kids by parents who had some fascination with these ancient places. Ok I used to hate the national trust, garden centres, churches, scones and jazz. Now I love those things and churches too. Then of course Tina and I got married in a Methodist church, North Camp, Farnborough where Alice went to her youth club as a young girl some years before.
This project is very much a husband and wife thing, it gets us out, we explore and discover places we wouldn’t have known existed otherwise
