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Church of St Mary's ancestor |
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Credit: Judy Stack
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The Church of St Mary, located on the corner of Trustcotts Road and Martindales Road in Heathcote, will soon be 150 years old. In preparation for the celebrations, a group of interested parishioners have been researching the history around the building of the church. This includes making contact with the descendants of the people who built it.
 The church is said to be modelled on the Church of St Lawrence on the Isle of Wight, an island off the south coast of England. An interesting situation developed however when we researched into the story. The Archdeacon of the Isle of Wight very kindly had a photo of his church scanned and emailed to us and we were very excited to finally see what the original church looked like. Some readers will have viewed the photo in the most recent Heathcote Valley Community Association newsletter.
However it was after we received this photo that things got really interesting. Jane Teal, who is the Christchurch Diocese Archivist, found a drawing in the deep recesses of the diocese archives and started wondering. To be fair it really didn’t look that much like the photo of the Church of St Lawrence, which we had already received, but it did bear a startling resemblance to our little Church of St Mary!
 So it was back to the Archdeacon in the Isle of Wight to resolve the puzzle for us. It appears that the drawing and the photo are of one and the same Church, albeit drawn and photographed in different millennia! Puzzle solved!
[As a footnote; the lovely Church of St Lawrence on the Isle of Wight was built in the 12th Century and is still used for services today. You can experience the wonders of the internet by clicking here to take a virtual tour of the outside of the church without leaving Heathcote!]
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