The most prominent feature of Booton is the church of St. Michael and All Angels, often referred to as the 'Cathedral of the Fields'.
The church was designed by the eccentric amateur architect the Reverend Whitwell Elwin who was rector there from 1850 until his death on 1 January 1900. Elwin, who also built the village school, was the son of John Rolfe, former lover of native American Indian Pocahontas, who eventually married John Smith, his fellow settler in America.
Whitwell Elwin is also noted for his literary talents as author of 'The Aspect of a House Devoted to Prayer' and for editing the famous Quarterly Review for John Murray, also from Booton. Among his literary friends, many of whom came to stay at the Rectory in Booton, perhaps the most well known are Thackeray, Scott and Lockhart. Elwin was also a friend of Charles Darwin,
Elwin not only raised the funds for the building, he also designed it – without the help of an architect - borrowing details from other churches throughout the country. Some of his models can be identified; the west doorway was inspired by Glastonbury Abbey, for example, but the slender twin towers which soar over the wide East Anglian landscape and the central pinnacle which looks almost like a minaret, seem to have sprung solely from his imagination.
The result is a masterpiece.
Inside, he filled his fairytale creation with angels all modelled on the rector’s young female friends! The nave of the church is copied from Temple Balsall in Warwickshire and has a beautiful angel hammer beam roof. The wooden carved angels are the work of James Minns, a well-known master-carver whose carving of a bull’s head is still the emblem on Colman’s Mustard.
The delicately coloured stained glass windows also show angels as a series of musicians with flowing hair and pretty faces. Edwin Lutyens, the distinguished architect who married the daughter of one of Elwin’s oldest friends, said the church was "very naughty but built in the right spirit".
You may love the church; you may be outraged by it, but you cannot remain unmoved by such an exuberant oddity.
There are two structures in the churchyard which are listed Grade II for their group value with the church. One is the 19th-century boundary wall of the churchyard, together with two sets of gate piers and wooden gates. The other is a late 19th-century sexton's store, constructed in flint with stone dressings and tiled roofs. Its façade has three gables with coped parapets and ball finials.
The co-ordinates take you to a resting place for Willis Feast and to find this cache you will need to find fill in the missing answers.
N052 45.4AB
E001 08.7CD
from:-
In memory of Willis Feast, rector of this Parish STUV-WXYZ
where A= V, B= Y, C= U-Z and D= Z
You are looking for a blue topped container slightly bigger than a 35mm film cannister.
This is hidden outside of the church yard a short distance away.
If anybody would like to expand to this series please do, I would just ask that you could let Sadexploration know first so he can keep track of the Church numbers and names to avoid duplication
To view the church micro stats page, please click here