Devon
-
Loud organs, his glory
It was reported in July that archaeologists at Exeter Cathedral had made some exciting new discoveries from their investigation in the Quire area of the 900-year-old building. Experts at the site said they were now certain they had uncovered the foundations of the...
Continue reading this entry → -
Celebrating Harvest and Christmas with Robert Hawker
I wrote this as we were preparing for our annual harvest festival at Pip and Jim’s church in Ilfracombe. In medieval England Lammas Day (1st August) was probably recognised as a thanksgiving for the first fruits of the harvest,...
Continue reading this entry → -
Exeter’s cleverest bishop?
The longest serving Bishop of Exeter in the twentieth century was Robert Mortimer. When I arrived at the preparatory department of Exeter School in 1952, he had already been Bishop for three years and when I left the main school...
Continue reading this entry → -
From Bishop Leofric to Bishop Jackie
When Bishop Jackie Searle came to Pip and Jim’s church in Ilfracombe on 13 June, preached, and celebrated communion with us, she was too modest to remind us that there was a Bishop of Crediton nearly 150 years before...
Continue reading this entry → -
The Devon men who shaped the infant Church of England
It is remarkable that two of the thinkers who shaped Anglicanism in the first 50 years of its existence were both Devon men, and one of them was actually born in our group of churches – John Jewel who...
Continue reading this entry → -
From Devon to the throne
Princess Victoria first saw the sea at Sidmouth. Her father (Frederick, Duke of Kent, the fourth son of George III) had come from Germany to England on borrowed money, and his creditors were pursuing him. A captain in the...
Continue reading this entry → -
Newman: One step enough for me
Last month I wrote about John Henry Newman’s love of the colours and scents of Devon. In December 1832, with his Devon friends Robert and Hurrell Froude, Newman set off from Falmouth on board the packet ship Hermes bound...
Continue reading this entry → -
The saint who loved the colours and scents of Devon
In the early church a common word applied to all believers in Christ was ‘saint’. So when Paul wrote his letter to the Romans, he addressed it to ‘all those in Rome who are loved by God and called...
Continue reading this entry → -
The rector who took time off to write a novel
‘But there is Ilfracombe, with its rock-walled harbour, its little wood of masts within, its white terraces, rambling up the hills, and its Capstone sea-walk, the finest “marine parade,” as Cockneydom terms it, in all England, except that splendid Hoe at Plymouth … And...
Continue reading this entry → -
Farewell to a man of ‘spiritual generosity and kindness’
On 6 March, 2019, Lord Habgood, who was Archbishop of York from 1983 to 1995, died at the age of 91. Eighty years earlier, at Eton, he hated games, but enjoyed chapel, although he rejected anything to do with God...
Continue reading this entry →
