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Holy Trinity in the Cumbrian village of Casterton is a typically English parish church from the 1830s constructed in an Early English style, something shy of full-blown gothic. Its internals are characterised by large, colourful wall paintings, in that typically late Victorian style, and not unlike Burne-Jones’ manner, but by Clarke and the socialist Holiday.

As I sat in the grounds of ruined St Oswald's Priory in Gloucester last month, I pondered its age. Founded by Æthelflæd, ‘the Lady of the Mercians’ and daughter of Alfred the Great, along with her husband Æthelred, Lord of Mercia, the two lay buried somewhere in its grounds. Those big wide arches, above, are from the ninth-century Saxon construction.

St James’ Church at Tebay in Cumbria is a peculiar little church. From without, it seems a little fanciful with its tower’s conical roof as though a long-haired damsel should peer out of one of its windows, and it has an apse at the west end rather than east, where the communion table sits. This is a good example of that peculiarly Victorian phenomenon, the Railway Church, and dating from 1880.