St Bartholomew’s Church, Ruswarp
St Bartholomew’s church at Ruswarp, North Yorkshire, is described on Historic England’s database as:
‘a clever design for a relatively small church with an imposing presence and a real sense of quality despite a limited budget’;
‘the church retains good-quality interior features, most notably the painted ceiling to the chancel and the stained-glass windows’.
It certainly looks like a fine parish church, with an imposing apse (a rounded chancel) built out of a hillside. When I called, the flowers without were blooming and the blossoms waved in the breeze. Sadly, St Bartholomew’s has become a redundant church. A printed sign from the York diocesan ‘Closed Churches Officer’ advised families of relatives interred in the grounds of how they might make arrangements to access the graves.
So here is another token of Britain’s love affair with secular materialism. The houses and cottages of Ruswarp were very pretty, the gardens well maintained, the insides furnished to the highest standards. Had that church remained open, they might have been reminded that houses, families and bills of clean health cannot be retained. One day, all shall be lost, but the eternal truths no longer proclaimed from that church shall remain. A closed church in a dying and ignorant land: the great tragedy of the age.
“Many rulers have destroyed My vineyard,
They have trodden My portion underfoot;
They have made My pleasant portion a desolate wilderness.
They have made it desolate;
Desolate, it mourns to Me;
The whole land is made desolate,
Because no one takes it to heart.
-Jeremiah 12: 10-11, New King James Version
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