Church Micro 1351 St. Helen's Hangleton Traditional Geocache

This cache has been archived.

Orlando's Rat: I can no longer cache due to physical health problems and medical advice to continue to shield. So I'm archiving this cache. Thank you to everone who visited and logged a find (or a DNF) or threw the magnetic cache up to the top of the lamppost.

More
Hidden : 9/9/2010
Difficulty:
1 out of 5
Terrain:
1.5 out of 5

Size: Size: micro (micro)

Join now to view geocache location details. It's free!

Watch

How Geocaching Works
Looking for a different adventure?

Please note Use of geocaching.com services is subject to the terms and conditions in our disclaimer.

Geocache Description:

A beautiful and wonderfully unspoilt Saxon and Early Norman church.

I have adopted this geocache from brightonrob, who has (regretfully) now moved away from the area. Hopefully I can fulfill his trust in allowing me to take on some of his caches.

BrightonRob often passed this church and was struck by an oddity. How was it that in this modern area of housing there sits a church that is obviously of great age?



The herringbone flints point to Saxon construction and the tower shows reasonable local wealth in the thirteenth century, yet the tiny windows led me to believe that by late Medieval times, the money had gone.

And this is the case. The church is indeed late Saxon and it was developed up to the fourteenth century when the chancel with its larger window was added.

And then it all stopped......Hangleton more or less vanished and the church endured many centuries of decline and neglect, so much so that by 1600 the village comprised a single dwelling and even by 1725 the parish was a mere five families.

And the reasons for decline? Black Death probably, but also a drift away from an area no longer on any through route.....Hangleton simply withered away.

And then, in the twentieth century, the spread of Hove swept up the slopes from the sea and the church, which had stood in beautiful but lonely isolation on the Downs for centuries, found itself in the middle of a community for the first time in five hundred years.

Finally, why St. Helen? She was the mother of the Emperor Constantine and an early Romano-British Christian saint. This leaves us with the intriguing possibility that the very earliest church here was a late Roman foundation, not so unlikely as the area had been Christianised and wheat from here was exported from the little port that stood at the mouth of the Adur and a Roman road passed nearby.


****************** ********************
For full information on how you can expand the Church Micro series by sadexploration please read the Place your own Church Micro page before you contact him at churchmicro@gmail.com.

See also the Church Micro Statistics and Home pages for further information about the series.
****************** *******************

Additional Hints (Decrypt)

Vafvqr pbeare

Decryption Key

A|B|C|D|E|F|G|H|I|J|K|L|M
-------------------------
N|O|P|Q|R|S|T|U|V|W|X|Y|Z

(letter above equals below, and vice versa)


Advertising with Us

Inventory

There are no Trackables in this cache.

View past Trackables

What are Trackable Items?

Bookmark Lists

View all bookmark lists...