The modern village of Stubbington includes the far older village of Crofton, hence the name for the parish. Evidence of a church within Crofton parish can be traced back to the Domesday Book of 1087. It is likely that there has been a church on the site of St Edmund the Martyr since Anglo-Saxon times. The famous diarist, Samuel Pepys noted that the graves in the churchyard were accustomed to being sown with sage.
The church of St Edmund the Martyr (or St Edmund’s or Crofton Old Church as it is usually known) was administered as a chapel of ease from the greater parish of Titchfield until 1871 when Crofton became a parish in its own right with the Revd Herbert Alder being appointed as its first incumbent. By the 1870s the village of Stubbington was expanding, whilst the village of Crofton was in decline. Moreover, St Edmund’s was in a dilapidated condition.
It was decided that a new church was needed at the heart of Stubbington. Under the direction of the then vicar the Revd Pitt Cobbett, the new church of Holy Rood was built at a cost of £4000: it was consecrated in 1878. Holy Rood church tower was added in 1928 in memory of all those Old Boys of Stubbington House School who had fallen in the Boer and Great Wars. Another milestone for Holy Rood happened in 1968 when a severe fire destroyed the entire chancel end. This was seen as a God-given opportunity to modernise the interior of the church building. The church centre was later added in 1991.
The cache is a short distance from the published coordinates. To obtain the final location you will need to answer a few simple questions and do some simple number/letter replacement and simple mathematics:
Final Cache Location is:
N50 49.ABC
W001 12.DEF
Go to the published coordinates and answer these questions:
A. Number of sides on the tower
B. 10th number of the Church Office phone number.
C. The year the Church was conscrated - 18C8
D. Number of vertical posts on the front wall (including either side of the entrance/exit) + G
E. The year the church tower was added - 1E28
F. A+G
G. The number of clock faces on the tower.
Checksum (all 15 individual numbers added together) is 59.
Good luck!
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
