St Lawrence Church - West Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, UK - Unique Weathervanes on Waymarking.com

West Wycombe is a delightful, though tiny, village, comprised of a single high street of timber and flint buildings, on the outskirts of which sits the magnificent seat of the Dashwood family, the beautifully Palladian West Wycombe Park. On the summit of the steep conical hill across the road from the house, is the immense Dashwood Mausoleum, behind which towers the strange golden ball that sits uneasily atop the church of St Lawrence. Meanwhile, hewn out of the hillside beneath are a series of caves, reached via an entrance that has been fashioned to resemble a gothic church and which adds to the overall ambience of eccentricity with which the overall estate seems imbued.

The person responsible for all this was Sir Francis Dashwood (1708-1781), a man whose name has become a byword for hedonistic debauchery, and who is today best remembered as a leading light in the most infamous of all the so-called “Hell Fire” clubs. These secret societies had become popular with wealthy young aristocrats in the first half of the 18th century and in 1721 it was considered to necessary to pass a Royal edict condemning “Young People who meet together in the most impious and blasphemous manner.. and corrupt the minds and morals of one another”.

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Date Logged Log User Rating   08/28/2012 The Mekon visited it 01/23/2010 Norfolk12 visited it 08/02/2006 GeoRams visited it

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