Avenbury, Herefordshire

The journey and the arrivalI read somewhere that there’s a ruined church in a field somewhere near the village of Avenbury in Herefordshire. Checking in Pevsner,* the church seems to have been abandoned in 1931 and left to the elements, with just the walls of the tower and chancel left above ground. This sounds sad, but I like ruins, and next time I’m in the area I find the rough location and drive up and down a lane, looking for signs of the tower in the loop of the River Frome that Pevsner mentions when describing the location. Seeing nothing, I find somewhere to pull in and get out a useful online map called mapy.com, a Czech enterprise that seems to have a lot of detail and has very clearly marked footpaths. There it is, St Mary’s church, marked with a ‘ruin’ symbol, about one field away from the lane. I find a small gap in the hedge with a footpath sign and head into a barely discernible defile through foliage that’s almost as tall as me. In this fashion I pick my way through the…