Contents
- Home
- News
- ‘Packed, solemn, engaged’ prayers for Jersey inquiry
- ‘Unsuitable’ foster-parents to appeal
- Churches survive shaking
- UN warns of new food-price crisis
- Larry Norman ends his visit and flies home
- A fair wine for the vestry cupboard
- New Dean has RC background
- News in Brief
- Dioceses continue opposition to sub-post-office closures
- Touring show
- Children’s inquiry probes materialism
- Dug out
- Parishes endure upheaval caused by reorganisation
- Levy promised, as casinos go ahead
- York Chapter House roof
- Religiously aggravated crime less than in 2006
- Shortfall, after CCJ’s work grows
- Charity rattles biscuit- tin to raise awareness
- Chad: aid agencies in crossfire
- Conference: include RCs
- Archbishop’s 50-year thanksgiving
- Kenyan bid for unity
- Get lost, Schofield tells ‘meddlers’
- Africa gospel
- Border-crossing is out, say Windsor bishops of US plan
- Different look
- Consider our proposal: a gift to TAP
- Joint school in Oldham: plans fail
- Antique floor
- Question of the week
- Comment
- Letters
- Real Life
- Features
- Faith
- Humour and crossword
- Pastimes
- Books
- Arts
- Media
- Gazette
 back to News |
 previous story
|
next story 
|
Churches survive shaking
by Bill Bowder
 Shaken: the Revd Mark Charmley with the remains of the cross from St Leonard’s, Banbury OXFORD MAIL |
| AN OXFORDSHIRE church lost a stone cross from its roof this week in the earthquake that rocked much of England and Wales. Several other churches suffered damage. |
 Fallen stonework at St Thomas’s, Market Rasen PA |
| The tremor, which struck at 12.56 a.m. on Wednesday, measured 5.2 on the Richter scale. It continued for up to 30 seconds at its epicentre near Market Rasen, in Lincolnshire. One seismologist said the earthquake was “extremely large in UK terms”. Brickwork fell off the church of St Thomas’s, in Market Rasen, and Chris Pitts from Ecclesiastical Insurance said that, in the main, only properties within five miles of the epicentre were affected. But St Leonard’s, Banbury, in Oxfordshire, which lost its cross, is 125 miles away. “I was surprised we were affected so far from the quake’s epicentre,” the Priest-in-Charge, the Revd Mark Charmley, said on Wednesday. “When I opened the curtains at 7.30 this morning, I looked at the church and saw that one of my crosses was missing,” he said. The heavy stone cross had been dislodged from its site on the bell tower and hit the steep church roof twice, before coming to rest in the roof gully. “The church used to have four crosses. We have lost one, and another came down, but is in store. Now this one’s gone, we have only one left standing, over the west end of the nave,” he said. An assessor from Ecclesiastical Insurance had been on site by midday. They would initially seal the hole in the roof so that worship was not affected. Mr Pitts said that there were places where plaster and stonework had been shaken free. “However, churches are pretty resilient.” |
