All Saints Church, Bow Brickhill

We decided on a walk from one of our many books in an area we haven't walked before, Bow Brickhill near Milton Keynes. It was a good walk, only about 4.5 miles and through a mixture of dense pinewoods, very sandy tracks, beech woods, an area where there are Redwoods growing alongside Rhododendrons and of course lots of bluebells! It's nice to walk somewhere different occasionally and I think we'll return to do this one again someday!

On the last leg of the walk we passed All Saints, the Parish Church of Bow Brickhill, known in the 1930's as the Beacon Church as it was conspicuous, standing out like a castle on the hill, however now that the hill is heavily wooded, views to the south are masked, but there are spectacular vistas of Milton Keynes from the top of the tower.

The tower contains an unringable, but interesting, ring of four bells, with original fittings. The Church are keen for them to be rung again but also want to keep the original fittings, sadly they will have to chose between the two.

During the Napoleonic Wars the tower was used as a telegraph station and during the 1939-1945 war was used by the Royal Observer Corp.

The Church is built of sandstone rubble, in large blocks, dug from the greensand escarpment on which is stands. Before the fifteenth century it probably consisted of an aisleless Nave and a Chancel dating from the twelfth century. The first records of the Church refer to a transfer of the advowson in 1185.

The North and South aisles and the West tower were added in the fifteenth century when the arcades were built at the same time.