RC Church of Our Lady Help of Christians, Bourton on the Water, Gloucestershire

About the Day
A great day today with walks connecting up the Slaughters and Bourton. Got through the equivalent of three rolls during the course of the day and just one shot stands out for me; this rather sloppily executed one of what at first blink might be mistaken for an engineer's workshop.

About the Blip
The church stands a little back from Station Road, between modest residential properties. I was unable to disconnect the church before me from the 14th century one I had seen and entered in Bourton village centre not a half hour earlier. The humility of this place was overwhelming.

The parish church now of the established Church of England, not unlike the parish church of many a proud village the width and breadth of a shire, with finely honed masonry, timbers and glassware, all requisite drapes, monuments and so forth, steeped in bygones and the stories of village worthies, was once RC. But then there was the divorce from Rome and adherents to the 'old faith' were ridiculed and unwelcome without a public vow of disassociation. And if they refused they faced charges of recusancy and praemunire. So soon they lost their clergy. Practicing families dwindled with a decline in pro-faith marriageable partners. Their gentry faded to obscurity, and with it ther lands and stocks, enveloping all in a cloud of fatalism. But with time, winter turned to spring and allowances were conferred, and slowly, friends of the old faith cobbled together sufficient to erect a church.

All this was writ for me in bold when I got home and happened on the church website.

Evidently during WWII, Father O'Donnell from nearby Stowe was saying Mass every Sunday in a Nissen hut at Little Rissington airfield. After the war, efforts were made to assemble a fund. By 1957, jumble sales, fetes, bazaars and what have you, had raised sufficient to acquire this patch of land. Building work began on the erection of this church on 24 May 1960, and less than 5 months later, on 9 October, the first mass was said.