Stepping back in English history, there were times when just about everybody went to church. Family, social, employer and landowner pressures meant that church attendance was more or less obligatory. The church was at the very heart of every village community and it thrived.
All of the big stuff happened in the church - baptisms, weddings and funerals. Churches were solid and strong, built to last. They had bells that called you to worship and contained beautiful things - unlike the hovels that most parishioners inhabited.
The clergymen who presided over churches sought to explain the meaning of life through The Bible and associated prayers and songs. They built an edifice of words and holy notions that would be almost impossible to resist.
Though I have been a lifelong atheist, I recognise the key role that the church played in village life. Nowadays hardly anybody goes to church but the voices and footsteps of those who went before us are still there - like echoes. We can't pretend otherwise. Many of them predate The Norman Conquest of 1066.
In the fourteen years I have been taking photos for the geograph mapping project, I have submitted images of over a thousand churches. I am fascinated by them and on my country rambles, despite my atheism, I always make a beeline for the church, hoping that I will find it unlocked.
Along with the top one, here is a small sample of the churches I have visited and not one of them happens to be in Yorkshire:-
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/2e6z1h9
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