Dud chapel

Today I have another small blog, taking a break from the larger adventures I've been writing about on the international blog. This tiny roadside chapel was on my radar for some time, but it's a bit remote, so I put it off. It was just another addition to my growing list of local loose ends. I was a bit apprehensive as I approached, mainly because the above photo is what the chapel looks like, but the image below is how it looked on streetview when it first caught my attention:

Goddammit, I've been catfished by Google!

So as you can see, while the chapel was once gloriously obscured by nature, now it's been cleared out and exposed. Someone has taken an interest in it. I'm late to the party on this one. 

In all fairness though, streetview has been updated in recent years. The chapel has just been on my to-do list for longer than that, so really it's my own fault for not checking in to see if anything had changed.

Nevertheless, I'm here now. I might as well take a look, and see how much of this cute derelict chapel is left to see.

There's a couple of sheep skulls in the wall, which is quite ominous, but makes for a good picture.

I guess "Chapel of Bones" would make a great cheesy nickname for this place. 

 

Whatever happened to that guy who put bones into all the nicknames of the urbex spots for clickbait? We had "Church of Bones," and "Village of Bones." The Village of Bones actually caught on, and is still getting referred to as such by the mainstream media today, despite just being a derelict farm house, and containing no bones. The church of bones, really a chapel but actually containing bones, is more commonly referred to as Lambs Rest Chapel now, but what a legacy for that weird chap. He gets to forever point at a ruined farm house called the village of bones and say "I achieved that. That was me."

 

Slipping inside the chapel, I found... almost nothing. It was a little heartbreaking, but it's still possible to imagine how it would have looked. On the far wall it's still possible to make out the arched details above where the vicar would have addressed his presumably tiny congregation. The details, the pews, everything chapel-like, has been stripped out, presumably by the same people who cleared out the bushes and trees that were obstructing the chapel from view. 

The ceiling has some glorious decay.

So in regards to the history, it was built in 1866, but it's in a fairly remote location. Chapels like this typically owe their existence to the time before motorised transport and the railway really took off, when people lived off the land in tiny disconnected communities. For them, the chapel was a lifeline. For those who lived in hamlets and on farms, coming here on Sunday was actually their social life.This was a communal hub of sorts.

As time passed, the number of religious people dropped, and the congregation stopped being the place to be. In addition to that, the advances in technology connected the rural communities to the rest of the world. Chapels like this relied on the communities to maintain them, but with the communities themselves no longer confined to one spot, the chapels became neglected.

This one in particular must have been Hell for the congregation to get to as motorised traffic became more and more prevalent, purely because its door and steps lead right onto the road, with no pavement. Obviously it was a lot less hazardous in 1866, but in the modern era it's a health and safety nightmare. While I don't have an exact date that the chapel closed, I do know that it was disused by 1990.

Now it seems to be used for storage. Having come here to see the chapel, and finding that it wasn't what I was hoping, I decided to leave. I don't normally blog about my dud adventures, but I do actually like this chapel, and I feel like it needs documenting for its historic significance. It would have been quite cute in its day. 

But this is why urbex is important. Real urbex, that is. Documenting places before they're lost forever, not purposefully annoying security in a power station and then crying victim when they use your social media stickers to figure out who you are and take legal action. I mean real urbex. If I'd come here a few years earlier, I'd have very different images to show, but now the former interior of this chapel has been lost forever.

So that's all I've got for this spot. Don't go here. It's clearly at the start of some sort of restorative process, and it's best not to disturb any of that.

My next couple of blogs will not be duds. One's a nuclear monitoring bunker and the other is another chapel that I'm quite fond of. 

 

In the meantime, to get regular updates on the blog, follow me on Instagram and Reddit, and also Twitter and Facebook for some reason. Using Facebook is a little like performing self harm nowadays, but nevertheless I am on it.

Thanks for reading!