Relic Overload

A couple of weeks ago a sunny day off took me walking the footpaths north of Guildford and to the church of St Edward, Sutton Green. I came here some years ago to visit the very nice holy well of St Edward in the churchyard (a site whose history is somewhat obscure), but had never managed to get inside the church itself. On this particular day the building was open, and although the church - beautifully situated across the fields as you can see in the photograph - isn't a great success architecturally (it's too much out-of-the-catalogue 19th-century Roman Catholic for that), it contains the most astonishing collection of relics. There are various bits of sanctified bone encased in glittering Gothic reliquaries, a fifteenth-century cupboard which once did service as a tabernacle in the church, and even - not pictured here - Cardinal Heenan's biretta, though why that should be a particularly revered object I don't know.