Farnham and About

My week off between New Year and Epiphany came to a conclusion yesterday in a walk around Farnham. It was a bright, chilly late morning and early afternoon, and the fairly short walk - only an hour and a half or so - took me around the hills northwest of that small Surrey town, past timber-framed farmhouses glimpsed across the fields, and more modern structures such as the 1930s - perhaps - Cedar House.

I took in visits to a couple of churches. Although St Francis's, Byworth, was shut, it's a perfect example of the sort of small estate churches being built during Anglicanism's boom-time of the 1950s, when a moderate sort of Catholicism was the natural environment for the Church of England. It has a bell, a statue of the Saint by the door, and an altar hung with a brocade frontal. 

Its mother-church, the medieval St Andrew's in town, is intriguing because it seems to suggest successive waves of Catholicisation, beginning with a restoration of the chancel in 1848, whose tide is now ebbing. A Lady Chapel was created in 1909 and the altar brought forward in 1959, a very early date for a change like that. In the early 2000s an internal suite of meeting rooms was created by clearing out the pews and creating a wood and glass box at the west end of the nave.  I couldn't find any date for this splendid sort-of sub-Comper reredos, which now sits behind the old high altar at the far end of the church. I'm guessing it can't be earlier than 1910 (and perhaps not much later).

Finally I called in at Farnham Museum, set in a Georgian town house on the main street. Its staircase is apparently very highly regarded:

The collection isn't vast, but every local museum furnishes some surprises and Farnham's is no exception. I will spare you the taxidermy diorama of red squirrels playing cards, but thought I would share John Verney's The Three Graces Playing Croquet in the Garden of Farnham Castle which was definitely a surprise to me, at any rate. Splendidly the Museum has it available in postcard form. Mr Verney is on record as saying that 'the addition of a clergyman raises the tone of any painting.'