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Consider the Lychgate
On the moors in West Yorkshire, there are some stones, two placed together, with crosses marked on them. Many people have thought that they were boundary or marker stones, and in so far as they marked the way towards the oldest church in that area, they were. To be more exact, the oldest churchyard.
In ages past bodies were carried by hand, sometimes over long distances, and there were restrictions placed on where they could be laid to allow the bearers to rest. These two stones were ‘resting’ stones.
When a body arrived at the church for burial, it would again be put down while the administrative formalities were carried out, and again the bearers could rest. So a resting stone was placed at the edge or start of the consecrated land around the church. 
The priest conducting the funeral would meet the cortege here, not originally out of respect, but rather to receive the required legal certificate for burial before he allowed them to enter the church grounds.
Because of rain and wind it was usually sheltered, and benches were built for the bearers. There would also be a cross within the construction to signify the start of holy land. This is what today we call the ‘lych-gate’; lych coming from the anglo-saxon word lich or lic, related to the modern German word leiche, all meaning corpse.
Few old lychgates remain today as many were destroyed or damaged after the Reformation, and most of those that survived were constructed of timber and have since decayed.
In the eighteenth century when the use for the resting stones and thus lychgates declined many were removed and replaced with gates, often retaining the shelter as it continued to be a meeting place for the priest to receive funeral parties. |
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YouTube provides new online audience for Church Army
Who would ever have dreamed that a 125 year old mission agency would be using the world's most popular video sharing website to share stories of faith in words and action?
YouTube, with an estimated 20 million visitors each month now hosts short stories of Church Army evangelists reaching out to their communities with the gospel through new and exciting fresh expressions of church. The featured videos focus on the work of a skateboarding evangelist, a former Sikh and others working in urban, inner city and rural settings. The Church Army page on YouTube aims to showcase the good work being done by its 300 or so evangelists all over the UK and Ireland.
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How the economy benefits from church tourism
In this holiday month, anyone who begrudges what it costs to maintain Britain’s churches in good repair should be aware of the extent to which church tourism benefits the economy: no less than £300 million a year, according to the Church Heritage Forum.
Cathedrals and historic churches are a quintessential feature of our landscape and are part of the historic narrative of our national identity, which has a strong appeal for domestic and foreign visitors alike,” the Forum told a Government committee’s inquiry into tourism. The potential for even greater development is not always recognised and, as a result, is not supported and resourced to the degree that it deserves.
The current interest in genealogy and the tracing of ancestry, in which churches play a key role, is an area that could be promoted during the Olympics in 2012, the Forum suggests. This would help to spread the benefits of Olympics tourism across the country.
 Local initiatives, such as in North Yorkshire, have shown that encouraging church tourism by providing training and resources to local churches can increase visitor numbers by as much as 120 per cent. They have also shown that opening up more churches brings real benefits to community cohesion and encourages churches to provide other community activities.
Church buildings and cathedrals are consistently in the list of most-visited tourist attractions. Five World Heritage sites in the UK specifically include church buildings: Bath Abbey, Canterbury Cathedral, Durham Cathedral, Fountains Abbey and Westminster Abbey. An independent survey found that visitors to cathedrals generated £91 million for their local cities in terms of direct spend by visitors. The benefits to local economies of visitors to parish churches are more difficult to quantify, as they do not charge for entry and most are not stewarded, but various surveys suggest that 35-50 million visits a year would be a realistic estimate. The Diocesan Tourism Officer for the Diocese of St Edmundsbury & Ipswich is Margaret Blackall The Churches Tourism Association now has a website: www.churchestourismassociation.info |
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