St Edmund's Church, Castleton

As promised a couple of posts ago I've now written a separate post about St Edmund's church in Castleton.  The church stands just off the main street close to the old market building and on the way up to the path leading to Peveril Castle.

We spent ages wandering around the church yard reading the memorial inscriptions looking for Paul's ancestors  without success.  There were several generations of the same families all close together.

There was also lots of wildlife in the church yard, it was only after I'd taken this photo that I saw the little bird sitting on a branch, it might be a wren.

Some inscriptions were a dream for family historians with loads of information etched into the stone

Others were small and simple and gave the bare minimum of information.  I guess in 1822 everyone would have known who MR was.

Inside, the church was bathed in sunlight with shadows and reflections filtering across the floor and onto the wooden pew doors.

There were some lovely stained glass windows in the chancel

The large window is above the altar and the one below to the right of the altar.

The other windows had lovely coloured glass around their edges and it was these that were reflecting across the floor.  I loved the brass oil lamps with engraved glass globes attached to the pews.

The hatchment below is for Frances Mary, sister of the Reverend Frederick Farran who was Vicar of Castleton from 1780 to 1817.  She married a Captain George James Hamilton and died in 1820.

I was intrigued by the names carved onto the doors of the box pews.  Each pew was owned by a different family.  There were two Robert Halls the one below from 1676 and an earlier one of 1663.

The brass plaque over the carved name is I Royse and its date is 1822.  On the stone memorial pictured above are several Royse family members including two Isaacs, father and son, the second died in 1831 aged 77 so this box pew could have been his.

The church, which was restored in 1837, is the focus of the Castleton Garland Day festival which is held on 29th May also known as Oak Apple Day. This was a celebration of the escape of Charles II from the parliamentarian forces after the battle of Worcester in 1651 when he is said to have hidden in the branches of an oak tree at Boscobel house in Shropshire on 29th May which was also his birthday.  When he was restored to the throne in 1660 the 29th May was declared a national holiday to celebrate his safe return.  It is possible that the Garland Day festival dates back to much earlier times but it is now associated with Oak Apple Day.

It struck me that the dates on these pews of 1661 and 1662 were of the time of the Restoration and that the Cresswell, Hall and Cryer families may have joined in those new oak apple and garland day celebrations.