Messages cast in stone

English country churches are a repository of the country's history, as Andrew Unsworth discovered on a recent visit

Exploring country churches is one of the best forms of free entertainment when you are travelling in England. For me it has become a bit of an obsession, which probably irritates the hell out of my various hosts who may be driving me somewhere for lunch in a pub, or to a country house and garden. Wherever we stop, I will disappear to nip into the parish church - so long as its empty and there is no service in progress.

You can still do this in England because, unlike here, churches are still left unlocked so people can visit. I've noticed that these days the best silver candlesticks and crosses may have been replaced by cheaper ones on the altar (they get swiped), but the buildings are still open.

Some have controversially sold treasures to pay for building maintenance, others have been stopped from doing so, and so its always a good thing to leave a pound or two in the donations box to help.

You usually have the place to yourself, and if there is an old lady arranging the flowers for Sunday, or cleaning, you always get a warm welcome.

The reason for visiting is that all these churches are different, built in different eras and styles, and all are packed with art and history. There is always some discovery to thrill. The art is in the stone structure, the stained-glass windows, the carvings, the painted surfaces and pictures, the history is in the monuments to people long dead, ancestors long forgotten, and the very air that you breathe.

En route to Padstow in Cornwall, I insisted that we stop in Launceston to see the Tudor church of St Mary Magdalene, which was finished in 1524 by Sir Henry Trecarrel as a memorial to his infant son who died while being bathed. It's described as the finest parish church in the county, and you don't even have to go inside: the granite exterior is carved in incredible detail. It was early and the door locked, but someone was practising on the organ inside. Eventually the vicar came scuttling along to prepare for the morning service.

In All Saints, Holcombe Rogus, near Wellington in Somerset, I found the Bluett pew, the best surviving example of a family pew in England. These are boxed-off rows of pews, the enclosure beautifully carved, where the lord of the manor and his family could worship separated from the no-doubt smelly peasantry.

They were buried in the Bluett chapel, which includes the memorial of Sir John (deceased 1634) and his wife Elizabeth (deceased 1636), lined with kneeling figures of their eight daughters, four holding skulls showing they died in childhood.

A later Bluett died a teenager and his memorial is below his parents': "Alfo of John Edward Robert, only child of ... Robert Bluett and Jane his wife, an amiable and promifing Youth, who died November 21st 1766 Aged 17 years. Could the Ardent wifhes of his furviving Parent and a large Circle of Friends have availed he had ftill continued amongst us: but Heaven determined otherwife." Two-and-a-half-centuries later, that still moves the reader.

There are, of course, many sad memorials to children and many to soldiers and sailors who did not return from journeys of trade and exploration, or fighting for the empire. In Launceston I was fascinated by a memorial with this inscription: "In Memory of Thomas Prockter Ching ... aged 22, who in the month of August 1834 after having been wrecked in the ship 'Charles Eaton' on a voyage to China, suffered a more cruel fate at the hand of ignorant savages, by whom the crew were decoyed and murdered in the island of Boydang in Torres Straits."

What an extraordinary tale for townsfolk to digest back in 1834.

At the Holy Cross church in Crediton, Devon, I made my best find: a chancel archway covered in 1911 by a pained screen in memory of General Sir Redvers Buller VC, who died in 1908 after a long military career.

He served in Ghana against the Ashanti and in the frontier war against the Xhosa in 1879. Against the Zulus later that year he won his Victoria Cross after rescuing three men.

After serving as aide-de-camp to Queen Victoria and other posts, he eventually returned to South Africa during the second Boer War. He was badly defeated at the Battle of Colenso trying to relieve the siege of Ladysmith in 1899, and again at Spioenkop the next year. But he managed to relieve Ladysmith in February 1900.

Never popular with the British press, MPs and then King Edward VII, he retired to the family manor house, Downes, near Crediton in 1901, a local hero at least.

Many towns in the UK are today "twinned" with towns in France, but Crediton should really be twinned with Ladysmith.

Unsworth was in the UK as the guest of British Airways but visited the West Country privately