[Mar. 2024] On our last domestic trip in the UK, on the way back from Torquay in the southwest of England, we stopped off in Sherborne in Dorset.
There was someone we wanted to meet here too.
She is quite old, but she drove herself to pick us up.
Sherborne is a historic market town and is famous for its public school for the children of the wealthy, but according to online information, nearly one-third of the residents are over 65 years old.
A town that is easy for the elderly to live in must be a good town.
After spending some time with her, we went to Sherborne Abbey, the town’s biggest attraction.
I didn’t think it was a very famous church, but there was a pamphlet in Japanese.
According to it, it is a church with a history dating back to 705 AD.
When we went inside, I was surprised at how luxurious it was.
I was particularly captivated by the beauty of the ceiling.
This type of ceiling is called a fan vault apparently.
It was completed around 1490.
My husband exclaimed in admiration, “This may be the most beautiful English church I’ve ever seen.”
And seeing how well-maintained it is, you can see how wealthy this town is.
The pamphlet we received had an interesting story.
In the Middle Ages, it was managed by Benedictine monks, but in 1437, the townspeople could no longer tolerate the monks demanding a fee every time they were baptized, so they built their own baptismal font in the small church next door.
The angry monks hired the town’s strongest man who was a butcher to destroy the townspeople’s baptismal font with a hammer.
This apparently led to a riot.
However, in 1539, the monks surrendered to King Henry VIII, who started the Reformation, because he wanted to get a divorce, and the abbey became a parish church for the citizens.
It’s really good that it wasn’t abandoned during the Reformation like many other abbeys in Scotland.
It’s still a parish church, so people around here probably hold their weddings in this beautiful church.
I’m really glad I got to see this on our last trip in the UK.
After leaving the abbey, we wanted to take a leisurely walk around the town, but it was raining that day.
The rows of old yellowish stone houses were picturesque.
If anything, the rain may have made the mood even more mellow.
We had nowhere to go because of the rain, so we took an earlier train back to London than we had planned.
That night, we stayed at a hotel near Heathrow Airport, and the next morning, we left London, where I had lived for many years.
