St Andrew's Church could be found, just up the bank to Easinghope from the Farm at Doddenham.

This lovely watercolour has Dodenham (spelt the old way) (Knightwick) (sqd) Thos: Rickards at the bottom of it. I imagine it to mean that it was painted by Thomas Rickards. Many thanks to my friend Peter Walker from Knightwick for this scan.

Some of the Grubham family would have used this church in the olden days. It does not exist now. The church in the village of Knightwick (technically Doddenham) was built to replace it by Greswold Williams in 1852.

"The chapel is like a small barn, being as it were a mere shell of a building. The roof open to the tiles, and one can see up from the pavement of the church, through the o1d oak framework of what must be denominated the tower, into its pyramidal continuation, which I have dignified by the name of a spire. The walls are as old as the period of the Conquest, as attested by the masonry and the small and plain Norman lights. The hand of the improver has been busy even here: a window in the north wall has been cut into a very peculiar shape the heads of other windows and of the door have been made square, the latter having wooden jambs and the top, and the old inscriptions on the walls are now hidden beneath plentiful lavations of whitewash. There is here a round massive font, ornamented with the chevron, being probably of the same date with the chapel. I saw here no table of benefactions, but am informed there was a table, dated 1710, setting forth that a “Madam Randell gave the sum of ten pounds, ye interest for ye repairs of the Vole” - that is, the repair of the road at the Vole; the legacy, however, seems to have disappeared and to have been almost forgotten."

Extract from the late Ald. John Noakes’s “Rambles in Worcestershire” or “Stray Notes on Churches and Congregations,” published 1851

 

 ©peh