On our way back from the Channel Tunnel we found the grave slab of Anne Hilder, one of my fourteen great-great-great-grandmothers. Her grave is in what at the time of her death was still the private chapel of the owners of Sandhurst’s Old Place within the Parish Church. (This is the Kent village, not the Berkshire town of the same name and military academy.)
The first picture shows that what was a pre-Reformation Chantry Chapel continues to be recognisably distinct part of the building. The second picture shows the deeply worn path which runs down from the church to what was the medieval manor site and is still Old Place Farm today.
Anne married a cousin and had a daughter who then married a second cousin once removed - by which complicated configuration I end up being descended not only from Anne’s father but also from two of his brothers (that is, from each of three Hilder brothers, who lived ten miles away in Rye in the middle of the eighteenth century).
Below is a beautiful piece of pre-Reformation glass from elsewhere in the church and Bodiam Castle two miles down the road.
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