I had a lovely time pottering around the huge, 1,200-year-old Church of All Saints at Brixworth in Northamptonshire. I sat on a bench beneath a tree until the funeral inside had finished, and could see how the four great windows on either side of the nave, arched with recycled Roman brick, used to be doorways into side chapels that have disappeared. A walkway sunken in a semicircle round the east end no doubt once led pilgrims to venerated relics.

It is more difficult to picture the place without changes that have since been made with the intention of making it look more like the rugged Anglo-Saxon structure that restorers imagined. Outside, the walls are a pleasing jumble of rubble and brick. When new, they would have been rendered and whitewashed to keep the damp out.

Inside, there is plenty of whitewash now, accentuating the massive arches of thin red Roman brick. Later develop­ments were tidied away. A lovely openwork wooden screen, made in the fifteenth century for the entrance to the holy chancel, was moved, to act as a war memorial in front of a side chapel, though it is too wide for the entrance. The lovely curved octagonal Georgian polished wooden font cover was lucky to escape the re-Saxoning campaigns.