Culbone Church

You're deep in a wooded combe high above the Bristol Channel, no road behind you and none ahead, and there in the green hush stands a church so small you could almost miss it among the oaks. This is Culbone, and it is said to be the smallest complete parish church in England still in regular use.

Let the size of it sink in. Culbone is barely thirty-five feet long from end to end, and it seats around thirty people. Yet it is a proper working parish church, and a church has stood on this exact spot since Saxon times. Its dedication is to Saint Beuno, a Welsh saint, and that name is a clue, a hint of the old Celtic Christianity that crossed this water long ago. The little building you're looking at is largely Norman, twelfth-century work, with medieval additions layered on since. For century after century this was one of the loneliest parishes in all of England, reached only on foot, its congregation drawn from charcoal-burners who worked these woods and, further back, from a small community of lepers who lived apart in the combe. There has never been electricity here. To this day it is lit by candle and by oil lamp, so that a service at Culbone still looks and feels very much as it would have done five hundred years ago, the flames wavering on old stone while the wind moves through the oaks outside.

The very name tells you something. Culbone is thought to come from the Welsh, kil Beun, the church or cell of Beuno, another thread reaching back to those Celtic missionaries who once crossed the Bristol Channel to spread their faith along this coast.

As you stand here, look for a few things. First, the spire, slate-hung and modest, half-swallowed by the towering oaks around it, a spire added long after the Norman core. Second, step inside if the door is open, and let your eyes adjust to the dimness, the plain benches, the smell of cold stone and candle-wax, the sheer intimacy of a space this small. Third, find the church's little treasure, a two-light window cut from a single slab of sandstone, a delicate piece of medieval stone-carving. Fourth, look at the woodland itself, this ancient sessile-oak forest, a protected nature reserve thick with moss, fern and lichen, where pied flycatchers and redstarts arrive in spring. And fifth, seek out the old yews in the churchyard, dark and slow-growing, keeping watch over the graves as they have for generations.

Now picture what it once took simply to worship here. There was no road, and there still isn't. For hundreds of years the parson and the people came on foot along these steep muddy paths, in rain and winter dark, to a church with no heating and no light but flame. The charcoal-burners came smoke-stained from the woods; the sick from the leper community kept their distance, so the story goes, watching through a narrow opening. And still, week after week, year after year, the little building was filled, and prayers rose under this same slate spire while the sea sounded far below. Few places in England hold quite this much stillness or this much stubborn, patient faith.

The Coast Path either side of Culbone is remote and steep, climbing on through the oak woods toward Lynmouth on this wild stretch of the Exmoor coast, and phone signal is patchy, so keep your wits about you and allow plenty of time. Before you go, sign the visitors' book and leave a little something for the upkeep, because this tiny church depends on the kindness of walkers like you. Sit a moment longer in the hush of the oaks. Then walk on. Walk safe.