In the UK – and most probably elsewhere in the world – the slightly more ‘minor’ roads are white on Google. The wider the white, the wider the road and clearly, the reverse is also true, as I discovered today. In order to correctly refer to the A-road I travelled on yesterday (for the blog), I looked it up on Google and to my surprise, noticed a Methodist Church which, to my knowledge, I had never visited in order to find out if any Sillifants were buried there. Not all non-conformist chapels/churches have burial grounds but I decided it was worth a slight detour to find out.
Sunday is always a really good day to visit a church – the car parks are usually packed (if in existence at all) and there is generally nowhere to leave the car for the five minute visit required. Holsworthy Beacon Methodist Church was no different. Just a tiny chapel marked as ‘Wesleyan Chapel – 1882’, there were sadly no Sillifant gravestones, but I did find a Lashbrook to send to a geneamate doing a surname study on the name (one which regularly crops up in my travels in Devon!).
Rather than retrace my tyre tracks, I continued along a previously uncharted road and found that I was soon heading out at Anvil Corner. Rather than follow the main A3072, I decided to visit the village of Hollacombe (my Sillifants passed through there in the late eighteenth century) as I had in my mind that I had failed to find the church on a previous attempted visit. However, as soon as I arrived in Hollacombe, I remembered the church and recognised the stones I had photographed on my last visit some years ago. Nevertheless, I also found some Rickett graves which had previously gone unnoticed, so a trip worth making.
My journey continued down lanes designed more for tractors than for an Audi A3 but we managed well, avoiding as many pot holes as we could! A sign for Muckworthy directed us off right into a very mucky lane (rather apt) and the lane became narrower and narrower and narrower. Thank heaven that nothing came the other way but no church to be found in the village which was a little disappointing.
Exiting Muckworthy and placing ourselves half in a hedgerow to avoid the most enormous pot hole in the world, we decided to aim for the wider white roads and headed back towards civilisation. A long journey including the A30, M5, M4 and a wiggle home from J17, Gertrude, the ‘as-yet-unnamed’ new car and myself are now collapsed for the evening before beginning another hectic week of heir hunting and family history cases…. Zzzzzzz ……
