The Covenham St Bartholomew Heritage Trust’s stated aim is “To secure the preservation of the church of St. Bartholomew, Covenham, Lincolnshire, for the benefit of the nation and use it for charitable purposes.”

Covenham is a village of two parishes, St Bartholomew and St Mary, originally a Saxon settlement, St Bartholomew is the oldest part of the village. St Bartholomew’s church is actually in a moated enclosure but unfortunately all of the surviving surface archaeology was bulldozed flat in 2018 as requests to protect the site fell on deaf ears. Saxon pottery and evidence of iron workings had been found on a previous survey leading to the possibility of the church originally being a minster.

Churches were never just places of worship, they were the first village hall, marketplace and pub, a much larger role in the community than we often see today. Covenham, along with so many villages, has lost its shops, transport services, clinics, garages and pubs over the years and St. Bartholomew’s, a stunning medieval structure with a wealth of history can replace some of those lost services and more to the benefit of those living here and from further afield.

Covenham, during the middle ages was a very wealthy settlement from salt production. According to Domesday, Covenham, in terms of wealth was in the top 20% of all settlements recorded.

The church, in common with many others, has been rebuilt many times during its long history but originally would have been constructed of wood. The history is covered in greater detail by Richard Halsey under “Historical” for the purposes of the Grade II* Listing but we include other information as and when we become aware.

More recently, when the church was closed, a scheme to move St. Bartholomew’s to California was dreamt up! We have a page on this under “Historical”, including a letter from the Rev. Stephen Scarlett, the current rector of St. Matthews in Newport.

An architect’s (Mr G.A. Mack of Louth) reported that the church was mostly of Victorian construction, however we feel that what he really meant was that the Victorian refurbishment had destroyed a lot of the medieval fabric. His report, in 1977, also stated that the church was is imminent danger of collapse and at the time of writing that was almost half a century ago and “she’s still hanging in there”! Between then and now some items were removed without authority from the building with some being returned and some not, we are still working on the some not.

A trust was formed by the late John Bowles to save St. Bartholomew’s back in 1988, he and two other trustees (Anne Gray and Julian Limentani) achieved just that. Unfortunately that information didn’t become general knowledge within the village for a number of years, most that live here were of the impression that the church was condemned. Anne is still a most valued trustee and now that the village is onboard we run regular events in the churchyard to raise both money and interest in our project.

During the pandemic we received funding to replace the south transept roof. To extract the best value for money on that project it was used as a training project for roofers looking to qualify in conservation roofing and special thanks must go to Sarah Moore and Richard Jordon for making the whole project work during such times, it was even snowing on the final day.

We now have irregular working parties to help maintain the churchyard and cleaning the church internally and have a “We will will work with what we have.” attitude to event management. We are very grateful to Historic England for both advise and support, financial and technical. We are also humbled by the generosity of people locally and from all over the world for adding to the the pot without the requirement of anything in return, we thank you all.

If you wish to become a Friend of St Bartholomew’s or simply make a donation please use the menu links above.