Organ concert took us back into history
ACHILL wind blew over the dusky foothills surrounding Stockport as the pale sunset subsided beyond sad clouds.
Eagerly we filed into St Thomas’ Church, Mellor, perched high above the village, clutching plastic cups of complimentary Pimms to the welcome warmth and twilight of a hundred burning candles. The church organ was celebrating its 40th year by performing one of a series of Johann Sebastian Bach concerts, the church’s director of music at the keyboard, with violin, cello and brass accompaniment.
The place was crammed with grey heads eagerly craning between the live screen at the front and the musicians at the back.
I am not a cultured musical aficionado, so was there to soak up the ancient atmosphere (and the Pimms) instead.
Pews are not the best place to doze off in, being rather too hard and upright for comfort.
So I was able to absorb the history of the place.
Hidden by the screen was the oldest wooden pulpit in England – carved from a single tree trunk circa 14th century and covered in foliage and archaic ornamentation.
An attempt to chop it up by a modernising vicar long ago turned the churchwarden’s axe so the treasure was saved.
A stone Anglo Saxon font is the oldest church relic, carved with primitive figures including a big headed being with a small body riding what one presumes must be a horse.
Most of the church was reconstructed in the 18th and 19th centuries, only the tower is medieval, but the whole sits within what was an Iron Age hillfort with history dating back even further to the Mesolithic Stone Age.
Stockport Museum is full of artefacts this site has yielded.
Within this charmed circle of ditch, music, alcohol and naked flame I was able to commune with ancestral voices.
Whether they were impressed by the organ I cannot say, but with their harps, lyres and woodwind pipes may well have accompanied the performance sotto voce.
By a similar process of sympathetic magic, readers of Stockport Heritage Magazine may be transported to an age of their choosing, be it prehistoric, medieval or merely 1960s simply by flicking through their copy obtainable at local newsagents, Co-ops, WH Smiths, Waterstones, Museum and Heritage shops and view our back copies online at www. stockportheritagemagazine.co.uk.