Two Welsh examples of lychgates, with a room built over each,
are enumerated by the Rev. Elias Owen, in 1886, viz., Derwen,
Denbighshire, where the upper storey is utilised for parochial
purposes, and Whitford, Flintshire, where it served as a schoolroom.
Latterly, "when the school increased in numbers, the lychgate was
blocked up and formed into a class-room" in addition to the upper
part. The same writer remarks that a fully equipped lychgate includes
seats, a lychcross and a lychstone. As a rule, both lychcrosses and
lychstones "have disappeared ... but underneath the roof of Caerwys
(Flintshire) lychgate are still to be seen the beam and socket, where
once stood the wooden lychcross, and on the ground are traceable the
foundation stones of the two lychseats, and of the lychstone in the
centre of the porch. This rest for the coffin was a low wall" of about
a coffin's length. Some of the distinctive features of lychgates were
destroyed in the eighteenth century. Thus "the beam that stretched
from wall to wall," and had a wooden cross inserted into it, "has,
in nearly every instance, been sawn away." The above-named example
at Caerwys, however, according to the _Inventory_ of the Royal
Commission, still survives. The place was visited in July 1910, and
the report runs: "Within the covered lychgate is a pre-Reformation oak
frame, the two uprights supporting a beam in which a cross was fixed,"
the ancient custom having been to set down corpses on their way to
burial upon the lychstone immediately beneath this cross.
The distribution of lychgates in various districts is most unequal.
Thus nearly every one of the twenty-four churches of the Deanery of
Woodleigh, Devonshire, is said to possess a lychgate. An instance,
which may safely be pronounced unique, is that of Troutbeck,
Westmorland, where there are, or were, no less than three stone
lychgates to one and the same churchyard.
[Illustration: 200. HAYES, MIDDLESEX
LYCHGATE]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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