Miscellaneous

Locked Churches

One of the most annoying things when visiting a church is to find it locked with no keyholder displayed; something that is even more annoying when you are in a region far away from where you live. Therefore, planning ahead is sometimes of utmost importance. I have tried to include the locking status of each church, but I cannot guarantee that the information are correct in all cases. 

Unfortunately, some churches are really “out of bounds”; there is no way you will be able to visit them for different reasons.  If a church is usually locked with no keyholder displayed, I tried to include contact addresses on the individual church sites so that you can make the appropriate arrangements in advance. 

Planning ahead

This is something I have not adhered to myself on many occasions. You visit a church, take lots of photgraphs (like I usually do), and when you read about it afterwards, you realize you have missed to the most important or historically or architecturally valuable features.

A helpful guide for visiting churches can be found on this website, the author has called it “The Ten Commandements of Church Crawling”, which I have linked here. I must confess, I have been a sinner in this effect on too many occasions…

Missing Churches

Of course, this website is far from complete. Firstly, there will surely be many Round Tower Churches in Europe I haven’t been able to locate, even though I do a lot of research in this direction. So if you know a church not included yet and not on this list, be so kind to let me know (see Contact pages). And secondly, there are some churches we are well aware of, but have not yet visited (I have only included those we have been at yet), 

sometimes because they are not easy to reach (see Orkneys), sometimes we have not been in the region yet, and sometimes because no visitors are allowed at all (see Hengrave in Suffolk). Thus, I have included a table of the churches we are aware of, but have not yet visited. I have included links to any information about them whenever possible.

French Round Tower Churches

The exemption to the rule set above (to show churches we are aware of in the table) are the French Round Tower Churches, as there are simply too many. We will try to visit as many of them as possible in the future after all restrictions have come down. But there is no list of them, and no “Societé d’Églises avec une Tour Ronde” or else like there is in the UK.  A general advice for visiting churches in France: the best contact for details of where to obtain a key is usually the Mayor, 

thus I have included links to the local “Mairie” in many cases. One region in France has an abundance of churches with a round tower, even though most of them are completely different in style to the ones on this site. This is the Thiérache with its many fortified churches, which often have more than one round tower. You can read more about them on this Wikipedia site. These churches are a project of mine for the future, as I will try to built a separate website for them. But this will take a lot more time.

External Links

This is not the only website showing Round Tower Churches. Below, you can find a list of other websites dedicated to 

churches in general which also have one or more entries for Round Tower Churches.

Name

Description

Web address

Round Tower Churches Society

Website of this important charity

Essex Churches

Website of all churches in Essex

Sussex Churches

Website of all churches in Sussex

Exploring Norfolk Churches

Website of the open churches in Norfolk

Angels and Pinnacles

A celebration of Suffolk churches