Projector photos on Flickr

A big church in one of south Cambridgeshire's larger villages. Lots of interesting buildings, suggesting that Linton was a very prosperous place in the 17th and 18th Century. I wonder why it never developed into a proper town? The church is away from the high street, sequestered in a rather tight churchyard. We are only a few miles from the county border, and architecturally this is entirely a Suffolk church, with clerestories and aisles and big gargoyles. In 2012 I had found the church open, and a sign on the inner door saying it was open every day, but coming back in the middle of the day in May 2018 was to find a locked church with no keyholder notice.

I knocked on the door of the rectory, but no one was in. I rang the team vicar, who was the most apologetic person I think I've ever spoken to. 'Oh dear, oh dear, I'm sorry, its my fault, I was just thinking about it, I usually open it, only it's my day off, and the man who opens it for me is on holiday, oh dear...' she said she'd come straight down on her bike, but before she got there the churchwarden arrived. She'd been summoned by someone else, not for the locked church but to show a workman a job that needed doing. She was very surprised to find the church locked, and happily unlocked it for us as the team vicar arrived. Everyone was most apologetic, and dismayed that we hadn't found the church open.

The workman's job was to fix the overhead projector screen hanging in the chancel arch, which makes the heart sink a bit but in fact it was not particularly intrusive in this big and rather cluttered space. The south aisle is dominated by the memorial to brother and sister Elizabeth Bacon and Peter Standly, the 1782 work of Joseph Wilton. Two life-size figures flank a large urn, a somewhat operatic Hope on the left and an angel laying a wreath on the right. A detail which you might not immediately notice is the little dog who lies at the feet of the angel.

There are a number of other good memorials, but the best of them is behind the organ at the east end of the north aisle, and it is worth squeezing round to take a look at it. It remembers John and Alice Millicent, and was installed here in 1705 but with all the imagery of more than half a century earlier - their hands are joined on top of a skull, Alice leans on an hour glass, a cherub with an anchor represents Hope, while another, holding an hour glass, stands with a foot on a skull. It must have dominated the church before the organ was installed, but today is all but invisible and almost impossible to photograph apart from some details. As Pevsner notes, it is oddly ironed flat, as if pressed against a wall, creating the absurd illusion that the organ was here first and the memorial was slipped in behind it.

The south aisle has roundels of continental glass, and one which contains the upper part of an English 15th Century figure of St Philip which may have come from here originally. There is good 20th Century glass, the best of which depicts Christ meeting the Samarian woman at the well flanked by two gorgeous angels. It is one of only half a dozen East Anglian windows by the great suffragette artist Mary Lowndes, and was installed just before the First World War. The sower window is as striking, but unsigned, and no one seems to know who it is by. Could it be by Reginald Bell? There is a good 1901 window by Lavers & Westlake, depicting the Adoration of the Magi and installed in memory of Queen Victoria, in the pastelly style of the day. At the east end of the south aisle, AL Moore's war memorial window is also striking, but an uneasy composition I think.

Perhaps this church does not have the wow factor of some of the smaller and more remote churches in this area, but it is full of interest and, as we have seen, wants to be welcoming.

Dirty Projectors by John Purcell

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Dirty Projectors at the Todd P 'springtime unamplified acoustic BBQ' on Roosevelt Island (6/17).

Bolex Projector by Trigger_Happy77

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A cute swizz Bolex film projector I saw in a second hand store for $30.

hologram-projector-15 by Trade Show Hologram