Follow-up: a beautiful old church in Owston Ferry, England

UPDATE: Owston Ferry photographer Steve Oatway sent me this beautiful photograph, taken by him, of St Martin's Church in the snow


I love this moody, evocative portrait of St Martin's Church in Owston Ferry, England


St. Martin's Church, Owston Ferry, England (Wikipedia)

Not long ago, I blogged about my connection with a murder in a tiny English village. It's a pretty fascinating story, if you have a moment to read it.

Granted, my connection is tenuous. It all revolves around a book called Red Knights from Hy Brasil, and this sticker inside the book:



Shortly after writing that post, I got an e-mail from a photographer named Steve Oatway who lives in Owston Ferry and actually knows Peter Torn and even the vicar who signed that sticker (now retired.)

Steve offered to send me some photos of the village, and I haven't received them yet. (UPDATE: Steve has now sent me a photo of St Martin's, which I posted above.) But I got curious about St. Martin's Church, and turned up some fascinating photos and info about it on the internet.

Photo by Paul McConachie via


A very old place of worship

When Steve Oatway told me that St. Martin's is 600 to 800 years old, I was awestruck. We simply don't have buildings, much less churches, in America that are that ancient.

According to the church's website:

The earliest reference to a church in Owston Ferry is about 1150 CE. As none of the present fabric dates before 1280, there must have been an earlier building on the site. The site itself is within the inner bailey of the "Motte and Bailey" castle which formerly stood there.

A triple archway was built in 1859 at the entrance to the avenue of trees leading to the church.

photo by wiatrak2 via

Stained glass window inside the church

Another website relates:

The parish church, situate at the western end of the village of Owston Ferry, is dedicated to St. Martin and contains much of interest to the family historian, not least are those tombs therein of local gentry, the family containing most being that of Pindar, prominent in the Isle since the mid-sixteenth century.

... On the south side of the Church can be seen the mound on which stood in former times the keep of a "motte and bailey" castle, said to have been built shortly after the Conquest and held at one time by the powerful Mowbray famiLy. It was taken by Geoffrey, Bishop elect of Lincoln, in 1174, on behalf of Henry the Second and was later destroyed and never after rebuilt.

A view of the church's interior, from a Church of England website


St. Martin's choir members (also from this Church of England website)

As a confirmed Anglophile and lover of history, all this fascinates me. How I would love to visit England someday and see this incredible old church for myself.

In the meantime, I hope you've enjoyed these photos.

Note: Every effort has been made to give proper credit for these photos, which do not belong to me

What murder in a tiny English village has to do with me

The Internet has made our world a much smaller place, and yesterday that fact was illustrated to me with a clarity that I found intriguing and, yes, amazing.

Yesterday, nursing a sinus infection and holed up in my house for the day, I decided to blog.

My book blog, Cindy's Book Club, has woefully few readers (please DO check it out sometime!), and I've been trying to come up with interesting and appealing topics to post.

I decided to blog about a couple of favorite childhood books and how I found copies of them on the internet.

Both books, Red Knights from Hy Brasil and Auntie Robbo, are out of print and fairly obscure, so I was delighted to reclaim them.

You can read more about those books here and here.

Anyway...

While taking pictures of the books, I was struck once again by a sticker on the inside of Red Knights from Hy Brasil.

(My own copy of the book, which ended up being somehow lost, was purchased circa 1965 or 1966 at a small Christian bookstore in Beirut, Lebanon, where my parents were missionaries at the time.)

As you can see, the sticker shows that the book was awarded to Peter Torn at St. Martin's in Owston Ferry, on Christmas 1963. It's even signed by the vicar.

I found that charmingly English, and I could just picture this little British lad being handed the book that I held in my hands 40 years later (I received the book from abebooks.co.uk in October 2003).

So what does all this have to do with murder?

Well, yesterday I got curious and decided to Google Peter Torn, St. Martin's, and Owston Ferry.

Here's what I came up with--a June 2003 article from the Yorkshire Post about the funeral of a girl named Laura Torn:

Almost the entire village of Owston Ferry, near Scunthorpe, turned out to pay tribute to the 18-year-old whose body was found in Misson, Nottinghamshire, last month following a huge search.

Scores of mourners filled St Martin's Church, while the sermon was broadcast over loudspeakers to those who could not get inside the historic building.

...Schoolfriends, neighbours and family held each other and police officers who searched for Laura also turned out in tribute.

The church was packed to capacity by the time Laura's coffin was brought in to the church, followed by her weeping family. Her father, Peter Torn, fought back tears as he held wife Heather and 13-year-old Martin.



Without a doubt, this is "my" Peter Torn. He was 49 years old when his 18-year-old daughter was murdered.

Further Google searches turned up follow-up stories about the case. In April 2004, 31-year-old Guy Beckett, Laura's boss at a local pub, admitted to strangling her to death, apparently enraged when she broke off their secret relationship.

In May 2004, Beckett was sentenced to life in prison.

Even more meaningful...

Reading the story of Peter Torn's loss and grief somehow made the fact that I own what used to be his book even more meaningful to me.

On Christmas in 1963, little Peter Torn was handed a copy of the book that was to be one of my own favorite childhood books, and the book that singlehandedly started my lifelong obsession with Ireland and all things Irish.

Forty years later, just a few months after the death of Peter Torn's daughter, I held his copy of that book in my hands.

If Peter Torn ever somehow stumbles across this post on the Internet, I want him to know that my heart goes out to him and his family for their terrible loss. It's been seven years since he lost his precious daughter, but a parent never really gets over their grief.

My hope is that he finds comfort in the God he learned about as a little boy at St. Martin's Church in Owston Ferry, England. And each time I pick up his copy of The Red Knights from Hy Brasil I will send up a prayer for him and his family.