One of the first novels I ever remember reading in childhood was Nine Bright Shiners by Lois Lamplugh, and I instantly recognised its dustcover on eBay recently and bought a copy.

The writings of Lois Lamplugh (1921-2013) are manifold – much fiction, especially for children, biography and books about the area of north Devon around Barnstaple where she was born.

Nine Bright Shiners was published in 1955, which means I must have read it when it was new and I was eight or nine years old.

Its main characters are a group of young people, well-mannered, energetic, forever organising picnics and lighting camp fires while on holiday from boarding school, who become intrigued by the legend of a church buried in the coastal dunes near their homes.

It’s a conventional example of its genre:  the characters are cardboard and the plot ticks along like a well-oiled clock.  The children’s parents exist only in the background, a source of food for picnics and tools to borrow.  One older gent is pivotal to the plot, and there is one necessary group of stock villains.  All of them could be sourced from Central Casting.

I enjoyed every minute of it, as I did five decades ago, when I was all for digging up the sand dunes when we went on holiday to Llandudno.  It didn’t happen, because my parents weren’t from Central Casting.

When I revisited the novel recently, I wondered if Lois Lamplugh was thinking of an actual church, over the border in Cornwall which was buried in the dunes for centuries.

Perhaps she was aware of the story of St Enedoc’s Church, which stands beside the estuary of the River Camel near Trebetherick in Cornwall.  I was taken to see it when I was a guest of Bodmin Decorative & Fine Arts Society some years ago.

For at least three hundred years, until the middle of the nineteenth century, St Enedoc’s was buried by the sand dunes that still surround it, so that the vicar and clerk – and perhaps some parishioners – had to gain entry through a hole in the roof once a year to conduct a service that guaranteed the right to collect tithes.

The building was uncovered at the instigation of a local vicar and in 1863-64 it was restored by the architect James Piers St Aubyn (1815-1895).

The family of Sir John Betjeman (1906-1984) kept a residence nearby:  the poet’s father has a memorial inside the church and Sir John himself is buried in the churchyard.  He wrote about the church in the poem ‘Sunday Afternoon Service in St Enodoc Church, Cornwall’.

There are two other poignant modern memorials at St Enedoc’s – one to the three crew-members killed in the wreck of the Maria Assumpta (1995), carved by Philip Chatfield, one of the survivors;  the other the grave of Fleur Lombard QGM (1974-1996), the first female firefighter to die on duty in peacetime Britain.  She is also commemorated by a plaque near to the supermarket where she died in Bristol.

The church and the stories are detailed at St Enodoc (greatenglishchurches.co.uk).