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).

© Richard Miles

When my friends Richard and Janet returned from their first trip to Turkey they had, as usual, lots of travellers’ tales and a couple of phones full of images.

One building they described attracted my attention particularly – the Bulgarian St Stephen’s Church, a magnificently Baroque confection looking out over the Golden Horn, the river estuary that makes the shape of a horn as it drains into the Bosphorus.

St Stephen’s is fallaciously described in tourist literature as “the world’s only iron church”, when it may be the only iron and steel prefabricated Orthodox church in the world, an epithet which in no way diminishes its charm or significance.

Under the Ottoman Empire Christian congregations were classified as Greek or Armenian, and the Bulgarian congregation of Constantinople was administered by the Greek Orthodox Patriarchy.  The Bulgarians persistently asserted their separate identity, objecting to the imposition of the Greek language in their schools and churches. 

The Bulgarian-born Ottoman statesman Stefan Bogoridi (1775- or 1780-1859) gave a wooden house in the district of Balat for use as a church in 1849.  Replacing it with a purpose-built stone structure proved impossible because of the unstable ground, so when it eventually burnt down it was replaced by a lightweight steel-framed iron church.

Iron churches had been manufactured from the early nineteenth century.  The Liverpool ironmaster John Cragg (1767-1854) used designs by the architect Thomas Rickman (1776-1841) to market architectural components for prefabricated churches from 1812 onwards:  in Liverpool St George’s, Everton and St Michael-in-the-Hamlet, Aigburth remain, and a third, St Philip’s, Hardman Street, came to light when the building that had enveloped it was demolished.

Architectural iron and steel technology was revolutionised during the nineteenth century.  Even after Bessemer steel became available in the 1850s, wrought iron remained the dominant material in building construction.  Sir Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace (1851) and the Eiffel Tower (1889) were both built of iron.  The first major steel structure in the world was the Forth Bridge (1890).

There was a short period when iron was employed to clad lightweight steel structures, before the steel-frame construction developed by the Chicago School of architects meant that buildings of any height were not dependent on the weight-bearing capacity of the walls, so the exterior could be clad in any weather-proof material.

The Bulgarian Church in Istanbul is arguably the most beautiful of the nineteenth-century iron churches.  It was designed by the Ottoman-Armenian architect Hovsep Aznavur (1854-1935) and the highly detailed exterior was manufactured by the Viennese Rudolph Philip Waagner Company, which was responsible a century later for the Reichstag Dome (1999) and the Great Court of the British Museum (2000).

Only the iconostasis, the screen that partitions the east end of the interior, is wooden:  it was the work of the painter Klavdy Lebedev (1852-1916).  The 131-feet-high tower contains six bells cast in the Russian city of Yaroslavi. 

St Stephen’s was inaugurated on September 8th 1898. 

Its contemporaries include the San Sebastian Church, Manila, (1891) built primarily to resist earthquakes, and St Louis’ Cathedral, Fort-de-France, Martinique (1895) built to resist also to survive hurricanes and fires like that which destroyed its predecessor.

All these buildings are beautiful and fascinating, and Istanbul’s Bulgarian Church deserves a visit alongside the city’s first-order experiences of seeing Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque.