Archaeologists seize chance to study St Mary’s in Buckinghamshire before the rail line obliterates it
For 150 years, in a small, tree-lined corner of a Buckinghamshire field, a large pile of stones lay overgrown and almost forgotten. A thriving local parish church for almost 800 years, the little building of St Mary’s near Stoke Mandeville had gradually fallen out of use and been abandoned. By 1866 its crumbling walls were judged to be dangerous and it was pulled down, its rubble left to the grass and weeds.
The site of Old St Mary’s church is no longer silent. The ruins sit on the route of what will – most people in Buckinghamshire now reluctantly concede – become the HS2 rail link, and like dozens of other landscape features along the line’s 150-mile length, they are busily being excavated before the track’s construction. This week, HS2 archaeologists announced they had identified 3,000 burials in the churchyard that will be carefully exhumed and reburied elsewhere.
