Bladon is a small village close to the Blenheim estate in Oxfordshire, England.

This view of it is almost prototypically of an English village:-

This is the village’s church, St Martin’s:-

Church interior showing stained glass windows above the altar:-

More stained glass in St Martin’s:-

There is more from Bladon to follow.

Buxton’s War Memorial is prominently situated on a small hill opposite the spa and close to the main shopping area.

From the spa side:-

Looking towards the main street. First World War names on the plaque:-

Looking towards the spa. First World War names above, Second World War below:

Other conflicts; Cyprus Emergency, Afghanistan and Palestine Conflicts, Korean War:-

Erected in memory of the crews of Royal Navy submarines K4 and K7 lost off Anstruther, Fife, on 31/1/1918.

The plaque:-

The Wigan War Memorial was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, R.A. and opened in November 1925.

An elegant hexagonal construction it is situated in the grounds of Wigan Parish Church near the town centre and Wigan Wallgate Station.

Situated at the junction of High Steet and Rossland Place (leading on to Pettycur Road) the Memorial has statues of two soldiers atop a plinth. This side (facing the High Street) bears the names of WW1 dead:-

Reverse View (WW2 Names):-

A wider perspective:-

In the form of a Spitfire, this is situated at the side of the entrance road to Edinburgh Airport (former RAF Turnhouse.)

Arbuthnott is a village in the Mearns, the area south of Aberdeen and north of Montrose.

It is most famous for being the home of writer J Leslie Mitchell (Lewis Grassic Gibbon.) Its War Memorial is on a wall of the local hall.

In Arbuthnott graveyard there is a memorial to Lt Col Hew Blair Imrie who was killed in Normandy 1944. His name does not appear on the main memorial though.

This is in the form of a Celtic Cross and stands in a small gardened area just off the main street.

Reverse view looking on to Main Street:-

The Names on the Memorial include a staff nurse, only given as Staff Nurse Macbeth:-

A new addition to the small memorial garden, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Great War, is a pair of memorial benches of which I photographed one. Both benches have inlays of soldiers, barbed wire and stylised poppies.

I must confess to feeling some unease at viewing and photographing these memorials to colonial wars such as the ones on Stirling and Edinburgh Castle esplanades.

This one is in Station Square, Inverness, facing on to Academy Street and seems to commemorate both the Anglo-Egyptian and the Mahdist Wars. The front is marked for Tel-el-Kebir.

These two sides are marked with Khartoum, Egypt and Ginniss:-

As well as Tel-el-Kebir we have Atbara and Khosheh:-

The Memorial has a sphinx squatting at the soldier’s foot.

St Augustine’s Episcopal Church, Dumbarton (above; dedicated to St Augustine of Hippo) is possibly the most important building in my life. Not just because it was where I got married – though that can’t be minimised. It was the church where my grandfather (the original Jack Deighton) was the incumbent Rector in the 1930s and 1940s. The Episcopalian ministry was more or less the Deighton family business. Not only my grandfather but his brother (my great uncle,) his son (my uncle,) and his grandson (my brother) took up holy orders – or as I used to put it, “I come from a long line of penguins.” My generation was where the tradition ended though.

The church was where I spent a fair part of each Sunday in my youth as a member of the church choir. There were two accompanied services each Sunday; Matins/Morning Prayer or Sung Eucharist in the morning and Evensong in the evening.

More germane to its importance to my life is that it was where my mother first laid eyes on my father as he entered church in the choir procession and she told herself, “I’m going to marry that boy.” At the time they were both aged nine! My mother was a strong-willed woman and knew her own mind from a young age: her mother said she was so thrawn she’d walk on the other side of the road because she didn’t want to walk with the rest of the family. My father never had a choice. Still, without that I wouldn’t be here.

Since I moved to Fife the only times I have entered St Augustine’s have been for family funerals or as in Saturday’s case a memorial service for an old family friend who died earlier in the year. It was a chance to see how cruel time is to us all. One woman said to me, “I know you,” but couldn’t work out who I was till she was told. Mind you I didn’t recognise her either. My excuse is that she’d changed her hair colour.

I took the photograph below of the chancel, high altar, reredos and stained glass window at the east end; now all much more visible from the nave since the rood screen was removed during restoration. (The pictures on the lower altar are from the life of the old family friend.) The reredos is a particularly fine example of the form.

The War Memorial to St Augustine’s congregation members used to be to the right of the entrance door. When the church was refurbished with heritage funding – the church is a grade A listed building – it was relocated to halfway or so up the left hand side:-

It only occurred to me when I got home that this was probably the last time I’ll ever attend St Augustine’s. With the loss of that old family friend I no longer have a connection to the church and none with Dumbarton – except for the glorious Sons of the Rock of course. I’m kicking myself that I didn’t take more photographs, especially of the stained glass windows facing the High Street.