Old Crosses and Lychgates

Vallance roams through the churchyards of England and Wales, documenting a vanishing world of stone and timber. His subject is the cross in its myriad forms - the market cross, the wayside cross, the cemetery cross - and the lychgate that marks the threshold between the living and the dead. This is not mere antiquarian cataloguing; it is a passionate defense of craftsmanship and a lament for what industrial progress threatens to erase. Vallance wrote with conviction that modern indifference to traditional artistry represents a cultural impoverishment, and his prose carries the urgency of someone documenting something precious before it disappears. For readers drawn to church architecture, medieval history, or the hidden histories embedded in rural English landscapes, this book unlocks a vocabulary of form and meaning that most pass without seeing. The crosses standing mute in churchyards become legible - their variations in style, their evolution across centuries, their role in how communities remembered their dead.