This morning I took the train to North-West London on a personal pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Willesden. A few weeks ago I received my copy of the new Britain’s holiest places by Nick Mayhew Smith. It’s a wonderful travel guide with personal observations to the places of Christian heritage around Britain. I must confess that I had never heard of Our Lady of Willesden. Reading Mayhew Smith’s one page write-up, I jumped on the train this morning to make pilgrimage.
The Shrine is both oddly English and oddly London. It is in the Parish Church of St Mary Willesden, a rather pretty English parish church surrounded by a verdant graveyard, typical of so many village churches up and down the country. Yet just beyond its stone boundary wall is a busy roundabout with red London double-deckers ferrying passengers to and from Neasden Tube Station.
The church of St Mary dates back to a foundation of King Athelstan, 10th-century King of England and grandson of King Alfred the Great, and was built above the holy well that gives Willesden (well’s ‘down’) its name. The church possesses many hallmarks of its age: an 11th-century oak door, a square stone font of equal age, and the water from the holy well is now piped up into a little fountain in the chancel.
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