conveyed the party to Walton, where tea was provided in the 

 School-room. Unfortunately, time ran short, and the visit to the 

 Church was quite cursory ; but it is intended to revisit Walton at 

 an early date, to enable our members to have the benefit of the 

 Vicar, Mr. Fisher's, promised description of a very interesting 

 building. The return journey was made from Burton-on-Trent 

 Station. 



A second expedition was held on Wednesday, August 1 2th, to 

 Pentrich and Codnor Castle. The party left Derby at 10.25 a.m., 

 arriving at Wingfield Station at 10.59, where brakes were in 

 readiness, and the visitors drove to Pentrich Church. Here the 

 Vicar, the Rev. W. J. Ledward, received and conducted them 

 over the building, and read the following paper : — 



PENTRICH CHURCH. 

 To those who delight in searching the remains of past days, perhaps there 

 is no county that presents for this purpose a wider or more varied field, more 

 filled with sacred memories and heart-stirring incidents, than our own. 



Derbyshire is rich in old village churches. The church in which you 

 are assembled to-day, small and humble though it be, is full of stirring 

 memories. It has resisted well for nearly eight hundred years the 

 disintegrating forces of nature, and is still in excellent preservation, 

 apparently able to weather the storms of centuries to come. It by no 

 means follows that the date of its erection, about 1150, was the beginning 

 of a religious edifice in this parish. It is well-known that many of our 

 Norman churches were built on the site, and partly with the materials, 

 of the rude Saxon building which previously existed on the spot, just 

 as our builders in the Perpendicular period, when they added these 

 clerestory windows, made use of the incised slabs of Norman, or perhaps 

 Saxon, gravestones for the window sills. 



The study of past times is often a melancholy retrospect, but in most 

 minds there is a desire to know what has gone before us : to discover 

 something of our ancestry, our race, our country, and, above all, our 

 religion, and though our parish church, and the traditions that cling to it, 

 give us no certain clue to what took place here before the Conquest, 

 we know that long before the Saxons drove the ancient inhabitants into 

 Wales and Cornwall, the Christian religion had been established and 

 continued for 300 to 400 years, for the testimony of Gildas proves that 

 there had been numerous churches all over Roman Britain, and we know 

 from church history that three British bishops were present at the Council 



