Although Hertfordshire is one of the smaller English counties, there are numerous attractive historic towns, villages and hamlets. The influence of St Albans Abbey, one of the most powerful monasteries in the country, spread throughout the county, and there is a wealth of other fascinating medieval churches, including St Michael’s, St Albans (with Saxon origins), the Norman Hemel Hempstead, and the fourteenth-century Ashwell with its famous plague graffiti. Later periods are also well represented, including two often overlooked seventeenth-century Gothic Survival churches at Buntingford and Oxhey, the important Greek Revival church at Ayot St Lawrence, others from the Victorian period (including Ayot St Peter, which was influential on the Arts and Crafts movement), and St Martin’s, Knebworth, by Sir Edwin Lutyens, from just before the First World War. The monuments, stained glass, screens and other furnishings found within the churches are just as rewarding, ranging from a Saxon crucifix to a window from 2013. The county’s churches are also particularly rich in corbels and other similar carvings, which often go unnoticed by the casual visitor but when seen close up are revealed as fine examples of folk art, ranging from handsome to humorous to hideous and all the way back again.
