England & Wales Hardwicke Marriage Index
Marriages 1754 - 1837
Linch St Luke

The Parish

The parish of Linch lies in the extreme northwest of Sussex not too far from the 3-counties meet where Sussex meets both Hampshire & Surrey. Linch is located roughly 6 miles northwest of the market town of Midhurst, it stands almost 3 miles west of the A286 road which links Midhurst with Haslemere. There is no village of Linch, indeed the name does not appear on stand 1:50,000 Ordnance Survey mapping rather it is Woodmansgreen where Linch parish church sits. Pevsner describes the the area as "more remote than one would expect" in "jagged hilly heathland". A glance at the area's map shows it dominated by forestry with only the area around the infant Hammer Stream as agricultural land. Like most of the Weald Linch owes its origins to individual farmsteads carved into the formal wild wood. Linch is drained westward and then south by the Hammer Stream which soon joins the River Rother which heads determinedly east as far as Pulborough before turning south to reach the English Channel through Littlehampton. Linch is sited at around 70 metres above the sea at the parish church with bracken covered hillsides at Redford rising to 183 metres as the local high spot. Linch parish was one of the tiny parishes of its county covering just 700 acres which would have supported a population of little more than 50 parishioners. In Domesday times Linch was a settlement of 14 houses and a holding of Earl Roger of Shrewsbury, it offered 3 ploughs and some meadows and woodland.

The Church

St Luke now stands beside Linch Road at Woodmansgreen well over a mile north of the site of the original medieval St Luke which once stood adjacent to a Linch Farm hence the parish' name. By 1551 that church had become a total ruin and for around 150 years there was no functioning church. In 1705 the present St Luke was completed as a 4-bay nave with a single bay for the chancel, a simple chapel for a small congregation.  In 1814 the church was extended westwards and acquired its bellcote, the vestry was added to the southeastern corner in or around 1865. The major work of 1886 was conducted by one Lacy Ridge employed as the surveyor of Chichester Cathedral. That work took the simple chapel and turned it into a Early English Gothic revival piece which Pevsner describes succinctly as "very unpleasant". Finally in 2012 an extension and community hall (Bettesworth Room Annex) was added at the northwestern corner. Outside the churchyard the verge is turned over to gravel allowing safe on-street parking for a few vehicles, the church lies amongst several substantial trees which must do limit the views, some scouting around is needed to find the optimal viewpoints.