St. Michaels Church (Lyndhurst)
St. Michael and All Angels is the parish church of Lyndhurst in Hampshire, at the heart of the New Forest.
It is a 19th century church, built at a time when the New Forest was becoming popular with wealthy visitors.
William White, who had learned by working under Gilbert Scott, was the architect, and he built the church between 1858 and 1869.
St. Michael's is built of brick and stone, and stands on a slight rise overlooking the main street which is always busy with tourists.
White put in Gothic arches, and roof corbels with carved heads depicting churchmen influential at the time of the Reformation. There are life-size angel musicians (human life-size, that is) on the brackets of the roof, and stone saints around the pulpit.
Lord Leighton contributed the reredos, consisting of a mural depicting the seven wise virgins and the seven foolish virgins. Edward Burne-Jones designed the large East window, and there is also work by John Millais.
In the churchyard is a grave that is rarely visited, but would be of great interest to most English-speaking people. Buried here is Mrs Alice Hargreaves.
As a little girl, she was Alice Liddell, and was told stories, with herself as the heroine,by a clergyman and mathematics writer named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. He is far better known as Lewis Carroll, and the first of the stories was "Alice in Wonderland".