Why did the vicar preach outdoors?

One of my favourite walks takes me over the moors and down through Eyam, the picturesque Derbyshire village made famous by the inhabitants’ self-sacrifice during the Great Plague. When the pestilence arrived from London in a bolt of cloth, the residents – led by the young vicar, William Mompesson – agreed to quarantine themselves to stop it spreading to the neighbouring towns and villages. One third of the villagers died.

It’s an interesting story, but not one I expected to make its way into my fiction. But when the area suggested itself to me as the ideal setting for my current novel-in-progress, I couldn’t ignore its history. As a vicar’s daughter growing up within a couple of miles of Eyam, my protagonist would be as familiar with the plague narrative as with the Nativity and Snow White.

The plague influenced the games she played as a child with her brother and sister. They played shop at the boundary stone where, in 1665/6, the people of nearby Stoney Middleton left food for the afflicted in Eyam. The siblings in my novel pontificated from the outdoor pulpit beyond the village where William Mompesson preached his sermons after the plague forced him to close the church.

You can still put a finger in the holes drilled into the boundary stone where the people of Eyam left coins soaked in vinegar – believed to kill the infection – in exchange for supplies. You can still stand beneath the limestone arch where the vicar consoled his congregation gathered across the valley in socially distanced family groups. But the crags are now so thick with vegetation I wouldn’t even try to reach that point.

Nor did I expect to be able to see the pulpit from the muddy path that runs along the bottom of the valley. But, looking up, I caught a glimpse of light through the trees. Can you spot the outdoor pulpit in the image above right? It actually looks more obvious here than it did when I took the photo.