Church Visitors’ Books

The church visitors’ books give an insight into the 15,000 people who have visited St Edmund’s church in Marske since that 1950s.  What makes people sign a visitors’ book?  Is it the desire the leave a mark, to record proudly where you’ve travelled from, or to record a special memory about the place being visited? 

Most people visit the church in the summer as the chart shows. 

The actual number signing the church visitors’ book has however been remarkably constant over time.  This seems to be at odds with the general trends in visitors to the area – for example the number of visitors to the Yorkshire Dales National Park increased by nearly 40% from 2010 to 2019.  ¹  What has changed much more over time is the nature of people’s visits, and their origins ². 

Throughout the sixty years many comment enthusiastically about the box pews.  In the 1960s there are comments on the whitewashing of the walls, and the concealment of the roof timbers through the creation of a false ceiling over the aisle.  This was notionally to make the building warmer. However anyone who has been in the building on a winter evening (not many of our visitors fortunately!) will be able to attest to the doubtful success of this modification. 

People visit to look for ancestors, including families whose relations who are named on plaques as having been killed in the World Wars of the twentieth century.  Others look in the graveyard for the gravestone of those buried in centuries before.  The visitors include those who used to live in the area.  In the 1960s and 70s this group includes a sizeable number of pupils of Scarborough College.  The College (a school) was evacuated to Marske Hall in 1940 and remained there until at least 1947. The pupils clearly enjoyed their time in Marske. 

Of course many people visit Marske and the church as part of a walk.  Since the late 1970s this has included the Coast to Coast walk.  The first Coast-to-Coast walker identified themselves as such in 1978, 5 years after Wainwright published his book.  The Coast-to-Coast brings an international flavour to Marske – with walkers principally from Europe, Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand.  The change in the origin of those signing the visitors’ books from the late 1950s until the 2020 pandemic is portrayed in the graph below.

The recent visitors’ books today record fewer people from places such as Darlington, Teesside and neighbouring North Yorkshire.  In the 60s and 70s groups of people from Marske-next-the-Sea took pride in signing into the Marske-in-Swaledale visitors’ books!  One suspects however that over the last 60 years people have become less enthusiastic about signing visitors’ books if they are visiting somewhere close to home.  Further analysis of the changing habits of those who sign church visitors’ books across England is beyond the scope of this website!  Maybe someone can do a PhD on it?

1. Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority.  Webpage on presentation of tourism survey.  https://www.yorkshiredales.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2023/03/Yorkshire-Dales-STEAM-Infographic-2021.pdf.  Accessed 2023.[↩]
2. Local contributor 2:  Analysis and partial database of church visitors – available on enquiry via comments form.  Created 2023.[↩]