Mamble and Crowl, Worcs

Finally got to Mamble, which was a bit of a disappointment, to say the least. A little place with its most open area on a downward piece of the hill, a pub and a church and almost nothing else. Plainly we’ll have to rewrite the song:
Now we’ve been to Mamble
That lies above the Teme,
And there’s no one much in Mamble,
At least as we have seen.
No doubt they breed and brew there,
Still lazy as the claim,
But I doubt that any song there
Sets the local pub aflame.
However, we also went to the other Crowle, in Worcestshire. This has a totally different atmosphere to the Crowle up north, which seemed run down and devitalised. Crowle, Worcs, is probably a dormitory suburb, but the houses are both old thatched roof style and modern, the church has a sense of quiet about it, and there’s a modern parish hall at one end of the village. No sign of any Crowls in the church graveyard, so maybe we’re a hardy lot!
This morning, however, we went to church at the local place just down the road, in the village of Wolverley. This was a fairly High Anglican place, seemingly occupied by widows (only a couple of blokes that I could see) and not very many of them. There was a choir, however, all in heavenly-blue robes, and there were a couple of guys in amongst them too, so that supplemented the numbers on both sides.
The minister was a woman, but she isn’t the vicar, apparently. He was away doing a service elsewhere. She spoke well in her short sermon, and made a good point about reaching out to others in her comments on John’s Gospel.
At the end we took a brief look around the place, and there was a list of former vicars, going way back to the 13th century. One John Crowle stood out among them. He was vicar around 1545, and had an alias: Yewes. Not sure what that had to do with anything!
Of course he may have no connection with my part of the family, but it’s good to see someone in the wider clan doing a good job all that time ago.
Anyway, both the Wolverley church and the Crowle church are named after St John the Baptist. The Wolverley one, which is in the picture, is built on a hill. This is probably a good thing, apart from its biblical significance, because in June this year, Wolverley's lower reaches were flooded twice. We saw a man digging out the stream that runs past his house, and replacing the rocks that had been shifted from his garden wall. He's planning on building a much higher wall around that side of the house, even though the stream is at present more than a metre below the foundations.