The church building is open every day and regularly welcomes visitors from the village and, as part of the newly established London-Walsingham Camino, from all across the world. Visitors are helped to look around by a series of leaflets explaining the building’s key features. For those who wish to pray during their visit, there are also some seasonal guided prayer cards.
The Church Council is currently planning a re-ordering of part of the building to introduce kitchen and toilet facilities, as well as opening up the rear of the nave so it can be a general purpose space. Plans also include the temporary hosting of the village archive.
We note that no valuable church plate or other artefacts are on display in Widford Church. However, the parish’s oldest communion cup dates from 1562 and is currently on loan to the Abbey of St Albans. It can sometimes be viewed there as part of a changing display of articles of special historical interest.
People seeking information about their family trees may be interested to know that we have a digitised map of the “new” churchyard (from 1903) on our church website, here. There is no hard-copy map of the churchyard in the church building at present, but notices in the porch and lychgate have a QR code which will take visitors to the right page of the website so they can search the database and even see photographs of the headstones or other memorials. Regrettably, our parish registers were stolen with the safe in 2005, so our records are not as complete as we would like.
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