On 30th November last year, in front of Prince Charles, Barbados replaced its head of state with a president – Sandra Mason.
Still, lots of the island’s 17th-, 18th-and 19th-century British buildings, great and small, not only survive but thrive. What a huge pleasure it is to discover them all.
Patrick Leigh Fermor was spot-on in The Traveller’s Tree (1950): ‘In nothing is the illusion of England so compelling as in the parish churches of Barbados. They stand alone in the canefields, their battlemented belfries and vanes and pinnacles appearing over the sheltering tops of clumps of trees.’
Despite the odious nature of slavery, apparent when these churches were built, many of them are wholeheartedly glorious.
So deep is the pleasure of coming upon them that they quite sear themselves into your senses. Today, when seeing
