Pevsner has nothing to say about the village but an online description I found reads “A simple little building set in a formal churchyard, with curiously domestic details reminiscent of C.F.A. Voysey (a prominent turn-of-the-century architect). With a pebble-dashed exterior, steep slate roof and plain nave windows between battered buttresses linked by segmental arches. At the west end is a stumpy towerlet with a gable for bells.”
Preston. It has a delightful green with fine elms and a churchyard with four avenues of cypresses, but its attractive church belongs to our own time. In it is an interesting witness to the days when a house of the Knights Templars stood here, founded in the reign of King Stephen by Bernard de Baliol, ancestor of the founder of Qxford’s famous college. The Knights Hospitallers succeeded to the Knights Templars, and held the house until the break-up of the monasteries by Henry VIII, who gave it to his secretary of state, Sir Ralph Sadler. His family held the house till Queen Anne’s day, when the present manor house of Temple Dinsley was set up on the site.
The witness of those days which we find in the church is the lid of a stone coffin with a long-stemmed cross carved in relief upon it. It was dug up with other coffin lids and with human fragments, and there is no doubt that it covered one of the ancient knights. His name is unknown, but all the world knows the name of a humbler soldier of Christ who came this way, for John Bunyan would often come to preach in a dell in Wain Wood, half a mile north of the village. Not far away are the ruins of Minsden Chapel, a 14th-century fabric abandoned for nearly three centuries.
Castle Farm is interesting because it is said to be the site of a home of Lawrence Sterne’s Uncle Toby. It is declared that this famous character in Tristam Shandy was drawn from Captain Robert Hind, whom Preston folk knew as the General. Here he would disturb his neighbours by firing a battery of guns rigged up on the terrace of his castle, which he fitted with portholes, turrets, and a portcullis, and he would parade the terrace with friends and children dressed in scarlet uniforms with blue sashes.
The witness of those days which we find in the church is the lid of a stone coffin with a long-stemmed cross carved in relief upon it. It was dug up with other coffin lids and with human fragments, and there is no doubt that it covered one of the ancient knights. His name is unknown, but all the world knows the name of a humbler soldier of Christ who came this way, for John Bunyan would often come to preach in a dell in Wain Wood, half a mile north of the village. Not far away are the ruins of Minsden Chapel, a 14th-century fabric abandoned for nearly three centuries.
Castle Farm is interesting because it is said to be the site of a home of Lawrence Sterne’s Uncle Toby. It is declared that this famous character in Tristam Shandy was drawn from Captain Robert Hind, whom Preston folk knew as the General. Here he would disturb his neighbours by firing a battery of guns rigged up on the terrace of his castle, which he fitted with portholes, turrets, and a portcullis, and he would parade the terrace with friends and children dressed in scarlet uniforms with blue sashes.
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