I had no intention of re-reading Turgenev’s novella, First Love. I had gone into Primrose Hill Books simply to get out of the rain when I spotted a pretty paperback, Love and Youth: Essential Stories, published by Pushkin Press. My first thought was to leave it where it lay, amid a jumble of other books. My nightstand has lots of unread books and I didn’t need to add to the pile. But the sales assistant was sweet, I was glad of the shelter, and the charming bookshop worked its magic.

I first read First Love more than forty years ago. I was at that time going through something of a “Turgenev phase” and had convinced myself that he was my favorite of all of the great nineteenth-century Russian storytellers. The phase passed, as phases tend to do, but I still remember clearly how impressed I was in those days by the combination of clarity and vividness I found in his stories.

First Love is not the tale of foolish teenage infatuation that I first read when I had just left my own teenage years behind me. Decades on it seems to me to be a melancholy reflection on the innocent happiness of youth. “And now that the shades of evening begin to descend over my life, what is left to me that is any fresher or dearer than my memories of that storm which blew over so soon, one springtime morning?” Great stories change as we change. First Love is a great story and Turgenev is one the greatest storytellers.

The Cotswolds is an area rich in ancient and beautiful churches. Many of them are large and grand, endowed by the affluence and generosity of local wool merchants since the Middle Ages. The “wool churches” in villages and towns such as Chipping Campden, Burford, and Northleach, are some of the most magnificent in the country; dazzling expressions of that happy combination of faith and wealth. I have spent many enjoyable hours exploring their treasures over the years, but none of them stirs my spirit as much as the tiny, simple, and largely unadorned churches from even earlier times.

St. Oswald’s is one such gem. Although it’s easy enough to find, the church sits in a remote field and the only access to it is via a rough footpath. Widford itself is a hamlet with only a few houses and even fewer signs of life on the day we visited. We parked on a grass verge, walked over the cattle grid and headed for what looked in the distance more like a barn than a church. The building is clearly mostly from the 13th century, but once you’re inside parts of an earlier church (Saxon? Early Norman) become visible. Excavations of the site revealed Roman floor mosaics and partially uncovered wall paintings from the 14th century. Box pews from the 1700s are still in place.

Bare descriptions of the building’s features do nothing to convey the power of this church. It’s an austere, cold place. The god worshipped in this place for nearly a thousand years is no comforting or reassuring presence. This is a church that marks an older, tougher, more rigid faith. A church for a harder world, where many died in infancy and few lived beyond the age of forty. A place that knew plague, invasion, and real hardship, and served a god to be feared and obeyed.

If you believe in holiness and believe it persists in the wood and stone of ancient buildings, the chances are you’ll feel it in St. Oswald’s.