The Church of England must always have struggled in Snailbeach. The miners, some of whom had come from Cornwall as the tin mining industry there declined, had their own Nonconformist chapels.
Today, St Luke's in the village is a festival church, open only for a few services a year.
It is also given over to the worship of the Shropshire novelist Mary Webb. Obscure in her own lifetime, she had a huge vogue in the 1930s after Stanley Baldwin had spoken in praise of her shortly after her death.
In those days charabancs roamed the Shropshire hills with 'Mary Webb Country' on their blinds.
The Mary Webb Society has done something of what Lord Bonkers suspects Tim Farron wants to do at St Asquith's and taken out the pews at the back of the church to make room for their exhibitions.
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