Stone Giants and a Sting-in-the-Tail Walk

'As you enter the church of St Mary the Virgin, you are greeted by a remarkable sight – nine reclining stone giants. This is the De La Beche family, usually called the “Aldworth Giants”. They were knights and lords in the 1300s, during the reigns of Edward I, II and III. Some of them were retainers to the king, warders to the Tower of London, and Sheriffs of Oxfordshire and Berkshire. The figures were carved between 1300 and 1350 and vandalised by Cromwell’s men in the Civil War ...  The Church of St Clements at Ashampstead, dating from the late 1100s, has some of the finest medieval wall paintings in the country, painted in the 1200s, probably by a Benedictine monk from Reading Abbey ...'