Unusual finds – chapel panels
While spring cleaning in Salisbury District Hospital’s chapel during 2019, the chaplaincy team discovered these two panels in a storeroom. Not unusual you might think, unless you consider the hospital was only built in the late 1990s! So, the team contacted ArtCare to take a look to see if we could discover more about these unusual finds.
The two panels stand about 5ft tall and are made from heavy oak planks. A closer look at the style of lettering, sees the use of the long ‘s’ as in ‘trespasses’, which went out of use in the early 1800s. There are also wording differences for the Lords Prayer. Other than that there were no defining marks to date them or provide provenance from where there came from.
After a call out by ArtCare on social media a retired chaplain and several people from the local community came up with the answer. These panels were originally on the wall of the chapel at the Old Manor Hospital (now empty and derelict but still stands on the current Fountain Way site as it is a listed building). The chapel here was built in the 1860s and some later photographs of the altar from our archive show the shadow marks where the two panels were originally placed.
