Shropshire Magazine

Shirley Tart discovers the hidden treasures at St Bartholomew’s Church in Tong.

The village of Tong, so the guide books say, is best known for its church.

To thousands of visitors, the splendid and listed St Bartholomew’s is best known for the (alleged) grave of Charles Dickens’s Little Nell.

But though the Little Nell story was fuelled by the theory, partly borne out, that the great novelist visited the church when his grandmother worked at Tong Castle, it sadly must remain just what it was . . . fiction.

Since Little Nell Trent lived only between the pages of a Victorian novel as a character in the author’s The Old Curiosity Shop, there were no mortal remains.

However, it is possible, as suggested elsewhere, that the hamlet where Nell dies in the book was based on Tong.

For the full story see this month’s Shropshire Magazine