a tomb-slab carved with a foliated cross flaked by a mitre and crozier, with the inscription “Hic jacet Hugo Bssop”. This is a rebus, as the deceased was not a bishop but had the surname Bishop. On the chancel north wall is the spectacular Baroque monument commemorating Colonel John Birch (d. 1691). It has a pair of black marble Corinthian columns, standing on a high shallow plinth bearing his epitaph which is framed in the same marble. The columns support the ends of a broken segmental pediment, and in the gap of this is his heraldry carved in relief. The aedicule frames a statue of the deceased within a shallow round-headed niche in grey marble. Churchyard cross In the churchyard just south of the chancel are the remains of a 14th-century churchyard cross, which comprise a Scheduled Ancient Monument. This has five octagonal steps, and a decorated socket stone. The shaft and cross-head are modern. There is a legend that if you walk around the cross seven times at midnight while reciting the Lord's Prayer backwards, you will summon the Devil. War Memorial The village's war memorial is further south in the churchyard, and is a Grade II Listed Building. The material used is sandstone, and it was inaugurated in 1920. It is a cross with a tapering shaft, standing on a monolithic block with partly chamfered corners, itself standing on a stepped plinth. The names commemorated are carved into the block; there are eighteen from the First World War, and none from the Second World War because the village suffered no casualties -this is mentioned in the epigraph. Roman Catholic Weobley's little Roman Catholic church is on the Kington Road outside the village, and is dedicated to St Thomas of Hereford. When being a Catholic was illegal in England under the Penal Laws, Weobley was described as a “nest of Papists”. The recusant Monington family of Sarnesfield Court (demolished 1955) maintained a chapel in their house after the Reformation until Catholic emancipation in 1829, whereupon they decided to have a church built. It was erected in 1835, and is the oldest Roman Catholic church in Herefordshire as well as being a very early example of ecclesiastical Gothic Revival architecture. The family put the church under the care of Downside Abbey, and several other local Catholic churches were founded from it. However, in 1923 the responsibility was transferred to the