Hitchin Nub News aims to support our community, promoting shops, businesses, charities, clubs and sports groups.

We profile some of these businesses and organisations regularly in a feature called 'Up Close in Hitchin' while also encouraging opinion pieces from our readers and trusted contributors.

Here's our popular columnist 'Sparky', with his regular Friday column 'Sparky's View'.

With Halloween fast approaching here's his take on Minsden Chapel, ruins, ghosts and mystery....

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The remains of Minsden chapel have been slowly crumbling since services for its dwindling congregation were finally stopped in 1690, thus ending some 700 years of worship at the site.

The subsequent neglect and lack of maintenance meant that these picturesque ruins were soon subsumed by the encroaching woodland and scrub.

This process of rewilding and decay was no doubt hastened by vandalism and even looting: the good people of nearby St Ippollitts apparently stole one of the windows for their own church.

'Menlesdene', as the hamlet of serfs' dwellings and smallholdings was originally called, was recorded in the domesday book in 1086.

The chapel of St Nicholas, one of six so named in Hertfordshire, served not only this small woodland settlement but the nearby villages of Preston and Langley too.

In time the small rural population of Minsden moved away to the bright lights of Hitchin, and beyond, and the hamlet on the hill ceased to exist. And then so eventually did the chapel as consecrated ground.

As the ruins decayed the tales and legends grew…

Over the last century or so this local landmark, just off the B656, a couple of miles from Hitchin, has continued to attract more than its fair share of visitors.

Many are simply passing ramblers, their eyes drawn to the picturesque ruins peeking through the trees beside the Hertfordshire Way, but there have also been amateur historians, thrill-seekers and even some Satanists and more than a few ghost hunters.

The latter have been drawn by tales of haunting and apparitions of a murdered nun who emerges wraith-like from the fabric of the collapsing clunch walls. Especially on Halloween - well, there's a surprise.

Awareness of this particular legend was greatly increased by Thomas Latchmore's famous 1907 photograph of 'The Minsden Ghost' which was curiously included, without thorough explanation, in local historian Reginald Hine's book, 'The History of Hitchin' (volume II) published in 1929.

It was later proven to be a hoax, and some say Hine included it in this august work as a serious attempt to deter 'trespassers and sacrilegious persons' who may have been tempted to visit and interfere with Minsden, a place that he loved dearly. If so, this peculiar tactic somewhat misfired.

It reminds me of Springfield's hapless Chief Wiggum who once famously exclaimed 'You know you're not meant to go in there. What is your fascination with my Forbidden Closet of Mystery?'

There is, however, still a curious atmosphere to the ruins, aided no doubt by its remote hilltop position and reputation.

And for those fond of even older mysteries, Britain's most famous lay line (St Michael's) runs right through the site on its route from Lands End in Cornwall to Hopton-on-Sea in Norfolk (taking in the sacred stones at Avebury, Stonehenge and even the Royston cave as it does so): was there also a pagan religious temple here before the chapel was built?

Reginald Hine was latterly a deeply troubled man and sadly took his own life at Hitchin Station in April 1949.

He had always vowed to protect the ruins: in life he had come to a partial ownership arrangement with the church authorities to achieve this and his ashes were scattered there shortly after his death, protected a pile of flints.

His family then laid a more formal headstone there in 1983, which remains to this day.

Perhaps in death and in situ he can now deliver on his vow: 'Furthermore, if as possible, I am buried there, I will endeavour in all ghostly ways to protect and haunt its hallowed walls'

Murdered nuns and a ghostly watchmen or not, I think we should all help to protect this special place.

And it is also on private land, so please respect this. When I visited earlier this week, I admired the ruins from the path and from the nearby field, leaving the site untouched.

I think this is what he would have wanted and what the site deserves. Look after it, please.