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<li data-anchor="tl" data-twitter-status=" website via @MailOnline" data-formatted-headline="Bats are invading and ruining some of our oldest churches" data-hide-email="true" data-article-id="2686807" data-article-channel-follow-button="MailOnline" data-is-channel="false" id="shareLinkTop" class="share-icons" data-placement="top" website <\/li>\n<\/ul><\/div>\n
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Any restaurant that looked \u2014 or successful unique lacquer paintings<\/a> stank \u2014 like this would be shut down on the spot.If it was a school, the gates would be padlocked and Landscape lacquer painting the fumigation squad sent in.<\/font><\/p>\n
But it isn’t.<\/font><\/p>\n
It’s a very pretty, very fragile medieval village church. It is still very much in use, with a dwindling but devoted congregation and an excellent rector.<\/font><\/p>\n
But more than 500 years after St Andrew’s in Holme Hale, Norfolk, was built, its primary role is no longer that of a place of worship.<\/font><\/p>\n
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To some they are cute; to others a pest but you can be arrested for just blocking up the hole that bats use to get in and out of your house<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p>\n
Thanks to an all-powerful alliance of European Union technocrats, environmental zealots<\/a> and dithering politicians, St\u2009\u2009Andrew’s \u2014 like churches all over the country \u2014 has been redesignated as a bat loo.<\/font><\/p>\n
Not that anyone bothered to ask the parishioners first, of course.They have merely been informed that if they attempt to interfere with the bats, they risk arrest.<\/font><\/p>\n
Each week, churchwarden Tulah Tuke, 82, spends hours removing the worst of the excrement so that worshippers will not have to sit in the sort of faeces and urine which I find splattered over the pews when I arrive.<\/font><\/p>\n
She can do nothing about the excruciating smell, however \u2014 an all-pervading blend<\/a> of old gym kit and Third World public lavatories in high summer.<\/font><\/p>\n