A great church-crawling fan of rood screen remains, I saw this when it was whole some years back.
Telegraph, ' Priceless medieval panels 'hacked out' of church '
The Independent, 'Thieves steal 'priceless' medieval wooden panels from Devon church',
NewsRT.co.uk, 'Torbryan screen panels stolen from Holy Trinity church',
Guardian.co.uk, 'Fifteenth-century icons stolen from Devon church'
BBC 'Torbryan screen panels stolen from Holy Trinity church'.
Because the missing bits are pictures we tend to consider this as 'just' art, rather than an integral part of something else and it affects us that somebody's ripped it off with a thought to finding a greedy no-questions-asked collector who'll give cash for it. A hole ripped in an archaeological site to get some collectable geegaws for the same purpose perhaps does not have the same gut-feeling as being a loss, but the damage is the same. A part of a whole gone. The screen panels may surface again and the thieves hopefully will get locked up and the screen made whole again, sadly one cannot do that with damaged archaeological sites.
Photo: BBC
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