The interior of this large plain church is a red surprise. In most churches, pews fill the cold stone floor. Here, they are confined to the rear half of the nave, and face inward from the side aisles onto the cleared central space. This is covered by a huge red-and-gold Axminster carpet, on which stands a grand piano. After a word of introduction from rector John Good, or from Ian McDonald the organizer, up starts music for clarinet, cello, and piano, by composers of whose names (Jean Xavier Lefèvre, Gabriel Pierné, E. J. Moeran, Ernest Bloch, Gabriel Fauré, André Messager) you perhaps recognize only some. The pieces are so dazzling, the performers' mastery of them so unbelievable, that you are inclined to think (even though you were at the Edinburgh Festival last week) that this is the best music you've ever heard!

The concert lasts only half an hour (which is about right for my attention span). Afterwards, you make a voluntary contribution for the upkeep of the church, and stay for lunch, which is cooked somewhere along behind the choir stalls and eaten in the pews and at trestle tables.

The piano stays where it is throughout the week. On this red-carpeted space, too, the services are conducted. The upper end of the church, the inner sanctum, seen through the screen, is dark and filled with scaffolding: roof and windows are being repaired (by means of your donation). But even when the chancel is restored, it will be used only for special small services; the life of the church stays out here on the red carpet. Opening so close off Axminster's green and market, this is a social space for the town. (Much as church naves used to be in mediaeval times, and mosques still are.)

The concerts enrich Axminster's market days from May to October. (In 2002, May 2 and October 31 were Thursdays, so the number of concerts was a maximal 27, and in 2003 the same happened because May 1 and Oct. 30 were Thursdays. Alas, the Lyme Bay Women's Chorale didn't think of singing the "Internationale" or dancing around the maypole. 2004 being a leap year, Thursdays shifted two days back, and it was back to 26 in the season.) Returning on other Thursdays you would hear varying fare: local composers; sea songs; the Woodbury Wind Ensemble or the Sidmouth Music Club Orchestra; early music played by an ensemble of violin, two guitars, and a viola da gamba; an unfinished Mozart work completed by local musician Erik Smith; sitar and violin; Judy from the Bay Hotel in Lyme singing the songs of Ivor Gurney and reading the letters he wrote from World War One battlefields; a haunting slow movement from a wind octet by another eighteenth-century composer you've never heard of, Franz Krommer; the Woodroffe school band playing thirteenth-century music with krummhorn, bass bracket, and a Syrian lute from Aleppo. (What about the rhythm-and-blues from the market stall outside?—well, either the church wall is thick enough to mask it or the vendor has politely desisted. However, it can happen that in the middle of a programme, just as the conductor raises his baton to begin the next piece, the church clock chimes the quarter hour.) Returning at other times, such as a winter evening, you might find an Indian concert for a charitable cause: rugs draped from the pulpit and over a table on which sit the players of sitar and tabla, filling the church with heathen strains such as would have shocked Anglican congregations of a few decades earlier. There is much musical talent in this rural region: try the Schubert festival in July at the large village of Colyton a few miles southwest of Axminster.

But there is no secret tunnel out of the Minster (as the Cavaliers found when Roundheads from Lyme besieged them inside it in 1644). So you'll have to go back out to the side street.