The other man's grass...

For anyone who thought they were doing well bringing a live Donkey into a nativity play, York Minster has upped the ‘nature’ ante – by carpeting the nave in real grass for a special service.

The Minster team brought in a specialist team to carpet the stone floor with specially grown ‘Wow grass’ – real grass grown in a felt carpet of recycled textiles.

Although the grass has to be mown and watered, there is no soil involved, and therefore no mud.

The 14th century nave was carpeted for a special dinner held to celebrate the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, which raised money for the York Minster Fund.

The 1500 square metre lawn was grown on a nearby farm, and installed in the 700-year-old building by specially trained ‘carpet fitters’.

While you might think this is a pretty weird stunt to pull in a church, it pales into insignificance when compared to some others – witness the ‘lego’ church in the Netherlands, a (now dismantled) building made of concrete blocks made to look like lego bricks; or – even stranger - the Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech republic, a church decorated with the bones of 40,000 human skeletons.

What with the Germans making an ‘ice church’ out of 49,000 cubic feet of snow, a grass carpet seems almost ordinary – so what’s the weirdest or most imaginative church sanctuary you’ve ever seen? Let us know.