Folksworth

On the face of it St Helen, LK, is entirely Victorian, or at least it looked all new to me and Pevsner, but on closer inspection you start to see Norman elements like the north door and splendid grotesque by the south door. When I arrived there was an ongoing service - very strange timing, quite what Mass was being held at 2.30pm on a Tuesday afternoon I have no idea - so I didn't get inside and am now undecided as to whether to revisit or not!

ST HELEN. Nave, chancel, and S transept. A steep bellcote on the W gable. At first it all seems Victorian, but then one realizes that the masonry and the buttressing are medieval, and one is not surprised to find a Norman N doorway. One order of shafts with scallop capitals. Arch with a roll, tympanum with a pattern of gridiron and pellets. The chancel arch is indeed also Norman. It is quite high and has thick zigzag in the arch. The capitals are decorated, two with small heads, the others with volutes. The arch to the S transept has two continuous chamfers and may well be contemporary with the buttressing. The Victorian work is of 1850, especially the blatantly neo-Norman chancel. - PLATE. Cup and Cover Paten, 1569-70; Paten on foot of Britannia silver, 1697-8.

FOLKSWORTH. It is very old, with the remnant of a 14th century cross behind an inn, a 17th century dovecot falling down when we called, a little group of ancient houses, and a church which has been here 800 years. It has a Norman doorway into the nave with an arch of two orders and a tympanum decorated with tiny squares; and a Norman chancel arch, also of two orders, with simple ornament and two quaint faces on the capitals. There is a 14th century transept, a 16th century porch, a font where the children of the village have been baptised since the first Tudor king was on the throne, two coffin lids with crosses of the 13th century, a piscina over 600 years old, gravestones of Stuart days in the churchyard, and an altar cup engraved twenty years before the Great Armada.

Flickr.