Spaldwick

St James, open, is dominated by its huge spire. The church interior is remarkably spartan but whilst taking interiors my memory card decided it was full so I will have to return to finish off.

ST JAMES. A fascinating W tower of the mid C14, 152 ft high. The doorway has continuous mouldings, and on the stage above are lozenge-shaped windows to N, S, and W with flowing tracery, a typically Dec conceit. Above, two-light transomed bell-openings and a broach spire with three tiers of lucarnes. (The stair-turret has a stone vault with chamfered ribs and a boss. RCHM) The oldest part of the church is the Norman N doorway with continuous mouldings, including one of stylized beakhead. Hood-mould with billets. The masonry on this side (brown cobbles) is Norman too. The chancel is latest C13 - or is the chancel arch a little earlier? The windows have excellent tracery, of the stage just before ogees appeared, i.e. pointed-trefoiled lights, pointed trefoils but also a large circle and rounded trefoils. The S arcade is of c.1300. Four bays, round piers with round or octagonal abaci, bits of nailhead, double-chamfered arches, and coarse nailhead in the hood-moulds. Wide Late Perp S aisle and S chapel. One-bay arch to the chancel. - SCREEN. To the S aisle, Perp, only bits original. - STAINED GLASS. Fragments in the S aisle E window. - PLATE. Silver-gilt Cup and Cover Paten, 1628-9. - Also the Chalice and Paten of 1570 from Woolley.

SPALDWICK. It has lost most of its ancient earthwork, but Danesfield can still be seen, one of the many things reminding us of the years that have gone over this village near Ellington Brook. Many of its cottages were here in Cromwell’s day; its bridge of three arches must be nearly 500 years old; its green, shaded with spreading chestnuts, has what is believed to be a fragment of an ancient cross; its High Street has a 17th century inn with quaint frescoes, found in our time under 20 thicknesses of paper, and showing three men, one an archer. We come into the church by the doorway the Normans built; it is charming, set in a rough wall with beak-heads worn by centuries of wind and rain. Men and women have been passing through it since Richard Lionheart went on the Third Crusade. The lofty tower, dominating the rather dainty looking church, with a 14th century clerestory, is crowned by a beautiful spire with windows that were looking down on Spaldwick six centuries ago. Light enough for us to see all its beauty, the church has a 13th century arcade with four arches and a man’s head watching over them, a south porch 300 years younger, fragments of glass that were here before the monasteries fell into ruin, a 16th century screen with finely carved tracery and vine ornament, and a 17th century chest. Seven centuries old is the simple font, and at the chancel windows are stone faces thought to be kings and peasants of 600 years ago. The sill of one chancel window was cut down 600 years ago to form a seat. The roofs of the south porch and the south chapel are 16th century. On a buttress are three sundials, one marked with the hours.

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Woolley

St Mary, ruined, is a sorry sight. Unlike many ruined churches I've visited which have been lovingly maintained St Mary has been allowed to be reclaimed by nature and is subsumed by vegetation. This, it seems to me, is a shame.

Pevsner missed it.

WOOLLEY. Far from anywhere it seems, a farm or two, and a church enshrined in splendid elms and chestnuts. It has fragments of Norman work but most of it is 13th century, though the tower with its spire is 14th. Children have been christened at its font 600 years. There is a screen with a panelled door, a Jacobean stool, a stone coffin, and, rather an odd thing to find in a church, a chest-of-drawers made about 1700.

We came here upon Mikipher Alphery, of whom we had not heard before. He was a Russian prince who left Russia with two brothers because their lives were threatened, and it is odd to find that he came here as rector about two years after Shakespeare died and stayed for a quarter of a century. Then he was back here again. He died in London in the year of the Great Fire, having suffered much at the hands of the Puritans but finding England safer and much more comfortable than his own land. A little strange it seems to think of this little flock with a Russian prince for a shepherd.

Barham

St Giles, locked, keyholder notice, is a pretty, little, transitional building in an attractive village but didn't seem likely to hold much of interest inside, so I didn't bother to try and find the keyholders - this may have been a mistake. I'll probably never know.

ST GILES. Nave, narrow N aisle, and chancel; no tower, but a bellcote of 1842. The S doorway and the three-bay arcade are Transitional between Norman and E.E. The doorway has one order of polygonal shafts, scallop capitals, zigzag set diagonally, and the arch just pointed (an alteration?). The arcade has round piers with square abaci and round arches with only a slight chamfer. The hood-mould also has a slight chamfer. But the capitals are one of the Late Norman waterleaf the other of the E.E. crocket variety. The E bay is wider than the others. The chancel is late C13 with Y- and intersecting tracery. - BOX PEWS. - C17 BENCHES with knobs on the ends (cf. Leighton Bromswold). - PLATE. Cup with bowl of c.1570.

 BARHAM. It has a few old houses and a church with a Norman arcade, its round pillars crowned with carved capitals. Over 30 generations of Barham folk have passed through its narrow south doorway, and 600 years seem to have so weighed down the chancel arch that it is now shaped rather like a child’s magnet. The 13th century chancel has a chalice of Elizabeth’s day and a 17th century altar table; the nave has benches of the 17th century. But the church’s oldest possessions are a 14th century coffin-lid and a font at which children have been christened since soon after Magna Carta. There is a Jacobean chest.

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Leighton Bromswold

The boys, justifiably, bang on about St Mary so I'll just say that I was blown away, not so much by the exterior, which I liked very much, particularly the tower, but by the interior, which is a sea of Jacobean woodwork and makes for a very special interior. To quote Pevsner "this is a wonderful church".

ST MARY. This is a wonderful church, thanks to the E.E. architects, and a highly interesting church, thanks to the patrons of the first half of the C17. What faces the visitor first of all is the C17, a strong W tower, ashlar-faced, cream-coloured, and dated 1634. It exhibits no Gothic yearnings, except that from a distance its general shape is traditional. But the W doorway and the W windows are round-arched, and so are the twin bell-openings. There are battlements and pinnacles, but the pinnacles are obelisks. However, behind that tower, there is the C13 at once, in its details and even more in its clear plan of the noblest simplicity: nave, transepts, chancel. In fact, as the roof-line against the W walls of the transepts proves, the E.E. church had narrow aisles, and the two doorways must have belonged to them. The N doorway with a bold, rather blunt semicircular moulding and two orders of colonnettes may - so the RCHM suggests - even be in siru. The S doorway is the more splendid, with four orders and fine arch mouldings, one of them occupied by dogtooth. In the transepts no E.E. features remain, except the buttresses. The large E windows with their reticulated tracery are Dec. But the chancel is wholly of the latest C13. Its two large, clear S windows with intersecting tracery make the room beautifully light. The E window with panel tracery, almost entirely uncusped, is Late Perp, but has something of the same spirit. Late Perp also one chancel S and one N window. There is no more to be said about the architecture. The interior is one of large unbroken surfaces. To go into details, the chancel arch stands on triple shafts which start high up, i.e. presuppose a low stone screen. The arch is double-chamfered. In the chancel is the finest of all E.E. DOUBLE  PISCINAS, square-headed with a large round arch intersected, even in the individual mouldings, by two half-arches. Opposite is an AUMBRY with a shelf. Of the E.E. transept details there are only the E responds of the arches towards the former crossing.* The roofs transport us to the C17. They are original in transepts and nave, with tiebeams on short straight braces and arched braces up to the collars, and also wind-braces. The tower arch has C17 responds too, though the arch is pointed.

The C17 dates, as far as we know them, are as follows. The church was ruinous about 1600. The S aisle was demolished in 1606. The nave was then roofless. In 1626 George Herbert, the poet, was ordained deacon and became prebend. In 1630 he was ordained priest and took over the parish of Bemerton. In 1633 he died and left the manuscript of his The Temple to Nicholas Ferrar of Little Gidding. In Herbert’s years the N aisle was demolished and the church re-roofed. The furnishings also belong to that time. The Duke of Lennox was Lord of the Manor and paid for the W tower. Other benefactors were Nicholas and John Ferrar. - The FURNISHINGS just referred to are these. PULPIT and READER’S DESK. Two identical pieces with sounding-boards, l. and r. of the chancel arch - like Early Christian ambos. - STALLS. Just long benches with open front and open ends. Balusters for the front, knobs for the arms. - The BENCHES in the body of the church are the same. In the transepts they face inwards, college-wise. - SCREEN. Only 5 ft high, also open, and also with knobs. - The screened-off part of the S transept, the LECTERN, the LITANY DESK, and the TOWER SCREEN all have original C17 parts. Those of the lectern come from Stow Longa Manor House. - RAINWATER HEADS. They are very fine, and one is dated 1634. - PLATE. Cup and Cover Paten of 1627-8. The cup has the Lennox arms. - MONUMENTS. Sir Robert Tyrwhitt d. 1572 and wife. Alabaster effigies, defaced, on an alabaster tomb-chest with stiff standing figures of children and in the middle the coat of arms. - Lady Darcy, daughter of Sir Robert, d. 1567. By the same hand, and also defaced.

* Two round E.E. capitals have been cut to make them suitable as a FONT.

LEIGHTON BROMSWOLD. Here is the church of the rare poet George Herbert in the days when Nicholas Ferrar was at Little Gidding a few miles away, with Charles Stuart calling to see him now and again. This was the poet’s first living. He had left Cambridge undecided “whether to choose the painted pleasures of the Court” or to give himself to the Church, and while meditating on this at a house in Kent the Bishop of Lincoln appointed him Prebend to Leighton Bromswold, with a church in ruins. He made it beautiful again, though it is almost incredible, yet said to be true, that he never actually visited the place but entrusted what was to him a sacred charge to his great friend Nicholas Ferrar. Yet we must believe that the thought of this place runs through his series of poems on The Temple.

Izaak Walton tells us that Herbert made the rebuilding of this church so much a business that he became restless till it was finished, “being for the workmanship a costly mosaic, for the form an exact cross, and for the decency and beauty I am assured it is the most remarkable parish church that this nation affords.” In the midst of his great expenditure on this church the poet’s mother sent for him and begged him to give the living back to his patron, “for, George, it is not for your weak body and empty purse to help to build churches.” George begged his mother that at the age of 33 she would allow him to become an undutiful son, for he had made a vow to God that he would rebuild that church.

We must read his poems on the Temple (as Charles Stuart read them in his captivity), or those on the Synagogue if we would realise the depth of feeling and earnestness of purpose with which George Herbert carried out this work. We are to feel the spirit of this poem, with its playful boasting, as we come into this porch:

What Church is this? Christ’s Church. Who builded it? '
Master George Herbert. Who assisted it?
Many assisted: who I may not say,
So much contention might arise that way.
If I say Grace gave all; Wit straight doth thwart,
And says, All that is there is mine: but Art
Denies, and says, There’s nothing there but’s mine:
Nor can I easily the right define.
Divide: say, Grace the matter gave, and Wit
Did polish it: Art measured and made fit
Each several piece, and flamed it altogether.
No, by no means: this may not please them neither.
None’s well contented with a part alone,
When each doth challenge all to be his own.
The matter; the expressions, and the measures,
Are equally Art’s, Wit’s, and Grace’s treasures.
Then he, that would impartially discuss
This doubtful question, must answer thus: .
In building of his Temple, Master Herbert
Is equally all Grace, all Wit, all Art.
Roman and Grecian Muses all give way:
One English Poem darkens all your day.

The poet’s biographer, Izaak Walton, tells us that he would have his church exceeded by none, and though the church is not today entirely as the poet built it much that he did remains. What surprises us all as we come in would be no surprise to him. These twin pulpits on each side of the chancel arch were put there by his order, a Reading Pew and Pulpit, a little distance from each other and both of an equal height, for he would often say they should neither have a precedency or a priority of the other, but, Prayer and Preaching, being equally useful, might agree like brethren and have an equal honour and estimation. The pulpits are in oak, with canopies and pendants.

The altar is that built by George Herbert when he was refashioning the church, pulling down the old ruins and rebuilding the nave. The tower is apparently part of his reconstruction, though it was not finished until 1634. It is crowned at its corners by four obelisks, and the walls are made charming with rain-water heads of 17th century leadwork. The chancel and the transepts are as they have been 600 years, and there is a piscina older still. On two alabaster tombs lie Sir Robert Tyrwhitt and his wife, with a grown-up daughter and two infants in swaddling clothes below them. She was a governess of Queen Elizabeth and maid-of-honour to Catherine Parr, the lucky wife of Henry the Eighth. There is a chest with ironwork by a Tudor craftsman, Jacobean work in the lectern and desk, some 17th century benches, a low oak screen with round arches joining the pulpit and rostrum, a font made out of a pillar of a 13th century arcade, and a screen in the tower with arcading 400 years old.

The surprise of the village is the vicarage, an extraordinary place made out of the gatehouse of what was to have been a castle. In the year when Shakespeare died Sir Gervaise Clifton set out to build the castle of his dreams, but his dream was broken and only the gatehouse was finished. It had four towers with the archway between, and the arch has now been filled up and the whole structure made
into a house. It stands by a moat still filled with water. The main street of the village is a delight, a grass-bordered avenue in which cottages have been looking at the passing life of three centuries.

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Old Weston

I found St Swithin rather surprisingly open. I say surprisingly because first the church is situated some distance from the village and secondly the building has suffered a series of roof lead thefts. To find it open under these circumstances restores ones faith in humanity [well it does mine].

As a result of, I assume, the presence of bats the box pews are covered with plastic sheeting which is, an understandable, shame - they looked of interest. It looks to me as if this building is in serious trouble without a massive, and costly, restoration - which is a shame as it is obviously a well loved church. The highlight here was the various C14th wallpaintings.

As to the lead thievery, it almost beggars belief: in 1995 the roof lead was replaced, in 1997 the lead was stolen from the south aisle which was then replaced, which was then stolen in 2007 and replaced with stainless steel. In late 2015 the lead was stolen from the north aisle and half of the nave and then in early 2016 the last of the nave lead was stolen. I believe the roof has now been repaired, without the use of lead, but I was shocked by the story, and the pictures of the damage you can find online.

ST SWITHIN. The W tower has an odd top. It starts with breaches, but then there is another string-course. Two tiers of lucarnes, the lower three-light Dec. The bell-openings however are Perp, of two lights with transoms. The earliest part of the church is the plain N doorway, which must belong to c.1200. The chancel follows. Its Y-traceried windows indicate the late C13. A little later are the four-bay arcades. Octagonal piers and double-chamfered arches. One has a little nailhead, and so has the one pier with round abacus. The S doorway with continuous filleted mouldings belongs to the arcades. Straight-headed Dec N aisle and clerestory windows. In the S aisle is a specially pretty three-light Perp window with traceried spandrels to connect a four-centred arch with a straight top. - BOX PEWS. - PAINTINGS. In the S aisle C14 scenes: the enthronement of one bishop by two others, the beheading of a Saint, and in the jambs of the E window St Margaret and St Catherine. - PLATE. Cup of 1727-8.

OLD WESTON. There is a quaint custom among its people. Every summer on the Sunday after St Swithin’s Day they carry hay into the church from a field bequeathed to them by a lady.

There was no hay on the floor when we called, but there were fine chestnuts guarding the church, with two arcades and a chancel 600 years old, and aisles and clerestory only a little younger. The tower has been here since the 14th century, and has windows which seem half in the tower and half in the spire. One of its bells was ringing before the monks were driven from the monasteries, and a door in the south aisle has been turning on its hinges nearly 500 years. On a buttress is an old sundial. There are coffin stones with crosses carved about 1300, old corbel faces with staring round eyes, a 14th century font, and a 17th century altar table.

But we come to Old Weston to see its paintings. They have been here 600 years and are still clear. There is one of St Margaret, a graceful figure with a crown, her feet on a dragon and a book in her hand. There is St Catherine with her wheel, a scene showing the enthronement of a bishop, and odd pictures of John the Baptist leaning out of a house patiently waiting for the executioner.

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Brington

These parts just kept getting prettier and prettier and All Saints, open, is simply stunning though, sadly, it's another somewhat dull interior.Having said that the location more than makes up for any internal deficiency.

ALL SAINTS. Slender Dec W tower with low-broached spire. Three tiers of lucarnes. The bell-openings are of two lights with a transom. There is a frieze above them. The steep roof of the chancel is higher than the embattled aisleless nave. The nave has on the S side an attractive Dec window of uncommon details. The chancel is mostly 1868 (Slater), but the DOUBLE AUMBRY is C13 work. - FONT COVER. Jacobean. Simple, conical, with a ball finial. - STAINED GLASS. Bits in one S window. - PLATE. Plate of 1638—9 (or 1678-9) ; Cup of 1663-4.

BRINGTON. We wonder if Huntingdonshire has a quieter spot than this. There is a delightful thatched cottage 300 years old near a fragment of a wayside cross, a farm with two barns built before the Mayflower, and a small church tucked away with a 14th century tower and a spire lit by three rows of dormer windows. The nave is 14th century and the chancel 15th. The font must be 700 years old, the altar table is 17th century, and in the windows of the nave are fragments of rich glass, with oak leaves which have not withered in six hundred years.

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Molesworth

St Peter, open, with its short tower sits in a tiny churchyard and is really rather splendid. Inside there's a good Margaret Rope window, a St Christopher wallpainting and what purports to be one of St Anthony and his pig but is so badly damaged as to be unrecognisable but other than that it's really quite bare inside.

ST PETER. Short W tower without spire. Aisleless nave. The steep chancel roof is higher than the nave. The chancel, though it looks all  Victorian, is in fact a genuine and fine design of the C13.* This is evident from the chancel arch and the beautiful blank giant arches enclosing the windows, single lancets and triplets of lancets. Externally the buttresses are original too; on both N and S they continue as a framing band at the top of each bay. The nave S doorway is C13 as well. It has one stiff-leaf capital, and the arch starting with broaches. The rest is Perp. - PULPIT. Early C18; plain. - ARCHITECTURAL FRAGMENTS. They include a spiral-fluted Norman column-shaft and a piece of Norman abacus. - PAINTINGS. Large St Christopher (N wall). Note the timber-framed house in the middle distance on the l. Although the painting is of c.1500, the house has the kind of braced panels making concave-sided lozenges which one would not expect before c.1575. - St Anthony and the pig (S wall); unrecognizable. This painting is late C15. - PLATE. Cup and Cover Paten of 1569-70.

* It was demolished and rebuilt in 1884-5.

MOLESWORTH. It has a Yew Tree Farm with timbered walls under a thatch, and a pathetic patch of ground in an orchard where many dogs sleep. Faithful and much-loved creatures they were, among them Tantalising Tommy, who died in Italy. One monument has a bird bath with a stone figure of a terrier.

The church has something to astonish us. The chancel, with angels in its roof, is modern, but the nave and tower are 15th century, and the north and south walls have paintings worth coming far to see. Both were the work of an artist 600 years ago, and though they were fading away when we called we could still see St Christopher and St Anthony. St Christopher is shown with his great stalf and the Child on his shoulder. He wears a white tunic and a red cloak, and is fording a river full of queer fishes, a hermit at the door of what looks like a sentry-box holding a lantern to guide him. Only the lower part of St Anthony’s figure is left, standing among trees with a bell in his hand; jumping up in front of him is a pig with a bell round its neck.

There is an 18th century oak pulpit and an Elizabethan chalice.

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Bythorn

St Lawrence, open, has lost most of its spire and the tower now appears to have been topped out with a pepper pot; it looks bizarre but I rather liked it even if Pevsner found it "an unhappy sight". The setting is lovely but it's internally dull.

ST LAWRENCE. An unhappy sight. The tower has recently lost most of its spire, and what remains looks like a tower-mill with its cap and without sails. The broaches are there too, and one tier of lucarnes. The bell-openings are of two lights, and there is a quatrefoil frieze over. The W window is Dec; so is the spherical triangle window above it. The chancel with its steep roof is higher than the embattled nave, and that does not make things better. The plain N and S doorways are of c.1200, the N and S arcades of c.1300. They are of four bays. N has alternating round and octagonal piers, S all quatrefoil. Both have double-chamfered arches. N probably precedes S by a little. The two-bay N chapel arcade is elementary Perp. - PLATE Cup with Steeple Cover of 1614-15.

BYTHORN. It is a quiet place with charming cottages gathered round its little church, its nave belonging to the 13th century, the handsome tower with a fine spire 14th, and the imposing clerestory, crowned with an embattled parapet, about 400 years old. The church has two sundials, a big font of Shakespeare’s day, a 16th century chapel, and a 17th century altar table. But its best possession is the roof of the nave, with foliage and faces that have seen the coming and going of Bythorn folk for five hundred years.

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Keyston

As with most Huntingdon churches St John the Baptist, open, is very stripped back and shouldn't appeal but I found I really liked it. Admittedly it is lacking in furnishings and monuments but there's a C15th oak cadaver, a smattering of good glass and the location is stunning. The first of a run of nine churches that were all, bar two, one of which was keyholder listed and the other a ruin, open.

ST JOHN BAPTIST. Of grey stone. The W tower is highly unusual and also poses a problem. Its W doorway with continuous mouldings is recessed behind a porch which is, however, flush with the wall. This porch has a high ogee arch beneath a gable with billet, cusped and subcusped and with buttress-shafts.Figure of a man above the ogee top; carved spandrels (a head, bust of a goat). Above it is a lozenge-shaped window with flowing tracery. All this is clearly Dec. The bell—openings are Perp - pairs of two lights with transom, and the blank arcading above is of course Perp too. But the broach spire (with high broaches) has three tiers of lucarnes in alternating directions, and they are as clearly C13 in style. The explanation is a rebuilding and remodelling of the spire in the favourite Victorian ‘Middle Pointed’, done in 1882. The tower buttresses are of the set-back type. The arch towards the nave has three chamfers and may well be Dec. Vaulting springers are preserved inside the tower. As for the rest of the church, the chancel is late C13, see the pointed-trefoiled priest’s doorway with stiff-leaf capitals and the chancel arch, the window with Y-tracery, and the good SEDILIA and PISCINA. Of the same time the arcades. They have piers alternatingly round and octagonal, and not only along but also across the nave. The S arcade is entirely a Victorian rebuilding or re-tooling. The N doorway with one order of (missing) colonnettes is E.E. too. Dec S porch entrance, Late Perp transepts, and Perp windows of specially nice design in the westernmost windows of the chancel and in the S transept and aisle. The N  transept N window has an embattled transom. Good N transept and good nave roofs. - LECTERN and READING DESK. With Jacobean pieces. - BENCHES. A few are old, and one of them carries the date 1608. - STAINED GLASS. In one N and one S chancel window, including one small figure. - More in the N transept. - PLATE. Cup and Cover Paten of 1735-6; Plate of 1775-6. - MONUMENT. Leaning in the S aisle oaken cadaver from a C15 tomb (cf. Bishop Fleming at Lincoln).

KEYSTON. Its magnificent tower has been standing about 600 years, the elegant buttress rising to the very parapet. It has a glorious spire as old as itself, crowning a church with the loveliness our chief building centuries in its walls. Built into the porch and tower are a few stones with what is believed to be Saxon carving. In the walls of the south transept are three mass dials.

The nave, aisles, and chancel are 13th century, the clerestory 15th. The chancel has a charming doorway 700 years old, its capitals and  spandrels rich with foliage. There are two fonts, a modern bowl on a 13th century shaft and a 13th century bowl without a shaft; we thought it a pity the two old things were not made one.

One grim and ugly sight of ancient days we found, a piece of English oak carved in the form of a skeleton, partly covered by a shroud; it seemed a curious thing to find in this fine place, this unpleasant conception of a craftsman 500 years ago. We loved much better the work of our own time in the east window here, beautiful glass in memory of Wilfred Horsley, who died for his country in France. There are lovely angels in the tracery with Our Lord in Majesty and Gabriel bringing the good news to Mary; and below, among a fine company of saints, evangelists, and prophets, is a Crucifixion scene, with St George of England on one side and Joan of France on the other. There is a little glass from the 15th century in other windows, in which we noticed oak leaves, crowns, stars, saints, and beautiful roundels; and there is a lovely figure in a white embroidered robe, a winged lion, and a saintly lady with a rich dress under her plain cloak. The roofs are the work of Elizabethan carpenters, who gave them charming roses and faces, and theirs also are the nail-studded doors with fine hinges, one with a ring handle which has been used by 12 generations of Keyston folk. The lectern and reading desk are Jacobean.

In a field are some very old coffin stones, as old as the king and queen and bishop who have been looking down from the outside chancel walls since the 13th century. On a farm is an ancient dovecot.

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Houghton

St Mary the Virgin, open, whilst not the most exciting interior does have a very good 1959 Hardcourt Medhurst Doyle window and a couple of other good windows. My favourite item here though was Thomas Garner's inscription on his headstone by the south porch:

My sledge and hammers be declined
My bellows too have lost their wind
My fires extinct, my forge decay'd,
My vice is in the dust all laid.
My coal is spent, my iron gone,
My nails are drove, my work is done.
My fire dried corpse here lies at rest,
My soul smoke-like soars to be blest

ST MARY. Of brown cobbles. Partly Dec and partly Perp. Early C14 the chancel with windows from the cusped lancet to reticulation. The DOUBLE PISCINA indeed looks no later than c.1300. Early C14 also the N arcade of standard elements. Perp W tower of unusual shape (but cf. more than
half a dozen in Cambridgeshire, the centre of course being Ely). The buttresses stop below the bell-openings, and above them the tower turns octagonal to carry the stone spire. The spire has two tiers of lucarnes, the square part of the tower very prominent pinnacles, the top parts of which unfortunately were blown off in the hurricane of 1741. The N aisle wall is a cheap brick rebuilding of 1871. - SEDILE. Stone seat, with arms like that at Stanground; C13 (N aisle, W end, not in situ). - PLATE. Early C17 Cup.

 

HOUGHTON. Those who love Constable will find here a picture he would have loved to paint, Houghton Mill. They should go across the river to see it from the Hemingford side, about a mile away, a point from which it is enshrined in a scene as fair as anything in our countryside. A charming
idler by the Ouse, it is a massive timbered building of the 17th century.

The old houses gather round Houghton’s Square, one of them a rare piece of beauty with its white walls. Near it is a bronze bust of a man the village wishes not to forget; he had the curious name of Potto Brown. Thereby hangs a tale. Potto Brown was a rich miller and a Nonconformist,
a devout man who believed profoundly that prayer is one of the mainsprings of men’s lives. He was quite sincere in taking his ledgers with him to family prayers and in telling God all about the debts that were owing to him; he would mention the debtors by name. As for his bust, it
happened that the village wanted one when Potto Brown died, but he had always refused to be photographed and there was nothing in existence save a slight pencil sketch of him. Near by lived a farmer named Albert Goodman who had never done anything artistic in his life; and Goodman
shut himself up from the world for several days, with a lump of plaster, and from the rough sketch produced this excellent portrait, since made in bronze and placed here for us to see.

The beautiful and lofty spire of the church gleams in the sun long before we reach it. It soars above a 14th century nave with a 13th century chancel. There is a rough stone seat 600 years old, a very fine piscina, and a pulpit made from a tree in Houghton Park.

We find on Houghton roll of honour the name of Leslie Green who died for us. He went out badly wounded under heavy fire to save a comrade entangled in the wire of No Man’s Land. He dragged his friend to a shell hole and dressed his wounds while bombs fell all around him, and he carried him to safety. Then he fell, and the VC was given to his widow.

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Wyton

St Margaret & All Saints was declared redundant in the 1980s and is now a private residence.

ST MARGARET AND ALL SAINTS. Brown cobbles and externally mostly Perp. The label-stops of the S doorway are specially pretty. However the following are not Perp. First the SW steeple, by Hutchinson, 1865-6 - rather starved. Then the priest’s doorway, with a little dogtooth, and the paired lancets in the chancel. They are early C13. A very little later is the N doorway, with stiff-leaf capitals looking c. 1230-40 and a keeled roll moulding. The doorway goes perfectly with the N arcade, which is a beautiful design. Four bays and two different pier shapes: octagonal, and four keeled shafts and four minor shafts. Deeply moulded arches, including keeled rolls. Very bold and animated stiff-leaf capitals, all different. The Perp roof-corbels of the nave deserve notice: foliage, grapes, a rose-sprig, heads. The three incongruously placed gargoyles in the outer wall of the N aisle come from the tower of 1846 which preceded the present one. - NORTH DOOR. With sparse C13 iron scrolls. - STAINED GLASS. In a N window Kempe glass of 1906.

WYTON. It has charming white cottages with thatched roofs, a 17th century inn with a finely carved beam in one of its rooms, a medieval church, and the memories of a famous and heroic woman and two famous and unheroic men.

The small church enshrined in trees is 13th century, with a 14th century chancel guarded by a fierce lion on its chancel arch, which has also two faces keeping watch. The fine chancel roof rests on embattled corbels carved with oak leaves and grapes, a king and an angel. The east window has a modern St George set among fragments of 16th century glass, with a sun and a castle in them.

It was in this church that one of the unheroic figures remembered here was married. He was Charles James Fox, the famous parliamentary orator who tried to regularise his scandalous life by a marriage here which he kept secret for seven years. He drank heavily and was a mad gambler, and about the time of his marriage his friends subscribed about seventy thousand pounds to pay his debts. He had a little deaf and dumb son, and one of the pathetic pictures in the history of those days is of this eloquent orator sitting at dinner talking to the little boy on his fingers.

The second famous man remembered here lived at the rectory; he was parson and politician too, and a very poor farmer, Horne Tooke. He was born a poulterer’s son and attracted the attention of the rich Mr Tooke of Purley by his opposition to an enclosure Bill in Parliament. He interfered too much in politics to be successful as a parson, and became notorious as a controversialist, finding himself ultimately in prison. He adopted his patron’s name, was debarred from practising as a lawyer, and was acquitted on a charge of high treason, and, though he won a seat in the Commons for Old Sarum, an Act was passed excluding him from the Parliament which followed.

The famous woman remembered here was Isabella Bird, who came with her father, rector for ten years in the middle of last century. She loved the garden, which goes down to the River Ouse on which she learned to row, and by which she wrote books. Here she slowly recovered from a serious illness, and from this quiet spot she went on her first voyage, little dreaming it was to be the beginning of a long life of travel far and wide.

The Woman Who Conquered Fate

THE life of Isabella Bird was one long triumph of mind and will over physical infirmity. Daughter of a clergyman whose duties took him into difficult parishes, she spent the first 16 years of her life with her stern father. Happily she gave herself a wide knowledge of Nature, an interest which counteracted the depression which a spinal complaint would otherwise have caused. In her schooldays at Birmingham she practised writing, and she carried on her studies in the quiet rectory at Wyton. At 23, her health still being feeble, she was sent for a sea voyage to America, where she took careful notes of all she saw, making a book of them on her return. With the help of her younger sister, to whom she was devoted, she spent part of her profits in providing fishing boats for the men of the western islands of Scotland, and furthering emigration schemes.

She found that her health was feeble at home but improved when she moved about the world, so she visited America again, where she made friends of Longfellow, Emerson, Lowell, and other literary men.

Tiring of this, she began in 1873 that series of journeys in unfrequented parts of the world which she made famous by a succession of travel books which were read by thousands. The tumbling and tossing of the sea did her good and the hardships of weary journeys on horse, donkey, mule, and yak added years to the life of this frail little woman (who was under five feet high).

She gazed on the glowing crater of Kilanea in Hawaii; she climbed the Rockies alone with a scapegrace guide (whom she converted); she travelled in out-of-the-way districts of Japan and lived among the hairy Ainos on Yezo Island; she spent five weeks with the Malays and passed on to Egypt, where she fell ill with enteric fever and had to return to Scotland. In 1880 her sister died, and she then married Dr Bishop, who declared that he had only one rival in his wife’s heart, the high tableland of Central Asia. In 1888, three years after his death, Mrs Bishop, now keen on medical missions, set sail for India, and after a month’s hard travel from Kashmir she reached Tibet. Back in India, she persuaded an army oflicer to take her to Ispahan. Her caravan journey through Persia was appalling; she wrote that if there was a more devastating oppression on earth than that of the Turk it was that of the Shah. But she pressed on, sleeping in stables and in Kurdish houses, so that she traversed Persia, Kurdistan, and Armenia where no Englishwoman had been before. On her return she lectured before the British Association and was elected the first woman member of the Royal Geographical Society.

A wandering of 8000 miles at great personal risk from robbers next occupied her until 1897, and last of all; in her 70th year, she made a journey to Morocco, being landed by the ship’s crane and riding 126 miles in six days to Marakesh, “the noisiest, vilest, filthiest city she had seen.”

This most courageous woman, ever daring and never afraid, spent the last year of her life on her back, and passed into the realms where heroes go in 1904.

Hartford

All Saints, locked no keyholder, is an attractive building in a stunning position right on the north bank of the Ouse. I don't think I missed much inside.

ALL SAINTS. It is odd that the S porch windows should be late C13, with bar tracery. Do they come from a porch preceding the present one? The W tower is ashlar-faced and Perp, with set-back buttresses, a W doorway with traceried spandrels, bell-openings in pairs of two lights each, a quatrefoil frieze over, and no spire. Embattled S and N aisle and clerestory, all Perp. But the S doorway seems to be of c.1300 (continuous mouldings) and the chancel of about the same date, though over-restored. Windows with Y-tracery and two low-side windows, that on the S a prolongation below a transom of one light of a two-light window. Early C14 N and S arcades of four bays, tall piers, standard elements. The nave roof has figures on the wall-posts and angels against the intermediate principals, the N and S aisle roofs only the former. - FONT. A big, ambitious Perp piece. Panelled stem, bowl with alternating patterns. - PLATE. Cup and Cover Paten of 1674-5; Paten on foot of 1837-8. - MONUMENTS. In the S aisle two large, uncouth standing monuments, both no more than an inscription tablet in big letters with strapwork around or on top. Mawde Bedell d. 1587, dated 1597, and Sir John Bedell d. 1613.

HARTFORD. Very charming is its white manor house, older than Queen Elizabeth, and rather quaint is the inn, with stones said to have come from an ancient church at Huntingdon. It faces a quiet lane bringing us from the twisting High Street to the church, which still has stones carved and set up by the Normans. They built the chancel and part of the north and south arcades. The font is 13th century, the tower about as old as Caxton’s books. There is a 17th century oak chest with flowered panels. The most pathetic thing we saw here was a tribute to Reginald Coleridge, a young man on board the Titanic when she went down in 1912, one of the most dramatic catastrophes of the generation before the Great War.

There are two points of interest outside the church. One is the vicarage, reminding us that the gift of the living, with the tithes, was part of the marriage settlement of Oliver Cromwell’s wife; the other is the gravestone where the poet Cowper is said to have loved to sit looking across the river. In the days when he lived at Huntingdon he would often come to this churchyard.

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Great Stukeley

St Bartholomew has two rather strange notices. First on the north door is one that reads something like "if this door is locked please try the south door" and the second, in the south porch, says "welcome to our church which is open for visits on Sundays and Wednesday" and then goes on to list numbers for access on another day.

Now I know it's really none of my business but it seems to me a tad strange that someone, presumably one the owners of the numbers listed, can make time on Wednesdays to open and close the church but is too busy the rest of the week to be able to do so [I can understand Sunday because it needs to be opened for the vicar and four members of the congregation]. Call me old fashioned but if you are going to open your church go the whole hog and do so seven days a week [unless of course there's research to show that church burglars do not operate on Wednesdays].

In the south porch there's a recycled coffin lid and on the tower a curious mason's mark [?] but other than that it's not terribly interesting so I resisted the urge to track down the keys.

ST BARTHOLOMEW. Substantial Perp W tower with clasping buttresses chamfered towards the middles of the four sides of the tower. Low post-medieval pyramid roof. On the chancel N side a pair of E.E. lancets. Internally the evidence is earlier. Arcades of four bays. N differs from S in interesting ways, suggesting only a small difference in time. On the S side the piers and abaci are round, and one capital has early stiff-leaf. The arches are pointed, of one step and one slight chamfer - say 1190. But the W bay has two slight chamfers, i.e. is a little later. On the N side the abaci are octagonal, and arches two and three are of the earlier, arches one and four of the later variety. The arch from tower to nave is Perp, and a vault was begun inside the tower. The ribs rest on figural brackets, one of a frightening frog creature. - STOUP. Square and gabled. Mr Sisson suggests that it may be part of a pinnacle. - PLATE. Cup and Cover Paten 1624-5.

GREAT STUKELEY. It has a majestic tower with a little red cap looking over these green fields a mile or two from Huntingdon. It has a thatched post-office and a hall in a park. Standing by its church (dedicated to St Bartholomew) we counted a dozen towers and spires.

An extraordinary company of grotesques have been looking out from the tower since the 15th century, some terrifying, some rude, some droll figures to amuse us, and one a queer creature like a frog. The church has fragments of stone coffin lids about 700 years old, a font of that age with nine shafts, some fragments of old glass and a 17th century altar cup; and among so much that is old it was delightful to see an oak pulpit made by a craftsman of our time, its panels enriched with splendid carving of a vine, an oak tree, and a bush of roses. We noticed an unusual kind of sundial meant to show only the afternoon hours.

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Little Stukeley

St Martin, locked keyholder listed, would normally be my church of the day except for the keyholder notice stating "Visitors must always be accompanied by a keyholder". Why? Is a visitor who seeks out the keyholder likely to plunder the church or strip the lead from the roof? If I had evil intent would I turn up on a midweek afternoon - perhaps I would if I were so inclined.

Anyway I decided to swallow my pride and found the keyholder out.

It's a gem of a building with some fabulous corbels. gargoyles and grotesques.

ST MARTIN. The most interesting thing about the church is that R. Hutchinson, who restored it, collected earlier remains carefully and displayed them to advantage. Thus in the S wall of the tower outside are Norman column-shafts, and inside the tower whole collections including an arch with proper beakhead, an arch with beakhead stylized to excess (cf. Spaldwick), two Norman window-heads, and lengths of a battlement frieze and billet, in the N aisle N wall outside quite a length of Norman corbel-table, and in the N chapel S arch a whole order of short Norman rolls or tubes set at r. angles to the arch. Something similar seems to have been done by Hutchinson inside the nave, where carved friezes of Early Renaissance foliage are used to form a vertical strip (N), a cross (S), and a square set in a lozenge (E). Due to Hutchinson may possibly also be the wealth of corbels. A large winged man is attached to the N arcade, and there are plenty of smaller ones. Now for the church itself. The W tower is short and has big pinnacles but no spire. There is a top quatrefoil frieze. Perp windows in the S and N aisles, the clerestory, and the chancel (E). The S porch has the date 1652, but it is Perp, and the S doorway inside is quite ornate, with the stoup in a niche on the r. and a bracket on the l. The two-bay arcades of standard elements are Perp also. The SE respond is a monster devouring a man, the deed performed horizontally. The chancel arch and the one-bay N and S chapels are contemporary with the arcades. - FONT. Octagonal, with quatrefoils. Leaves on the underside. - GUERIDON. By the altar. Domestic, and probably of c.1730-40. - STAINED GLASS. In the S chapel parts of canopies made up as canopies.

LITTLE STUKELEY. Eight centuries have helped to give this village its chief treasure. It is in a hollow near Ermine Street, a church the Normans began with old Henry of Huntingdon watching them at their work.

He was born hereabouts soon after the Conqueror came, and he wrote a History of England from Roman times to the death of King Stephen in 1154, carrying on the work of Bede and other chroniclers. He was Archdeacon of Huntingdon for nearly half of the 12th century, and it is believed he built this church at Little Stukeley. It may have been his birthplace, but at any rate we may feel that many times this scholar would leave his books and his writing and walk over to see the Norman masons at their work. It has been much changed, but fragments of the west wall and ornamental stones on an arch in the north wall of the chancel are still as he would see them. Part of the tower is 13th century, part of the chancel 14th.

In the nave above the piers are interesting carved stones of the 16th century, among them some angels, a ram, and a curious bearded man in pleated gown and wearing a tall brimmed hat. There is a stoup with a lion’s head and an angel fading away, a Jacobean altar table, some ironwork 400 years old in windows, a 15th century font bowl carved with flowers, and a little glass painted about the time our first books were printed. A brass shows Sir Nicholas Stukeley in his Tudor cap and gown. The village remembers a martyr of the 19th century, Flora Lucy Stewart, who was brought up at the rectory and lost her life in a violent outburst of superstition in China in 1893.

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Alconbury

SS Peter & Paul, open, but I think occasionally  however a keyholder is listed. Great gargoyles and grotesques adorn the exterior whilst the interior is stripped back and plain. This ought to be dull inside but I rather liked it despite the plainness.

ST PETER AND ST PAUL. An E.E. church of high quality, certainly in two of its elements, the steeple and the chancel. The steeple has a W lancet, then a circular window with a quatre-foil, long bell-openings of two lights with bar tracery, and a spire with high broaches and three tiers of lucarnes. The lowest ones are large and of c.1300. The arch to the nave is small and triple-chamfered.* The chancel is late C13 too. The windows are lancets - three very slightly stepped in the E wall - or have Y-tracery. The N doorway has a rounded-trefoiled head. Traces of a S doorway can also be seen. The buttresses are slightly chamfered, and the chamfers end charmingly in a little concavity at the top. Inside, the chancel is quite excellent. It not only has rich shafting to the E lancets, but all along the N and S walls close high blank arcading on shafts - six full arches and at the W and E end the baffling half and two-thirds arches which the E.E. style never minded, though they contradict so much an ideal of purity which we cannot help attributing to it. Below the E window are three recesses, arranged symmetrically - cupboards probably. The chancel arch matches. The nave arcades cannot have been done much after the tower, yet must be later, though not later than the chancel. This dating is based on the fact that the tower in its position presupposes the S arcade where it is, but a N arcade some feet further S. On the other hand, the chancel arch is centred with the nave. So, when the arcades were built, that to the N was set further N than a preceding N arcade or nave N wall had been. The details of the arcades (standard elements) are hardly later than 1300. The clerestory has plain Y-tracery, and that also means late C13. In the S aisle are a W lancet, a late-C13-looking doorway with fine mouldings, and a window with bar tracery. The nave buttresses are chamfered, as in the chancel. There is also a Perp and a Dec window, the latter with reticulated tracery, and a low tomb recess. The N aisle has more reticulated windows, and a doorway with continuous mouldings. So that will be c.1330. Good Perp roofs of chancel and N aisle. In the chancel angels against the intermediate principals, in the aisle figures against the wall-posts, holding shields and various other things. - (PULPIT. With some original Perp tracery. GMCH) - PLATE. Cup of 1634-5, gilt inside, and Paten Cover of the same date.

* The base of the tower was rebuilt in 1877 by Ewan Christian.

ALCONBURY. A delightful village, with tiny white footbridges over the brook, white houses with crumpled-up roofs, and an Elizabethan manor house with dainty gables, it has in its keeping one of the finest 13th century churches in the county, with a 17th century farmhouse and an 18th century barn at the gate. The stately church is famous for its chancel, long and rather narrow, with stones chiselled in the 12th century in its rough walls, and a buttress with a fragment of interlaced carving thought to be Saxon. Very beautiful are the 13th century lancet windows. The 15th century roof is carved with bosses and enriched with eight winged angels, one with a lute and others with wreaths, palms, and shields. There are traces of original painting on the walls, and an unusual communion table on richly carved arches has cherubs and grotesques 300 years old. The clerestory nave is 14th century, built of Barnack stone, the older chancel (originally the church) being built of pudding stone and cement, with sides sloping like the sides of a ship. There are floral bosses in the medieval roofs.

The oak pulpit has 15th century buttresses, the clerestory windows have some 14th and 15th century glass showing canopies and flowers, and there are two stone coffins over 600 years old. Here also is a 17th century chest, a 14th century piscina, and one of the quaintest brasses we have seen, for it has a picture of the 13th century tower as it appeared in 1877 with the spire and belfry supported in mid-air by massive scaffolding. This tower and spire did actually appear like that. Originally built in 1290, the spire remains as its 13th century builders left it, while the tower on which it is set has been taken down and rebuilt. It was judged to be unsafe in 1876 and was taken to pieces stone by stone from beneath the spire, which was left shored up in mid-air while the tower was put together again with the same materials, rising till it met the spire. It was one of the most remarkable pieces of engineering work ever known in this countryside.

The old bridge across Alconbury Brook is 15th century and has four pointed arches. At Alconbury Weston, a mile away, the Brook runs across the green and the stone work of the bridge is said to have come from Coppingford’s medieval church. The hamlet has a few 17th century cottages, and a wet moat in Hermitage Wood, but it has no church, its people walking across the meadows to Alconbury. A mile away the Great North Road joins Ermine Street at Alconbury Hill, where is a high and beautiful milestone crowned with a finial and railed round. On this hill stood the gibbet on which Jarvis Matcham was hanged. It is a name everybody here knows, for it comes into a story which begins at Alconbury, has become a legend of Salisbury Plain, and has found its way into the Ingoldsby Legends. We were told that there were old folk who could remember the mark of the hangman’s rope on the bough of the tree.

The Drummer Boy of Salisbury Plain

In June 1796 two sailors named Matcham and Sheppard were tramping home from Plymouth, where they had been paid off, when a thunderstorm burst over them as they were nearing Woodyates Inn on Salisbury Plain, the inn which was kept by the first known ancestor of Robert Browning. Matcham began to run wildly about, screaming to his shipmate to protect him from ghosts, and declaring in his frenzy that stones were rising up and dashing themselves against him.

Sheppard did what he could to calm the man, but Matcham continued to dodge hither and thither, now shouting to his friend to keep that blood-stained drummer boy from him, and pointing to a post where, as the thunder rolled overhead, his terrified eyes could see the boy drumming at him. When the storm had passed Matcham confessed to his mate that seven years before he had murdered the drummer boy of the regiment in which he had enlisted near Huntingdon. Robbing him of six gold guineas, he had escaped to London and become a sailor; but wherever he went the face of his victim haunted him, so that he knew no peace by day or night. Preferring death to a haunted life, Matcham tramped on to Salisbury and surrendered. The story was investigated and he was hanged.

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Buckworth

All Saints, locked with keyholders listed, is a vast tower with a church attached but is really rather run of the mill, although it does have some fine gargoyles and grotesques. Having looked through a nave window there didn't seem to be much internal interest so I decided not to seek out the key.

ALL SAINTS. The church has a splendid late C13 W steeple. Set-back buttresses, a doorway with three orders of columns and a handsome moulded arch, a sexfoiled, cusped rose-window, bell-openings of two lights with Y-tracery, and to their l. and r. one blank cinquefoiled arch. In the heads of these arches are carvings of three radially placed heads and foliated cusps. The spire has high broaches with three tiers of lucarnes. The first tier is very high, transomed and with Y-tracery. Quadruple-chamfered arch towards the nave. The S arcade is late C13 too. Three bays, round piers, double-chamfered arches. The N arcade with octagonal piers is a little later. The N doorway goes with it. Whether the chancel is still C13 or just after the turn of the century must remain open. It has to the S intersecting tracery in one window and a corresponding priest’s doorway. The vestry doorway from the chancel is obviously Dec (ogee arch). So are the N aisle W window (reticulated tracery) and the S doorway. Perp S aisle windows and clerestory windows. Perp nave roof with large bosses. But the nave E angles are the oldest thing in the church. They are Norman. - PLATE. Cover Paten of 1671-2.

BUCKWORTH. It was once a hunting centre, and still has two big woods in which the bucks were hunted, but its population has fallen and today its church is too big for its people. Long before we come to it we see its impressive tower, rich with 14th century arcading and crowned by a spire with 12 gabled windows. The tower and aisle have old sundials on two buttresses and there is an astonishing collection of gargoyles, perhaps one of the ugliest crowds looking down anywhere on a charming churchyard. A very curious and unusual thing we noticed, the trefoiled head of a tower window with three stone faces in it, a scowling man, a man showing his teeth, and a queer grotesque. The tower arch is carved with queer faces.

We passed through a door which has been swinging on its hinges since the bells rang for the crowning of Queen Elizabeth. It brings us into a clerestoried nave with two aisles, the work of all our great building centuries. The oldest work in the church goes back to the 11th century, and the list of rectors to 1225. The vestry cupboard in which the rector keeps his robes was the case of the old barrel organ which used to play two or three tunes at every service. In the 14th century chancel is a bracket with a figure holding a book.

Perhaps the thing that will impress the traveller most in this small place is the tribute to a father and his sons. He was Walter Yeatherd, who fell fighting for his country at the relief of Ladysmith and left two boys behind who fell fighting for their country in France.

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Upton

St Margaret, LNK, is another seemingly unnecessarily locked church - it's in the heart of the village and I really can't imagine evildoers would get away with much before a mob would descend...if they gave a shit. Someone's looking after the churchyard given the pleached  limes (?) and well tended CWGC headstones but why it's locked is beyond me.

ST MARGARET. Not a large church. The W tower has a short broach spire with two tiers of lucarnes. The big mid-buttress is odd, but the RCHM has an explanation for it. The S doorway is the oldest feature. With its thin angle-shafts it is undoubtedly Late Norman. Then follow the arcades. They are mid C13, with round piers, round abaci, and double-chamfered arches. There were originally three bays, but the tower was built into the nave. The tower W wall was once the nave W wall. The RCHM suggests that when this received its two ogee-headed lancets, the big buttress was also built to receive a bellcote. But is the buttress not fully justified by the fact of a tower being raised on a mere W wall? The chancel is E.E. too, see the lancet giving into the vestry, the priest’s doorway with its rounded-trefoiled head, and the tomb recess. However, the chancel arch is Perp. Straight-headed Dec S aisle and clerestory windows. The N aisle is by Scott, 1870 - FONT. A tremendous Norman piece like a two-scalloped capital. It stands on nine (renewed) E.E. supports. - PLATE. Cup and Cover of 1634-5.

UPTON. For 300 years the church on a hill by the Great North Road has had the company of Christ’s College Farm with its white walls, thatched roof, and part of a moat. A path sheltered by limes brings us to the little 700-year-old church with its dimly lighted chancel, restored by Sir Gilbert Scott. It has an Easter Sepulchre on the north of the chancel just outside the sanctuary, a chalice made in Cromwell’s day, a 17th century altar table, and a chest with old panelling. The tower and spire are 16th century. The oldest possession of Upton belongs to its children. It is the bowl of the font, carved by a 12th century sculptor who seems to have been trying to make it look as if it were draped with cloth hanging in folds.

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Winwick

I am constantly surprised by finding a really remote church, which I know will be locked because of its location, militantly open. I could write a list almost as long as a list but wont.

I am more amazed at the amount of churches that are kept locked in relatively safe environs for no apparent reason and the closer I got to Huntingdon the more they occurred.

I was going to be politely dismissive about All Saints until I found the south porch padlocked.

Let's assume the lead has been stolen from the roof - locking the church does not protect the roof.

Let's assume the local youth have been using the altar as a private sofa - keeping it open makes it less likely to be used as a sex shop - now there's an idea.

Let's assume that keeping it open will lead to it being treasured as a heritage building rather than an antiquated relic.

Anyway it doesn't sound very interesting.

ALL SAINTS. Perp W tower with broach spire. Two tiers of lucanes. The S doorway is a C13 re-use of Late Norman zig-zag set at r. angles to the wall. But the S aisle is of the early C14 - see one window with intersecting and one with reticulated tracery. The S transept has a Dec PISCINA, but a large Perp window. The chancel is a good C13 piece, with chamfered buttresses similar to those at Leighton Bromswold, and two N lancets. The large E window dates from the restoration by Slater & Carpenter, 1864. They are also responsible for the round, octofoiled clerestory windows. The arcades are late C13 and early C14. Four bays, low, on the S alternating round and octagonal piers with a little nailhead, on the N octagonal piers. The chancel arch responds are C13 too; the arch has two hollow chamfers. The N aisle and transept roofs have carved bosses. - SCREEN. Wide one-light divisions with ogee arches and busy details. Mostly C19. - PLATE. Cup inscribed 1569, made at Norwich; the Cover Paten matches.

WINWICK. We come into its little shrine through the oldest doorway in the village, built by the Normans but with its arch pointed by the first English builders. The rest of the beautiful little Norman church was made new about 700 years ago, and the handsome tower and spire are 16th century. The oldest stones in the structure, relics of probably the first church on this site, are let into the eastern wall. A striking feature of the church is the clear glass windows, the big window in what was once the private chapel of the Dukes of Buccleuch being particularly notable for its glass and its stone tracery. The screen and the altar table have both carving by Tudor craftsmen. The font is 13th century, and in the bosses of the roof we noticed two merry men who seem to have been laughing for 400 years. The peal of fine old bells, after having been damaged by lightning, has been rehung in our own time.

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Hamerton

I thought All Saints was LNK until I processed my photographs and noticed that a keyholder is listed, they're held at the Manor House which I assume is the house next door, but am not sure I missed much - Pevsner is faintly dismissive whilst Mee is enthusiastic, I tend to regard Mee as a hagiographer and, having done a Flickr search, side with Pevsner.

ALL SAINTS. It is odd that the S porch windows should be late C13, with bar tracery. Do they come from a porch preceding the present one? The W tower is ashlar-faced and Perp, with set-back buttresses, a W doorway with traceried spandrels, bell-openings in pairs of two lights each, a quatrefoil frieze over, and no spire. Embattled S and N aisle and clerestory, all Perp. But the S doorway seems to be of c.1300 (continuous mouldings) and the chancel of about the same date, though over-restored. Windows with Y-tracery and two low-side windows, that on the S a prolongation below a transom of one light of a two-light window. Early C14 N and S arcades of four bays, tall piers, standard elements. The nave roof has figures on the wall-posts and angels against the intermediate principals, the N and S aisle roofs only the former. - FONT. A big, ambitious Perp piece. Panelled stem, bowl with alternating patterns.- PLATE. Cup and Cover Paten of 1674-5; Paten on foot of 1837-8. - MONUMENTS. In the S aisle two large, uncouth standing monuments, both no more than an inscription tablet in big letters with strapwork around or on top. Mawde Bedell d. 1587, dated 1597, and Sir John Bedell d. 1613.

HAMERTON. Once seen, can it be forgotten? It has had for centuries more than its share of white cottages and thatched roofs, and all about them is a loveliness which makes this a place of sheer delight. It has a wooden bridge over Alconbury Brook, set on 17th century stones. It has Manor Farm enshrined in trees, its Elizabethan walls and windows captivating under grand old chimneys.

The church, built by the monks of Colchester, has much that has been here 500 years. Its roofs have been made new, but they have in them much of the 15th century craftsman’s work. The wallposts in the nave have ten Apostles carved in oak resting on stone corbels with angels and grotesques; they have been holding up the roof 500 years. Above them are angels with trumpets, harps, and cymbals. Above the pulpit is the old roodloft, reached by a flight of stone steps within the wall, deeply worn by constant use in the few years of its existence between the end of the 15th century and the Reformation. The massive and splendidly carved reredos, with communion table and rails to match, are in memory of a rector for nearly 50 years, Daniel George Thomas. In the aisles are carvings of men with strange beasts, and there are extraordinary creatures on stone brackets. The traceried font, a man and wife keeping watch from the chancel arch (known as the hooded lady and the little imp), and seven old benches, are all from medieval England. In one of the aisles are traces of paintings 400 years old.

The peal of five old bells, after having been silent for nearly a quarter of a century, has been rehung in our time.

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Steeple Gidding

St Andrew, CCT and open [although the door is tricky], was my church of the day. Although not particularly exciting externally, the location is exceptional and inside it is everything, and possibly more, that a CCT church should be: stripped back, elemental, slightly shabby but beautifully maintained and, of course, permanently open.

ST ANDREW. The steeple is rather underfed. The narrow arch towards the nave is of three chamfers and dies against the imposts. This, and the whole tower, is Dec. Recessed Perp spire; shortish and with two tiers of lucarnes. Dec also the S arcade of four bays (standard elements), and the chancel, the S aisle, the clerestory, and the straight-headed N nave windows. The S aisle E window still has intersecting tracery. Only the S doorway is much earlier. It is partly late C12 and partly early C14. Outer arch with zigzag at r. angles to the wall. Inner arch pointed. The capitals of the colonnettes have one normal stiff-leaf, the other oddly stylized and interlocked stiff-leaf. - BELLS. Three by Henry Jordan, i.e. c.1450-60. - ALTAR CLOTHS. One large mid C16 piece, Flemish, with the Virgin and angels, and one small, early C17 one, also Flemish, with a hunting scene. -- PLATE. Cup of 1569-70; Paten on foot of Britannia silver 1697-8. - MONUMENTS. Mrs Mary Kinyon d. 1714, wrongly assembled, with a bust on top. - Sir John Cotton d. 1752. Large, but mostly an inscription plate.

STEEPLE GIDDING. There is not much of the steeple and little of Gidding. A village on a hill, it was loved by Nicholas Ferrar, the saint of Little Gidding, who used to walk over for service. It must all be much as he saw it, for nothing could be more peaceful than the fields round about Steeple Gidding’s church.

It has a tiny spire, three bells that have been ringing since the 15th century, and an English doorway with beautiful capitals, set in a Norman arch. There is an altar cup made before the Great Armada, a stone coffin lid with ornamental crosses 700 years old, a 16th century font, and a marble bust of Mary Cotton of 1714.

Carefully preserved by the rector is something made by a lady long ago, beautiful altar linen exquisitely worked by her clever fingers. There is a cloth with a hunting scene thought to be 17th century Flemish work; but one showing angels, a Madonna under a canopy, and a pot of lilies on a table was worked soon after Queen Elizabeth was crowned, and is one of the fine possessions of the county.

Flickr.

Little Gidding

St John the Evangelist, open, is an astonishing interior, which I'll leave it to Pevsner to explain, contained by a decidedly odd exterior - naturally I loved it but I think St Nicholas in Rushbrooke, Suffolk is superior.

Nicholas Ferrar was the son of a wealthy merchant. He was born in 1593 and studied medicine. He went abroad, to the universities of Padua and Leipzig, and returned home in 1618. He was a man of a mystic bent, impressed by the Cambridge Platonists, Juan de Valdes, and the Arminians. The idea of forming a religious community came to him in 1624. His mother felt as he did, and they decided to buy a house at Little Gidding. Nicholas Ferrar was ordained deacon in 1626. The community numbered about thirty to forty, and Nicholas’s brother John Ferrar with wife and two children and their sister with husband and sixteen children also joined. There was a school with three schoolmasters, and there were alms-people. The discipline was demanding, three services a day and only two meals for the adults, but no vows were prescribed. Nicholas Ferrar worked on Concordances or Harmonies of the Bible, i.e. biblical materials presented as consecutive stories. The books were written and bound by hand. Embroidery was cultivated too. The community was in close touch with George Herbert at Leighton Bromswold and Sir Robert Cotton at Conington. Charles I visited them three times, the last time on his flight. Bishop Williams of Lincoln also paid them a visit (from Buckden). Mrs Ferrar died in 1634, Nicholas Ferrar in 1637, and the nephew whom he had regarded as his successor in 1640. In the mood of the forties the community was decried as popish. In 1646 Little Gidding was attacked and sacked. The fifties saw the end.

ST JOHN EVANGELIST. The community did not build a new church: they remodelled a dilapidated old one. Excavations in 1921 have shown that this old church was larger than the present one. Anyway the present church is very small. It consists of nave and chancel only. It lies with trees l. and r. looking into spacious fields and towards the gently rolling country. The building is of brick and only its facade is of stone. This facade is dated 1714. It is a strange facade, not in any Queen Anne tradition. If a big name were to be connected with its style, it would be Archer rather than Hawksmoor. The facade is quite narrow and has two giant angle pilasters with small obelisks on. The doorway has a kind of pilaster strips with sunk panels carrying big corbels for the straight hood instead of capitals. In the middle is a bellcote of rusticated pilasters, and on that a flat obelisk or steep pyramid with a ball finial and three mysterious pierced oblong openings. - The most interesting feature of the interior is the arrangement of the SEATING in the nave college-wise. This is decidedly a Puritan tradition, and one would like to attribute it to Nicholas Ferrar’s time. If so, it can only have applied to the church preceding this, and the argument that the household and other population was too big to allow for such an arrangement would only be fully valid if the dimensions of the preceding church were known. The STALLS in the nave have thick balusters and the backs high detached baluster-like columns carrying segmental arches. In the chancel the PANELLING has long balusters too. This may well be of 1714, in imitation to a certain extent of the time of Nicholas Ferrar. But can the stall-fronts also be 1714 and not c.1625? Or can they possibly be Clutton’s, who restored the church in 1853 and must have done the job extremely well? - REREDOS. One panel of the Jacobean reredos with one of the usual broad blank arches is now S of the altar. - The present REREDOS of brass tablets with the Creed, the Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer dates from c.1625. - Also of c.1625 the FONT, a brass baluster with a delightful brass cover surrounded by a kind of crown. -  Of the same time also the HOURGLASS STAND. - But the CANDLE SCONCES of slender turned balusters, extremely well grouped, are an exceedingly good Arts and Crafts job of c.1920, designed by W. A. Lee. - The LECTERN is the one medieval piece in the church. It is of brass, of a well-known East Anglian type, of the late C15. The same moulds were used for the lecterns of e.g. Urbino Cathedral and Oxburgh in Norfolk. It was presented by Nicholas Ferrar and is a splendid eagle, the moulded stem is splendid too, and the little lions at the base are pretty enough. - CHANDELIER. Little Gidding is a confusing church. This piece of a familiar Baroque type is of 1853. It might just as well be 1753. Is it perhaps a copy of a predecessor? - STAINED GLASS. Probably of 1853. The Crucifixion in the E window still has the ‘pre-archaeological’ glaring colours and pictorial composition. - EMBROIDERED cushion cover of the Ferrar Community. - Also three BOOK-BINDINGS. - PLATE. C17 Paten on foot; Flagon of 1629-30; Almsdish of 1634-5; C17 Crucifix.

LITTLE GIDDING. Small as it is, it has entertained a king, and has precious memories of a company of saints, who came to live here about the time the king was crowned. They made Little Gidding famous not only for their piety but for their delicate craftsmanship, examples of which we may all see here or in the British Museum.

They found only a crumbling manor house here, and a tiny church used as a barn, but it was as lonely then as it is today, and that is what Nicholas Ferrar wanted. He made the house his home and restored the church, and here his whole family came during the plague in 1625, staying on to live a community life of devotion and worship. With Nicholas were his mother, his brother’s family, his sister’s family (nearly a score of children), and three schoolmasters, the servants bringing the number to over forty. In all England there was not a more serene community; in no family were prayers more continuously or more devoutly said. The life was almost monastic, and it amazed and delighted Charles Stuart when he came to see the books they bound here and ordered two for himself. The first time the king came (he came three times) the whole family went out to meet him in a field still called King’s Close, and marched with him to the little church. At this old farmhouse the king once slept when his life was in danger.

Of the Little Gidding house hardly a stone is left, and the pigeon house which Nicholas cleared of its pigeons for the school has also tumbled down; but lonely in the field is the tiny church to which the family procession brought the king in 1633. The whole household proceeded to the church twice a day, two by two, a procession lengthened on Sundays by about 100 children from neighbouring villages - the Psalm Children they were called, for each one able to recite a psalm received from Nicholas Ferrar a penny and a Sunday dinner with the household. By the church is a little wood, and in it have been found traces of a flagged path Nicholas had made from this church to Steeple Gidding, a quarter of a mile away.

The church, with a stone front and a brick nave, is an odd little place from the outside, the 19th century west front all doorway and bell-niche topped by a pyramid; but inside it has a gracious charm, and still keeps much that Nicholas and his mother gave it 300 years ago. On the door is still the tiny brass plate, a few inches square, on which we can still decipher the words put there by them, the House of Prayer. They found it filled with hay and left it as complete and charming as a little church can be; and though it was much damaged by the Parliament men, who mistrusted the Royalist Ferrars and their devotions, and though the nave was shortened and shorn of its aisle in Queen Anne’s day, we seem here back in the world of that peaceful community as we stand in this narrow place, a church like no other.

A row of seats runs all the way round the church, their backs supporting rich oak arcading against the panelled walls, the nave seats arranged like the choir stalls, 15 on each side. The congregation sit facing each other across the narrow aisle, a plan we have only come upon once or twice. Very handsome are these arcaded walls, and the fine oak roof. The south wall is probably as in Nicholas Ferrar’s day, but the north wall has been made to match.

It is in the small sanctuary that we feel most intimately near the spirit of this place, for here is still the simple cedar wood altar table at which the rector would administer communion to his people and at which his king would kneel; and on the wall near by hangs a panel of the original reredos which was found in pieces some years ago. There is no pulpit now, but in Ferrar’s time, when the church had a transept, there was room for one, and on the wall near the old hourglass stand, where the nave and chancel meet, is a small cross made from the timbers of the old pulpit.

At the back of the altar now are the brass panels which were here in those days; it was Nicholas and his mother who set them on the wall: the Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Creed, all beautifully engraved on brass. They gave the brass lectern with its eagle and the three lions at its foot, and it may be that they ordered a local blacksmith to make the iron hourglass stand with scrolled ornament. We know that Little Gidding’s greatest treasure was their gift, a brass font thought to be unique. It is an elegant possession, its small bowl raised on a handsome stem and covered with a brass lid with piercing cresting, the top engraved with crosses and fleur-de-lys. The church also has a flagon engraved: “What Edwyn Sandys bequeathed to the remembrance of friendship his friend hath consecrated to the honour of God’s service.” There is a chair in the church made from old oak in the 17th century style.

Other reminders of the Ferrar community are the Stuart arms beautifully embroidered by the ladies of the manor; two pieces of tapestry once used as book-rest covers, and a Book of Meditations with a rich embroidered binding such as has made the Little Gidding community famous in the book world. Here also is a deed bequeathing a pound a year to the poor, with Nicholas Ferrar’s signature still plain to see.‘ His grave is outside, under the altar tomb before the west door, and between him.and the door is the sunken grave of the brother who brought his family to join this loving community at Little Gidding, surely the most blessed spot in England in the turbulent days before the Civil War; and the pound a year (eight halfcrowns) is still distributed in the parish of Steeple Gidding to which it was bequeathed.

The Little Company of Saints

NICHOLAS FERRAR, who brought his saintly family to‘ Little Gidding and set them binding books between their prayers and praises, was the son of a London merchant who had Drake, Raleigh, and Sir John Hawkins among his friends. But the mind of this small boy, born in 1592, was set on religion and learning rather than adventure. He was not yet six when he lay awake one night tormented with doubts of God, and, having wandered into the garden to wrestle with his soul, flung himself on the frosty ground acknowledging God and vowing to serve him always. That vow he kept through his brief life, though not till he came to Little Gidding could he fulfil it as he wished.

So persuasive was his tongue that his Cambridge tutor was heard to exclaim: “May God keep him in a right mind, for if he should turn heretic he would make work for all the world; I know not who would be able to contend with him.” Scholars all over Europe became acquainted with this brilliant man when the doctors ordered him to travel and he went on a tour of foreign universities. He had to walk most of the way back from Madrid because his money did not arrive, and it was his safe passage through lawless country which led him to dedicate his life to God. He might have taken one of the richest heiresses for his wife, but excused himself for the sake of his vow, and settled down to the life of devotion he longed for. He bought the manor of Little Gidding in 1624, and was ordained deacon. His influential friends offered him rich livings, but he explained that he sought no advancement, and had only been ordained that he might minister to the needs of his community. That community was a family one, including his old mother, his brother John with his wife and three children, and his sister Susanna Collett, with her husband and 12 children. These, with three schoolmasters and the servants, all settled in the manor house of Little Gidding to a life of routine which made religious devotion the first duty. Their daily services, their prayers and psalms, their vigils through the night, were as continuous and as strictly regulated as in a monastery. There were watchings each night in the house chapels, the women in one, the men in another, and the whole household rose at four in summer and five in winter.

Everyone in the community was expected to learn a trade. Out of his great store of knowledge Nicholas taught medicine to his nieces, who tended the sick and put aside two rooms as dispensary and infirmary. That they had time for needlework we may see by their gifts to the church, but we must go to the British Museum if we want to see the finest art produced by this small company of saints, for here the books they bound are displayed as some of the best examples of 17th century craftsmanship. Nicholas engaged a bookbinder to teach the family; and himself wrote essays and stories and compiled Harmonies for them to bind. One of those Harmonies was a blending of the four Gospels into a chronological whole, his nieces cutting out the passages as he directed and neatly pasting them to make a patchwork book. Nicholas presented one to his friend George Herbert, and when the king came to Little Gidding to see their work he borrowed a Harmony for a few days.

As is the way of book-borrowers, the king clung to it for months, making notes in the margin in his own hand, and returning it with a request that the young ladies of Little Gidding should make him one. Mary Collett was the niece chosen to make the elegant binding for the king’s book, which we may see in the British Museum. Charles also begged Mr Ferrar to make for him a Harmony of Kings and Chronicles, as he was sorely puzzled over these two accounts of the Old Testament kings. This Mr Ferrar did, his young nephew Nicholas binding it in purple velvet, and from Little Gidding to the king went out this fragment consolation in the troubled days when the Civil War was brewing.

The old mother and Nicholas himself both died before the waves of war broke over the heads of this devoted company. They had longed for nothing better than to live in peace with their neighbours, but for long they had been persecuted by many who called their devotion popery. A pamphlet was circulated protesting against the Monastical Place called the Arminian Nunnery at Little Gidding; and in 1646 the day came when they had to flee from the approach of military zealots; who ransacked the house and spoiled the church. Little Gidding saw its company of saints no more, and two years later the king who had delighted in their books walked out on to the scaffold.

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