Holywell cum Needingworth

St John the Baptist, open, is pretty much perfect both architecturally and location wise, inside maybe not so much so but there's enough interest to be pleasing. A great church with lots to reward the visitor.

ST JOHN BAPTIST. The W tower is a mystery. It is said to date from 1547 and to be built of stone from Ramsey Abbey. What does that statement involve? The tower is broad and substantial and built of regular stone blocks. Its buttresses start with chamfers, i.e. semi-polygonal, and the W window is indeed Tudor. But the bell-openings are Dec, and the doorway with its broadly rounded-trefoiled head and the big cusped tracery motifs of the spandrels defeats dating. The arch towards the nave is Dec anyway, and in the N and S walls are thin blank arches which are Dec too and fulfil no useful function in their position. Is it then all re-used Ramsey material? The body of the church is stone and cobbles, and the features are over-restored. The chancel is a beautiful early C13 piece with paired lancet windows, with a detached middle shaft between them inside and a rib rising from the shaft to the rere-arch, an unexpected personal touch. The aisle windows are Early Dec. So are the three-bay arcades with their standard elements. The roof of the nave is of 1862, but figures from the old roof are displayed in the church. - PLATE. Cup 1822-3; Paten on foot 1834-5.

HOLYWELL-CUM-NEEDINGWORTH. They are two small villages sharing a church. Holywell near the Ouse has a holy well by the church with a medieval carving over it; Needingworth, having lost almost all by fire (86 houses) last century, has hardly anything left of those Tudor days when its little son Ambrose Nicholas walked about here dreaming perhaps of being Lord Mayor of London - a dream which, whether he dreamt it or not, came true.

The small church is 12th and 13th century, the clerestory added in the 14th century to light the roodloft, and the tower built in the 16th century of Barnack stone from the ruined abbey of Ramsay. The font has a modern bowl on portions of a 13th century base, and the modern roof of the nave has eight figures 500 years old. They are probably part of the old roodloft, which was taken down in 1563 and put back in the church in 1581 to form a front to a west gallery, which existed for. 300 years and has now disappeared.

The modern east window, with glass by Sir Charles Nicholson, shows Our Lord, King Edmund, and St Oswald, the panels below showing scenes in their lives: the Supper at Emmaus, the martyrdom of Edmund, and Oswald presenting the deeds of the manor of Needingworth, which he bought from King Edgar, and a noble Saxon lady who presented the church at Holywell. In the top light is a view of the holy well, which is still in the churchyard.

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Fenstanton

SS Peter & Paul, open, is a barn of a church which I found, despite having roof angels, some good corbels and a quantity of pleasing glass, rather soulless. It's too airbrushed and sterilised for my taste. It is also home to Capability Brown and his family.

ST PETER AND ST PAUL. The most interesting part of the church is the chancel. It is higher than the nave, and has a proud seven-light E window and high three-light side windows with reticulated tracery such as also appears prominently in the E window. The priest’s doorway is well moulded, and the SEDILIA and PISCINA have an even row of ogee arches. Now this chancel was built by William of Longthorne, whose brass - now only the indent - is in the middle of the floor, and he was rector from 1345 till 1352. The lettering on the tomb-slab incidentally is still Lombardic. So here is a dated piece of the mature Dec. The W tower cannot have been started much later. The W doorway is also still Dec. To it belong the two fragmentary windows to S and N cancelled when the mason of the Perp church decided upon aisles to embrace the tower. The head corbels of these new S and N arches look C13, but they must be re-used. The church is of rubble and brown cobbles. The ashlar spire with low broaches is Perp. Two tiers of lucarnes in alternating directions. Perp aisles and clerestory, Perp arcades of three wide bays, the piers with four polygonal projections and four diagonal hollows. Tower arch and chancel arch more or less match, though the bases of the chancel arch are E.E. As early. as this is the S porch entrance, re-set no doubt. This has dogtooth and an almond-shaped recess above. - PULPIT. With linenfold panels of the early C16. - PLATE. Silver-gilt Cup of 1619-20.  - MONUMENTS. For William of Longthorne see above. - Lancelot Brown d. 1783, i.e. Capability Brown, the celebrated garden designer. He was Lord of the Manor. The monument is a flat tomb-chest on steps with a back plate with modest Gothic detail. The inscription reads:

Ye Sons of Elegance, who truly taste
The Simple charms that genuine Art supplies,
Come from the sylvan Scenes His Genius grac’d,
And offer here your tributory Sigh’s.
But know that more than Genius slumbers here;
Virtues were his which Arts best powers transcend.
Come, ye Superior train, who these revere
And weep the Christian, Husband, Father, Friend.

- Mrs Brown, by Coade, 1793, i.e. made of Coade stone, and apparently designed by Bacon. Mourning woman by an urn on a pedestal. The pretty corbel is of Coade stone too.

FENSTANTON. It is on the Roman Road from Cambridge to Godmanchester, with the Fens about. Its houses have become good friends of time, and there is a quaint old lock-up of the 18th century which has now become a friendly place with a white bell turret, a clock, and a seat for weary travellers. The noble church tower with its spire has been a landmark 600 years, and in the churchyard is a fragment of a cross which has kept it company all the time. The view of the south wall is delightful, with the 15th century clerestory windows, the 16th century aisle windows, and the noble tower and spire soaring over all.

The tower has a lofty 15th century arch leading to the nave, but its side arches are 200 years older. There is a spacious porch as old as the tower, and a medieval nave roof with carvings and 18 old stone faces on the corbels. The lectern has old oak panels with good tracery. The pulpit in which Thomas Bourdillon preached for 52 years last century is 400 years old. In the Tudor roof of the north aisle are eight feathered angels holding crowns, lutes, and shields, with eight smaller figures.

But the glory of the village is the 14th century chancel, a spacious and lovely place, with a tremendous east window famous for its seven lancets and its graceful tracery. On one of the buttresses is an old mass dial. Here lies the man who built the chancel, William Longthome, rector a year or two before Crecy; there is a slab with his figure carved on it.

Long after his day another lover of beauty died in this village. He was Lancelot Brown, - always known as Capability Brown. His 17th century manor house is still here, said to have been given to him by the Earl of Northampton in gratitude for the wonderful gardens he laid out at Castle Ashby. His only monument here is a tablet, but it has eight lines that are a worthy tribute:

Ye sons of elegance who truly taste
The sample charms that genuine art supplies,
Come from the Sylvan scenes his genius graced
And ofler here your tributary sighs.
But know that more than genius slumbers here;
Virtues were his which art’s best powers transcend.
Come, ye superior train who these revere,
And weep the Christian husband, father, friend
.
In this country of great and beautiful gardens Capability Brown must be long remembered. Born at Kirkdale, Northumberland, in 1715, he started work as a gardener there in Lorraine Park. Ambition drove him south, where he found a footing in the kitchen garden of Lord Cobham at Stow. Here his talent flowered, and the man with the hoe was found to be a man with the eye of an artist. He had the faculty of seeing how an English landscape should be draped and dressed. He struck remorselessly at the prim geometrical scheme of gardening then in vogue, and made his trees and shrubs and plants fit in with and enhance the natural charm of a situation.

“The capability of the site” was his constantly recurring phrase as new undertakings were presented to him, and so Capability Brown he became in all men’s mouths. It was soon possible for him to set up independently as a landscape gardener, and he was in general request among the owners of parks and fine gardens.

Kew, Newnham Courtenay, and Blenheim were among the triumphs of his genius. Like Paxton, he was an architect too. He knew how to design a supremely comfortable and attractive -home, and from the time he was 36, when he began his second venture by building the church and dwelling for Lord Coventry at Croome, he was as active with schemes for architecture as in harmonising artificial cultivation with the natural configuration of landscapes. He made great gardens, let us say, as an artist makes pictures.

He was rewarded with a considerable fortune, was High Sheriff of Huntingdonshire, and died here in 1783.

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Hilton

St Mary Magdalene, open, is not a particularly interesting building but its location is stunning which more than compensates for the over restored interior and there's also a Saxon cross reset in the west wall, as well as an alabaster remnant in the chancel.

ST MARY MAGDALENE. C14 W tower, the rest Perp. Brown cobbles. The arcades of four bays have typical Perp piers with capitals only to the arch openings. In the chancel a bracket on a head, in the S aisle a very pretty but mutilated vaulted niche. - SCULPTURE. Small, strange stone of keyhole shape now in the W wall of the tower. In the upper part the Crucifix, in the lower defaced foliage. - STAINED GLASS. In a chancel N window a head of Christ. - The E window by Wailes of Newcastle, 1861, the W window by Constable of Cambridge; both bad. - Also two windows by Kempe, 1896 and 1898. - PLATE. Cup and Cover Paten 1571-2; Paten on foot 1681-2. - MONUMENT. Two alabaster pieces from a tomb-chest, one with two quatrefoils enclosing shields, the other with two kneeling angels holding a shield.

HILTON. It is thrilling to find Roman brick in its church walls, made by Romans and first used by them, used again probably by the Saxons and the Normans, and again by our English builders.

The chancel arch was new about 700 years ago, the tower is a few years younger; the fine plain roofs are 15th century, as old as the font. From that great building century has also come the fragment of glass with the head of Christ in one of the windows. There is a 17th century chest. It is said that parts of the churchyard wall are 500 years old, and the’ stone cross with rich foliage and a battered Crucifixion in a circle is perhaps older still. Hilton Hall with its mellow bricks and stones has a dovecot 300 years old, and St John’s Farm goes back 500 years.

We were delighted to find in this place one of those rare survivals of Merrie England, a maze cut in the turf. It has a stone pillar in the middle on which the inscription tells us that it was made in 1660 by William Sparrow. We found two boys who showed how to reach the pillar without cheating. Often must old Robert Walpole have watched people finding their way in and finding their way out. He saw the maze made before his long life ended in the last year of the 17th century. He was 101, and had he lived a few years more would have seen three centuries; yet he had enough to boast about, for he was a child when Elizabeth was old and when Shakespeare was writing his plays; the Mayflower sailed in his youth, Charles and Cromwell were fighting in his prime, and when London was burning he still had before him another thirty years of sitting in the chimney corner talking of old times.

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Grafham

All Saints, open, was definitely a contender for the title of church of the day, not for any especially outstanding feature but for its intimacy. I particularly liked the low rise arcade columns and the nave dormer windows.

ALL SAINTS. Not a large church. The W tower turns octagonal at the very top, for the short length above the springing of the arches of the bell-openings. The spire has two tiers of lucarnes in alternating directions. On the square lower part are four C17 obelisk pinnacles. Late C13 chancel with Y-tracery, and intersecting tracery, the E an adaptation of this tracery made probably in 1803. The DOUBLE PISCINA is late C13 too, and so is the N arcade of four low bays with round piers and double-chamfered arches. The S arcade of standard elements is Dec. - FONT. Octagonal, Dec, with quatrefoils of three varieties and simple blank-arched panels. - ARCHITECTURAL FRAGMENTS in the S porch. - BELL. One by W.Dawe, c.1400. - MONUMENT. Upper part of an early C14 effigy of a priest (S porch).

GRAFHAM. We remembered it for the story of two brothers who died far apart and will long be remembered here. Their grandfather lived  in the lovely 14th and 16th century rectory and preached from the Jacobean pulpit of the 13th century church. The pulpit has an altar table which has been here with it all the time, and there are pews with woodwork in them older still. One of the bells has been ringing in the tower since Agincourt, and the fine old roof was built over the nave in the same generation; the stone heads its beams rest on are the work of 15th century masons. Older than all these things is the bowl of the font, which was probably carved 600 years ago; it would be new when they brought here the quaint figure of a 14th century priest who lies in the porch with his head on two cushions.

The two Buckle brothers, whose grandfather was rector for 29 years, were adopted by their uncle, who was rector for 39 years, and they spent all their early childhood at the rectory; there are beautiful memorials in the church to their memory. They used to love the old home and their explorings in the country round about. Then came the war, and Thomas fell fighting with the Camerons and John went down in a transport ship torpedoed off the coast of Greece. He was in command of the troops on board, and it is the proud memory of his people that he was last seen at his post on the bridge.

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