Church Heritage Record id18852

The church consists of an aisled nave of four bays, a chancel of two bays with vestry and organ chamber on the north side. There is a porch on the south side of the nave and .a bell-cote on the west gable.

By Samuel Whitfield Daukes, 1846. At the time of the building of the church over 1800 of the total population of 3,000 in Tetbury were described as poor, but the parish church had only 240 free seats situated in remote parts of the church. In 1041 the vestry , decided that a new chapel of ease should be built in order to remeay this situation. The estimated total cost as £1,400, but this was in the event exceeded by £2,000 which the Vicar, Canon John Frampton, contributed.

The warm stone and the sweeping tiled roofs make an immediateand strong impact, unmistakably Cotswold and undoubtedly 19th century. The effect of the building relies as much on careful detail as on the impression of its overall appearance. The three windows first seen are the east and the two in the south wall of the chancel. The east window has three main lights with curving mouchettes and daggers in the head which spring cleverly but naturally from the ogee cinque-foiled heads of the lights. A simple dripstone surrounds the window, as there is at all the windows in .the church. The two windows in the south wall of the nave have differing tracery, although both basically of two lights. That to the east is shorter than the other and has a vesica shape in the tracery, while its companion has a simpler design of two mouchettesand a dagger. Between the two is a priest's door with wrought iron hinges.

The roof of the nave is continuous from the ridge to the wall-head of the aisle, although it changes its slope at the level of the nave arcade. The windows in the side walls of the aisles are tiny lancets with trefoiled heads, but there are larger windows in the eastern walls of the aisles. The main entrance to the church is through a wooden porch at the south aisle beneath the yew tree. The porch is of dark oak, most untypical of the area, but a good design with stone seats along the plinth inside and open arcading with quatrefoils in the side walls. The entrance is under a two-centred arch with quatrefoils in the spandrels above which are two strongly curving braces which together with the wavy cusped line of the eaves-boards, give the design some movement. This is especially noticeable when contrasted with the severely plain walls of the aisle against which. the porch is set.

The west wall shows the whole effect of the slope of the nave roof, the change in line giving the church an odd, brooding look. The west wall is treated as one surface on which the small buttresses dividing nave from aisles make little impression except to articulate the wide flat expanse. In the central part, there is the west window of two lights with a circle containing three curving mouchettes. High in the gable is a small round window which lights the roof space. Above this is a bell-cote with an unusually elegant weather vane of a cock above a spiky cross. The walls of the aisles have the same lancets as the side walls although here they are a little larger, and there are angle buttresses at the corner of the building.

The north aide of the nave is similar to the south but without a porch, and the north wall of the chancel has the vestry and organ chamber projecting from it. The vestry is a little gabled room with the nice detail of a chimney rising between its two lancet windows in the gabled north walls. The organ chamber continues the slope of the chancel roof, and has a canted corner to allow light to reach the east window of the nave aisle. In the angled part of the wall there is a door.

The structure of the nave itself is straightforward - arcades with octagonal piers supportingmoulded arches which have carved steps in the form of angels. Above these, the timbers for the roof are carried on corbels most of which have naturalistic foliage but one, that nearest the north door, has a face on the lower part. The corbels supporting the timbers in the aisles are carved as angels holding shields, but these are blank. The roof of the nave is a simple type with cross-braces and king-posts. These king-posts cut across the tiny round windows in the west and east gables, one of the few faults of the design. In the centre of the nave hangs a particularly interesting corona lucis of two octagonal frames, the larger lower one hanging from the upper on a chain-like construction. This is still fitted for gas, but additional lighting in the form of a triple electric fitting has been added along each side of the nave.