Church Heritage Record 927025

Nave (roofless) with west tower, north apsidal vestry (also roofless); chancel with apsidal sanctuary. There seems to be a vault below part of the nave.

The church is basically Norman, and Norman windows survive in the north and south walls of the chancel. The walls of the roofless nave are essentially mediaeval. In 1791 Bishop Shute Barrington, who used Mongewell House as a country retreat from his sees. of Salisbury and Durham, applied for a Faculty, on the grounds that the church was small and inconvenient, to enlarge the west end, pull down and rebuild the walls of the chancel, re-pew the whole of the church and chancel, build a gallery for himself and his family, and erect buttresses on the outside of the church and chancel and battlements round the roof. This work was done, but the architect is not recorded. Bishop Barrington employed James Wyatt at Salisbury and Durham, and he may well have drawn up these designs. In 1880-1 the church was restored by Joseph Morris and Spencer Slingsby Stallwood of Reading who rebuilt the apse, put in a new font, pulpit and floor, took down the gallery, put in new fittings of oak and restored the body of the church. The fixings of the downpipes are dated 1881. The tower was to have been taken in hand in a year or two, but it never was. The vestry was added in 1888 and the church was restored in 1915. During the present century it has gradually fallen into disrepair. It was abandoned between the Wars; part of the north wall fell, the tower staircase collapsed, ivy forced itself through the roof and windows and the monuments began to suffer from the weather. In 1954 Hugh Vaux, architect, tidied the church up, removing the fallen remains of the nave roof and repairing the chancel into which he moved the monuments. The work was done by the three sons of A.E. Collier, builder, of Crowmarsh Gifford. The church was reconsecrated by the Bishop of Dorchester on 19th June that year.

It seems to have begun as a typical three-cell Norman church with rectangular nave, smaller rectangular chancel and apsidal sanctuary. The nave walls are mostly built of flint with some rubble and have sandstone quoins at the angles. Bishop Barrington's work (all originally unified by a coat of rendering) may be seen in the brick patching, the brick gabled buttresses against the north and south walls and the south doorway with its pointed arch set in a round-headed opening from which he presumably removed a Norman doorway. The most astonishing change which he brought about, however, was at the west end, where his extension of the nave added little in space but a good deal in character. This consisted of building a cylindrical tower outside the west wall of the nave, demolishing the west wall almost completely and attaching the tower to the nave by diagonal walls which were curved internally inside to give an apsidal west end. The tower seems to have been intended more to give the church a picturesque appearance from the house than anything else.

At the foot of the tower is a pointed doorway facing north-west, which seems to have been sheltered by a small porch, although only one post in the form of a quatrefoil shaft survives upright. The stair within the tower was lit by a single lancet facing south-east. At the level of the nave wallhead the tower becomes abruptly hexagonal, with two tiers of pointed lights placed in alternate faces. It was capped by an ogee lead-covered cupola of which only the shaped wooden structure remains.

The south door has two panelled leaves and formerly had a glazed tympanum above with panes set in a cast-iron gothic frame. At the west end there was a doorway under a pointed light in the south-west diagonal wall and a light alone on the north side. The nave roof timbers were cleared away in 1954 but the roof structure of the north vestry has fallen since. The vestry is semi-circular with three small neo-Norman lights in the curved wall and a small doorway to the west. The only other features to be seen in the nave are the stone base of the pulpit in the north-east corner and a large stone in the south-west part which seems to cover the entrance to a vault.

The chancel walls were almost entirely rebuilt in 1880, and such features as the slender priest's doorway (formed from a low-side window) in the south wall were entirely renewed. In the north and south walls of the chancel there is a single Norman light with a deep round-headed splay internally which shows the original date even though the windows themselves have been made pointed. The apse has three small neo-Norman lights. One of the finest features of the building is the fourteenth-century roof of the chancel, of two bays with an arch-braced collar and big curved wind-braces. The stone wall-plates carved with chevron pattern are Norman even though that on the south has been partly renewed. The Victorian roof of the apse adapts this pattern to fit a semi-conical shape. The broad chancel arch and sanctuary arch both have entirely Victorian zig- zag, but set in the rendered wall above the west face of the chancel arch are two genuine Norman corbels carved with grotesque heads, evidently re-set. The zig-zag continues vertically below the plain capitals in place of shafts. The wall filling the arch, with a central doorway and two pointed. windows with pretty wooden gothic tracery, is a sympathetic insertion of 1954 to keep the chancel weathertight.

The chancel floor and furnishings are mostly of 1880, but the several monuments which remain from the eighteenth-century predominate as forceful reminders that the former status of this building was effectively that of an estate church used as a family chapel and burial place.