Church Heritage Record 634217

Nave with south porch; chancel with north vestry.

Nave 29ft by 18ft; chancel 11ft square.

The basic fabric is Norman, but most of the visible features belong to a mid-nineteenth-century restoration.

The walls are of flint and rubble, all roughcast; the roofs are covered partly with stone slates and partly with tiles. 

Although at first sight the church might seem to be a modest nineteenth-century estate chapel, it is clear that the roughcast covers a much more ancient and interesting fabric. In the north and south walls are visible blocked Norman lights, and the chancel arch retains Norman details also.

As it now stands the church is a simple two-cell building with a vestry on the north side of the chancel and a timber porch on the south side of the nave. The nave, has two-light windows in the west, north and south walls, all with cusped Y tracery and a tracery quatrefoil with pointed lower lobe, the stonework all dating from the mid-nineteenth-century restoration. Near the midpoint of the north and south walls are visible the only two blocked Norman lights left uncovered by the roughcast. At the kneelers of the gables are stone brackets decorated with nailhead, and the roof slopes have stone tiles in the lower courses and clay tiles above. High on the northern part of the west wall is a round-headed opening which may perhaps be Norman in origin, now housing the single small bell. The angles are left unrendered, and only the south-west angle of the nave has a small diagonal buttress.

The north and south doorways are very plain, with simply chamfered four centred arches, possibly dating from c.1810 , the southern sheltered by a timber porch set on a stone plinth with stone flagged floor and stone benches. The outer arch is simply chamfered and pointed and the gable has attractively cusped and sub-cusped bargeboards.

The chancel is lower and narrower than the nave, though its walls are thicker, which suggests that it may have carried a tower in its original form. The east wall has an offset at gable level. The chancel now has a small two-light nineteenth-century window in the east wall and another, slightly larger, in the south wall. Both of these have round rather than pointed arches.

The vestry on the north has a roof gabled at right-angles to the chancel, a similar two-light window in the north wall and a narrow round-arched doorway with a continuous chamfer and keystone in the east wall. The west wall has a small single-light window.

The interior is correspondingly plain, and rather dark because of the modest number of windows, their small size, the dark stained glass with which they are all filled, and the overhanging trees at the west end. The walls are plastered and whitened and the floor is paved with stone flags in the alleys, the pews being set on timber platforms. The roof is a simple open timber design with braced collars at each pair of rafters. The windows have plain round-arched reveals and the small light in the west wall, housing the bell, has a moulded sill. At the west end of the nave is a burial vault forming a raised platform for the family pew. This was installed by Peter Beckford in 1809 "Sibi et Suis" - for himself and his family and at each side are panels commemorating himself and seven other members of the family. The pew, approached by four steep narrow stone steps at each side of the central inscription panel, has a linenfold front of oak.

The chancel arch is an entirely plain round-headed opening, and at this point are two stone steps with nosing, beyond which the chancel is paved with patterned tiles. The open timber roof is like that of the nave. The vestry on the north opens through a similarly plain arch, and may stand on the site of a transept. The east wall of the chancel is the most notable feature of the interior, and even this has been much renewed. Supported on two jambs on the east wall (these being the only exposed ashlar masonry inside the building) is a semi-circular arch. It has an order of plain voussoirs springing from chamfered imposts enriched with a pattern of small rectangles enclosing saltire crosses and pearls, which also appears on the label of the arch. Only on the inner faces of the imposts, however, is it original. In the west face of the north respond is a fourteenth-century recess with a trefoiled arch. The arch, which presumably once opened into an apsidal sanctuary, is now closed by a wall pierced by a small two- light window of fifteenth-century character. On the south side of the altar is a piscina with an ogee head, set low in the wall and containing a mutilated polygonal basin.