Church Heritage Record id18518

West tower, nave with south porch and north aisle; chancel with north aisle.

The tower is Norman, as is the south doorway. The north arcade of the nave follows, and is Early English; the north arcade of the chancel is of c.1300 and the chancel is Decorated; the north aisle shows signs of nineteenth-century enlargement, and the whole church seems to have been restored in c.1855.

The west tower is the oldest part of the building, and is essentially Norman. It is about ten feet square, and does not vary in dimension at any level.

The rest of the church is built to quite a different scale, making the tower look disproportionately small. Seen from the southern part of the churchyard, the nave and chancel are of about equal length. They are virtually roofed in one but a slight change in level, a matter of three inches or less, may be discerned at the midpoint. The nineteenth-century south porch stands near the west end of the nave wall, sheltering a fine Norman doorway with attached shafts each side and a simple round arch above.

Near the buttress which marks the chancel from the nave is a priest's door with two orders of shafts with moulded capitals. The arch over the doorway is neither round nor pointed, but rather between the two.

The two orders of the arch are moulded and have fillets, with a hood mould ending in a wimpled head on the right side and another head, less easy to discern, on the left. The two bays of the chancel are divided by another buttress, and the eastern corners have paired buttresses of the same design. The two south windows have three lights with reticulated tracery and hood moulds which terminate in small capitals over one window and heads over the other. The wall-head is enriched with a band of ball-flowers and paired leaves which in places resemble faces. The east wall has a large four-light window which dates from the mid nineteenth century, when the church was much restored, and has leaf-like tracery over the four main lights.

The north aisle, which is almost co-terminous with the nave and chancel and almost as wide again, was much altered in the 19th century to accommodate a family pew and seating for the servants. The eastern half which corresponds with the chancel seems to be basically mediaeval, although the north wall shows much regular nineteenth-century masonry. In the north wall is a simple doorway and a three-light window, both entirely nineteenth-century.

The nave is the oldest part of the building, entered by the Norman south doorway. A Norman arch opens into the tower space; it is entirely undecorated, and rests on imposts with abaci which continue along the walls as stringcourses. The two small windows within the tower are set within deep embrasures, and the floor of the next stage is supported by two crudely shaped beams running north and south. The north arcade is transitional, with big, rather short, cylindrical piers and round arches outlined by a simple chamfer, yet displaying moulded capitals of a more Early English type. The roof (like all the others in the building) is nineteenth century, supported on small half- octagonal moulded stone corbels. The design is simple, with arch braces marking the bays. 

The chancel arch is wide and misshapen, with signs of disturbance on the north side which indicate that a rood- stair has once been inserted. The chamfered arch is supported on small attached pilasters which rest in turn on corbels carved as human heads. The prosent screen, a conflation of seventeenth-century turned communion rails and thin nineteenth-century arcading, is fixed into old slots which must have held its predecessor.

The chancel is a stronger contrast to the nave internally than it had seemed outside. The rather heavy nave arcade is here replaced by an Early English arcade of considerable refinement and elegance carried on quadripartite piers with moulded bases and capitals. The double chamfered arches are outlined by hood-moulds with coarsely carved faces above each pier. The south windows are filled with twentieth-century stained glass in the tradition of at least a generation earlier, and the priest's door is seen to be about three feet above floor level. The east window is filled with colourful grisaille of high quality, and is flanked by two niches of slightly differing design. Both have trefoiled heads within crocketted gables, but that on the south is narrower and has an ogee head while the northern niche is given a two-centred arch. The north chancel aisle was the family chapel of the Stafford O'Brien family, from which they had a good view of the chancel.