Church Heritage Record 626688

Four bay nave with chancel in the east bay; three-bay north aisle with round tower at the west end; south porch.

The round tower shows Norman origins but was almost entirely rebuilt in 1903-6. The rest of the church seems to date from the mid-fourteenth century.

Although not large, the church has a strange and interesting plan which must be explained by its building history. As far as existing evidence shows, this began with a Norman round tower, nave and chancel, of which only the tower survives in anything like its original form. Although the lower two stages are round, the upper stage is octagonal, probably added in the thirteenth century, and in any case the tower was almost completely rebuilt in 1906. 

As the church is approached from the south-west gate, the porch is the most prominent feature with the round tower a little way off to the north-west and a row of three fine three-light windows in the bays of the nave which lies east of the porch. These windows are interesting in that they present a possible example of a Transitional style set forth in exemplary fashion. The outer pair of windows have Perpendicular panel tracery, and the central one has the familiar Decorated motif of a five petalled flower as tracery. Yet all three are of the same shape and proportions and are surrounded by identical mouldings with identical hood-moulds.

The porch is tall, with a steeply pitched roof of which the ridge stands at the level of the nave eaves. The side walls have single cinquefoil-headed lights under square hood-moulds and a niche over the doorway, much smaller but of the same form, contains a small statue (presumably of St. Nicholas). The gable above has been much rebuilt with larger flints and bright red bricks, and terminates in a stumpy brick finial. The angle buttresses have finely moulded plinths and the doorway is of two orders, the inner supported on half-shafts with octagonal capitals and the outer running continuously from apex to floor. The entrance is closed by a delicate wrought-iron gate with a cresting of scrolls.

The north aisle, on the site of the original nave, is roofed in one with the north slope of the nave roof, giving a large expanse of tiles instead of a clerostory which might be expected (and which indeed once existed). The north wall is terminated by buttresses at both ends; near the west end is a doorway with continuous moulded surround and hood-mould in the manner of the windows already studied in the south wall. Further east is a two-light window with a modified form of the Decorated tracery, and towards the eastern end of the wall is a wide three-light window with Perpendicular tracery. The east wall of the aisle has a particularly fine three-light window with cusped ogee heads to the main lights and two cusped and pointed quatrefoils surmounted by two mouchottes as tracery.

Since the aisle is one bay shorter than the main body of the church, there is a window in the north wall to light the present chancel; this is Perpendicular, with three main lights divided by a transom, and panel tracery. The corbels above show that the aisle at one time continued at least one bay further than it does now.

The pair of large brick buttresses against the east wall suggests that the chancel was finally demolished and the present east wall constructed towards the end of the eighteenth-century. The east window also appears to date from that time, but is well in keeping with the Perpendicular strain of the church's style, being indeed an enlarged version of the south windows thus described. Much of the wall each side is flint, but the broad gable itself is brick.

The floor of the church is two steps lower than the ground level outside, and the tracery of the windows is seen to advantage since apart from a few fragments in the south windows and a single stained glass window in the north aisle wall, there is no stained glass in any of them. Many, indeed are glazed with quarries which by their unevenness and the colour of the glass may well be eighteenth-century or older. The north arcade is of three open arches and a fourth now blocked but pierced by a window, the arches with double chamferings being carried on piers of quatrefoil section with moulded capitals. The roof, which in the western three bays is covered with a plaster ceiling and in the eastern bay is open to the timbers, seems to be of the eighteenth-century in the former part and nineteenth-century in the latter.