Church Heritage Record id18988

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

The existing chancel, nave and remains of the south chapel of St. Mary (now incorporated into the later south aisle) survive from the medieval period. The west tower was added about 1400 and the south aisle and south porch are later fifteenth-century. In the nineteenth century the vestry was added and the whole church was thoroughly restored.

The west tower is of three diminishing stages, marked externally by moulded stringcourses. The angles are supported by diagonal buttresses round which the moulded plinth also runs, and these are offset three times before dying into the walls at belfry level. At ground level, the north and south walls are blind, while the west wall is pierced by a doorway with moulded jambs and two-centred arch with a label terminating in grotesque heads. The middle stage has narrow slits in the west and south faces, but is blind to the north. The two-light belfry openings in the top stage have been much repaired, and that to the east has been filled in; all have labels terminating in carved heads. The embattled parapet also seems to have been much restored. 

The nave has three two-light windows of fourteenth-century date in the north wall, each with a pointed quatrefoil in the tracery and ogee-headed lights. The bays are divided by buttresses, and in the westernmost below the window is a sixteenth-century doorway with a square head. In the wall to the east of this are the remains of a stoup for holy water.

The chancel on the north side is virtually in alignment with the nave, but much of the north wall is now obscured by a nineteenth-century vestry under a low pent roof; this has a doorway in the west wall and a small window in the east wall, the north wall being blind.

The nineteenth-century east window has three ogee-headed lights and tracery in the form of a four-petalled flower. The wall within which it is set is mostly nineteenth-century, and is supported at the ange by angle buttresses set back from the corners. The south chancel wall is pierced by two windows, each of two lights with trefoiled ogee heads at the labol-stops, but the wall in which they are set has been re-surfaced with flints. Just to the east of the western window is a priest's doorway with moulded jambs and arch, and in the western corner is a low-side window rectangular with a sunk splay on the external jambs.

The south nave aisle is of three bays, all Perpendicular in detail, with four similar windows under four-centred arches, each of through cinquefoiled cusped lights (two in the south wall and one each in the east and west walls). The parapet is straight, without battlements or any embellishment save a moulded stringcourse and upper edge. The south doorway has been entirely renewed, and has a four-centred arch ith two moulded orders under a square hood-mould with quatefoils in the spandrels.

The nave is of three bays, the three fourteenth-century windows in the north wall being set quite high above a moulded stringcourse. and having heads carved at the label-stops. On the south is a fine arcade opening into the aisle. It is also of three bays, with two-centred arches of two moulded orders; the outer order is continuous, terminating on a splay halfway down each pier, and the inner rests on semi-octagonal piers with moulded capitals which merge with the same splays, giving an odd effect of the pillars standing on disproportionately tall bases. The western arch is wider than the others, and is carried on a corbel carved with an angel holding a shield, in place of the respond shich appears at the east end.

Beyond the eastern respond, partly buried in the wall, is part of the fourteenth-century respond which formerly opened into the south chapel. Four corbels which supported the rood loft still survive, and a further architectural feature in this crowded corner is a pair of niches back to back between the nave and aisle which may have formed the openings of a hagioscope.

The roof of the nave is said to be modern, but this is difficult to ascertain since it is plastered so that the only visible timbers are the tie beams and braced principal rafters.

The south aisle is even more full of light than the nave, having large south-facing windows entirely free of stained glass. All the mullions and cusps of the windows are finely moulded on the inner faces, and the roof incorporates some moulded fifteenth-century timbers with carved bosses. The corbels supporting the wall-posts are half-octagonal and moulded. 

The chancel arch is of two chamfered orders, the inner slightly hollowed, with a moulded label on each side; the responds are triple shafts with moulded bases and capitals, the former nineteenth-century. The interior of the chancel is almost entirely nineteenth-century, since all the stonework has been renewed as well as the roof. In the north wall is a nineteenth-century arch to the vestry which frames the little organ with its stencilled front pipes and pine case.