Church Heritage Record 601149

W tower, nave with clerestorey and N and S aisles, chancel.

The site has high archaeological potential as the site of a church building since the C13.

There was a chapel at Low Ham, probably in the C13 and certainly by 1316 when a chantry recently granted there for the benefit of one landowner was suppressed in favour of an earlier foundation for another. In the later C16 it was thought that the founder was a gentleman named Bartlett in association with a house known as Burcy's Court. Further evidence exists in the fragments of medieval stained glass in the E window, and the two C14 bells.

By the earlier C15 the advowson of the chapel was owned by Sir John Berkeley (d. 1428) and the rector in the later C16 continued to accept its private status but appointed a chaplain at will. It remained essentially a private, family chapel in the time of the Hexts and the Stawells, both of whom expressed their ecclesiastical opinions within it. By the later C17 seating was provided for all the inhabitants of Low Ham, all tenants of the Stawells.

The chapel stood close to successive manor houses, but the removal of the Stawell mansion left it isolated and unfenced in a field close to a modern farmyard. The church is built in a clearly Gothic idiom, resembling a Perpendicular church in miniature with free versions of Decorated tracery. An inscription, visible in the chancel window c. 1785 and subsequently misread, described George Stawell as having founded and finished the building on 20 May 1668. It was consecrated in the following year. The north door of the chancel includes the arms and initials of George Stawell, and an altar frontal formerly in the chapel bears the date 1669. The association of the style at that date with high church practice is borne out by the range of furnishings, which include a chancel screen with a cornice like that of a rood loft in miniature bearing on one side a quotation from the Bible entirely consonant with royalist thought: “My sonne feare God and the Kinge and meddle not with them that are given to change” (Proverbs 24. 21).

It has been argued that the present church was built by Sir Edward Hext, b. c.1550, who came to Low Ham around 1600 when he married the widow of Thomas Walton; d. 1624. This argument claims that during the Civil War the church probably suffered damage, and it was repaired by George and Ralph Stawell who inherited the estate from their father Sir John, who had married Edward Hext’s daughter and sole heiress, Elizabeth.  Subsequently there have been some additions made by Sir Charles Wathen, wool merchant, and one-time Mayor of Bristol who acquired the estate in the 1880s, when the chancel was raised and the N door blocked off. He was also responsible for the insertion of a stone screen at the W end and a new font. 

Michael Sacklett of NADFAS argues that William Arnold, the architect of Montacute House, Wadham College Oxford, and Cranborne Manor, at least had a hand in the building of the church, if he was not the main architect. Sir Edward Hext knew William Arnold, the architect/builder of Wadham College, well, having in 1609/10 recommended him to Dorothy Wadham, sister of Lord Petre and widow of Nicholas Wadham.  Hext and Petre were executors of Wadham’s will in which he asked his widow to complete the foundation of Wadham college. 

The tower was recovered in lead in c. 1989 and parapets rebuilt. In 1994/95 the roof and parapets were restored with aid from English Heritage and the east face of the tower was repointed and the Ham stone to the east belfry opening was restored. Electrical under pew heaters were installed in 2005/06.

The tower at Low Ham has three storeys separated by stringcourses and slender diagonal buttresses with three set offs. The tower has a plinth and battlements with gargoyles at the corners and centrepoint of each side. The bell openings are of two cusped lights, with Perpendicular style tracery in two-centred arches and super mullions. A single light window with a cusped arch inside a rectangular head lights the middle storey on the N, S and W faces. A staircase projects from the south side. The tower forms a local landmark, visible from some distance over the undulating countryside that surrounds it. There is a large W window and W doorway in a Tudor arch set in a square frame. The window has three lights with Perpendicular tracery set in a two-centred arch.

The aisled nave is of three bays, with a single aisle and clerestorey window to a bay. All the windows are of three lights with tracery of a roughly 14C style, with cinquefoil cusping and quatrefoils in the window heads. The windows are set in moulded embrasures that are almost round. The aisles have (modern) castellations and pitched roofs, and no plinth. The N aisle has a plinth at dado level – the distinction is probably due to the sloping ground, which creates a taller aisle elevation on the N. The east end of the nave is gabled.

The chancel has 14C-style windows of a different type, with two lights under pointed trefoils, maintaining but varying the stylistic emphasis of the nave. Like the nave, it has battlements and no plinth. The E window has complex tracery, with an eight-cusped ‘star’ contained in a round opening above three lights. It marks the least convincingly ‘medieval’ aspect of the design.

The nave interior is of three bays and two aisles, both built contemporaneously and in all other senses matching. The piers have demi-shafts in the cardinal directions, with deep hollows separating them. Each demi-shaft has a demi-capital with Perpendicular mouldings, but the hollows are continued into the arch without break (again a Perp form). The arch mouldings otherwise continue those of the piers. Described by Nikolaus Pevsner as Somerset standard ‘A’ type, albeit an evolved version.

There is a single clerestorey window above each arch, of three lights with quatrefoils in the tracery (described more fully above). The nave has a stone floor laid in decorative diamond patterns. There are windows with excellent tracery in a 14C-style style (but still of 1660s). It has an archbraced timber roof in the central aisle and simple lean-to roofs in the aisles. There are four figurative corbels; two in the S aisle, at each of the E and W ends, and similarly in the N aisle.

The chancel has fine 14C-style windows to N and S, with pointed trefoils (described more fully above). The E window is of three lights with unusual rose in its head, with an eight-lobed shape surrounded by quatrefoils. The chancel is panelled, with the Ten Commandments and Lord’s Prayer to l and r of the altar. It has a pitched timber roof with bosses containing figures and flowers. The chancel arch is carried on responds and is well moulded. The chancel floor was raised in the C19 by Sir Charles Wathen.

The tower arch is strikingly tall and well moulded (following the chancel arch), with lozenge shaped responds. It contains the heavily moulded C19 tower screen – an almost rounded arch with cusps that form an ogee and finial above, with statues of the evangelists and very worn glass panels.