Church Heritage Record 627081

Four-bay nave with south aisle and south-west tower, the base of which forms the entrance to the church. The chancel has a transeptal vestry on the north and organ chamber on the south.

The church was designed by Arthur W. Blomfiold (1829-1899) and was built in 1880. The builders were Messrs. Groves, the Clerk of the Works, Mr. Calloway of Heythrop and the foreman Joseph Buckingham. Some of the material is said to have come from the Roman Catholic chapel of 1822-6 which demolished the previous year, and part was quarried on the spot. The church was consecrated by the Bishop of Oxford on 28 September 1880. It cost £12,000 and was paid for by Albert Brassey, son of Thomas Brassey the railway magnate. Blomfield's other works in the county are Adwell (1864) the remarkable Romanesque church of St. Barnabas, Oxford (1868-72), Ramsden (1872), the chancel of St. Mary Banbury (1873) and Bladen (1891-2). Blomfield was knighted in 1889, and his obituaries stress his practical approach to design and, in particular, the planning of churches.

The church is on a large scale, rather hard and somewhat townish for its completely rural setting. 

The tower is big-boned, and a prominent landscape feature. It is of four stages with diagonal buttresses which diminish at each stage and rise above the parapet as diagonal crocketted pinnacles (the top of the south-east pinnacle has fallen). The lowest stage has a doorway of Early English character with attached shafts and moulded two centred arch under a gable in the south wall with angels, at the kneelers and an empty niche over the doorway. The plinths of the buttresses are embellished with a moulding which also encircles the rest of the building, and the stringcourse a little distance above rises on the west face to accomodate a bronze tablet which is a First World War memorial, the stone tablet below for the Second World War fitting slightly awkwardly. Above these is a lancet with a trefoil in the head which lights the porch within. The second stage has small lights in the west and south faces each with a pair of trefoil-headed lights and a trefoil above. The third stage is the smallest, with two plain rectangular lights in each face, and the uppermost stage, which houses the bells, has large three-light openings in each face with three trefoils in a circle in the head. The stepped parapet is pierced by alternately tall and short trefoil-headed arches.

The west window of the nave is of four lights with geometrical tracery and the windows on the north side are tall; each is of two lights save the westernmost which has a single light, and they are separated, by gabled buttresses. The south aisle has three small lancets to each bay set within arcading, the bays divided by small buttresses, and there is unfortunately no clerestory so that there seems to be an immense slope of roof tiles broken only by a short band of walling above the arcade. The south transept has two lancets and a group of three trefoils in a circle all embraced under a hoodmould to form a unified composition and at the foot of the wall in the south-east corner is a blocked Caernarvon headed doorway. The east wall of the transept has two single light windows with trefoils in the head of each. The north transept has a three-light window with a square head in the lower part of the gabled north wall with the text LET THY PRIESTS BE CLOTHED WITH RIGHTEOUSNESS carved on the stone lintel. The upper floor is lit by three large and three small trefoils in a circle, and is approached by a spiral staircase within an octagonal turret at the north- east angle. The east wall has a door for access from outside the church. The east window of the chancel is of three lights, the lower parts of each blocked for the reredos within and decorated with incised quatrefoils and circles. The head of this window has geometrical tracery, the central trefoil with a slightly over-bold attempt at Kentish split cusping.

The inner door of the porch opens into the west bay of the nave under an arch within which it is set off-centre to the west. The body of the church is big, and rather bare both as a result of the ashlar wall facings and the singular lack of monuments or even stained glass. All the more impressive therefore is the east wall, arranged in three parts with blind arcading each side of the east window filled with fine (though decayed) stained glass of the Crucifixion by Burlison and Grylls. The plan of the building bears out Blomfield's desire to provide churches which would serve both as fine auditory buildings and seemly settings for ritual, whether advanced or simple. Thus the chancel arch is wide, and set on high triple colonettes above conical corbels which die into the wall. 

In the nave, the south aisle is separated by a tall arcade of double chamfered arches carried on quatrofoil piers with moulded bases and capitals and at the east end the aisle opens through an arch into the side of the organ chamber, a practical consideration which was not by any means universally observed. The nave, indeed, is practical to the point of ordinariness, furnished simply with rows of deal pews with the font centrally placed beneath the west window. Only at roof level did the architect allow a little fancy to break out, both in the fine stone carving of the capitals and corbels of the wall shafts and in the series of four pairs of winged angels at the bases of the principals carrying shields and emblems alternately. The principal rafters are arch-braced with collar beams high above, and above the latter the space is filled with pierced wooden tracery. A slightly simpler design is followed, for the intermediate secondary rafters also. The quality of the roof is further enhanced by windbraces between the purlins. The chancel roof, which is of three bays, has prominent cusping in an enormous scale which is reminiscent of such examples as the remarkable roof of the hall at Athelhampton in Dorset. The chancel is divided from the nave by a low stone wall.

The stonework in the chancel is richer, with heavier mouldings to the arches opening into the north and south chambers and, as has already been mentioned, blind tracery against the east wall each side of the east window. The altar rails abut against small projections shaped rather like gabled buttresses which are also embellished with blind tracery and the sanctuary is lit by shafted single-light windows in the north and south walls, the latter with a bar cill forming a sedilia. The altar is given a spacious setting is an uncluttered sanctuary and attention is drawn to it by a long mosaic panel between it and the east window which is recessed within a frame of a hollow moulding filled with ball-flowers. A stone credence shelf is supported on an octagonal shaft in the south-east corner. There is one marbled step at the chancel arch and two at the communion rails with only the footpace eastward of that. The mosaic pavement has a background of the small white tesserae of which Blomfield was especially fond and this is scattered with small roses, fleurs-de-lys and cross motifs rather small. The pavements were made by Messrs. Burke of Newman Street, London. The carved stonework was executed by Thomas Earp who worked also, for example, for Street at St. Mary Magdalane, Paddington and St. John the Divine, Konnington, and carved the Eleanor Cross at Charing Cross for Sir Gilbert Scott.