St John the Baptist, Saxmundham

Visited last week, this is not your typical Suffolk Church. Little evidence of the original  Norman or possibly Saxon church remains, much disappearing during major restoration and rebuilding in 1873 by  Diocesan architect Richard Phipson.  However the church  still contains some original items of an earlier date.

Much of the text that follows is taken from an excellent guide to the church.

The Western tower (14th century) has diagonal buttresses at its western angles. The two light belfry windows and the similar west window are in the Decorated style of the early 14th century. The restored west doorway is also of this date, although some of the masonry in the lower part of the tower is arranged differently from the rest and may have formed part of the 11th century church.

The Font c 1400 - This is a typical East Anglian design with octagonal panelled bowl carved with lions interspersed with angels holding shields on which are displayed the instruments of the Passion (East), the Cross (South), the emblem of the Trinity (West) and the three crowns of East Anglia (North). The bowl of the font is original.

The whole of the nave is crowned with a splendid 15th century single-hammerbeam arch braced roof, with castellated hammers and wooden demi-figures as corbels below the wall posts.

During the Georgian era, or perhaps before, the roof was covered in with a flat plaster ceiling. however the ceiling was removed in 1932 to reveal this splendid roof. It has been restored and the wall plates have been renewed, as have several of the other timbers. The ancient woodwork is less brown in appearance than the modern. The figures beneath the wall posts are mostly original.

The Chancel- One of the most distinctive features of St John's is its weeping chancel. (The Chancel is built at a pronounced angle to the nave.) This is fairly common in churches built in the shape of a cross (cruciform) but is very rare in a church of this type. The main feature is not the angle, which is much greater than usual, but that it is to the South.
Other churches with weeping chancels incline to the North, representing Jesus on the cross with his head towards the penitent thief on his right Here it is to his left, signifying that Jesus died for the impenitent as well as the penitent. Saxmundham church is one of the few in Europe to have this feature.

 This is believed to be part of the original Rood screen.

Perhaps the most interesting survival in the church, and a rare one, can be seen in the most easterly windows of each of the clerestories. These are the stone corbel ledges that once supported the canopy of honour over the rood. They are both carved elaborately, and the northern one is castellated.

 Sancta Johnannes, Ora Pro Nobis ('St John pray for us') is carved in a banner along that on the south side.

Outside again and one final feature of note can be found in the churchyard on the tombstone of John Noller (1725). The east and west faces of the tombstone are small, inclined oblong recesses which form a simple and imaginative sundial. Every sundial needs a pointer or gnomon projecting in front of the dial to cast a shadow on to a marked scale. Any such projection low down on a tombstone would certainly, sooner or later, be damaged. To prevent this happening, the designer of John Noller's headstone hit upon the ingenious idea of making the edge of the headstone's surface the gnomon and obtained the relative projection by recessing the dial.

As the stone faces east and west, he carved a morning dial on one side (east face) and an evening one on the other (west face). If you look in the recesses on both faces you will see the hour markings 1,2,3,4,5 on the west recess and 7,8,9,10,11 on the east recess. 12 o'clock is not marked because at the moment of noon each dial is completely in shadow.

It was  13:24 when I took the photograph.

The dials are not upright on the stone but at a slant. The upper edge which acts as the gnomon is so slanted as to point exactly to the north star, or in other words, be parallel with the earth's axis.

The Parish Church of St Peter, Limpsfield, Surrey

The church is set above the road to the north of Limpsfield village. 

 It is approached by a double Lytch Gate

The oldest part of the present church building is the tower which is thought to have been built around 1180 and unusually placed to the south of the chancel. The C12 was constructed of ironstone and sandstone rubble and originally consisted of a nave, chancel and the tower.

During the thirteenth century the chancel was extended to its present length.  The roof of the chancel  (and adjacent Gresham Chapel) are trussed rafter roofs and the nave roof of a lower pitch is a good example of a cradle form of roof.

The 12th Century font was moved to its present location and placed on a new stone base with supporting shafts during the 1870s the Victorian restoration under the aegis of the squire Mr Leveson Gower and supervised by Mr J L Pearson FSM

St Mary the Virgin, Upwaltham, West Sussex

We visited a garden at Upwaltham Barns yesterday, halfway between Chichester and Petworth in West Sussex.  From the garden, across the main road, is the C12 church of St Mary the Virgin (otherwise known as  'The Church in the Fields').

 

The church is unusual in that it remains almost unaltered from when it was built in the 12^th century. According to Chris Partridge on his excelent  blog 'Looking at Sussex Churches',   http://sussexchurchez.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/st-mary-virgin-upwaltham.html  

'From 1833 to '51 the rector of Upwaltham and neighbouring East Lavington was the dynamic high churchman Henry Manning, later one of Britain's most high profile converts to Catholicism, second Archbishop of Westminster and a cardinal. He had East Lavington church so brutally restored and extended barely any original features survive today. Luckily, he never got round to 'beautifying' Upwaltham. Perhaps he just liked it the way it was – in in later life he described the church and its downland setting as "only less beautiful then heaven."'

Standing alone, halfway up the hill, the church is a simple rectangle with an apsidal chancel. The church is small - just 54 feet long by 23 feet wide - and only one of four churches in Sussex with apsidal chancels [the others are at New Marden, Worth and New 

Unusually, there is no east window. Instead, there are windows on either side. The chancel arch is C13 (C12 arch would have been considerably narrower).

The stained glass of the wetern window was commisioned by the parish to celebrate the millenium and shows the flora and fauna of the South Downs. It was installed in 2005 and is called Agnus Dei. It is by MEG LAWRENCE, a Kent artist http://www.lawrencestainedglass.co.uk/index.html

The church was designated as a grade I listed building in 1958.

Salford, Oxfordshire

St Mary's Church

The church was originally Norman but was re-built by the Oxford Diocesan architect, and Gothic Revivalist G.E. Street in 1854.

 The south elevation .

The fine stone font dates from the 12th century….

…as does parts of the north and south doorways. Above the north doorway is part of a Norman tympanum with a central Maltese cross flanked by a lion and a centaur – the latter representing Sagittarius, the Archer.

A final view of the north elevation.

Westerham

The Parish Church of St Mary the Virgin

We spent an hour in Westerham on Saturday (and had one of the best Cream teas ever at 'Food for Thought' on the Green) but also had a quick look in the church. Howveer whilst having tea we looked out over the green and the two statues.

Firstly Winston Churchill. A plaque on the back says 'The plinth was presented by Marshall Tito and the people of Yugoslavia as a symbol of Yugoslav soli and in homage to Sir Winston Churchill's leadership in the War, July 23 1969'. The statue was sculpted by Oscar Nemon, a Croatian sculptor who produced a series of more than a dozen public statues of Sir Winston Churchill.

The second statue is of Major General James Wolfe who was born in Westerham on 2 January 1727 and died in the Battle of Quebeck, 13 September 1759. The statue was designed by Derwent Wood and erected in 1911. James Wolfe was born at the near by Quebec House (which at the time was the  Vicarage). William Pitt the Elder chose Wolfe to lead the British assault on Quebec City in 1759.  

The British army laid siege to Quebec for three months. After an extensive yet inconclusive bombardment of the city, Wolfe then led 200 ships with 9,000 soldiers and 18,000 sailors on a very bold and risky amphibious landing at the base of the cliffs west of Quebec along the St. Lawrence River. His army, with two small cannons, scaled the cliffs early on the morning of September 13, 1759, surprising the French under the command of the Marquis de Montcalm, who thought the cliffs would be unclimbable. Faced with the possibility that the British would haul more cannons up the cliffs and knock down the city's remaining walls, the French fought the British on the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. They were defeated after just fifteen minutes of battle, but when Wolfe began to move forward, he was shot twice in the chest. He reportedly heard cries of "They run," and thus died content that the victory had been achieved. Source: http://www.george-and-dragon-pub-in-westerham.co.uk/wolfe.html

The church is just behind the green. The earliest parts of the present building date from the 14th century and it has been added to and modified many times over the years. The oldest part is the tower.

The fourteenth century spiral staircase in the tower is one of only two in England from this era  to turn unusually to the left.

The font dates from the 14th century. The Church registers record the baptism of General James Wolfe  and three of Sir Winston Churchill's grandchildren in this same font.

The Westerham War Memorial is in the Churchyard.