The Corpus of ROMANESQUE SCULPTURE in Britain & Ireland
Holy Trinity or Holy Cross or St Mary (medieval)
Parish church
Bottisham is a village on the N side of the A14, Cambridge to Newmarket road, midway between the two. The church stands alongside the village High Street, and is a very tall and imposing building, largely built of clunch and limestone with some flint in the W porch. It consists of a chancel; an aisled nave with clerestories and N and S porches, the N now used as a vestry; a W tower and a tall W porch with a giant-order arch facing the High Street. The chancel and the lower parts of the tower and the W porch are 13thc, and the remainder belong to an extensive early-14thc rebuilding. The nave has a wooden W gallery. The main restoration was by Charles Papworth in 1839-40; the W tower and porch were restored in 1849-50; the chancel refurbished in 1867 and its E wall rebuilt in 1875, and the S porch was repaired in 1870.
The E ends of both nave aisles have been screened off to form chapels, and in the N chapel, below the touching memorial to two infants of the Alington family, are a number of carved stones and tomb fragments, including the three Romanesque pieces described here: a tympanum, fragments of a font bowl, and a chevron voussoir. There is no Romanesque fabric in the church as far as can be seen.