The Corpus of ROMANESQUE SCULPTURE in Britain & Ireland
St James (medieval)
Parish church
The small Cotswold village of Clapton, or Clapton-on-the-Hill, lies S of Bourton-on-the-Water. The village is in the centre of the parish, and the church is central to the village on sloping ground. St James is one of the smallest churches in the Cotswolds; it is built of rubble and consists of a chancel, nave, N vestry and S porch. The vestry and N doorway are 20thc.; evidence for an original N doorway was found during restoration work (Rood, personal communication). The Romanesque elements are the S doorway, tub font and responds of the chancel arch; the N respond has a Latin inscription in Lombardic lettering.
Parish church
Paulerspury comprises a W tower, and an aisled and clerestoreyed nave with N and S porches and an Early English chancel with a two-bay chapel on its N side. Apart from the tower it was largely rebuilt in the 1840s.
Parish church
The church comprises a two-bay aisled nave with
a Victorian bell turret on the W gable and a high, two-bay
chancel. The nave, largely 13thc. in date, has been
truncated and heavily restored. The chancel arch is
Norman and the font may date from
c.1200.
Parish church
St James' is a large, late 15th century, Perpendicular church. It had a major restoration in 1847-8 by Manners and Gill which included reconstructing the chancel, both arcades and the clerestory. The church includes four Romanesque coffin lids, including one inscribed and carved with a cross and diaper pattern.
Parish church
The village of Ashley lies some 8 miles SW of Cirencester. The Fosse Way forms part of the parish boundary and also the county boundary with Wiltshire. Ashley was one of several parishes that were transferred from Wiltshire to Gloucestershire in 1930. The church is built of coursed rubble and consists of a W tower, nave with narrow S aisle, S porch and chancel that was rebuilt in 1848. The S doorway and chancel arch are Romanesque.
Parish church
The church lies to the west of the prehistoric earthwork. In the 12thc., this must have dominated the church even more than it presently does. Avebury Manor lies a short distance to the north-west of the church.
The nave of the church was recognised by Ponting in 1883-4 to be Anglo-Saxon in origin. Its tall narrow proportions and thin walls suggest this, and the presence of two pre-Conquest windows at the west end of the north and south walls of the nave confirm this. The windows are cut across by the hood mould of the remains of the inserted 12thc. nave arcades. The circular clerestory is also thought to date from before the Conquest.
In the 12thc. the aisles were added to the nave and parts of the two eastern and western responds of both the north and south arcades survive. The arcades were largely replaced by a taller arcade carried on Tuscan order columns in 1812. Also belonging to the 12thc. is the south door of the nave, a number of fragments set into the south porch and the west wall of the nave, and the mid-12thc. font.
In the late 13thc. the chancel was rebuilt and it was restored again in 1879 by R. J. Withers. There is a Perpendicular west tower.
Parish church
The church comprises chancel with a vesty on the S, nave with S porch, and W tower. The church is substantially Perpendicular and later. It was heavily restored in 1902 (Pevsner 1989, 511). Evidence of early 12thc. work is found in the plain S doorway and the font. Romanesque sculpture is found on a reset fragment. The church fabric is red stone and a shale-like stone.
Parish church
The building comprises chancel, nave with porch and west tower; it is built chiefly in roughly-coursed small oolitic stone. The nave is thought to be Norman, at least in plan, as are the N and S walls of the chancel (Leadman 1902, 274).
The site of a Benedictine nunnery lies to the NE of the village; no remains visible.
Documents of 1864 say the church is old and bad but decent; in 1868 it is said ‘we want a new church’; the restoration under G. G. Scott junior followed in 1872-3. These documents and faculty papers for the tower, built anew on the twelfth-century plan in 1902 by Temple Moore, are at the Borthwick Institute. The previous tower, a late medieval one, had stood within the present plan.
The tower arch has survived as a spectacular display, but its sculpture has been crudely recut; there is a reset window and a blocked doorway also of our period in the N wall of the nave. The church is more famous for the cross-shaft of late 9th to early 10thc date now erected in the tower space; one carving on this may be a post-Conquest addition.
Parish church
The nave and chancel date from the 13th and 14thc. but the north nave aisle was rebuilt in the late 18thc. as the Methuen Chapel. The only surviving Romanesque carving is the S doorway.
Parish church
The church has a 12thc. nave with a N transept ofc.1330 and a modern S aisle, a 13thc. chancel, a 15thc. ashlar faced W tower and a modern porch. There is a small plain round-headed window in the nave to the W of the reset N doorway. According to Pevsner, this doorway was on the S side of the nave before the restorations of 1885; it bears the only Romanesque sculpture in the church.