The Corpus of ROMANESQUE SCULPTURE in Britain & Ireland
St Michael (medieval)
Parish church
Sollers Hope is a small village set in a hilly pasture and woodland area, 8 miles SE of Hereford and 6 miles SW of Ledbury. Settlement is scattered, and the church and Court Farm which form the focus are reached via a series of increasingly narrow single-track roads. St Michaels has a chancel with a N vestry, and a nave with a S porch and a timber framed W bell turret with an octagonal spire. Otherwise construction is of coursed local sandstone rubble, roughly squared. The body of the church is 14thc, and it was restored by Nicholson and Son in 1885. They added the vestry, and replaced the spire and the wagon roofs. The only Romanesque feature here is the font.
Parish church
Kingstone is a good sized village 6 miles SW of Hereford, with the church at its centre. St Michael’s can best be described as confusing. It has two parallel vessels, separately roofed, separated by a 3-bay 12thc arcade. Each has its own chancel, again separately roofed, and at the W end of the N vessel is a 14thc tower. In the present arrangement the S vessel, slightly wider than the N, is the nave and the N vessel the aisle, which makes the chancel on the N side a chapel. It seems possible that the present N aisle was originally an aisleless nave, to which a S aisle was added in the later 12thc. This would explain the position of the tower, but not the fact that the chancel is offset to the S to abut the chancel of the S vessel. The RCHME analysis, accepted by Pevsner and Brooks, is that the S vessel was originally an aisleless nave, and the fact that it has a 12thc S doorway supports this. This doorway is the only Romanesque feature of the church. The tower was rebuilt by Cottingham in 1848-51, and there was a complete restoration in 1889-90 by Nicholson and Son.
Parish church
Lyonshall is a village in the NW of Herefordshire, 10 miles W of Leominster. The chuch stands on a ridge overlooking the A44 from Leominster to Rhayader and consists of a W tower, a nave with N and S aisles, a timber framed S porch, transeptal N and S chapels and a chancel with a N vestry. The present building is largely 13th and 14th centuries, but the window in the W wall of the N nave asile is evidence of a lost Norman church, perhaps the one which housed the Romanesque font sitting outside, in the angle of the W tower and the S aisle, deprived of its original base. Another remanant is a corbel reset in the S nave asile wall. Pevsner does not record the older font, or the re-used corbels which now support it but, if they came from the earlier church and were discarded during the Gothic rebuild or G F Bodley’s restoration in 1872, they may only fairly recently have come to light. The church, some three-quarters of a mile from a stretch of Offa’s Dyke, stands on a site that was clearly of some importance in the middle ages, given its proximity to a moated castle with an outer and inner bailey and the masonry remains of a circular keep of 13th-century date. The castle belonged to the Careys and then the Devereuxs. (Pevsner Herefords, 1963 repr 1982, 244-5)
Parish church
Lydbury North is a village in the Shropshire Hills in the SW of the county, 8 miles SW of Church Stretton. The church is in the centre of the village, and is a large cruciform building with a W tower. The nave and chancel are 12thc as is the arch to the N transet chapel, but the chapel itself is 14thc. The S transept is 17thc and appears completely out of scale from the exterior. Plain 12thc windows survive on the N and S walls of the nave, and in the chancel. Features described here are the S chancel doorway, the tower arch, the N chapel arch and the font.
Parish church
Brodsworth is an estate village five miles NW of Doncaster. The church is adjacent to the grounds of Brodsworth Hall (English Heritage), close to the site of a previous hall, which was demolished in 1860 on completion of the present one. In 2010 the University of Sheffield ran a Brodsworth Archaeology Landscape Project, which included excavation in the churchyard.
The church, of a creamy limestone, consists of chancel, nave, tower, N and S aisles extending into the chancel, and S porch. Both the nave and tower feature battlemented parapets and tile roof; the tower is considered to be late 12th or early 13thc. The nave is early Romanesque, whilst the N arcade and the long chancel are later medieval additions (see Comments).
Parish church
The church has W tower; nave with N aisle and a N transept or chapel; chancel, but no chancel arch. Entrance is by the N doorway; the S doorway is blocked at least since the improvement in the line of road to the N (now A166). There was a restoration of the N wall and tower by Temple Moore, 1896, when presumably the reset stones were discovered; and the chancel was rebuilt by Hodgson Fowler in 1901-2. Morris (1919, 326-7) does not mention the reset carved stones in the tower or N aisle, but this entry may have been repeated from his first edition. The nave S wall has two small 12thc windows, but these are much altered outside.
Two capitals from the N arcade are reset, its W respond remains; most if not all carved pieces reset in the interior N wall of the N aisle and in the tower are not corbels but are likely to be voussoirs. There is an arcaded cylindrical font.
Parish church
Bowness-on-Solway is a small on the Solway Firth village about 13 miles NW of Carlisle. The church lies to the S of the village and its fabric appears to include re-used Roman stones. The structure consists of a rectangular building under a single roof, which covers both the chancel and the nave. There are also a S porch and a W bell turret. Repairs were undertaken in the 18thc and there was extensive restoration work carried out in 1891, at which time a number of changes were made to the church, including the addition of a N transept. A watercolour sketch inside the church shows the building before changes were made. Surviving Romanesque sculpture is found on the S and N doorways, on the E and N windows and, inside the church, there is also a Romanesque baptismal font with carved decoration.
Parish church
Bracewell is a small Dales village of stone cottages, west of Skipton and near Barnoldswick. The church has a nave with N aisle, S porch and W tower; a chancel and a vestry. There is a Norman S doorway and a chancel arch; the font is probably 13thc.
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Parish church
Torpenhow is a village about 10 miles NE of Cockermouth, in the Lake District National Park. Parts of an early church survive within the present structure, including the W end of the chancel and the upper stonework of the nave arcades. The church was altered again in the 12thc, which included an E extension to the chancel and at least one of the two nave aisles. Further alterations were carried out in the 13thc, in the 15thc and in the 17thc. In 1882 and 1913, restoration works were undertaken. Carved stonework survives from the 12th-c church, such as the chancel arch, the S doorway, the W responds of both nave aisles and the baptismal font. There are also three Norman windows on the N side of the chancel, and evidence of similar, previous windows existing in the E and S walls of the chancel. Two colours of sandstone are used for many of the carved Romanesque features.
Parish church
Breamore is a village on the NW edge of the New Forest, 3 miles N of Fordingbridge and 7 miles S of Salisbury. It stands on the E bank of the River Avon. The village extends from a centre on the main road from Salisbury to Fordingbridge, NW for half a mile to Breamore House (site of the former Augustinian Priory of Breamore, founded by Baldwin de Redvers and his uncle Hugh towards the end of Henry I’s reign), and the church stands in the grounds of the house. St Mary’s is best known as Hampshire’s most important Anglo-Saxon church, with a spectacular rood reset high above the S nave dooway. The church is basically cruciform, having a big Anglo-Saxon central tower with a S transept or porticus (the N has gone) that is narrower than the crossing. The S crossing arch is Anglo-Saxon but those to the E and W are 14thc, as is the chancel in the main. The nave is tall with a W gallery. Romanesque features are the S nave doorway, a medallion with an Agnus Dei above it, the S porch entrance (which is reset) and the E doorway of the S porticus.