St Nicholas (now)

Leeds is a village 5 miles E of Maidstone. The church of St Nicholas, mainly built of ragstone with tufa, has an aisled nave, a chancel with chapels, and a low but massive square W tower. The only Romanesque surviving sculpture is in the W tower arch.

Ruston Parva

St Nicholas, Ruston Parva, Yorkshire, East Riding

Parish church

Ruston Parva is a hamlet in the East Riding of Yorkshire, 8 miles SW of Bridlington. Nothing is known of the appearance of the medieval chapel on this site. The present building is in a field above the village, and ican only be reached by traversing private land. It was constructed by a local builder around 1832 in late Georgian yellow brick on a plinth of several courses of worked medieval stone. (Pevsner and Neave, 666) Inside, there is a restored Romanesque cylindrical font.

Brighton

St Nicholas, Brighton, Sussex

Parish church

The church of St Nicholas stands on a hill overlooking the Old Town of Brighton. It has a W tower, an aisled nave with 5-bay arcades and an aisled chancel flanked by chapels. It is essentially a late 14thc. building, but was largely rebuilt in 1852-54.

Loxley

St Nicholas, Loxley, Warwickshire

Parish church

Mainly 18thc. and consisting of nave, chancel and a 13thc. W tower on S side of church. There is Herringbone work inside chancel N wall and outside chancel S wall, and a plain, flattened round arch but these may be 18thc. (Pevsner). Romanesque sculpture is found on the pillar piscina.

South Ockendon

St Nicholas, South Ockendon, Essex

Parish church

South Ockendon is an ancient parish and now a large village in the Unitary Authority of Thurrock, 4 miles N of the Dartford Crossing and a similar distance SE of Upminster, immediately outside the M25. The villlage extends for 2 miles along the B186 that runs N from West Thurrock towards Brentwood, and the church is at the northen end of the village along with South Ockendon Hall and the railway station. St Nicholas's has a chancel with a N chapel and a S vestry; an aisled nave; the 15thc N aisle with a porch, and the 19thc S aisle with a rood stair turret at its E end. The W tower is round and 13thc (the neo-Norman upper storey by Armstrong). The external appearance is mostly due to the restoration of 1865-66 by Richard Armstrong. It is of knapped flint with Reigate stone dressings. The only Romanesque feature is the reset S doorway.

Britwell Salome

St Nicholas, Britwell Salome, Oxfordshire

Parish church

Britwell Salome is a small South Oxfordshire village about 4.5 miles NE of Wallingford. The church, which was rebuilt in 1867 by Charles Buckeridge, is of flint and stone construction. It consists of chancel, nave, vestry, S porch and western bellcote. Its predecessor had a Romanesque chancel arch and a S nave doorway of the same period. The latter was reused in the 1867 church.

Wetwang

St Nicholas, Wetwang, Yorkshire, East Riding

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.

Tackley

St Nicholas, Tackley, Oxfordshire

Parish church

This cruciform church of limestone rubble stands high above the west bank of the Cherwell, 8 miles north of Oxford. It now comprises the chancel, built up due to the sloping ground, central tower, N and S transepts, and a clerestoried nave with a S aisle. The N and S walls of the nave may be partly pre-Conquest. Although it was probably originally aisleless, on the N side remain two blocked arches, visible both on the outside and inside walls. These may represent either porticus arches, or arches of a N arcade built c. 1120. Whatever their nature, the extensions were demolished in the early C13th. A similar situation may have pertained on the S side because the S arcade and aisle were also built or rebuilt at the time of the demolition, when also the chancel was extended eastwards and the nave westwards. The N nave doorway of c. 1120 is thought to have been reset within the NW blocked nave arch also at the same time. The arch of another early Romanesque doorway, decorated with roll mouldings, is now set in the E wall of the churchyard. On the nave interior there are small round-headed arches, one each on N and S walls, just below the clerestorey windows. The W bay of the chancel on the S side still retains a C12th pilaster buttress. A further Romanesque detail is the three beakheads reset on the S face of the second stage of the tower.

Biddestone

St Nicholas, Biddestone, Wiltshire

Parish church

The church has a 12thc. font, south door and two windows in the chancel. However, most of the church dates from the 13th and 14thc. and there is a distinctive, late medieval bell-turret.

Bratton Seymour

St Nicholas, Bratton Seymour, Somerset

Parish church

The 2011 census counted 104 persons in Bratton Seymour village. The parish of 1,374 acres (historically fluctuating between c.1,000 and c.1,500 acres following boundary changes) is situated in South Somerset District, contiguous with the parish of Wincanton, the nearest small town. In the far east of the county, this area is close to the ancient boundary of Selwood Forest and the present border with Wiltshire: Penselwood village is only about 8kms distant. This moderately hilly district is reasonably prosperous agriculturally, concentrated on dairy-farming with a little arable. A cursory glance at a map will show that Bratton Seymour, together with many other comparably sized villages, sits within a triangle formed by three small towns at the apexes: (clockwise) the aforementioned Wincanton 3.5kms ESE, Castle Cary 4.5kms NW and Bruton 5kms NNE; all three are well connected by reasonably good roads, Bratton Seymour itself being sited a very short distance (200m-1km) N of the A371 Castle Cary-Wincanton road (part of the long-distance route between the Bristol and English Channels or Bristol and Poole). The A303 trunk road, nationally important because it forms part of a popular route between London and the South West Peninsula, runs E-W past Wincanton (until recent times, of course, passing through the town) and is easily accessible by lanes from Bratton Seymour at a distance of only 3kms. Railway access, at Castle Cary, is almost as easy for Bratton Seymour residents: reasonably frequent services are available along the main line between London Paddington and Exeter and beyond; there are also more local services on the Heart of Wessex line between Bristol and Weymouth, which services also stop at Bruton. The Domesday entry for the settlement spells the place-name ‘Broctune’, which has led to the probably erroneous inference that the ‘tun’ is named after a badger-sett (e.g., by Stephen Robinson in his ‘Somerset Place-Names’, Stanbridge 1992). More erudite and reliable information suggests that the place-name belongs with a common set in which ‘Bratton’ simply means ‘Brook-town’ after Old English ‘broc’=’brook’ (e.g., ‘The Vocabulary of English Place-Names’ volume 2, p. 37, published by the English Place-Name Society at Nottingham in 2000). This must imply that the nameless stream which rises 200m SE of Manor Farm, turns increasingly away from the settlement following a NE direction, runs down towards the Shepton Montague valley where it joins the river Pitt, which flows down to Cole to join the principal Somerset river Brue about 4.5kms away from Bratton Seymour Manor Farm, was originally considered far more significant than can now be believed. The ‘Seymour’ qualifier is a corruption of the French ‘Saint-Maur’, the family name of the local landowner who is supposed to have taken possession of the manor in the fourteenth century. A more obvious topographical distinguishing feature (than the brook) is Bratton Hill (184m OD) along whose eastern side the settlement is strung along a lane striking north from the junction (at Jack White’s Gibbet) with the A371. This lane runs generally downhill from the main road (157m OD) past Church Farm (140m OD), whence it descends more steeply to Shepton Montague. The church is perched above the road, on the W side, at about 145m OD; even higher is Bratton House, towards the summit of the hill. Not exactly but almost, the village lane follows the geological boundary between the Forest Marble of the higher ground and Fuller’s Earth below. (Hereabouts, the geology is characterised by the N-S Jurassic strand.) Map-readers may be forgiven the notion that the altitude of the church must give good views but they would quickly be frustrated on site by neighbouring trees: only the NE aspect is fully rewarding. The church is constructed of local uncourse rubble with Doulting and hamstone dressings, and consists of a 2-bay chancel with a N vestry and a 3-bay nave with a W tower and a S porch. Romanesque sculpture is found on the S doorway and the arch of the S porch, the font and reset stones in the external N and S walls of the nave.

The Corpus of ROMANESQUE SCULPTURE in Britain & Ireland

St Nicholas (now)

Leeds

St Nicholas, Leeds, Kent

Ruston Parva

St Nicholas, Ruston Parva, Yorkshire, East Riding

Brighton

St Nicholas, Brighton, Sussex

Loxley

St Nicholas, Loxley, Warwickshire

South Ockendon

St Nicholas, South Ockendon, Essex

Britwell Salome

St Nicholas, Britwell Salome, Oxfordshire

Wetwang

St Nicholas, Wetwang, Yorkshire, East Riding

Tackley

St Nicholas, Tackley, Oxfordshire

Biddestone

St Nicholas, Biddestone, Wiltshire

Bratton Seymour

St Nicholas, Bratton Seymour, Somerset