The Corpus of ROMANESQUE SCULPTURE in Britain & Ireland
St Nicholas (now)
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.
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.
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
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.
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. The sanctuary was added in the 19thc. There is a faculty plan by Chancellor and Hill in Bristol Records Office.
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.
Parish church
Condicote is a small Cotswold village 3 miles NW of Stow-on-the-Wold. The church, which is built of rubble, lies in a central location in the village on the N side of a large village green. The building consists of a chancel, nave, S porch and a 19thc. vestry N of the chancel. Much of the fabric from the 12thc. building survives, including the S doorway and chancel arch. In addition there is Romanesque sculpture set in the S porch, possibly from a N doorway, and Romanesque string courses reset into the exterior W nave wall as well as part of the string course on the N wall of the chancel still in situ. There are also corbels on the corners of the chancel.
Parish church
Set next to perhaps the most stunning churchyard tree in the county, this church, with its steepled W tower, three-bay nave with N and S aisles, and chancel is primarily from the first half of the 14thc. Pevsner notes a restoration done in 1907. Romanesque elements consist of six reset fragments in the S porch, reused fragments in parts of the 13thc N arcade, possibly the font, and part of the chancel arch.
Parish church
Withycombe is a village just below the N edge of the Brendon Hills, nestling close to a break in the hills leading into the coastal strip. It is four miles SE of Minehead, one mile SSE of the important medieval hundredal settlement of Carhampton and 1½ miles from the West Somerset coast. The village extends over a few minor roads at the base of Withycombe Hill, with the church in the centre. It consists of a tall nave and chancel with a very plain battlemented tower that is also the entrance porch on the S side of the nave towards the W end. The chancel has a N vestry. Construction is of rubble with Hamstone dressings and the church has been rendered in roughcast. Nave and chancel are 12thc-13thc, while the tower is 14thc and some nave windows are 15thc. There was no major 19thc restoration, but the church was restored and reroofed in 1912-13. The only Romanesque feature here is the font.
Parish church
Lillingstone Dayrell is in NE Buckinghamshire, 3½ miles N of Buckingham and just 1½ miles S of the Northamptonshire border. The present village consists of a few houses on a lane off the A413 Buckingham to Towcester road, but the church stands outside the modern village to the N, accompanied only by the buildings of Manor Farm and otherwise surrounded by fields. It is approached by a track from the W. The landscape is generally hilly and wooded; much given over to rough pasture now but originally forming the extensive woodland described in the Domesday entry (see VII). To the S and W of the church is a large wheatfield. The area was systematically walked by the Whittlewood Project in Autumn 2000, and their pottery finds revealed a great deal about the history of the village. It was occupied by the Romans, but the distribution of Romano-British pottery was too random to provide useful evidence of the settlement pattern. Later, but before the Conquest, pottery finds indicated that the village street followed the line of the present track to the W of the church. Shortly after the Conquest the village expanded with a second concentration indicating another street parallel to the first but further S. After 1450 it contracted again, back to its original focus along the track. To the SW of the church was the Manor House, but remains of this were lost when the ground was ploughed up in 2000 to form the large wheatfield described above.
The church is of limestone rubble and consists of an aisled nave with no clerestory and a S porch, a chancel with a 19thc N vestry and organ chamber and a W tower. The nave is tall with very simple and small tower and chancel arches of around 1100. The 3 bay aisles were added in the 13thc, and the S porch in the 15thc in a rich reddish brown stone that was also used for the 15thc S aisle window. The N aisle windows are 19thc in a simple 13thc style that was also used for the vestry. The chancel was also heavily restored in the 19thc, but retains one original 13thc window decorated with dogtooth, and a 13thc low-side window, both in the S wall, as well as 13thc wall arcades and tomb recess inside. The interior of the chancel is dominated by the large, centrally placed tomb of Paul Dayrell (d.1571) and his wife, and on the S side is another tomb chest with brasses commemorating an earlier Paul Dayrell (d.1491) and his wife. The tower must be 12thc in its lower parts, but its bell-openings are early 13thc. It is unbuttressed and has a flat top.
In the 17thc the church was in a poor state of repair, so that the N aisle was demolished, its arcade blocked off, and its stone used to repair the rest of the building. In 1868 a restoration was carried out byG. E. Streetin 1868, and he was responsible for the rebuilding of the N aisle and the vestry and organ chamber. In 1952 this vestry was converted into the Chapel of Our Lady. Features recorded here are the tower and chancel arches.