St Helena (now)

Bourn

St Helena, Bourn, Cambridgeshire

Parish church

A cruciform church with an aisled nave and a W tower with chapels to N and S (i.e. a species of W transept). Most of this, that is to say the lower stage of the tower with the W doorway and the N, S and E arches inside, the N nave arcade, the clerestorey with circular windows with plate-tracery quatrefoils, the S nave doorway and the N transept must date from the early 13thc. The S nave arcade, however, is older in conception and is described below. The S transept is in fact a later chapel, and looks 14thc., the same date as the upper storeys of the tower. The aisleless chancel is presumably c.1200 but its windows are later and the chancel arch is 19thc. Construction is all of pebble rubble with ashlar dressings, and the tower has a crumpled spire.

Austerfield

St Helen, Austerfield, Yorkshire, West Riding

Parish church

Austerfield is about a mile and a half NE of Bawtry. The small church lies off the village street in a narrow plot, up a gated track. This approach first reveals a W wall with two slit windows (lancets), massive buttresses, and a later bellcote; beyond are the red tiles and slates of the nave, S porch, N aisle and chancel. There is an early 12thcnave doorway with a tympanum, a chancel arch of the same period, and a late 12thc N arcade. The arcade had been walled up, probably in the 14thc, but was rebuilt in 1879 ( Morris 1919); Pevsner (1967), 87 says it was rebuilt, ‘faithful to the original’, in 1898.

Elstow

St Mary, Elstow, Bedfordshire

Parish church, formerly Benedictine house

Originally a cruciform, aisled Abbey church, now a parish church. Most of the E end of the nave and clerestorey and the first three bays of N and S arcades survive from the 11th-12thc. structure. The two W bays of the nave arcades are 13thc. and there is a 13thc. chamber, now a vestry, at the W end of the S side of the nave. The church was extensively restored in 1880 by Thomas Jobson Jackson, who rebuilt the 16thc. E wall, the clerestorey, S and N aisle walls and the N doorway. 12thc. sculpture is found on a reset tympanum and on some reset fragments from the original N doorway. The church has a 15thc. detached tower to the NW but very little survives of the conventual buildings.