
The Corpus of ROMANESQUE SCULPTURE in Britain & Ireland

St Helen (formerly)
Parish church
The church consists of a nave, a chancel in two sections (there are two chancel arches, of which the western has Romanesque sculpture) and a W tower; there is a N chapel off the western chancel and a vestry off the eastern chancel (Pevsner and Neave 1995, 361).
The Faculty papers for the 1858 restoration show the existing S elevation with a round-headed doorway in the nave. The first order was plain, chamfered and continuous. The second order on the L had a double scallop capital with two volutes; no volutes are shown on a similar capital on the R. There is no label. The chancel was higher than the nave. The Norman nave was ‘pulled down, and rebuilt on a somewhat larger scale, in the year 1859’ (Appleford 1886, 12). In 1878, the upper stage of the tower was rebuilt. A N chapel on the chancel, demolished in the 18th century, was rebuilt in 1905.
The jambs and capitals of the twelfth-century chancel arch survive. There is also a large, possibly twelfth-century, grave cover in two pieces outside the church near the S wall of the nave.
Parish church
Welton is a large church with an aisled nave, transepts, and a chancel with a north chapel and vestry. The church was restored in 1862-3 by G. G. Scott: ‘a typical restoration which resulted in a virtually new church in Scott’s favourite Middle Pointed’ (Pevsner & Neave 1995, 739; Borthwick Institute faculty papers). There is a pond or lake below the church on the north and west, held up by a dam.
All that remains of Romanesque sculpture is one reset capital and a pillar below it.