The Corpus of ROMANESQUE SCULPTURE in Britain & Ireland
North Somerset (now)
Parish church
The hamlet of Chelvey (‘calf-farm’), comprising church, manor house and farm, is in an isolated setting at an altitude of about 10m above OD. It lies on the lane between Backwell (1 mile to the east) and Clevedon (4.5 miles to the west). Today it is only 0.5 miles from the southern edge of the rapidly expanded town of Nailsea, although Chelvey enjoys a fair measure of rural tranquillity. Church and manor house occupy the edge of a bluff towards the western extension of a Mercia Mudstone (Keuper Marl) projection into the Yeo valley Alluvium. The church of St Bridget, which is built of coursed rubble with freestone dressings, consists of a W tower, nave, S aisle and chapel, S porch and chancel. Romanesque elements comprise a doorway, the font, a window and some reset sculptural fragments.
Redundant parish church
Brockley is a village on the N side of the A370 Bristol to Weston-super-Mare road, some 8 mls SW of Bristol. Brockley (‘wood or clearing by the brook’) church is an estate church. The adjacent manor house is now a home for adults with learning difficulties. The church is very difficult to appreciate externally because of surrounding walls and trees. It lies a short distance from the foot of the NW-facing scarp of the limestone ridge (a Mendip outlier) which runs from just W of Dundry Hill to the E as far as just N of Congresbury to the W. This would have been a very peaceful part of the Kenn valley before the GWR built its Bristol-Exeter main line 1.3km NW of the church; it still is quite sequestered, since the lane leading to Brockley Court from the main road leads nowhere else. That main A370 links Bristol with the M5 and Weston-super-Mare; less than 400m south of the church, it runs extremely busily along the foot of the aforementioned scarp. The church lies at an altitude of about 25m above OD on a rise of Mercia Mudstone (Keuper Marl) above the surrounding Head.
The church consists of a nave with S porch, N and S chapels, chancel with vestry and a W tower. It is essentially 12thc, altered 13thc to 15thc, and again altered c.1820-30 for the Smyth-Pigott family. Construction is of coursed rubble with freestone dressings. 12thc features recorded here are the S nave doorway, corbels reset inside the porch, and the font.
Parish church
Weston-super-mare (literally, translated from Latin, Weston-on-Sea) lies 20mi SW of Bristol in N Somerset. Geologically, the church of St John the Baptist rests on Clifton Down limestone (a quarry of which was close-by, up the hill from the church), above a thin band of Mercia Mudstone (Keuper Marl) and below Goblin Combe Oolite limestone, on the skirt of an E-W hill composed of limestone, with some basalt. The altitude of the church is about 16m. It is mostly built of limestone freestone and rubble, the latter presumably from the ground nearby and the former from the Oolite beds further up the hill. Replacing a medieval precursor, the present building in the neo-Perpendicular style dates from 1824, a response to the rapid population growth of the 19thc seaside resort. It has a W tower, nave with aisles and annexes. The only Romanesque feature is the font, recovered from an adjacent field in 1827.