The Corpus of ROMANESQUE SCULPTURE in Britain & Ireland
Parish church, formerly chapel
Parish church, formerly chapel
Aston Eyre is a hamlet in the southern part of Shropshire, consisting of a few houses, the church and Hall Farm scattered along a stretch of the B4368, a minor road linking Bridgnorth with the Corve Dale and Wenlock Edge. The nearest towns are Bridgnorth, 4 miles to the E, and Much Wenlock, a similar distance to the NW. The church stands on the N side of the road and is built of local red and grey sandstone rubble with ashlar dressings. It consists of a chancel with a taller and wider nave, having a S porch and a W bellcote. Under the porch is a rebuilt doorway of 2 periods in the 12thc, containing a clebrated Romanesque tympanum. The nave is 12thc, with lateral plain lancets and a 12thc chancel arch, and the chancel was rebuilt in the 13thc.
To the N of the church stand the remains of the Hall, a 14thc manor house now converted for use as a farm (Hall Farm House).
Parish church, formerly chapel
Walton is a small village centred around the church on a small abrupt hill. To the S and E, the trading estate and the British Library depot at Boston Spa to the N, arable agricultural land.
A 12thc W tower survives with a Perpendicular top stage; the nave and chancel are 14thc with added vestry, organ chamber on the chancel and a S porch (Kirk, 1938, with a plan). Plate I in Kirk (1938) shows the church from the SE ‘before 1891’; the E face of the tower is marked by two former roof lines above the nave roof; the nave and chancel walls were covered with ivy. This record is particularly useful, as the modern roof now covers the lower of the two old lines (Plate II). See also Butler (2007, 423).
The W tower has a deep plinth in three stages of plain-and-chamfered layers, rising to about 2 m above ground level. The W face of the tower stands above a fairly steep slope of the churchyard. The window on the W wall is not quite round-headed, perhaps re-made as a pointed window at some date. Kirk states that the tower was clad in the 14thc and shows this layer on his plan. The 12thc tower arch is plain, with plain and chamfered imposts.
Parish church, formerly chapel
The village of Ruyton-XI-Towns acquired its name in the 12thc, when the castle was built and it became the centre of a group of eleven manors. It is in the N of the county, 7 miles SE of Oswestry and 9 miles NW of Shrewsbury. The church is on a raised site,, dominating the centre of the village, with the ruins of the castle at the W end. St John's consists of a 12thc chancel extended E c.1300, with a N vestry added in the mid-19thc; a 12thc nave with a 14thc N aisle and a S porch, and a 15thc W tower. The N aisle was rebuilt in 1845; the chancel wasrestored in 1862 and the rest of the church in 1868. Romanesque features recorded here are the nave and chancel S doorways.
Parish church, formerly chapel
Rodhuish is in the Brendon Hills on the E edge of Exmoor. It is 5 miles SE of Minehead and 2½ miles from the coast at Blue Anchor Bay. The village has no well-defined centre, but extends along lanes low down in the valley of the Pill River, no more than a stream that rises in the Brendon Hills and flows into the sea in Blue Anchor Bay. The church is towards the W end of the village.
St Bartholomew’s consists of a nave and chancel without division, a S porch and a W tower. It is a 15thc building, refenestrated in the early 16thc, restored in 1826 and 1924, and refitted in the mid 20thc. It was formerly a chapel-of-ease to St John's, Carhampton, and contains a Norman font that was removed in the 19thc from that church, 2 miles to the N at ST 009 427.
Parish church, formerly chapel
The church was built on the site of the old church in 1880 by G.E. Street after it had become a parish in 1877. The church contains three short Romanesque columns, kept as fragments at the W end of the new building.
Parish church, formerly chapel
Exbury is a village on the SE edge of the New Forest, on a peninsula formed by the Beaulieu River estuary to the W and Southampton Water to the E. The village clusters around a bend in a broad lane that runs from Dibden and Beaulieu to the coast, a mile S of the village centre. The present church of St Katherine was built by J. Oldrid Scott and Son in 1907, and consists of a nave and chancel in one with a S doorway under a stone porch and a short tower at the W end of the nave on the N side. The interior is dominated by the 2-bay Forster Chapel on the ground floor of the tower, commemorating John and Alfred Forster who were killed in the Great War. The chapel contains a bronze soldier’s effigy on a tomb chest. The chancel is flanked to the N by an organ loft and to the S by a vestry.
VCH (1908) describes a different building on the same site – a rectangular yellow brick church of no known dedication, built by William Mitford and consecrated in 1827. The medieval church, demolished in 1827, was a mile to the S at Lower Exbury, where the Beaulieu River runs into the Solent. The only Romanesque feature is the Purbeck font, transferred from the medieval church via Mitford’s church to the present one.
Parish church, formerly chapel
The nave has a mid 19thc. south doorway with a hoodmould with dog's head terminals of the mid 12thc. The north arcade of the nave, dating from c. 1200, has circular piers and abaci, moulded capitals and double chamfered arches. The north aisle was rebuilt in the late 13thc. and the west tower was added in the 15thc. The chancel was rebuilt 1903-4.
Parish church, formerly chapel
St Giles's is a substantial church, comprising large early 13thc. chancel, early 13thc. N and S transepts, nave with early 14thc. N and S aisles, and a mid 14thc. W tower. Probably surviving from a late 12thc. church are (a) the very thick W wall of the nave with broad pilaster-buttresses, perhaps originally the W wall of a W tower, and (b) the chancel arch and the wall which contains it.
Parish church, formerly chapel
Wynford Eagle is a hamlet about seven miles NW from Dorchester. The church was entirely rebuilt in 1840, 500 yards N of the medieval one. The present building consists of a short polygonal chancel, a nave and a W porch. Fragments and furnishings from the earlier church are incorporated into the fabric, such as a very worn fragment of chevron moulding reused in S wall. Romanesque sculpture consists of an early 12thc tympanum reset outside the W wall and a reset capital in the S wall.
Parish church, formerly chapel
Cuddington is a village in the W of central Buckinghamshire, 5 miles W of Aylesbury. It stands on the rising ground on the E bank of the river Thame in rolling wooded pasture, and the church is in the centre of the village.
St Nicholas’s has a nave with N and S aisles, no clerestory and a S porch, a chancel with a N vestry and a W tower. The building history is a complicated one, not entirely resolved. The S arcade is of 4 bays and the N of 3 slightly wider ones, but the N aisle does not extend as far W as the S. It may have been shortened by a bay, according to Pevsner. In the S aisle is a transverse arch, connected to pier 2. To the E of this the aisle was widened c.1300 to form a chapel. This transverse arch, the two arcades and the chancel arch belong together stylistically (although they differ slightly in their details), and are dateable by their sculpture to the early 13thc, except for two trumpet-scallop capitals, one in each of the nave arcades, which must be a decade or more earlier and are presumed to have been reused. The S nave doorway belongs to the mid-13thc, and its porch was added by Street in 1856-57. The chancel has details suggesting a date around 1300, and the tower is 15thc with diagonal W buttresses and an octagonal N stair that rises higher than the embattled parapet and has its own battlement. The church was restored by G. E. Street in 1856-57. Features recorded below are the two nave arcades (on account of the reused capitals they contain) and the font. Photographs of the other features described above are included as an aid to understanding this complex building.