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Situated on a picturesque, woody knoll, St. Guthlac’s is a small Lincolnshire church consisting of a nave, N aisle with E chapel, chancel, and a S porch. The S doorway, chancel, and N arcade are from the 13th century. The exterior W wall has the date 1657 in the gable which must refer to its rebuilding; the N aisle was rebuilt in 1850.
The chancel arch and imposts (re-used capitals) on the S porch entrance are Romanesque.
Though Little Ponton is listed in Domesday Book, there is no mention of a church here in 1086.
Pevsner refers to the re-used stones on the S porch entrance as capitals, but it is very difficult to see how they could have functioned as such. Their details are almost completely weathered away, and what appear as possible scallops may be nothing of the sort. The shallow height of these stones suggests a function more in line with imposts than capitals.
In terms of building process, it should be noted that in the chancel arch the N side half-roll in the arch does not align directly over the nook-shaft capital below it, while on the S side the alignment with the nook-shaft is much closer. Is this a sign that the workshop was carrying out design elements which were new to them? The bulbous bases and, as Pevsner notes, the half-roll and wide fillet on the arch, seem to point to a Saxon-Norman overlap date of the late eleventh century.
N. Pevsner and J. Harris, The Buildings of England: Lincolnshire. London, 1964 (2nd ed., 1990), 531-532.
F. Arnold-Forster. Studies in Church Dedications. London: Skeffington and Son (1899), 226.